Keeping Yiddish Alive: The Workmen's Circle in Des Moines, Iowa, 1930-1952

The Workmen's Circle, founded in New York in the 1890s, spread throughout America's urban pockets of Yiddish-speaking, immigrant-laboring left. The Circle provided health and death benefit insurance, a forum to discuss socialist issues, and fellowship for men, women, and children. Although the Des Moines Circle branch did not leave an independent historical record, the weekly Iowa Jewish News and the activities of the New York office and Omaha branches permit a reconstruction of the social, political, and communal activities of this small group of Yiddish-speaking Jews confronted with assimilation, the Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust.