The Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF) was a secularJewishYiddish-oriented organization founded in 1912 which acted as a language federation in the Socialist Party of America (SPA). Many of the founding members of the JSF had previously been members of the Bund in Eastern Europe and sought to bring Bundist politics to the socialist movement in the USA.
The JSF split in 1921 over the question of the Bolshevik Revolution, with the organization disaffiliating from the SPA and a minority splitting to form a new organization called the Jewish Socialist Verband (JSV) and remaining affiliated to the SPA. The newly independent JSF soon joined the Workers Party of America (legal arm of the underground Communist Party of America) and merged into a previously-existing Jewish Communist Federation of that organization.
History
Background
Scholars have commonly dated the origin of the Jewishlabor movement in the United States to the decade of the 1880s.[1]
There were quantitative reasons for this date of origin. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb on March 13, 1881, which ushered in a wave of official and popular antisemitic violence known as pogroms in which individuals were killed, cultural institutions sacked, and property destroyed. The reaction raged at its most extreme in the years 1881 and 1882, during which there were scores of violent events throughout the southern and western regions of the Russian empire in which Jews were permitted to dwell.[2] A wave of emigration followed, with the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States rocketing from less than 35,000 for the entire decade of the 1870s to more than 175,000 during the decade of the 1880s.[3]
Jewish emigration, particularly from the violent and antisemitic Russian empire continued to accelerate during the decade of the 1890s, with more than one out of every ten new arrivals in the United States of Jewish ethnicity during those years.[4]
Antecedents
Early Jewish Socialist political organization in the United States kept its eyes and agenda focused abroad, as American affiliates of the General Jewish Labor Bund, a revolutionary organization seeking the overthrow of tsarism in the Russian empire. The first such American branch of the Bund was formed in 1900 and within five years about 50 such American Bund affiliates were formed, united under the umbrella of a group called the Central Union of Bund Organizations.[5] In addition to their Eastern European focus, centered around the raising and transmission of funds to the Russian revolutionary movement, these American Bund groups advocated Jewish cultural and political autonomy rather than assimilation into the domestic orientation of the anglophonic Socialist Party of America (SPA).[5]
From 1905 many local Yiddish-language organization were loosely coordinated by a group called the Jewish Socialist Agitation Bureau, founded by a tailor from Rochester, New York named Max Kaufman.[6] Kaufman's Agitation Bureau was envisioned as a mechanism for bringing prominent Yiddish-language socialists from New York City to address Jewish communities in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, and elsewhere in the Northeast.[6] This effort proved successful, with such socialist notables as economist Isaac Hourwich and politician Meyer London sponsored on speaking tours.[6] The Bureau also coordinated the distribution of leaflets and pamphlets in the Yiddish language.[7]
The Socialist Agitation Bureau met in convention annually,[8] with the established network of Bundist clubs playing a key role in the organization's expansion. By 1909 it was estimated that between 80 and 90 percent of the affiliates of the Bureau maintained Bundist ties.[9]
Establishment of the JSF
The American urban working class was largely an immigrant population in the early years of the 20th century and the Socialist Party of America sought to improve its connection with non-English-speaking workers through the expansion of its language federations — semi-autonomous parallel organizations coordinating the activity of party branches speaking a common language and expediting the distribution of pamphlets and leaflets in that tongue.
In contrast to the dozens of independent Finnish-language socialist clubs which joined en bloc to establish the Finnish Socialist Federation of the SPA in 1906, the Jewish Socialist Federation was created largely through the initiative of the Socialist Party itself. Socialist Party branches conducting their business in Yiddish existed as regular units of the state and national Socialist Party, paying full dues to those party organizations and differing from English-language branches only in the language in which they conducted their business.[7]
As early as 1907, Jewish Socialist Agitation Bureau founder Max Kaufman proposed the establishment of a Yiddish language federation within the Socialist Party — although this proposal was initially shot down by doctrinaire Jewish socialists as an unacceptable compromise with ethnic nationalism rather than class-based internationalism.[6] One prominent Jewish socialist was quick to dismiss the idea of a semi-autonomous Jewish federation paralleling the Bund with the assertion that "in America special Russian Jewish wounds do not exist; thus, here in America there can be no place and no value for special Russian Jewish remedies."[10]
Nevertheless, sentiment seeking organization of Yiddish-language Socialist branches continued to develop.
