Jewish People's Fraternal Order

JEWISH PEOPLE’S FRATERNAL ORDER. The Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO) arose from a decade of conflicts that consumed the Jewish immigrant Left as well as the broader American Socialist movement in the wake of the US entry into World War I and the October Revolution of 1917. The more popular Socialist Forverts aligned with the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) and the new Morgn Freiheit with the Yiddish part of the CPUSA.

By 1930 as the reality of the Great Depression sank in, ongoing cultural and political fights by activists inside the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) culminated in a split off. Pro-Soviet members formed the International Workers Order (IWO) א.א.א. as a Yiddish speaking fraternal society offering competitive benefits at a cheaper price. Unusually, these Yiddish-speaking Jews known as Di Linke proceeded to bring into the IWO’s umbrella other “ethnic,” “linguistic” or “national” groups at a point in which immigration had already been halted (1921-1924). Di Linke’s 5,000 original members then became the Jewish American Section of the IWO א.פ.פ.א (renamed the JPFO in 1944): its largest section it grew to encompass almost 50,000 members.

While the leadership was associated with the CPUSA, its immigrant fraternal members typically were not. The IWO’s benefit package and fraternalism were critical to its growth: urban immigrants needed cultural activities as well as the comprehensive life and health insurance at non-discriminatory rates that also encouraged black workers and miners to join. The IWO’s Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (Workers Children’s Camp) was one of the few integrated camps available for children.

Their first decade as Di Linke shows immigrants organizing on behalf of workers’ rights as well as promoting rent strikes, women’s rights, and anti-lynching legislation. They advocated for Popular Front anti-fascist politics and defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. They expanded Yiddish publishing in the United States by helping found YKUF (Yidisher Kultur Farband) as an international network, placing much of their energies on the prestige of Kultur-arbet (and supporting it in the Soviet Union) to prove that left Jewish secular politics could indeed produce high quality “workers” literature as well as publish Yiddish classics.

Their radicalization as immigrants owed much to conditions in Czarist Russia as well as to their rapid mass migration often directly into the Lower East Side’s miserable, yet culturally rich, working and living conditions. As working-class Jews migrated to first generation ethnic enclaves in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the JPFO expanded to Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles as well as to Jewish chicken farming communities. Organizers included Clara Lemlich Shavelson, the leader of the Uprising of 20,000, who became a founder of the JPFO’s Emma Lazarus Division. Due to its prodigious fundraising and political efforts during World War II, the JPFO achieved an unprecedented level of acceptance in the mainstream Jewish community and more broadly: fellow travelers included prominent figures such as Marc Chagall, Sholem Asch, and Albert Einstein.

The Jewish communist answer to the perennial Jewish Question posited that working-class interests and alliances could combine seamlessly with Jewish interests. JPFO members’ Americanization was mediated through adherence to a beloved fraternal organization that promoted Yiddish culture even as it offered solidarity with others. The JPFO’s fusion of left-wing Yiddishist and American Jewish politics often made for surprising agency in the face of top-down CPUSA politics that saw immigrant fraternal organizations as interfering with organizing real “Americans.” The Party did not view Jews as a “national minority” deserving of the highlighting of its language and distinctive history, and mainly denied the specificity of anti-Semitism, including the Nazi variety. The JPFO’s politics of Black allyship within and beyond that sphere are visible in its support for the Civil Rights Congress and the famous Paul Robeson 1949 benefit concert(s) in Peekskill.

The JPFO’s leadership often promoted the Party line, blurred the boundaries of pro-Soviet support with those of active support for Stalin’s policies, and claimed that anti-Semitism was impossible in the Soviet Union since it was illegal. Yet during and after the war, the incorporation of the JPFO’s offspring and new members —including veterans— into its lodges influenced its politics and newly bilingual approach to actively countering the assimilation of American Jews. The genocide of World War II shifted the JPFO’s emphasis to campaigns of Jewish pride and active commemoration. It provided secular education in its Shules (after-school Yiddish education network) and summer camp, Kinderland. Warsaw Ghetto commemorations were accompanied by intensive post-War campaigns for European orphanages and for Jewish refugees in Poland. The new English-language magazine Jewish Life was later relaunched as Jewish Currents after the belated revelations about Stalin’s repression of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and murder of its leadership.

The IWO was legally disbanded in 1953 due to the Cold War Red Scare; blacklisted JPFO artists included Jules Dassin. This closure followed a famous and unprecedented court case, resulting in seizure of the organization’s substantial insurance funds and records by New York State’s Insurance Department. The presence of a substantial portion of the IWO Records (#5276) in the Kheel Center at Cornell University’s ILR School is a direct result of that seizure. At the denouement of the legal struggle, some JPFO actors spun off its publications, children’s schools and camp as well as its cemetery department, to ensure that they were not fully shut down when the IWO could no longer function as a fraternal society.

Camp Kinderland exists today as a diverse, progressive summer camp aware of its Jewish Left antecedents. The (Women’s) Emma Lazarus Division became its own legal entity and went on to broader involvement in advocating for left wing and feminist causes. Perhaps most remarkably, the JPFO’s seventy-five year old English language publication Jewish Currents (2020) — which describes itself as a “magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left”— recently launched as a new online presence.

Buhle, Paul. “Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question.” Radical History Review 23 (spring 1980).

Fellow Travellers: From Popular Front to Cold War. Selections from the ILR School Catherwood Library Archives of the Yiddish Immigrant Left https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/iwo-jpfo

Glaser, A., David Weintraub, and Yankl Salant, Ed. Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets. Madison, Wisconsin, London, England, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture.

Sabin, A. J. Red Scare in Court: New York versus the International Workers Order. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.