Jewish Labor Movement Research Articles

Review of Media and Culture in the US Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber (Palgrave Macmillan)

Brian Dolber comprehensively explores the cultural and media-related developments of an important American social movement during its most transformative time: the varying business enterprises, community associations, party structures, and social institutions that collectively constituted 'US Jewish labor' in the decades between WWI and II. Dolber infuses his historical analysis with a nuance and urgency that ensures his readers will neither complacently shrug off the interwar era as limited in its relevance to our contemporary conjuncture nor nostalgically long for a supposedly romantic period of leftist political organizing in the US Indeed, a tacit takeaway drawn from Dolber’s book is that activists today (especially those experimenting with alternative media and cultural formations) can benefit greatly from both the inspiring examples of past precedence and a sober acceptance of the potential pitfalls that can threaten their efforts.

Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber

Reviewed by: Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber Brian Greenberg (bio) Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era. By Brian Dolber. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xiv + 256 pp. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the consolidation of modern America as a consumer society. During these decades, the motion picture, the automobile, and consumer durables for the home such as the radio and [End Page 307] the washing machine were regularly advertised in a growing number of national journals and newspapers. What did the spread of mass consumption, mass media, and mass culture mean for democracy in America? The transformation of America into a consumer culture in the first decades of the twentieth century was the central question addressed by Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, their early 1920s field investigation of Muncie, Indiana. The Lynds viewed the authority achieved by consumer culture as a danger to democracy, because, as Robert Lynd warned, Americans were more important to their country as consumers than they were as citizens. Middletown was written as a secular jeremiad in which the Lynds called on Americans to repent and to renew their traditional nonpecuniary culture. Focusing on the Jewish radical groups and media institutions in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, Brian Dolber, in Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era, reaches conclusions far different from those of the Lynds. For Dolber, even as they adapted to the developing consumerism in America, those who identified with the Jewish left kept alive their traditions of community culture and social unionism. As Dolber relates, in the decade following the Red Scare after the First World War, the Jewish Daily Forward (or Der Forverts), which had been founded in 1897 as the first Yiddish socialist newspaper in New York, and other socialist newspapers found themselves in dire financial straits as a result, in part, of the rise in anti-immigrant nativism in America. In 1918 Baruch Charney Vladack became the business manager of the Forward. Over the next decade, as advertising became a fundamental component of commercial culture in the United States, Vladack saw national advertising as fulfilling two functions: as a source of necessary revenue for the Forward and as a way to demonstrate to political and corporate elites that the Forward and its readership were good Americans, thus protecting them from anti-immigrant political repression. Dolber concludes that the commercialization of the Forward during the 1920s marked the integration of the Jewish labor movement’s media with the broader advertising-driven national commercial communications system. Unlike the Lynds, who equated integration with elite cultural domination, Dolber does not see the working class as becoming the passive tools of an all-powerful cultural elite. Instead, he shows how the Jewish left was able to secure a place for itself within the liberal New Deal coalition that developed in the 1930s. Besides the Forward, the Jewish left included the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union (ACWU) and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), industrial unions founded in New York City [End Page 308] during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As Dolber notes, the ACWU and the ILGWU, working with affiliated ethnic organizations and political parties, embraced what Daniel Katz’s book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (2013) called “social unionism” a radical expression of labor organization that embraced political engagement and integrated union culture with larger social movements. Social unionism was the ideal of unionism that coalesced in the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, as union leaders and members became key constituents in the New Deal coalition that emerged during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Yet neither Sidney Hillman nor David Dubinsky (the leaders of, respectively, the ACWU and the ILGWU) figure prominently in Dolber’s account of this change. Also largely absent from Dolber’s analysis is John L. Lewis, who personified the aggressive, CIO-led sit-down strikes of the...

