Thread: Jews Split In The Ranks On Immigration

Jewish Socialism in the United States, 1880-1920

The birth and growth of American Jewish Socialism.
By Daniel Soyer Email this page Print this page
American Jewish Socialism arose in the 1880s with mass Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, but it was not simply a Russian import. Jewish American immigrants turned to Socialism in response to their experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Many Jews in late 19th-century Eastern Europe had endured downward socio-economic mobility as traditional Jewish economic niches were undermined by the expanding industrial capitalist system. This experience, combined with persecution under the Tsars and encounters with poverty and factory labor in America, inspired many Jews to look for radical social change.

Jews as Proletarians
The influx of Jewish immigrants from Russia in the 1880s brought with it a small but vocal number of intellectuals, many of whom had had a Russian-language education and some of whom had been active in the early Russian revolutionary movement. In America, they took manual jobs, especially in the fledgling garment industry, and began to see themselves for the first time as proletarians, members of the industrial working class.

Meanwhile, they aligned themselves with either Anarchist or Marxian Socialist ideologies: Anarchists favored direct action and stressed the inherently oppressive class nature of the state, while Socialists (Social Democrats, as they were called) sought to capture control of the state for the working class. In the early years, though, the line between the factions was blurry, and both sides worked together in a number of short-lived organizations and institutions, including the Propaganda Association and the Russian Labor Lyceum.

At first, the Socialist intellectuals found it difficult to influence the much larger community of Jewish immigrant workers, who spoke only Yiddish and had not had the same experiences of the revolutionary movement in Russia. These intellectuals preferred to carry out their activities in Russian, and doubted that serious political ideas could be expressed in Yiddish, which they viewed as an inferior dialect of German. Gradually, however, the radicals began to give speeches and issue publications in Yiddish.

Socialism in Yiddish
Abraham Cahan, a young immigrant from Vilna, Lithuania, is credited with giving the first Yiddish Socialist speech in America. In 1882, after attending a Socialist meeting ostensibly aimed at Jewish workers but at which all of the speakers had given their remarks in Russian or German, Cahan asked the organizers why they did not use the language of the people they were trying to reach. The radicals laughed at the thought and contemptuously suggested that he try it himself.

A week later, in a packed meeting room, Cahan explained the Marxist theory of surplus value in Yiddish. Bernard Weinstein, who was to become secretary of the United Hebrew Trades, a federation of predominantly Jewish trade unions, later wrote in his memoirs that this was the first time he really understood the doctrine of Socialism.

Over time, the radicals' speeches and publications began to attract more people to their cause. At the same time, the Anarchists lost ground, and most of the Jewish radicals gravitated toward Socialism. In the 1880s and 1890s this meant joining the Socialist Labor Party (SLP).

Nevertheless, the Anarchists remained a visible and vocal presence, with energetic and eloquent champions such as the non-Jewish German Johan Most and Emma Goldman, who had come to the United States from Russia as a teenager. The Anarchists also published a highly regarded Yiddish-language paper, the Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Voice of Labor), known not only for its politics but for its high literary standards.

By the early 1900s, the institutional groundwork for a powerful Jewish Socialist movement had been laid. One of the most important institutions of the movement was the Workmen's Circle (Arbeter Ring), which began as a mutual aid society in 1892 and was reorganized as a multi-branch fraternal order in 1900.

The Workmen's Circle provided its members with material assistance, such as health and death benefits, and its branches served as venues for social interaction and cultural expression. Branches also supported their members who were on strike, and the order as a whole aided striking unions and Socialist causes. Members were permitted to hold whatever political or religious opinions they liked, as long as they did not vote for the candidates of a bourgeois party. The order itself was resolutely secular.

The Forward
Another central institution of Jewish Socialism was the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts), a newspaper founded in 1897 by dissident members of the SLP who became dissatisfied with the increasingly authoritarian and sectarian leadership of the party's leader Daniel De Leon (himself of Sephardic Jewish origin, but with no ties to the Jewish community). Abraham Cahan served as the newspaper's first editor, but he soon left to pursue a career in English-language journalism.

When Cahan returned to the Forward in 1902, he brought with him a flair for the sensational and a talent for sensing the pulse of the Yiddish-reading public. He turned the Forward into a peculiar mix of earnest Socialist propaganda and sensationalist yellow journalism, all presented in a lively, popular style and a simple Yiddish.