A major step towards language autonomy was taken in the summer of 1910 when the SPA's constitution was amended to entitle any non-English language group with 500 or more dues paying members to federation status with a paid official called a "Translator-Secretary" granted an office at party headquarters in Chicago.[11] Over the next two years SPA Federations had been launched for the party's Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Swedish/Norwegian, and Slovenian members, joined in 1912 with the formation of the Yiddish-language Jewish Socialist Federation.[11]
Many or most ethnic Jews in the SPA were not members of the Jewish Socialist Federation, instead participating in English-language branches.[12] Indeed, some of these disapproved of the Jewish Federation, preferring promotion of the process of "Americanization" and integration into American political life over the semi-autonomous federation approach — which was characterized by activist and historian Will Herberg as "virtually a Jewish Socialist Party within the...Party."[13] While tactically useful in coordinating socialist propaganda in the native language of immigrant workers, the implicit emphasis of ethnicity over social class of the federation approach seemed to many a departure from the traditional socialist principle of internationalism.[12]
Development
The Jewish Socialist Federation grew rapidly, soon numbering some 65 geographic branches with a membership approaching 3,000.[12] Despite the cultural orientation behind its organization, the Jewish Federation attracted some of the most radical Jewish socialists to its ranks, soon emerging to the left of the Socialist Party itself.[13]
Communist split
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2023)
Dissolution
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2023)
↑ See, for example, Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 30-41; Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the USA: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement: Volume 1, 1882-1914. New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950, passim; Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985, passim.
↑ For a monograph on the 1881-1882 terror, see Stephen M. Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881-1882. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
↑ Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the USA: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement: Volume 1, 1882-1914. New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950; pp. 38-39.
↑ Epstein, Jewish Labor in the USA, vol. 1, pg. 40.
1 2 Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871-1917. New York: Schocken Books, 1977; pg. 166.
1 2 3 Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985; pg. 104.
1 2 Will Herberg, "The American Jewish Labor Movement," in American Jewish Year Books, vol. 80 (1952), pg. 25; cited in Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, pg. 104.
Buhle, Paul. "Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question," Radical History Review, no. 23 (Spring 1980), pp. 9-33.
Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957.
Epstein, Melech. Jewish Labor in the USA: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement: Volume 1, 1882-1914. New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950.
Epstein, Melech. Jewish Labor in the USA: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement: Volume 2, 1914-1952. New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1953.
Gorenstein, Arthur. "A Portrait of Ethnic Politics: The Socialists and the 1908 and 1910 Congressional Elections," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, vol. 50, no. 3 (March 1961), pp. 202-238. In JSTOR
Hardman, J.B.S. [J. Salutsky], "The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States: Jewish and Non-Jewish Influences," American Jewish Historical Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 2 (Dec. 1962), pp. 98-132. In JSTOR
Herberg, Will. "Jewish Labor Movement in the United States: Early Years to World War I," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 5, no. 4 (July 1952), pp. 501-523. In JSTOR
Herberg, Will. "The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States," American Jewish Year Book, vol. 53 (1952), pp. 1-74. In JSTOR
Holmes, John Dewey. The Life and Times of Noah London: American Jewish Communist, Soviet Engineer, and Victim of Stalinist Terror. PhD dissertation. San Francisco State University, 1997.
Hourwich, Isaac. Immigration and Labor. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976.
Katz, Daniel. All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
Leinenweber, Charles. "The Class and Ethnic Basis of New York City Socialism," Labor History, vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 31-56.
Levin, Nora. While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871-1917. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
Liebman, Arthur. Jews and the Left. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979.
Manor, Ehud. Forward: The Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) Newspaper: Immigrants, Socialism, and Jewish Politics in New York, 1890-1917. Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2009.
Mendelsohn, Ezra. "The Russian Roots of the American Jewish Labor Movement," YIVO Annual, vol. 16 (1976), pp. 150-177.
Michels, Tony. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Rogoff, Abraham Meyer. Formative Years of the Jewish Labor Movement in the United States (1890-1900). [1945] Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Sorin, Gerald. The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Szajkowski, Zosa. "The Jews and New York City's Mayoralty Election of 1917," Jewish Social Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (1970), pp. 286-306.
Tcherikower, Elias (ed.) The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States. Aaron Antonovsky, trans. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1961.
Yellowitz, Irwin. "Jewish Immigrants and the American Labor Movement, 1900-1920," American Jewish History, vol. 71, no. 2 (Dec. 1981), pp. 188-217.
Yellowitz, Irwin. "Morris Hillquit, American Socialism and Jewish Concerns," American Jewish History, vol. 68, no. 2 (Dec. 1978), pp. 163-188.
Zumoff, Jacob A. The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929. [2014] Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.
Abraham "Abe" Cahan was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician. Cahan was one of the founders of The Forward, an American Yiddish publication, and was its editor-in-chief for 43 years. During his stewardship of the Forward, it became a prominent voice in the Jewish community and in the Socialist Party of America, voicing a relatively moderate stance within the realm of American socialist politics.
Language federations were formed in the late 19th and early 20th century by immigrants to the United States, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, who shared a commitment to some form of socialist politics. Some of these groups joined the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP); later, many joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and then later joined one of the precursors of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA); a number of federations also remained in the Socialist Party. The Russian and Finnish federations were particularly important in the early years of the Communist Party.
Morris Hillquit was a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and prominent labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side. Together with Eugene V. Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hillquit was one of the leading public faces of American socialism during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Morris Winchevsky, also known as Ben Netz, was a prominent Jewish socialist leader in London and the United States in the late 19th century.
