All Together Different

Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism

Daniel Katz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781479873258
• eBook ISBN: 9780814763667
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

In the early 1930’s, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. All Together Different revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression.

Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) appealed to an international force of coworkers, Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based cultural pluralism, which Daniel Katz newly terms “mutual culturalism,” back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth century Russian Empire. Built on original scholarship and bolstered by exhaustive research, All Together Different offers a fresh perspective on the nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.

PART I

1
“Harmoniously Functioning Nationalities”

Yiddish Socialism in Russia and the United States, 1892–1918

During the Sixth Zionist conference in Basle, Switzerland, in late August 1903, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, asked to speak with Chaim Zhitlowsky, perhaps the most famous philosopher of Yiddish socialism. Though an obscure historical figure today, during the 1890s and 1900s Zhitlowsky commanded the attention of Russian Jewish intellectuals, while Herzl was better known among European heads of state than in the Jewish Diaspora. As a small movement of western European Jews, Zionism was overshadowed by revolutionary movements in the Russian Empire, such as the General Union of Jewish Workers, known as the Bund.

According to Zhitlowsky’s account of their August 1903 meeting, Herzl asked him to use his influence in the Bund to halt the revolutionary movement among militant Russian Jews. Herzl had offered him a solution to the Jewish problem in Russia proposed by the Russian interior minister, Vyacheslav Plehve. “I have just come from Plehve. I have his positive, binding promise that in fifteen years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied to one condition: the Jewish revolutionists shall cease their struggle against the Russian government.”¹ Zhitlowsky refused on both practical and ideological grounds. He explained,

We, Jewish revolutionists, even the most national among us, are not Zionists and do not believe that Zionism is able to resolve our problem. To transfer the Jewish people from Russia to Eretz-Yisroel [the land of Israel] is, in our eyes, a utopia, and because of a utopia we will not renounce the path upon which we have embarked—the path of the revolutionary struggle against the Russian government, which should also lead to the freedom of the Jewish people.²

In the 1880s and 1890s, Zhitlowsky developed his ideas for revolution while living outside Russia, as did many Jewish intellectuals who influenced Russian Yiddishism.³ In 1891, Zhitlowsky settled in Zurich, where in 1893 he helped to found the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), a Jewish revolutionary movement that argued for Jewish agrarian socialism.⁴ Agrarian socialism was never more than a marginal philosophy in the urban centers of the Jewish Diaspora, but the SR’s vision of a socialist Russia comprising a federation of nations, each exploring and developing its autonomous culture within a socialist context, fired the imagination of other Russian socialists.⁵

Born in 1865 in Vitebsk, Belarus, Zhitlowsky lived with his grandfather, a prosperous merchant and a Lubavitcher Chasid, an ultraorthodox follower of a charismatic teacher.⁶ As a teen, Zhitlowsky met Shlomo Ansky, a slightly older man who introduced him to radical Russian and German Enlightenment literature. In 1879, Zhitlowsky entered gymnasium (an elite secondary school) but left before he graduated as he became more radicalized by Russian revolutionary thinkers. Throughout the 1880s, Zhitlowsky found inspiration in articles discussing Jewish nationalism in the Hebrew-language dailies, as well as in his friend Ansky’s travels among the poor Jewish shtetlakh (small towns) collecting folk tales.⁷ As Zhitlowsky began to write, he urged Jewish intellectuals to adopt a movement of Jewish nationalism built on a foundation of Yiddish culture among working-class Jews in Russia. For Zhitlowsky, the elevation of Yiddish kultur, “an all-encompassing, primarily secular civilization in Yiddish” best expressed in literature, was a means to struggle in Russia and throughout the Jewish Diaspora for a socialist society founded on the principles of social justice and human rights.⁸

When Zhitlowsky reflected on his meeting with Herzl years later, he remembered being both astonished and shocked at Herzl’s presumptions. First, Herzl misunderstood Zhitlowsky’s standing in the Bund, which he had formally left a few months earlier. Though Zhitlowsky still maintained good relations with the revolutionary Jewish organization, he was not its leader, nor was there any singular leader of Jewish revolutionaries. That was a relatively minor point, however. Zhitlowsky was much more disturbed by Herzl’s willingness to deal with Minister Plehve, whom Jews regarded as responsible for the Kishinev pogrom that had occurred a few months before, during Easter week of 1903. Hundreds of Jews were beaten, raped, and killed by local mobs whipped up by official anti-Semitic proclamations. Police in the capital city of Bessarabia (now Moldova) watched and did nothing to stop the slaughter. Pogroms—the Russian-derived Yiddish word for state-sponsored or officially tolerated terror visited on Jews—had been a fact of Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement, where Jews had been confined in the far west of the Russian Empire since the 1790s.⁹ But the magnitude and viciousness of the attacks in Kishinev, and the widespread belief that the top levels of the Russian government orchestrated the attacks, compelled activists and leaders of almost all Jewish movements to respond.