The formula worked, and the Forward soon gained more readers than any other Yiddish daily in the world or Socialist daily in the country. Not only was it the primary voice of Jewish immigrant Socialism, but it was also a highly successful business enterprise, giving away much of its profit, as part of its mission, to labor and Socialist causes, Jewish and non-Jewish.

Organizing Unions and Community
Jewish Socialists also controlled many of the predominantly Jewish trade unions, especially in the garment industry. Chief among these was the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, founded in 1900, which organized workers in the women's clothing trade, most of whom were Jewish. The union struggled for years to maintain its existence, until a series of massive strikes in 1909 and 1910 established it as a force to be reckoned with not only in the industry, but also in communal politics.

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, whose members made men's clothing, was founded in 1914, and many of the union's officers, staffers, and members were Socialists. Likewise, the United Hebrew Trades was led by Socialists.

Jewish Socialist attitudes toward Jewish identity and culture varied. Most of the 19th-century pioneers of the movement were ardent cosmopolitans. Even as they adopted Yiddish as a medium to reach the Jewish workers, they rejected any special appeal to Jewish interests or identity. The Anarchists became especially infamous for organizing Yom Kippur balls, at which revelers danced, ate, drank, sang revolutionary songs, and performed skits, all in a gesture of contempt for Jewish religious practice.

The first decade of the 20th century saw an influx of immigrants who had been active in the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia. The Bundists fought for the rights of workers as well as for Jewish national rights . In Russia, for example, they demanded national-cultural autonomy for the Jews, with Jewish control over Yiddish-language schools and other public institutions. They also saw Yiddish not just as a medium of communication, but also as the carrier of secular Jewish national identity. The Workmen's Circle gradually fell under control of the Bundists, and began to promote Yiddish secular culture. Bundists also dominated the Jewish Socialist Federation, the Yiddish-language arm of the Socialist Party (SP), which had overtaken the SLP as the most important Socialist party in the United States.

Labor Zionists sought to combine the principles of Socialism and Jewish nationalism. Friendly toward both Yiddish and Hebrew, they formed parallel institutions, including a fraternal order, the Jewish National Workers' Alliance. Whatever their orientation, Jewish Socialist leaders and organizations were adamantly secular, though rank-and-file supporters may not have been as consistently irreligious.

Entering Politics
In the 1910s, the Socialist Party entered a brief electoral heyday, dominating politics in the Jewish districts of New York City. In 1914, the Lower East Side sent Socialist labor lawyer Meyer London to Congress with a pledge to represent both working class and immigrant Jewish interests.

In the following years, Jewish districts in New York elected numerous Socialist members to the state assembly and the city board of aldermen, and even a municipal judge. In 1917, Morris Hillquit, another immigrant lawyer, garnered more than 20 percent of the vote in a four-man race for mayor of New York. Hillquit would later serve as national chairman of the Socialist Party.

This electoral peak came to an end in the early 1920s, brought down by gerrymandering, Democratic-Republican coalitions in Socialist districts, government repression, and the bitter split with the Communists after the Russian Revolution. But Socialists continued to exert influence through their control of important communal institutions, such as the Forward, the Workmen's Circle, and the unions. Eventually, they joined the New Deal coalition under Franklin Roosevelt, bringing their brand of Social Democratic politics into the mainstream. The liberalism that American Jews exhibit to this day descends partly from this Socialist legacy.

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history ... rica.shtml

The odd thing about the Socialism, Communism of the Jewish left is that these are the very doctrines that contributed to their extreme oppression in European countries such as pre-WWII Germany, Poland, and Russia. Yet they still seem to be trying to reinvent them all over again in this country. I have a number of friends who are Jewish liberals and they turn their angry backs on me every time if I try to discuss politics. They just don't get it when it comes to faulty logic.

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The Socialist Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism

By Tyler Cowen • January 1997 • Volume: 47 • Issue: 1

Dr. Cowen teaches economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were considered: money-Jews. Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews. . . . Antisemitism is really a hatred of capitalism.


