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    Jews in the American Labor Movement: Past, Present, and Future
    Jews in the American Labor Movement: Past, Present, and Future
    Jews in the American Labor Movement: Past, Present, and Future
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Jews in the American Labor Movement: Past, Present, and Future

    By Bennett Muraskin

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    About this ebook

    Jews in the American Labor Movement is a concise but complete summary of how Jews have influenced, and been influenced by, the Labor Movement in America. From the early beginnings on the Lower East Side, to Hollywood, to present day labor and race issues, Jews have been at the center of the power struggles that working people face. This short retelling looks at aspects of Secular Jewish culture and traditional Jewish beliefs, and how those have inspired workers in America to organize and demand justice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateDec 10, 2016
    ISBN9781941718025
    Jews in the American Labor Movement: Past, Present, and Future

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      Book preview

      Jews in the American Labor Movement - Bennett Muraskin

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      INTRODUCTION

      Think of the greatest strikes in US labor history. Apart from the garment workers’ strikes in New York and Chicago before World War I, none come to mind in which Jews played a major role. The railroad workers’ strike in 1877, the strikes for the eight-hour day in 1886, the Homestead Strike in 1892, the Pullman strike in 1894, the coalminers’ strike in 1902, the steelworkers’ strike in 1919, the general strike in San Francisco in 1934 and autoworkers’ sit-down strike in 1936-1937 all occurred either before Jews immigrated to the US in large numbers or in industries where few Jews were employed. Among the industrial proletariat considered by Marxists to be the agency of social revolution, Jews were under-represented. Furthermore, apart from the WASP elite, only Jews, among all European immigrants to the US, have been over-represented in the world of business. But if you look a little closer, you will find Jews as the ferment for a great deal of radical labor activism.

      The only two Socialist Party candidates elected to the US Congress were Victor Berger and Meyer London. Bernie Sanders is the only US Senator to call himself a socialist. All three were Jews.(Ronald Dellums, a non-Jewish Black man who represented Berkeley CA in Congress as Democrat from 1970 to 1997, is the only other person to so identify.)The Jewish garment workers’ unions pioneered social unionism and were among the founders of the CIO. Sidney Hillman became a top advisor to FDR. The role Jewish women have played in the American labor movement is even more remarkable in comparison to their Gentile counterparts. Jewish-led unions had close ties with Martin Luther King and were heavily involved in the civil rights movement. Jews have also stood out as advocates of labor in related forums, including mutual aid societies, educational institutions, law, scholarship and music, film and theater.

      How did all this happen?

      IN THE BEGINNING….

      German-speaking Jews who arrived in the US in the mid-19th century spread across the continent and tended to be merchants and shop keepers. If they became workers, they identified more as Germans than Jews. On the other hand, Yiddish speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who arrived in the US beginning in the 1880s settled in the big cities, tended to be workers and had a strong ethnic identity.

      The conditions faced by East European Jews were daunting. Low wages, long hours, unsafe workplaces, and overcrowded, unsanitary tenement housing were the norm. Most of these Jewish immigrants came from small towns and were not prepared for the noise, dirt, congestion, disease, and crime rampant in the great American cities of that period. Some even turned to crime and prostitution. However, they were free of the anti-Semitic laws and violence that plagued them in Eastern Europe. Their children were entitled to a free public education and once they became citizens, they could vote and participate in the political process.

      At first, many were pre-occupied with earning enough money to send for relatives left behind in Europe. From the beginning, Jews gravitated to the garment industry in part because they had experience as tailors in Eastern Europe. It did not take long before they began to see trade unions as the path their economic and social progress.

      However, before going any further, it is necessary to recognize one of the most important personalities in the history of the American labor movement, Samuel Gompers, who served as the president of the American Federation of Labor for nearly 40 years.

      Gompers was a Sephardic Jew. He came to US from England in 1863, but his parents came from Holland, with ancestry dating back to Spain. Gompers became a cigar maker and was one of founders of Cigar Makers Union back in the 1870s. He was integral to the founding of the American Federation of Labor in the 1880s and led it until 1924, but he did not share the language, culture or politics of East European Jews. Nor did he identify as a Jew. Gompers is considered a conservative influence because of his devotion to craft unionism, hostility toward socialism, and opposition to immigration.

      By 1888, there was already a Jewish labor organization called the United Hebrew Trades, originally conceived by Russian-speaking Jewish intellectuals and revolutionaries who frowned on Yiddish as an inferior language of the shtetl. Some actually came to the US to establish farms run on a socialist basis—a back to the land movement. But these projects soon fizzled and they moved to the big cities among other Jewish immigrants. As committed anarchists and socialists, they sought to organize the Jewish working class, but in order to do so, they first had to master Yiddish.

      At this early stage, Yiddish was a means to an end, not an instrument for cultural development. In their propaganda the stridently secular early Jewish labor leaders used religious imagery to inspire the workers—passages from the Prophets on social justice, references to modern

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