The So-What Question

The So-What Question Alice Kessler-Harris (bio) As I think of the history of women’s history, I think of the challenges that we faced at the start of the process: Gerda Lerner called the kind of history we started out with contributions history. We had an obligation, she insisted, to prove that the history of women could be written by excavating the sources that demonstrated not only that women had been present in history but that their absence impoverished the historical enterprise. Women, she wrote, had not simply been adjuncts to history; they had been an essential component of it. Those early excavations opened the field up to the hostile question asked by many of our mostly male colleagues and later taken up by Gerda. So what? So what if we uncovered women? How did our understanding of the past change when we added women to the mix? What did we understand about social circumstance that we had not previously understood? Did finding and including women change our conceptions of the historical process? So What? It’s a question that led Gerda ultimately into her last books, including Why History Matters. It is a question I still ask my graduate students. In the 1970s, the years when I worked with Gerda most closely, we (we em-battled historians of women) were happy to answer that question simply: adding women, we argued, enriches our knowledge. As Suzanne Lebsock often said, it makes us smarter. We proudly celebrated the recovery of lost women, especially of previously invisible women of color, of the poor, of the wage-earning minority. And yet we sought to rethink the notion of women’s history as a systemic process best comprehended relationally. As students of African American history were beginning to do for race, we wanted to know how the social relations of the sexes affected historical change. Gerda Lerner initially opposed this initiative for fear that historians would neglect women in favor of masculinity. She had earlier, in her pioneering Black Women in White America, diverted larger questions of race by uncovering a wide array of sources that documented the history of black women. By revealing the presence of sources that illuminated the historical presence of black women, she launched a generation of historians on new research agendas. One might say that she briefly stymied the turn to gender history by insisting on women as the subject of our investigations. Organizing her next book around “women’s culture” and “the female experience,” she sought to demonstrate commonality among women—to find in their shared and quotidian [End Page 12] experiences the sources of a collective consciousness and, ultimately, of women’s liberation. That move proved problematic for students of race and of class, like me. I had learned rather painfully to pay attention to relational questions in the course of a dissertation on New York’s Jewish immigrant community of the 1890s. Focusing on the Jewish labor movement, I had entirely ignored the existence of women on the then-prevailing assumption that paid work was for men and that the labor movement was therefore necessarily male. The motivating forces for social change, I believed, emanated from differences in religion and ethnicity and above all tensions in class and culture. I defended my dissertation in 1968, just in time to discover an emerging women’s movement. Informed by my uncomfortable graduate school experience as a woman, and embarrassed that I had systematically discarded evidence about women’s activism, I began research on my first articles by searching for the women workers and trade unionists I had missed. I was, as you can imagine, acutely conscious of class. Already familiar with the work of E. P. Thompson, who defined class as an ongoing interaction between traditional cultures and the tensions created by new means of production, I quickly became involved in a Marxist-feminist study group. This posed conceptual problems: If class and ethnicity and religion had constituted the analytic centers of my questions as a labor historian, how would I incorporate gender? What role would it play in the historical dramas I was trying to illuminate? So what if I found the laboring women? What...

Nationalising the Bund? Zionist historiography and the Jewish labour movement

This article examines the academic historiography on the Jewish Workers' Bund produced by Israeli and Zionist scholars. While the contribution of Israeli scholars to the historiography on the Bund has been significant in both quantity and quality, their works have had to grapple with the tension between the goals of Zionist historiography and the Bund's political and ideological commitments, namely the party's radical opposition to nationalism in general and to Zionism in particular. To various degrees, Israeli scholars sought to “nationalise” the Yiddish-speaking labour movement in Eastern Europe and incorporate it into a coherent narrative of the Jews' past as an “organic” nation. As a result of their authors' ideological and methodological preconceptions, and by portraying it as a nationalist movement, these works often misrepresent the Bund's ideas, policies and activities.

