A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (review)

On the back cover of Tony Michels's outstanding book on Yiddish socialists in New York is a promotional blurb which opens as follows: "Socialism as a force in the [Jewish] immigrant community has never gone beyond a kind of lip-service romanticism." Not only does this sentence rub hard against the book's title, A Fire in Their Hearts, it goes completely against the grain of this exceptionally well-researched and well-written account of the many forces that helped construct Jewish immigrant socialism in all its varieties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Michels persuasively argues that "Socialism's battles, won and lost, shaped the larger arc of American Jewish experience." And he insists that Jewish socialism in the United States was much "more than a passing phase" (259).

Most Jews of course were not socialists, and being a Jewish socialist meant having at least two identities in tension with one another as well as with the American mainstream. But socialism was, as Professor Michels shows us once again, a vital force in the Jewish immigrant community, so vital in fact that it helped forge a Jewish collective consciousness deeply committed to the pursuit of social justice. Michels's evident familiarity with the Yiddish language and his indefatigable hunt for Yiddish-language sources have helped him go beyond even the very good work of Jonathan Frankel, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Steven Cassedy, and my own less ambitious study of American Jewish immigrant radicals.¹

In the interest of full disclosure let me say that Michels cites several works of mine, but omits any reference to The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880–1920.² This is curious, since many of his arguments and interpretations are similar to mine: between 1880 and 1920, New York City was home to an enormous immigrant Jewish working class, most of which was concentrated in the garment industry on the impoverished Lower East Side; many of these Jews were influenced by an energetic group of émigré Jewish intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Philip Krants, and Mikhail Zametkin, most of whom were radicalized in Eastern Europe; the intellectuals, in the main journalists and writers, were virtually forced to learn Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses in New York, but they soon came to love what they once considered mamaloshen; after the failure of the Russian revolution of 1905 thousands of Bundists, social democrats, labor Zionists, and Bolsheviks ended up in New York City, having brought with them new ideas and enthusiasm for the Jewish labor movement; most were "practical" radicals, ready to trim ideological orthodoxy for measurable gains for the working class.

But Michels goes further. He is at his most original and compelling in arguing that Jewish socialism in New York was more of a home-grown product than an import from the Old World, and that American Jewish socialism in turn helped stimulate and even underwrite a socialist movement in less developed Eastern Europe. The size of the Jewish population (1.4 million in New York City in 1914) and its concentration in factories, neighborhoods, and tenements was greater than anywhere in the world including the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. There were, of course, Russian roots to the Jewish labor and socialist movements. But it was in the United States, and especially in New York, that an authentic Jewish proletariat developed, a proletariat sensitive not only to the ideas of émigré intellectuals, but even more so to its own living and working conditions.

Class conflict was sporadic but visible in American cities, perhaps nowhere more intensely than in New York at the turn of the century. And although there was plenty of repression, Jewish strikers, Jewish radicals, and Jewish radicals-to-be found themselves in a political and cultural environment more open (at least until World War I) than anywhere in Eastern Europe. It was in this modern industrial and exploitative context that many Jews, without...