Professing Leninist Yiddishkayt: The Decline of American Yiddish Communism

Although communism was conceived as an essentially internationalist movement, in its practical political life it developed currents that combined a commitment to class struggle and state control of production with various forms of nation building and nationalism. While the Comintern variety of communist nationalism sought to construct a multinational, Moscow-centered superpower, national Communist parties or their factions often tended to put their particularistic interests above those of the Soviet-led Communist movement.¹ An example of “national communism” was “Browderism,” the attempt of Earl Browder, general secretary of the communist Party USA (CPUSA), to distance his party from the Soviet brand of communism and integrate it into American capitalist life. In 1945, William Z. Foster replaced Browder, reinstating the CPUSA’s indiscriminate allegiance to Moscow.

Even with the removal of Browder, the CPUSA did not depart from the strategy of seeking a coalition with mainstream American organizations—including American Jewish organizations. In 1950, the leadership of the CPUSA admitted: “Our weakness today is that we are not associated closely with the members of the major mass organizations of the Jewish people.”² In the climate of the Cold War and against the backdrop of anti-Jewish repressions in the Soviet Union and its satellites, Jewish communists found themselves in almost complete isolation. Significantly, American Jewish organizations were eager to emphasize their aversion to communism. For instance, on October 1, 1950, some 2,000 delegates gathered in New York for what was dubbed a “Labor Conference to Stop Communist Aggression.” Many of the delegates were readers of the largest Yiddish newspaper, the Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), which had been among the earliest labor-oriented newspapers to see communism as an evil, and had waged a bitter campaign against it since the early 1920s.³ In the late 1950s, when the most repressive forms of Stalinism had been debunked even by the Kremlin, pro-Soviet activists encountered a particularly harsh ostracism, notably in the Yiddish-reading circles of the Forverts and the nationalist-cum-liberal Der Tog (Day), which confronted the Morgn-Frayhayt (Morning-Freedom), the newspaper of American communists and their sympathizers.

Journalists of the Morgn-Frayhayt and the Forverts were involved in perennial ideological warfare with one another. The former accused its larger rival of promoting assimilation, accepting capitalism as an economic model, and preferring low intellectual pabulum. At the same time, many of Der Tog’s editors and contributors had more in common with their Yiddish communist counterparts, because both dailies were middle-to-highbrow and targeted secular, anti-assimilationist readers. According to Henry Srebrnik, a historian of Jewish communism, the Yiddish communists “were not assimilationists, at least not consciously, unlike some Jews who belonged to mainstream, non-Jewish Communist” organizations.⁴ Beginning from 1918, when Jewish sections emerged in the Bolshevik Party in Soviet Russia and later modeled themselves in the American Communist Party fashion, the autonomy of their Yiddish-speaking membership helped to smooth the essentially de-nationalizing character of the movement.⁵ At the same time, the CPUSA was wary of its ethnic groups’ sectarianism. In 1950, the party leadership emphasized that “bourgeois nationalism” had “not always been fought against effectively or consistently by many comrades” of the Morgn-Frayhayt.⁶

Yiddish-speaking communist organizations usually had little to do with “the young Jewish intellectuals” for whom “Communism was the principal religion.”⁷ With few exceptions, members of such organizations were hard-working, proletarian immigrants with little or no formal education, in whose imagination the internationalist “diaspora” of the Comintern formed the right ideological environment for their essentially nationalist aspirations. Characteristically, a 1949 analysis maintained that among American political organizations, the communists were “the most active in the nationality field.”⁸ According to the CPUSA’s post-World War II “Leninist position,” the Jewish people had

only its national character and culture as common national attributes. Hence, it is not a single nation and is incapable of acting as such. But the Jews of all countries are capable, in the present period, of fighting as a people, in unity with all democratic forces, for uprooting fascism...