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| 1 Introduction The Jewish-Socialist Nexus Tony Michels 1890: New York City’s knee-pants workers go on a general strike, forcing their bosses to sign union contracts for the first time. 1892: an anarchist attempts to assassinate one of America’s leading industrialists. 1916: eight hundred workers assemble in a Philadelphia hall to hear a Yiddish lecture on “Revolutionary Motifs in World Literature.” 1919: an up-and-coming labor lawyer is elected to the New York State Assembly on the Socialist Party ticket, only to be expelled, along with four other Socialists, a year later. 1929: a Los Angeles judge sentences five women to San Quentin for flying the Soviet flag at a summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains. 1947: the Communist Party USA calls for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. These disparate events provide glimpses into the long, complicated involvement of Jews in American socialism, a history in which class conflict, political repression, revolutionary fervor, and universalistic visions of humanity collided into and intermixed with faith in American democracy, striving for economic success, and commitment to Jewish group solidarity. Along the way, Jews redefined who they were, as both individuals and a community, as they joined with like-minded people of all backgrounds to remake American society. What produced this convergence between Jews and socialism? And what were its ramifications? The story begins in the late nineteenth century. As a distinct phenomenon in the United States, Jewish socialism came into existence in the 1880s with the birth of the Jewish labor movement.1 The movement arose from the masses of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Romania between the 1880s and 1920s. Numbering more than two million, they crowded into America’s major urban centers, where they encountered harsh working and living conditions. Long workdays, low pay, mistreatment by bosses (usually other immigrant Jews who had worked their way up), dirty sweatshops, and substandard dwellings provided the ingredients of collec- 2 | Introduction tive hardship. In response, many immigrants took to protest and self-organization , building a movement that had, at its inception, few antecedents in eastern European Jewish life. The Jewish labor movement encompassed an array of trade unions, political parties, and voluntary associations centered in New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish population, but active in cities across the country. Organizationally decentralized, the Jewish labor movement was also ideologically diverse. Within its ranks, proponents of various brands of socialism —social democracy, communism, anarchism, and left-wing versions of Jewish nationalism—vied for popular support. They often differed fiercely and occasionally violently with one another, but Jewish socialists of all persuasions occupied common ground in their desire to create a cooperative, egalitarian society, freed from poverty and bigotry. The Jewish labor movement was arguably the largest upsurge of activism in American Jewish history. Although we cannot determine precisely how many joined its ranks, statistics provide some measure. A quarter of a million Jews belonged to the socialist-led United Hebrew Trades, an umbrella organization composed of union locals (especially, but not only, located within the garment industry) with predominantly Jewish memberships. The socialist daily Forverts, the most widely circulated Yiddish newspaper in the world and a powerful actor in American Jewish life, boasted more than two hundred thousand readers in the years following World War I. The Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) fraternal order counted eighty-seven thousand members at its peak in the 1920s.2 Beyond the realm of formal institutions, an untold number of individuals marched in parades, participated in rent strikes and consumer boycotts, crowded around soapboxes, and flocked to celebrations and fund-raisers for one cause or another.3 How many of those men and women considered themselves dedicated socialists or just casual participants? Historians will never know exactly. What we do know is that tens of thousands of immigrant Jews accepted the leadership of radicals, joined organizations they founded, and absorbed many of their ideas, not so much as doctrines but as “a whole climate of opinion that cemented, both socially and intellectually, a Jewish world in turmoil,” to quote the historian Moses Rischin.4 In deed and thought, Jewish radicals challenged established customs, ways of thinking, and dominant institutions within the Jewish community and American society broadly. The Jewish labor movement did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged in cooperation with the general American socialist movement, which, in the nineteenth century, was dominated by...

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