ARONSON, GRIGORI

ARONSON, GRIGORI (1887–1968), journalist, author, and public figure. Aronson, who was the nephew of mordecai ben hillel hacohen , was born in St. Petersburg and received a rudimentary traditional Jewish education in Gomel. As a youth, he was a Bolshevist, but in 1908 as a result of his growing Jewish awareness, joined the Bund. The following year, he became active in ort and the Society for Diffusion of Enlightenment. After the 1917 revolution he was active as a Menshevik and right-wing Bundist, particularly in Vitebsk. Aronson was permitted to leave the Soviet Union in 1922, after which he lived in Germany and France, and after 1940 in the United States. For some time he acted as general secretary of ort in Berlin. He was engaged in the political activity of the Menshevik émigrés. Aronson's studies of Soviet Russia and Soviet Jewry include Di Shpaltung fun Bund (1920); Di Yidishe Problem in Sovyet-Rusland (1944); and Anti-Semitism in Sovyet-Rusland (1953). In 1966 he coedited a collection of essays, Russian Jewry: 1860–1917, with J. Frumkin and others. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: LNYL, 1 (1956), 169–70. (Moshe Mishkinsky)