The Workers' Council of the United States, commonly known as the "Workers' Council," was a short-lived organized faction of former Socialist Party of America members seeking to affiliate with the Comintern. When that failed, it agitated for the creation of an open communist party. It was small and short-lived group, but it played an important role in the 1921 creation of the Workers Party of America. It included many individuals who would have prominent careers in radical and labor movements such as Moissaye Olgin, J. Louis Engdahl, Alexander Trachtenberg, William F. Kruse, and Melech Epstein.
Louis E. Miller (1866–1927), born Efim Samuilovich Bandes, was a Russian-Jewish political activist who emigrated to the United States of America in 1884. A trade union organizer and newspaper editor, Miller is best remembered as a founding editor of Di Arbeiter Tsaytung, the first Yiddish-language weekly published in America, and a co-founder with Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily Forward, the country's first and foremost Yiddish-language daily.
Baruch Charney Vladeck was an American labor leader, manager of The Jewish Daily Forward for twenty years, and a member of the New York City Council.
The United Hebrew Trades was an association of Jewish labor unions in New York formed in the late 1880s. The organization was inspired by and modeled upon the United German Trades, formed decades earlier by German immigrants to the United States who were active in the German, and later the German-American, labor movement.
Morgen Freiheit was a New York City-based daily Yiddish language newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, USA, founded by Moissaye Olgin in 1922. After the end of World War II the paper's pro-Israel views brought it into disfavor with the Communist Party and its editor Paul Novick was expelled from the organization. The paper closed in 1988.
Moissaye Joseph Olgin was a Ukrainian-born writer, journalist, and translator in the early 20th century. He began his career writing for the Jewish press in support of the Russian Revolution in 1910. During the First World War, he moved to the United States in 1915, settling in New York City, where he continued his career in journalism. Much of his work was in support of communism, and he was a founding member of the Workers Party. In 1922, he founded The Morning Freiheit, and served as its editor until his death in 1939.
The General Jewish Labour Bund in Romania was a Jewish socialist party in Romania, adhering to the political line of the General Jewish Labour Bund. Founded in 1922, shortly after the establishment of Greater Romania, it united Jewish socialists in Bukovina, Bessarabia and the Romanian Old Kingdom. Standing for the lay wing of the Jewish representative movement, the Romanian Bund had atheistic leanings and offered an alternative to the mainstream Jewish organization. Like other Bundist groups, but unlike the Marxist-inspired Poale Zion bodies of Bessarabia, it rejected Zionism.
Charles S. "Sasha" Zimmerman (1896–1983) was an American socialist activist and trade union leader, who was an associate of Jay Lovestone. Zimmerman had a career spanning five decades as an official of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. During the early 1970s, Zimmerman and Bayard Rustin were national Co-Chairmen the Socialist Party of America and the Social Democrats USA.
Haim Kantorovitch was an American socialist teacher, writer, and Marxist theoretician. Kantorovitch is best remembered as one of the intellectual leaders of the Militant faction of the Socialist Party of America in the early 1930s and as a founder and editor of The American Socialist Quarterly, the SP's theoretical magazine.
Melech Epstein was an American journalist and historian. His two most famous books, Jewish labor in U.S.A. and The Jew and communism are considered standard works.
Antoinette F. Buchholz Konikow was an American physician, Marxist, and radical political activist. Konikow is best remembered as one of the pioneers of the American birth control movement and as a founding member of the Communist Party of America, forerunner of the Communist Party, USA. Expelled from the Communist Party as a supporter of Leon Trotsky in the fall of 1928, Konikow went on to become a founder of the Communist League of America, the main Trotskyist organization in the United States. Konikow's 1923 book, Voluntary Motherhood, is regarded as a seminal work in the history of 20th Century American feminism.
During the nine decades since its establishment in 1919, the Communist Party USA produced or inspired a vast array of newspapers and magazines in at least 25 different languages. This list of the Non-English press of the Communist Party USA provides basic information on each title, along with links to pages dealing with specific publications in greater depth.
For a number of decades after its establishment in August 1901, the Socialist Party of America produced or inspired a vast array of newspapers and magazines in an array different languages. This list of the Non-English press of the Socialist Party of America provides basic information on each title, along with links to pages dealing with specific publications in greater depth.
Bundism is a secular Jewish socialist movement whose first organizational manifestation was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, and Russia, founded in the Russian Empire in 1897.
Jacob Benjamin Salutsky, also known by the alias as J.B.S. Hardman, was a Russian political activist, radical journalist and trade union functionary. Hardman was a proponent of radicalism as a Marxist thinker and a leader of the Jewish Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). A brief stint in the American Communist movement ended in his expulsion in 1923.
Isaac Aronovich Hourwich was a Jewish-American economist, statistician, lawyer, and political activist. Hourwich is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of labor statistics for the American mining industry and as a prominent public intellectual among the Yiddish-language community in the United States.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