Gentile New York: Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants by Gil Ribak (review)

Reviewed by: Gentile New York: Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants by Gil Ribak Daniel Soyer (bio) Gentile New York: Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants. By Gil Ribak. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012. xi + 293 pp. In Gentile New York, Gil Ribak takes on an uncomfortable subject —uncomfortable because it turns out that Jews for the most part did not think highly of the gentiles around them. And when they did have a high opinion of certain groups of non-Jews, it was often for reasons that would strike many of us as ignoble. In examining the gentile image in the Jewish mind, Ribak seeks to debunk the myth that he sees as pervasive among American Jews that Judaism is somehow inevitably liberal. He further argues that the ways in which American Jews viewed local gentiles was informed by their experiences with different groups of non-Jews in Europe. In addition, images of specific groups changed over time. The way in which Jewish perceptions of Yankees, in particular, changed for the worse in the first decades of the twentieth century shows that there was no linear and easy path to integration into American society. Ribak thus sees his book as a brief against the American exceptionalism prevalent in American Jewish historiography and which he views as a form of presentism. Gentile New York is well-written, strongly argued, and based on extremely thorough research in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Although it will not convince everyone, it makes an important contribution by complicating the story of American Jewish ethnic and racial liberalism, demonstrating the importance of the European background to American Jewish culture, and foregrounding Jews' relations with the others they lived with. Ribak uses a transnational lens. He begins his analysis in Eastern Europe, where Jews (influenced by negative portrayals of non-Jews in the Talmud and other sacred texts) saw the peasants around them as brutal, dimwitted, and drunken embodiments of violence and physicality. But there were other non-Jews, particularly Russian and German elites, whom Jews admired for their culture and refinement. These attitudes carried over to America, where Jews looked favorably upon upper-class "Yankees" seen as modern, progressive, well-mannered, and devoid of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, Irish, German and Polish immigrants, and, to some extent, African Americans, took over the demeaning place occupied by Polish and Ukrainian peasants in the old home. Ribak rightly, but sometimes frustratingly, complicates his analysis by pointing out the ubiquitous exceptions. Some Jews, disillusioned by the Russian upper class, turned to the peasantry instead, extolling the peasants' rough physicality as a model for the reform of Jewish life. [End Page 196] The dynamic of disillusionment with the elite and reassessment of ethnic alignments carried over to the United States as well. There is much evidence in Gentile New York that Jews were as quick as anyone else to employ negative stereotypes of other ethnic minorities, especially Irish, Germans, Italians, blacks, and Asians. Even the Jewish labor movement adopted an attitude of "chosenness," seeing Jews as inherently more progressive and class conscious than members of other groups. But after 1900, as the restrictionist movement gathered steam with the support of many in the Anglo-American elite, Jews began to reassess their views. More and more, according to Ribak, they found common ground with other immigrants and minorities. And they were more and more critical of "mainstream" Anglo-Americans. It is from this period, and partly from a perception of self-interest, that American Jewish liberalism on matters of race and ethnicity stems. Ribak makes a strong case that American Jews have not always been liberal in their attitudes toward members of other ethnic groups. But does he overstate his case when he downplays "historical experience" together with "religious values"? The logic of his argument and evidence does point to a liberalization of attitudes-a growing identification with the causes (if not always the individual persons) of other minorities. This growing liberalism certainly came from historical experience, but, as Ribak shows, it was not a primordial characteristic. Rather it developed over time in response to specific circumstances in America itself and was never free...