—Ulrike Meinhof, left-wing German terrorist of the 1970s

Capitalism and the market economy encourage racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance, while supporting a plurality of diverse lifestyles and customs. Heavily regulated or socialist economies, in contrast, tend to breed intolerance and ethnic persecution. Socialism leads to low rates of economic growth, disputes over resource use, and concentrated political power—all conditions which encourage conflict rather than cooperation. Ethnic and religious minorities usually do poorly when political coercion is prevalent. Economic collapses—usually associated with interventionism—worsen the problem by unleashing the destructive psychological forces of envy and resentment, which feed prejudice and persecution.

While discrimination is present in societies of all kinds, discriminators must pay pecuniary costs for indulging their prejudices in a market setting. Even the prejudiced usually will trade with minorities; bigots attempt to oppress minorities by socializing the costs through government action, but bigots usually are less willing to bear these costs themselves. Repeated commercial interactions also increase the social familiarity of customs or lifestyles that otherwise might be found unusual or alien. Sustained economic growth alleviates political and social tensions by creating more for everybody.

The history of the Jewish people illustrates the relatively favorable position of minorities in a market setting. Hostility toward trade and commerce has often fueled hostility toward Jews, and vice versa. The societies most congenial to commercial life for their time—Renaissance Italy, the growing capitalist economies of England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and the United States—typically have shown the most toleration for Jews. Ellis Rivkin, in his neglected masterpiece, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New Interpretation, wrote:

Since World War II Jews and Judaism have been liberated in every country and territory where capitalism has been restored to vigorous growth—and this includes Germany. By contrast, wherever anticapitalism or precapitalism has prevailed the status of Jews and Judaism has either undergone deterioration or is highly precarious. Thus at this very moment the country where developing global capitalism is most advanced, the United States, accords Jews and Judaism a freedom that is known nowhere else in the world and that was never known in the past. It is a freedom that is not matched even in Israel. . . . By contrast, in the Soviet Union, the citadel of anticapitalism, the Jews are cowed by anti-Semitism, threatened by extinction, and barred from access to their God.

The socialist origins of modern anti-Semitism illustrate the link between statism and the persecution of minorities. Anti-Semitism as a formal, intellectual movement arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jewish conspiracy theories grew in popularity. German writers picked up on earlier anti-Enlightenment theories of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to rule the world. During the French Revolution, the Jews, along with the Masons, were identified as forces for liberalism, secularism, and capitalism. German writers quickly found the Jews to be a more popular target than the Masons, perhaps because they were more visible or more different. The originally Judeo-Masonic theories eventually discarded the other conspirators, such as the Templars and the Illuminati, and focused on the Jews.

Anti-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Austria

The anti-Jewish creed was formalized by Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who coined the term anti-Semitic. In 1879 Marr published his book The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, which went through twelve editions in six years. He also founded the Antisemitic Journal, and started an Antisemitic League. Marr idolized Tsarist Russia, and earlier in his career he had been a radical socialist. The new anti-Semites who followed Marr expanded the medieval attacks on Jewish traders and usurers and developed them into a full-scale economic critique. The Jews who provoked the most anger were those who embraced cosmopolitan, Enlightenment values, and who achieved economic success.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany became the first country to develop systematic anti-Semitic political and intellectual movements. In Germany, Adolf Stocker’s Christian Social Party (1878-1885) combined anti-Semitism with left-wing, reformist legislation. The party attacked laissez-faire economics and the Jews as part of the same liberal plague. Stocker’s movement synthesized medieval anti-Semitism, based in religion, and modern anti-Semitism, based in racism and socialist economics. He once wrote: I see in unrestrained capitalism the evil of our epoch and am naturally also an opponent of modern Judaism on account of my socio-political views. Stocker had revered the Prussian aristocracy since his youth.

Georg Ritter von Schonerer led the left-wing, anti-Semitic movement in Austria. Schonerer’s German Liberal Party, developed a lower-middle-class, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalistic platform in the 1880s. Schonerer directed his anti-Semitism at the economic activity of the Rothschilds; he advocated nationalization of their railroad assets. Later, he broadened his charges to attack Jewish merchants more generally. Hitler was an avid admirer of Schonerer, and as a young man even hung Schonerer’s slogans over his bed.

The growing nineteenth-century socialist movements did little to stem the anti-Semitic tide and often explicitly promoted anti-Semitism. The initial link between socialism and anti-Semitism arose through intellectual affinity. Throughout the nineteenth century, the socialist critique of capitalism and the anti-Semitic critique used the same arguments. Many socialists considered anti-Semitism to be a way station on the path toward a more consistent socialist viewpoint. The very first systematic socialist philosophers, the French Utopians of the early nineteenth century, had implicated the Jews in their critique of capitalism. French Jewry was highly commercial, financial, and capitalistic. Proudhon and Fourier, who stressed the abolition of usury, saved their most vitriolic anti-Semitic tirades for Jewish moneylenders.