Plehve, a former director of police, had instituted a series of restrictive and oppressive orders regarding Jews during his tenure as interior minister beginning in April 1902. Police routinely searched houses, fired without warning on suspected meetings of revolutionaries, and developed an intricate spy network. Plehve directed the arrests of nearly forty-five hundred Bundists in the year leading up to his assassination in July 1904.¹⁰ Even Zionists, whose strategy of leaving Russia Plehve favored, were suspect and meetings among them suppressed. As Plehve told Herzl, “We used to be sympathetic toward the Zionist movement, when it confined its aim to emigration. You do not need to expound the movement: you are preaching to the converted.”¹¹ But Plehve worried that the nationalism inherent in Zionism flamed a revolutionary nationalism, which had been building over the preceding several years among some of the movement’s followers.

Zhitlowsky decided that Herzl’s efforts to seek out a singular leader of the Bund and his willingness to negotiate with perhaps the greatest enemy of the Jewish people stemmed from Herzl’s view of the world and his role in it. For Herzl, a Hungarian-born and Austrian-educated journalist turned diplomat, the Kishinev pogrom meant that a Jewish refuge in Palestine had become more critical than ever. Zhitlowsky wrote, “Herzl’s ‘politics’ is built on pure diplomacy, which seriously believes that the political history of humanity is made by a few people, a few leaders, and that what they arrange among themselves becomes the content of political history.”¹² Zhitlowsky surmised that in Herzl’s mind, the Kishinev pogrom demonstrated that Russia wanted the Jews out, that Plehve “was Russia,” and that he, Herzl, was the Jewish people. Zhitlowsky reasoned that only after conversations with Plehve did Herzl look for the leader of the Jewish revolutionaries, which Herzl guessed and hoped would be Zhitlowsky.

In Zhitlowsky’s view, Herzl’s strategy was deeply flawed. No movement based on the diplomatic meetings of elite leaders could resolve the crisis faced by the Jewish masses. For Zhitlowsky, as for many other revolutionary leaders and philosophers, no Jewish homeland outside Russia could possibly accommodate the five million Jews living in the Pale of Settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the revolutionaries, Kishinev, only the most brutal atrocity among many hundreds of attacks since the early 1880s, forced them to conclude that Jews had to organize for self-defense and to engage in revolutionary activity aimed at overthrowing the czarist regime. Yet, despite these sharp differences, Yiddish socialism and Zionism shared important historical roots, political contexts, and a central concern with the “national question” that was posed by thinkers in many countries in Europe and North America that were confronting a rising number of minority ethnic groups.

Jews and the “National Question”

These two great Jewish nationalist ideologies—Zionism and revolutionary socialism—had evolved in response to massive social and political transformations from the late eighteenth century. Generations of monarchs beginning with Catherine the Great looked on the Jews as obstacles to the state’s imperial agenda. Jews doggedly resisted conversion to Russian Orthodox or any other form of Christianity, persisted in speaking a hybrid language of their own, and claimed no territory in the empire. In a state of permanent internal nomadism, Jews threatened the integrity of czarist attempts to forge an empire, which imposed a dominant language, religion, and cultural values. Catherine created the Pale of Settlement to limit that threat. But efforts to contain Jews geographically, politically, and economically chafed against Russia’s need to industrialize in the mid-nineteenth century.

During the Crimean War (1853–1856), Russia suffered abject humiliation at the hands of the technologically superior militaries of Great Britain and France. In response, in 1861, Czar Alexander II emancipated the serfs, who were becoming increasingly rebellious, and instituted a series of liberal reforms that affected Jews directly, in spite of the fact that few Jews had been agricultural laborers. Russian officials designed these measures to accelerate the growth of entrepreneurial industrial production. Capitalist industry needed a workforce free to travel to where manufacturing was located, near population centers, energy sources, waterways, and other transportation centers. Wage labor generated some of the internal markets necessary for exchange. In order to cultivate scientific and engineering initiatives that could assist in industrial development, Russia promoted the expansion of professional classes. For a while, an increasing number of Jews were allowed to venture beyond the urban ghettoes and small towns of the Pale of Settlement into the countryside and beyond western Russia to Moscow and other cities. Jews were admitted in larger numbers to Russian gymnasium and universities, which trained them for professions such as medicine, law, architecture, and government service. The reforms were never applied consistently, but enough Jews made it through the Russian education system to create an expanding urban middle class and a small intellectual elite.

