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 socialism was an import from Eastern Europe. Brodkin’s quite reasonable claim, and indeed what I think is common sense among American Jews and historians of the Left, is that Jewish socialism was born out of the crucible of tsarist antisemitism and a late-arriving Haskalah, fueled by an overeducated if underemployed working class. While this may be true for the arrival of the Bund in the early twentieth century, for the emergence of the late-nineteenth-century American Jewish left, according to historian Tony Michels, there was little Jewish socialism to import. As Michels argues, the Jewish labor and socialist movement precedes the Eastern European labor and socialist movements by two decades; “the Jew had not always been a radical; the Jew had become a radical in New York and in other American cities.” In part, Michels suggests, this has to do with Jewish contact with radical German American workers, who brought with them texts from the Oyfklerung of German socialism, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Michels’s historical observation functions as a critique of a far more pervasive assumption, that Jewish socialism is a single-generational affair and that, upon assimilation, socialist Jews quieted down into electoral liberals. Little could be further from the truth — indeed, the movement of Jewish socialism from the 1880s to the 1940s suggests an increasing radicalization the more assimilated Jews became in the United States and the more comfortable in their environs.
Indeed, the communist movement of the 1930s and ’40s was, as Michael Denning observed, a movement of largely second- and third-generation “ethnic American” immigrants rather than more recent arrivals. The communist movement was also the high point in many ways of the Jewish left in the United States, with the Communist Party (CPUSA) averaging nearly one hundred thousand members at this time, over half of whom were Jewish — and given the party’s high turnover, it would mean hundreds of thousands of American Jews passed in and out of the ranks of the organization.
Yet the range and scope of the CPUSA went far beyond its membership rolls, to the many affiliated unions, civil rights organizations, anti-imperialist and antiwar organizations, and cultural organizations in the party’s orbit. The left wing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the National Negro Congress, American League Against War and Fascism, Civil Rights Congress, Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, and others meant that millions of Americans were fellow travelers with the CPUSA or active members in CPUSA-aligned organizations. This both followed and helped produce the greatest realignment of American mass politics in history — a coalition of white liberals, labor, civil rights organizations, people of color, and American Jews.
The alliance is such a bedrock of modern American life, it causes confusion if it begins to unravel. The high point of the American Jewish left, in other words, also coincided with and helped produce the common sense of left-wing American politics.
And while the Communist movement of the 1930s promoted its Popular Front slogan, “Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism,” it has been noted by wide swaths of both historians of communism and Jewish history that the movement of the 1930s and ’40s was anything but assimilationist. As Brodkin writes, “Jewish workers did not accept the notion that a Jewish identity was peripheral to their working class interests” as late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish socialists. Describing the same phenomenon a decade after the period Brodkin describes, Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik argue that “Jewish Communism” in the United States “was a combination of socialism and secular Jewish nationalism.”
Indeed, reading through the left press of the 1930s, “assimilation” was understood to be anathema to socialism; not only something a socialist Jew would not want to do, but very much a project conceived to counter socialism and undermine it. As one of the major Communist Party editors and theorists of the late 1930s and 1940s, Alexander Bittelman, writes:
Everybody knows that the non-democratic forces in American Jewish life are either assimilationist … or reactionary-nationalistic. The assimilationists are altogether opposed to the building of a Jewish life in America or they seek to reduce the American Jewish community to a religious group, which is tantamount to a denial of Jewish life. And on this point, the reactionary nationalists, who deny the possibility of building a Jewish life in the diaspora (the Goluth), take the same position as the assimilationists. Namely: they either oppose altogether the building of a Jewish life in America or — which is virtually the same thing — they want to confine it to a religious community.
For Bittelman, the alternative to “assimilationism” and “reactionary nationalism” (that is, Zionism) is “progressive Jewish values.” Much like “tikkun olam” a generation later, “progressive Jewish values” in the lexicon of the 1930s and ’40s Jewish left refers to a secular culture of social democracy, anti-racism, and cultural diversity, expressed through Jewish tradition. As the scholar Yuri Slezkine articulated it, of the three Jewish answers to antisemitism in the twentieth century — immigration to the Americas, emigration to Israel, and the Bolshevik Revolution (that is, assimilation, nationalism, or socialism) — socialism remained by far the most popular solution to the “Jewish question” in the early to mid-twentieth century. As a solution then, communism was not a form of assimilation, but rather an alternative to it.
Of course, this raises the question, what was it about the United States that allowed for the flowering of Jewish socialism? While that may be an overdetermined question, it is clear that Jewish socialists expressed their political commitments through a language of ethnic identification and racial solidarity; indeed, these tended to be inseparable.