Karl Marx continued the anti-Jewish polemics of the socialists. The historical association between Jews, private property, and commerce led to his well-known anti-Semitic diatribes. Marx, who sought to reconstruct society according to his master plan, detested the particularistic nature of Jewish religion and custom. Some of Marx’s followers, such as Duhring and Lassalle, used anti-Semitism as a means of introducing anti-capitalist doctrine. They believed that if the public could be convinced to hate Jewish capitalists, the public would eventually come to hate non-Jewish capitalists as well.

A widely circulated nineteenth-century witticism described anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools [der Sozialismus des bloden Mannes]. It was widely recognized that the anti-Semites shared the same gripes as the socialists; the anti-Semites simply chose too narrow a target. The socialists happily accepted the spirit of anti-Semitism, provided the target was widened to the entire capitalist class. More recently, the historian Paul Johnson has noted with irony that socialism has served as the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.

Even when socialists opposed anti-Semitism, as later came to pass for tactical reasons, European socialist parties failed to provide effective opposition to anti-Semitic trends. Most socialists, with their dislike of capitalism, were unwilling to defend the economic activities of Jews. Socialism pretended to be a revolutionary, liberal movement but in fact embraced the conservative doctrine of concentrated state power. Most socialists supported World War I, which provided a tremendous boost to anti-Semitism, without hesitation. Later, the Nazi party, the most dedicated enemy of the Jews, was a national socialist party from the beginning.

Soviet Anti-Semitism

The actual practice of socialism has not been kind to its religious and ethnic minorities, including Jews. The Soviet government adopted consistently anti-Semitic policies. Lenin was strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, but Soviet policy reversed shortly after his death. Totalitarian states, with their inevitable economic failures, eventually need scapegoats. Economic performance rarely matches the official promises, and the subsequent privations feed social resentment; one person gains only at the expense of another. The necessities of totalitarian government, in time, override whatever nonracist feelings might be held by the leaders, and create strong pressures for political support of racism. Control over the press and rights of speech makes racist feeling relatively easy to whip up.

Soviet anti-Semitism flourished after the Second World War, as the Communist leaders were unable to resist the target that had proven so successful for Hitler. In 1953 Stalin alleged the existence of a Doctors’ Plot, masterminded by Jews, to poison the top Soviet leadership. Stalin died before a trial was called, but he had been planning to forcibly deport two million Jews to Siberia. The economic crimes executions of the early 1960s were directed largely against Jews.

Textbooks were rewritten either to remove the Jewish role in history, or to provide negative stereotypes of Jews. Government texts dealing with Germany and World War II mentioned neither the Jews nor the Holocaust. The Russian pogroms were reinterpreted as justified retribution for the capitalistic excesses of the Jews. The Soviet government attacked all forms of religion, but Judaism most of all.

Eastern Germany continued the earlier Nazi polemics against Jews, substituting the words Zionist or Israel for Jew, and referring to the salutary effects of progressive socialist forces, a scant difference from the earlier Nazi terminology of national socialism. Many former Nazi journalists were hired to write these anti-Zionist polemics. Similar trends came to pass throughout eastern Europe. In the early 1950s, thirteen leaders in the Czech Communist party (ten were Jewish), were accused of being Zionists, and were hanged. In 1968 the Polish media spent months debating the unmasking of Zionists in Poland, although Jews comprised less than one-fifteenth of one percent of the population. The anti-Zionist campaign was accompanied by demonstrations, arrests, surveillance, police persecution, and other typical methods of totalitarian oppression.

The contrast with the more capitalistic United States is striking. The United States started off with few Jews but attracted many Jewish immigrants with its relatively free economy and atmosphere of relative tolerance. By the 1920s, three of the four cities with the most Jews were located in the United States. New York had the largest number of Jews, and Chicago and Philadelphia were third and fourth (Budapest was second). Today Jews account for only two percent of the American population, but they account for half of the billionaires. The history of the Jews provides a stark illustration of the differences between capitalism and socialism.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/feature ... -semitism/