These Russian-trained Jewish intellectuals of the 1860s and 1870s formed the backbone of the Haskalah movement, the Jewish Enlightenment. Influenced by scientific advances and modern notions of nation building, rationalist German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and especially Moses Mendelsohn, and Russian philosophers such as Vissarion Grigoryevich Bielinsky and Alexander Herzen, the Haskalah was the first significant secular movement among eastern European Jews.¹³ Like American progressivism several decades later, Haskalah was really multiple movements that shared broad approaches to social problems, such as faith in science and education.

Scholars and activists of the Haskalah, who were known as Maskalim, held many conflicting ideas. One prominent group believed that the czar was fair in offering citizenship to Jews in return for Jewish efforts to acculturate to a modern Russian state. For these Maskalim, Jewish salvation within the empire required Jews to embrace the state as well as the dominant culture, even though both contributed to a weakening of Jewish ethnic identity. These Maskalim stood in direct opposition to orthodox religious cultures, especially the antimodern Chasidic movement. Some leading Haskalah scholars, including a few in the employ of the Russian state, supported autocratic measures by the czar to suppress Jewish religious orthodoxy. One pernicious measure conscripted Jewish children into long periods of military service, during which they would learn to identify with the Russian nation, language, and Orthodox Christianity.¹⁴

Another noxious policy was the suppression of Jewish schools and the promulgation of Russian-only schools in which Hebrew and Yiddish were forbidden. A few Jews were commissioned by the state to implement education policy among their coethnics. According to one historian, Dr. Max Lilienthal, a Jewish commissioner, helped to implement the educational reforms by recommending “the application of severe police measures against” Jewish dissenters.¹⁵ Reaction to harsh policies associated with some Maskalim bred new ideas that were inspired by Haskalah’s powerful secular attractions. Two movements, socialism and Zionism, aimed at combating what they perceived as collaboration between “Russified” Jews and the czarist state. Both appropriated the Enlightenment and asserted their own forms of Jewish nationalism.

For most of the 1880s and 1890s, socialism was made up of small groups of philosophers, students, and other intellectuals who discussed radical literature in reading groups modeled after Russian reading circles. Jewish socialists participated in ethnically mixed circles and also formed Jewish circles. While much of the activity in the circles was limited to disseminating literature and to political education and consciousness raising, some participants were moved to direct action. In 1881, a Polish member of the small radical socialist group Narodnaia Volia, or the People’s Will, assassinated Czar Alexander II. Like Jews, Catholic Poles and other ethnic minorities in the empire felt their cultures under attack by the czar, particularly through the Russian education system. The People’s Will was composed of young Russian university-educated socialists from many ethnic backgrounds, including Jews, who were impatient with the peaceful methods and poor results of other reform groups in the empire. They sought to overthrow the regime through violence as well as through education.

After Alexander’s assassination, the period of liberalization, such as it was, came to an end, and a renewed period of civil restrictions for Jews began. In 1882, Alexander III issued a series of orders, the May Decrees, that reinforced restrictions on Jewish residence, occupation, education, and movement that had been relaxed for two decades. With a series of legislative orders, the czarist state forced Jews to move back to the shtetlakh and urban ghettoes within the Pale of Settlement. The law prohibited Jews from owning land. They could not vote, sit on a jury, or sue non-Jews for civil damages. State authorities severely curtailed Jewish admission to university and relegated them to a few spots in Russian gymnasium.¹⁶ State-sponsored schools offered classes solely in the Russian language as a means to break down ethnic cultural identity among children. Most Jews refused to send their children to Russian schools and developed both religious and secular Jewish schools within the Pale.¹⁷ Educational institutions became arenas of cultural conflict between czarist efforts to control the economic, political, and social mechanisms of the empire, on one hand, and Jewish nationalist resistance to those efforts, on the other. A sharp increase in pogroms, in reprisal for real or perceived Jewish participation in revolutionary activities, accompanied this period of state-imposed segregation.

Jewish resistance in the 1890s formed as a direct response to Russian cultural suppression. Playwrights such as S. Ansky, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, historian Simon Dubnow, and Zhitlowsky led the movement for Yiddish-language culture. The radicals among them argued that only a revolutionary movement based on national cultural autonomy could relieve Jewish suffering. Advocates of national autonomy believed that the many diverse cultures could not be suppressed by the czar, and Jews in particular could not afford to be assimilated. Zhitlowsky articulated this best in a series of articles he wrote for the Bund journal in 1898 and 1899. He argued that Jews could only effectively struggle for socialism from a position of equality as an autonomous nation within a multinational socialist movement.¹⁸ In “Socialism and the National Question,” a paper he wrote in advance of the Austrian Social Democratic Congress in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Epilogue: Cosmopolitan Unionism and Mutual Culturalism in the World War II Era
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author