As Amelia Glaser writes in her comprehensive history of left-wing Yiddishkeit poetry in the US, part of Jewish leftists’ acculturation to the United States was through the language of racial solidarity and racial identification. American poets writing in Yiddish would often transpose language of pogroms onto stories of lynchings and would compare the sufferings of African Americans with the sufferings of Jews in the Pale of Settlement. Yiddish-speaking poets would even translate black idiom and black poetic styles into their writing. While such forms of borrowing and identification could be seen as a kind of left-wing minstrelsy, it expressed a critique of the Al Jolson modality of shedding Jewish tears through blackface. Rather than expressing Jewish grief through transposition, such poems were a way of communicating the oppression of African Americans to other Jews in an idiom they could understand.
In an analogous move, the mid-century novelist and editor Mike Gold’s 1930 Jews Without Money features a dark-skinned, curly-haired Jew — nicknamed the N-word by the community — as his hero. Rather than see this as appropriation, I would argue Gold features this character to reject a “teleology of assimilation” and embrace solidarity with other marginalized Americans. While there are many other reasons for Jewish socialism to have thrived in the United States, including a greater atmosphere of freedom than in Tsarist Russia (albeit often circumscribed), I would suggest it was rather that the American left lent itself to an expression of ethnic politics as a politics of socialist liberation. In the US, unlike Europe, racial solidarity was an expression of radicalism.
Bittelman, as a Communist Party theorist, attempted to schematize Ashkenazi Jewish identity and its relationship with non-Jewish people of color throughout the world within a Marxian and intersectional framework after World War II. Bittelman first conceives of Ashkenazi Jewish life in the United States as existing within a “bourgeois nationalist” framework that seeks to incorporate the “Jewish bourgeoisie” into aims of US-dominated global capitalism and offer a form of subordinate “assimilation” to the Jewish masses. Bittelman then goes on to say that race in the United States is not simply an epiphenomenon of class; rather, there “exists in the United States a peculiar system of oppression of peoples, usually spoken of as minorities, which is a system of persecution of peoples and discrimination against them.” In other words, the US is not only a capitalist country existing through the exploitation of labor but the inheritor of the British Empire externally and the product of settlement and slavery internally.
While eschewing a strict hierarchy of oppression, Bittelman nonetheless describes the oppression of African Americans as akin to colonization, framing it as a “national oppression” analogous to the colonization of the Philippines and Puerto Rico within the “Black Belt of the South,” and a regime of oppression and discrimination throughout the rest of the United States. Bittelman describes a system of racial oppression that ultimately serves the interests of capitalism while placing “Anglo-Saxons” as the dominant group and subjecting white ethnics such as “Poles, Russians, Italians, Jews and others” to various forms of exclusion. Bittelman goes on to suggest that Jews stand apart from this general framework insofar as “anti-Semitism itself ” is a form of “national oppression and discrimination” that is less systemic than the oppression faced by black people, yet both sharper and more important to the forces of “imperialist reaction” than the general forms of social exclusion faced by non-“Anglo-Saxons.” In this framework, it is in the interests of American Jews to ally with the “Negro people” who are fighting for their “national liberation” within the Black Belt and are a “vanguard force against the whole imperialist system of national discrimination and oppression in the United States.”
It makes sense, then, that in his analysis of the role of Jewish socialists in the United States, a critique of Zionism emerges out the Jewish left’s general worldview. Thus for Bittelman, American Jewish identity is linked primarily to its conditions in the US and its lived solidarities with other “oppressed nationalities,” especially African Americans and people in the colonized world. Bittelman’s theorizing an American Jewish relationship to Zionism follows from his general theorization of race and capitalism as transnational formations, linked through circuits of military and economic form.
If Zionism is a form of imperialism, it is not only directly antagonistic for the Palestinians — it is also against the direct self-interest of working-class Jews. Bittelman grants that Jews form a“national group” in the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine. But their national character, language, territory, and national culture does not then grant Jews in Palestine the right to form a Jewish-only state. As Bittelman writes:
The Zionist solution of the Palestine question, being anti-democratic and reactionary and oriented on collaboration with imperialism against the Arab people, endangers the security of the Yishuv and tends to turn the Jewish people into accomplices and partners in imperialist oppression and exploitation.
Bittelman was hardly alone in seeing Zionism as a form of imperialism in the 1930s and ’40s; indeed, that was the commonsense understanding on the Left. Not only would Zionism, as Hannah Arendt accurately predicted, displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and set a minority of Jews against an entire subcontinent of Arab neighbors; it would be aligned with British and US imperialism and the bourgeois interests of the Jewish ruling class. Bittelman spoke for most American Jewish leftists including luminaries such as Mike Gold, Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others, when he wrote that Zionism was anathema to “progressive Jewish values.” Anti-Zionism seemed to swim well within the mainstream of American Jewish life. As Robert Gessner succinctly put it, in the United States “about one percent of Jews are Zionist.”