We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust David Cesarani (bio) We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust. By Hasia R. Diner. New York: New York University Press, 2009. xiii + 494 pp. For several years the debate over postwar responses to the Jewish catastrophe has simply recycled the same data, with partisans declaring that the cup is either half empty or half full depending on their point of view. Now, thanks to the mountain of evidence she has excavated, Hasia Diner has landed a knockout punch on those who assert that after 1945 American Jews were silent about the fate that befell the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, preferring to forget about it while busily integrating into American society and enjoying the postwar boom. This is not to say that Diner has answered all the questions hanging over the manner in which American Jews during the 1950s treated recent Jewish history. But within the terms of her inquiry it is hard to see how it would be possible to do a fuller or a better job. Her book will change the landscape of postwar American Jewish history irrevocably; the textbooks will have to be rewritten. [End Page 338] Diner’s methodology is simplicity itself: she has gone back to the sources. She has waded through countless sermons and liturgies written to commemorate the murdered Jews of Europe. She has looked at the record of meetings organized by an array of Jewish organizations to see how their leaders and members reflected on the war years. She has examined every major national periodical, and many minor local ones, serving American Jews. She has gone from the assiduous collators of the Jewish Book Annual to the history books, novels, books for children, textbooks, prayer books and anything else that touched on the recent genocide. She has also listened to recordings of radio broadcasts and tracked down TV programs that handled the subject. The weight of evidence is crushing. If her narrative has one stylistic weakness it is due to the unavoidable necessity of repeating the same thing over and over again. Even before the war had ended American Jews began commemorating their brethren slaughtered in Europe. Each section of the community did so according to its own particular traditions. The non-Orthodox were most able to draft new prayers or adapt old ones; secular Jews, especially in the Jewish labor movement, quickly established dates and patterns for memorial meetings. Religious and nonreligious sentiments converged on Passover as a key time in the Jewish calendar for remembrance because it overlapped with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During the 1950s, Rabbi Rufus Learsi’s memorial haggadah was distributed to over 10,000 communal organizations and printed annually in over thirty Jewish periodicals. Dozens of Torah scrolls from destroyed communities in Europe were brought to the United States and distributed to congregations that made their reception and display a focal point for memorial activity. Contrary to the notion that little was written or published about the genocide, Jewish institutions launched research projects, collected material, and built up libraries. YIVO led the way, but the Institute for Jewish Affairs and the American Jewish Committee all contributed to a wave of publications. The Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee channelled funds to survivor historians in Europe whose research fed back into public awareness in America. Within just a few years reviewers in Jewish Social Studies, notably Philip Friedman and Koppel Pinson, were bemoaning the sheer volume of historical works on the Nazi period. There was certainly no inhibition against exploring the subject. American Jews raised prodigious amounts of money for the survivors and sent aid of all kinds, including rabbis and social workers (such as Pinson). In campaigning for the improvement of conditions in displaced persons camps and struggling to enlarge the quotas for immigration to [End Page 339] the U.S., they constantly invoked recent horrors. Their incessant campaign against British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and for the Zionist cause unhesitatingly drew on sympathy for Jews as the survivors of Nazi...

Classless: On the Social Status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of European Socialists, 1934–1941

The Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), founded in New York in 1934, was the vanguard of American labor's anti-Nazi and antifascist activism. The JLC grew out of the Jewish labor movement in the US. In 1940–1941, it achieved the rescue of hundreds of European labor and social-democratic party leaders trapped in France by the invading German army or in Lithuania by the Soviet army. Among these persons were some of the foremost leaders of the Labour and Socialist International and of the International Federation of Trade Unions. Many others were Polish Bundists, the JLC's founders' original political family, doubly exposed to Nazi brutality by their Jewish identity and social-democratic positions. This event is the focal point from which American labor's international solidarity for the labor victims of Nazism and fascism can be observed. In addition, the connection between the JLC and the Emergency Rescue Committee whose agent, Varian Fry, rescued artists and intellectuals, is also established in the paper.

Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland by David s> Engel (review)

