This is an excerpt from Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left by Benjamin Balthaser, out this week with Verso Books.
As historian Karen Brodkin tells it, socialism was “hegemonic” in American Jewish life before the Cold War. Not in the sense that every American Jew was a socialist, but rather that a “working class” and “anti-capitalist outlook” was a familiar, even dominant political position of American Jews between the first waves of mass Jewish immigration in the 1880s and the Red Scare of the late 1940s.
The shape such political commitments took were in broad-based community organizations, labor unions, socialist publications, and leftist parties built in Jewish communities or in non-Jewish organizations with large-scale Jewish participation. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) not only formed with an overwhelming majority of Jewish workers, but formed through militant strikes and built a culture far beyond the workplace in dance halls, housing cooperatives, and left-wing Yiddish publications. The Socialist Party had almost unparalleled support among Jewish workers, with Eugene Debs receiving nearly 40 percent of the Jewish vote in 1920, compared to less than 4 percent of the vote from the general population. Victor Berger, Debs’s running mate and one of the most popular socialist politicians in the United States, was Jewish, as was Meyer London, an outspoken Socialist congressperson.
One of the great misconceptions about the sizable Jewish left of the early to mid-twentieth century (an error repeated by Brodkin among others) is that American Jewish…
Auteur: Benjamin Balthaser