To quote Stuart Hall on Gramsci, ideas are “never only concerned with the philosophical core” of their existence; for their “organic” presence in movements and communities, “they must touch practical, everyday commonsense.” It’s important to point out that American Jewish anti-Zionism emerged organically, in the Gramscian sense, from the already-existing socialist commitments of Jews in the US. While the US Jewish left was briefly “converted” to Zionism, it was not by Israeli military prowess, but rather the Soviet Union’s support for Partition in the United Nations. Yet this was short-lived for both the Soviet Union and the American Jewish left.
When Israel again emerged in the spotlight in 1967, the New Left response was remarkably consistent with the response of Jewish leftists a generation earlier. While the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) remained consistent on Palestine throughout the nadir of the 1950s, for many in the leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), there was a process of relearning. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came out in support of the nascent Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968, leaders in SDS felt that they should be supported. Susan Eanet-Klonsky, who was in SDS leadership and worked out of the national office in Chicago, said she received a stack of pamphlets and books “on the Palestine question” from older comrades and took up a study of the issue for the first time. Writing several articles for SDS’s newspaper, New Left Notes, Eanet-Klonsky framed Israel-Palestine much like communists of the 1930s had, as an imperialist conquest “analogous to the flight of early colonists in America . . . to a land already occupied by Indian people.”
When, fifty years later, Jewish Voice for Peace unveiled the “Deadly Exchange” campaign to highlight the racism of both the US police state and the Israeli apartheid state, they were articulating a hundred-year tradition of linking Zionism to racial violence and imperialism. While in each case the conditions and context may have been new, the left-wing transnational conception of race has remained a constant. Such a conceptualization of race is not a new phenomenon, but rather emerges from solidarities and articulations of a much longer tradition of an American Jewish left.
On the question of Zionism and solidarity with other oppressed ethnic groups and religious minorities, there is a straight line from the Communist Party to SDS, to the Chutzpah Collective, to New Jewish Agenda (NJA), to Jewish Voice for Peace. Indeed, one can even trace such lineages through singular individuals and families. Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are intergenerational organizations, and many of the founders and activists hail from multigenerational left-wing families themselves, including Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, whose career spans from NJA to JFREJ; to David Duhalde, a Jewish socialist in DSA whose parents are exiles from Chile; and Molly Crabapple, who is the great-granddaughter of a well-known Bundist. In this sense I would suggest that the Jewish left(s) are not peripheral to Jewish identity, but rather integral to understanding the ongoing cleavages and oppositions within the Jewish community, as well as the continued presence of self-identified Jews and Jewish organizations on the streets in protest over Israel’s latest war.
These questions are far from academic. As now right-wing Jewish institutions, from the American Jewish Committee to the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International, attempt to quash debate among the American public on Zionism and the continuing displacement of Palestinians from their land, not only is a living memory of the Jewish left a resource for American Jews, it can point to ways forward for those who wish to challenge such institutions on their own cultural grounds. As opposed to theories of the Jewish left’s “vanishing” or interest in the American Jewish left as a form of “nostalgia,” it should be remembered that Jewish leftists were not merely brave individuals but representatives of rooted communities and class perspectives, part of a longer story of class struggle, anti-imperialism, and assimilation into dominant modes of whiteness and power. As much as this is a cultural history of “the Jewish left,” Jewish lefts are inseparable from the longer history of the American radical left, of which Jewish lefts have been an active and influential part.
Of course, this is not to say that the (Jewish) American left has been infallible (indeed, blind adherence to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was a disaster for Palestine and for the credibility of American communism): its defeats are primarily the result of the uneven terrain of class struggle, not internal contradictions. The two Red Scares, COINTELPRO, and the alignment of liberal Jewish institutions with the inquisitions of the Right have played outsize roles in establishing the dominance of Zionism over Jewish and American politics. But it should be remembered that past struggles emerged and were fought out over terrain not wholly different from what we face now: an imperialist superpower against the interests of the global majority.
My intervention is not the idea that Jewish leftists were exceptional, farsighted, or cosmically visionary — rather that such lefts emerged out of the quotidian interests and struggles of ordinary people in a grotesquely unjust world. As such, earlier Jewish leftists built a Jewish left — and a critique of Zionism — out of the terrain that was autochthonous to the United States: one in which racial oppression, a rapacious bourgeoisie, a bloated military budget, and precarious living standards even for the educated are the norm rather than the exception. American Jews, like all other members of the 99 percent, have grounds to fight such formations in their own language, in a common language, in one’s own language in common with others.
Great Job Benjamin Balthaser & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