556 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 purposesof guidance on a pop-up. Bykeyingin any one of the many hundreds of keywords given on the pop-up, the user can come up with a list of all chartersrelevantto his or herline of interrogation.Upon furtherenquiry,the useris also given a very briefdescriptionof each relevantdocument and, with the press of a key, its thumbnail. A single sweep of the mouse transformsthe thumbnailinto an almost real document, on your very own computer screen, which can be enlargedand even printedout. This is not only tremendous fun but also makes the Royal Books an unexpectedly important source. By using the pop-up index as a guide to personal names, one can, for instance, find a huge number of sixteenthcentury and later referencesto familieswhich are thought to have expired in the MiddleAges. Likewise,it ispossibleto track,decade by decade, the history of individual properties, or to read the full texts of treaties and of hitherto unpublishednegotiations with provincial diets. In short, what was previously an almost useless source has by the ingenuity and diligence of its engineers, programmers and historical consultants been transformedinto an object of easy plunder and information. Of course, in order to use these disksone has to have some grasp of Hungarian 'computer-speak'.One also has to know Latin and to be ready to have a go at reading older calligraphicstyles,not all of which are immediatelypenetrable. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies MARTYNRADY University College London Engel, David (ed.). Gal-Ed.OntheHistoryofthejews inPoland.Gal Ed Society for Historical Research on PolishJewry, i 7. School of Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 2000. 212 pp. + I 78 pp. Notes. Bibliography .Index. Priceunknown. A distinct aura of generational shift surroundsthe yearbook Gal-Edfor the year 2000. With this issue, a long-serving member of the editorial board, Emanuel Melzer stepsdown, and a whole section is devoted to the memory of the late founding editor, Moshe Mishkinsky,the renowned historian of the Jewish labour movement in Eastern Europe. Most of the members of the passing generation were natives of the region that they studied, and deeply imbued with its cultural ethos. There is clear concern among the senior generation that their successorsretain their commitment 'to underscore the great variety and multilingualityof PolishJewish culture, in the hope that doing so will encourage the scholarswho are assuming centre stage today to broaden their familiarity with many different topics and types of sources'. Consequently, and in contrastto its friendlyrivalPolin,Gal-Edeschews issues devoted to a single topic, publishes documentary materials in their original language, and retainsitsbi-lingualEnglish-Hebrewformat. It is difficultto review a scholarlym6lange, but a few general observations on the contents of the currentvolume are in order.The explorationof radical Jewish politics in Eastern Europe remains a special emphasis, with articles devoted to the Bund and the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hazair (by Roni Gechtman, Mitityahu Minc and Eli Tzur). Polish-Jewishrelations are REVIEWS 557 also well traced, as in Sabina Lewin's examination of Jewish secondary schooling in the tsarist-ruledKingdom of Poland and in the inter-warPolish state. She pays special attention to the effect of external political and social forces on the tempo of the processofJewish polonization. PiotrWr6beloffers a content analysisof the officialnewspaperof the PolishGovernment-in-Exile, Dziennik Polski.Wr6bel demonstratesthat the paper was a major conduit for information about the evolving mass-murder of East European Jews. This articlelinksnicely with Natalia Aleksiun'sreview of Polish historiographyon the Holocaust from I945 to I998. Literarystudiesare well representedby Michael Steinlauf's study of Mark Arnshteyn, the bi-lingual (Polish and Yiddish) playwright and actor. The theatre, as Steinlauf demonstrates,functioned as a 'borderland'where Poles and PolishJews interacted in a unique way. Special attention should be paid to Hana Shlomi's study of the resettlement of Jewish repatriantsfrom the Soviet Union to Lower Silesia. This is a contribution to a topic that is beginning to attractscholarlyattention:the 'ethnic cleansing' that took place in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. The settlement discussed by Shlomi should be seen in the context of polices that culminated in Operation Vistula in 1947, the wholesale deportationof 'alien' elements of the population of south-easternPoland. Gender...

Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk History in the Jewish Labor Movement

Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk History in the Jewish Labor Movement

From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 by André s> Liebich (review)

REVIEWS 355 regionalautonomy. What is certainis thathe accepted and cooperatedloyally with Masaryk'spolicy of including German parties and ministersin the I926 to 1929 coalition government which he headed. In the last months of his life he died in December I933-he was deeply worriedabout the dangers to his countryfromthe Nazi riseto power and believed that the Czechoslovak politicalsystemshouldbe alteredin a democraticsenseto meet those dangers. This shows that he had a broader view of politics than mere fixing or deal making and while ProfessorMiller mentions these views he failsto give them properconsideration. That said, this is an excellent biography. The difficultiesof research have been overcome; it is well written,free ofjargon, and a pleasureto read. It also has the merit of placing Czechoslovak agrarian politics in a comparative frameworkso as to point out clearly the differenceswith similar Croatian, Bulgarianand Polishpartiesof the same period. Above all this book succeeds in giving a clear portrait, both personal and political, of this elusive, sympatheticand remarkablefigureof inter-warCzechoslovakia. London TREVOR VAUGHAN THOMAS Liebich, Andr&.FromtheOtherShore.RussianSocialDemocracy after192I. Harvard Historical Studies, 125. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, I~997 (hardcover) and I999 (paperback). xii + 476 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?31.95; $19.95. IN 1922, after their party had been declared illegal and their newspapers closed down, several hundred Mensheviks left Russia carrying Soviet passports and $13.oo bound for Berlin for what they thought would be temporary exile. Grouped around their journal, Sotsialisticheskiivestnik, and guided by the Foreign Delegation of the RSDRP, they led reasonably productive lives aided by their German socialist comrades for the next decade. The rise of Hitler changed this and in February 1933 sixty-seven menmbersof the emigre colony, the vast majority of them Jewish, moved to Paris on visas obtained through the intercession of L&on Blum. Seven years later, with the fall of France imminent, the westward migration of the ageing and diminishing Mlenshevik 'family' continued this time to New York where old ties with the Jewish labour movement led to a new and last home for the wandering band. One is struck, not only by the legality and propitious timing of these three moves, but also with Menshev ik resilience and optimism in the face of adverse conditions. Unlike many political refugees, they did not give in to despondency even wvhenthe dream of returning to their homeland faded. Wherever they lived, they sought to maintain contacts with Russia, to keep alive a belief in a non-dictatorial form of social democracy, and to interpret events in the Soviet Unioni for the edification first of western socialists and later of North American academnics. Even though they quarrelled incessantly about doctrinal matters, past history and future prospects, they always looked after one another financially and otherwise. Andre Liebich, a professor of international history and politics at the Institute of International Studies in Geneva, has provided in the book under 356 SEER, 79, 2, 200 I review the firstdetailed scholarly account of these peregrinations.He writes with grace and remarkabledetachment. He is also to be commended for the clarity and organization which he has been able to impose on his fractious, complex and often disorganized subject. What could have been a tedious compendium of the slowly evolving Menshevikworld-view has instead been presented as an engaging 'collective biography' of the 'Menshevik family' (p. io), most notably Fedor and Lidia Dan, Raphael Abramovitch, Boris Nicolaevsky,BorisSapir, Solomon Schwarzand David Dallin. In recognition of these qualities, FromtheOther Shore recently received the FrankelPrize in ContemporaryHistoryawardedby the Wiener Library. Liebich has mined virtually every major archive in western Europe and North America. Not surprisingly,much of his materialcomes from the taped interviews, mimeographed reports and memoirs compiled by the InterUniversity Project on the History of Menshevism at Columbia University. The Nicolaevsky,Volskyand SouvarineCollections at the Hoover Institution have also been consultedalong with the holdingsof the InternationalInstitute of Social History in Amsterdam. One unusual source is FBI and CIA reports on aged Mensheviksliving in New Yorkwhich the authorobtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These provide both a touch of humour and a clear indication that police reportsin generalmustbe treatedwith the utmost caution. One investigatorconcluded that J. Martow'was actuallyFedorDan and thatthelatterwas a 'SocialRevolutionary'.Dan mighthavebeen working...

Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk History in the Jewish Labor Movement

Foreword by Paul Buhle Introduction When Moses Met Marx: Aspects of Jewish Radical Folk Ideology Folk Ideology and Folk History: Reading Writings about the Jewish Labor Movement Matters of Belief: Secularized Judaism and Spiritualized Radicalism A Story in Itself: Personal Narrative and Folk Ideology Folklore and Folk Ideology: Political Expression in Traditional Forms The Third Seder of Passover: Liberating a Ritual of Liberation Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index

La solidarité ethnique et politique dans l'exil : Le Jewish Labor Committee et les réfugiés anti-nazis et anti-fascistes, 1934-1941

Catherine Collomp, Ethnic and Political Solidarity: The Jewish Labor Committee and Antinazi and Antifascist Refugees, 1934-41. This article presents the role of the Jewish Labor Committee, founded in 1934, in the struggle against nazism and fascism from the United States. Springing from the American "Jewish labor movement" in the garment trades, this organization, whose leaders had been Bundists in the Russian empire, obtained the support of the American Federation of Labor to establish American unions' solidarity for the victims of nazi and fascist persecution perpetrated against Jews but also against German, Austrian, Italian, Polish and Tcheck labor leaders, socialists and social-democrats more generally. In 1940-1941, the JLC organized two rescue operations for these leaders and militants who had sought refuge in Southern France or in Lithuania.

``Speaking to Moyshe'': The early socialist Yiddish press and its readers

The founding of Di arbeter tsaytung marked an important turningpoint in the intertwined histories of the American Jewish labormovement and the Yiddish press. Coinciding with a major strike wave in 1890, Di arbeter tsaytung signaled the entrance of social-democracy into the mainstream of Jewish immigrant life.At the same time, the founding of the newspaper and its subsequentsuccess consolidated a process of ``yiddishization.'' This processwas twofold: the newspaper attracted a growing number of Russian-speaking intellectuals to Yiddish and gave institutionalform to their position as leaders in the nascent Jewish labormovement, and in the larger public sphere. By the middle of the 1890s,the press had become the core institution of the Jewish labormovement and the focal point of the socialist Yiddish intelligentsia.

What Can Yiddish Mean to an American Poet?

What Can Yiddish Mean to an American Poet? REFLECTIONS WHAT CAN YIDDISH MEAN TO AN AMERICAN POET? by Richard Fein Richard Fein's books include a memoir of Yiddish, 1be Dance of Leah, translations, Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, and two books of poetry, Kafka's Ear (which won the Maurice English Award), At the Turkish Bath, and a new collection, To Move into the House. He lives in Cambridge, MA. "Late resounds in us what early sounded." Theodore Reik, jewish Wit 79 For so long, Yiddish has thrived on its own demise. It has become its own dybbuk-occupied by the presence of its former self. We can imagine the nature of its appeal lying in the very life of its dissolution-the bracing taste of our mortality. For me, reaching out to Yiddish was also groping inward to a language that I had spurned when younger but that suddenly-or not so suddenly-began to speak to me, or nudge up to me. To come to Yiddish as I did is like having a love affair in middle age with someone known years before but back then rejected as ungainly, embarrassing, and pushy. Now, the sounds and nuances evoke a pleasure I had once never thought possible, just as lonce thought that a woman's gray hair could never be alluring. Cynthia Ozick embeds this late embrace with words of longing, "We translate Yiddish with the fury of lost love." In a sense I did not go into Yiddish, but Yiddish came upon me. It is a specter from childhood; it is a night thought, a visitation of the shadows in the back rooms of shops I couldn't really look into when I was a child. 80 SHOFAR Summer 1996 Vol. 14, No.4 There were indistinct garbles there, hazy movements and figures beyond some cheap curtain over a doorway. Somewhere in back rooms with remote shelves were one shoe, a deserted bolt of cloth, a mismatched cap and bottle. I can never know what exactly was there but feel again the child's halting curiosity. Sounds felt like shapes that lay their hands on him. Whatever it was that shadowed the back rooms of those neighborhood stores, and beyond them to the Galicia, Volhynia, and Bessarabia those bodies came from I can only know by reading and imagining. And thus every Yiddish word comes from a destroyed and precious region that simultaneously shapes and vanishes as I enter it. How different Yiddish was for the wagon driver (der bal-agoleb), the female ritual bathhouse attendant (di tukerln), the pampered son-in-law financed so he could continue his religious studies (an eydem af kest). For them, Yiddish was merely normal, and therefore, for me, strange. For some ofus, Yiddish might be seen as our orphan-language of early years which squirmed underneath (or alongside) that English we were bound to learn. In our growing up, Yiddish became our dispossession that we later sought to recover-say the way a poet goes back to claim and refigure early feelings. If a poet goes back to the immigrant experience, the Bible, or Yiddish literature and life for some of his themes, he must first feel that those themes are really his own-not borrowings, approached identities, dutiful attachments, or exhumed exotica. Either you feel the frlsson ofYiddish or you don't, I mean to say der tsiter ofYiddish. The poet must find in those realms the provocations of his moods, the longings of his ignorance, knowing what he has lacked is more important than where he has willed to go. Otherwise, Yiddish is merelyworked up for a delicacy, a celebration, a mere identity. Robert Pinsky has extrapolated Zishe Landau's famous quip that Yiddish poetry had heretofore been the rhyme department of the Jewish labor movement to mean, in our day, "cleaving for material to the Holocaust, to the Old Testament, or to reminiscences of the immigrant generation." A shrewd admonition this, but if these sources writhe inside of you and are part of your natural turmoil, then the cleaving is genuine, and so the emerging poems will strive to be genuine. If Genesis, Yiddish, Grandmother's mortar...

Sweatshop strife: class, ethnicity, and gender in the jewish labour movement of toronto, 1900-1930

Sweatshop strife: class, ethnicity, and gender in the jewish labour movement of toronto, 1900-1930

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980. Iris BergerThe Most Difficult Revolution: Women and Trade Unions. Alice H. Cook , Val R. Lorwin , Arlene Kaplan DanielsSweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939. Ruth A. FragerMaid in the U.S.A.Mary RomeroBeyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThreads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980. Iris Berger The Most Difficult Revolution: Women and Trade Unions. Alice H. Cook , Val R. Lorwin , Arlene Kaplan Daniels Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939. Ruth A. Frager Maid in the U.S.A. Mary Romero Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930. Sharon Hartman Strom Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86. Carole Turbin Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java. Diane Lauren Wolf Sonya O. RoseSonya O. Rose Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 20, Number 2Winter, 1995 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494987 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto 1900-1939.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many of Toronto's immigrant Jews eked out a living in the needle-trade sweatshops of Spadina Avenue. In response to their expliotation on the shop floor, immigrant Jewish garment workers built one of the most advanced sections of the Canadian and American labour movements. Much more than a collective bargaining agency, Toronto's Jewish labour movement had a distinctly socialist orientation and grew out of a vibrant Jewish working-class culture. Ruth Frager examines the development of this unique movement, its sources of strength, and its limitations, focusing particularly on the complex interplay of class, ethnic, and gender interests and identities in the history of the movement. She examines the relationships between Jewish workers and Jewish manufacturers as well as relations between Jewish and non-Jewish workers and male and female workers in the city's clothing industry. In its prime, Toronto's Jewish labour movement struggled not only to improve hard sweatshop condistions but also to bring about a fundamental socialist transformation. It was an uphill battle. Drastic economic downturns, hard employer offensives, and state repressions all worked against unionists' workplace demands. Ethnic, gender, and ideological divisions weakened the movement and were manipulated by employers and their allies. Drawing on her knowledge of Yiddish, Frager has been able to gain access to original records that shed new light on an important chapter in Canadian ethnic, labour, and women's history.

Ruth A. Frager — Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939

Ruth A. Frager — Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939

Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939. By Ruth A. Frager. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Pp. xi, 300. $60.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.

Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939. By Ruth A. Frager. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Pp. xi, 300. 19.95, paper. - Volume 53 Issue 4