Jewish Socialist Federation

JEWISH SOCIALIST FEDERATION. The roots of the Jewish Socialist Federation, or JSF (1912–1922), formally a Yiddish-language “ethnic” federation of the American Socialist Party, lay in the General Union of Jewish Workers in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania (generally known as the Jewish Labor Bund), whose first US branch was formed in New York around 1900. By 1905, some fifty branches of the Bund across the United States had been created. From this activity came the Central Union of Bund Organizations, whose main work consisted of providing material aid to the movement in Europe.

Immigrant Jewish radicals, including Bundists and others who had participated in or watched with high hopes the 1905 Russian revolution, also became leading activists in the historic mass strikes that unionized the American garment industry on the eve of World War I. This “Great Revolt” of Jewish garment workers laid the industrial basis for the historic connection between Jews and the Left in America.

The Jewish Agitation Bureau of the United States and Canada arose at a convention in Rochester, New York, in 1907, as a Yiddish vehicle for the Socialist Party. The Bureau dissolved in 1912, and the Jewish Socialist Federation formed. It envisioned a Jewish socialist movement playing a major role in the United States, as the Bund did in the czarist empire. JSF members already had influential roles in garment unionism. The JSF’s central leader, J. B. Salutsky, closely associated with men’s clothing workers leader Sidney Hillman, was himself a Bund veteran from Lithuania.

While the JSF existed as an autonomous body within the Socialist Party, not all Jewish party members belonged to the JSF. Some Jewish immigrants who had come to America before 1900 and a number of leading members of the United Hebrew Trades concluded that the JSF was significantly to the left of the Socialist Party and far from their ideal, Morris Hillquit. Others expressed concern that Bundists dominated the Federation itself.

From their arrival on American shores until well after the revolution of 1905, Bundist and other Russian-Jewish revolutionaries focused most of their political hopes and aspirations on Russia. At first, they were skeptical of the Socialist Party and its main vehicle within the American Jewish community, Abraham Cahan’s Jewish Daily Forward. But by 1912, Bundists in America had shaken the dust of defeat in the old country off their feet—as was made explicit in 1914 when the JSF named its weekly journal Naye Welt (New World).

The JSF grew rapidly. Its journal, which was edited by Salutsky, had a sizable and influential readership, and it brought energy and enthusiasm to the Jewish labor movement. The JSF’s relationship with the Socialist Party, especially Cahan’s Jewish Socialist old guard, was not always smooth. Nonetheless, it never identified itself with the Socialist Party’s traditional Wobbly-oriented left wing. Indeed, the JSF was initially dubious about the Bolshevik revolution, as many of its leaders identified with the Bund, which was allied with Lenin’s Menshevik opponents. In 1919, when many units of the Socialist Party in the United States joined in the newly forming communist parties, the JSF stayed behind.

Two years later, the majority of the Bundists in the new Soviet Union joined the Soviet Communist Party. A large section of the Jewish community there had swung over to enthusiastic support for the Reds because of White pogroms in the Russian Civil War. The JSF also found itself divided. In September 1921 the JSF voted by a fairly narrow margin in a hotly contested decision at its convention to leave the Socialist Party. The majority joined with the Communist Party. While many of the leaders of the old JSF majority left soon after, most of their followers stayed in the Party.

A minority, led by Workmen’s Circle leader Nathan Chanin, immediately formed a new Jewish socialist group, the Jewish Socialist Verband. Renting space in the Forward building on East Broadway, the Verband started publishing a weekly newspaper, Der Wecker, and spent the next dozen years propagandizing among Jewish workers in support of social democracy and trade unionism and against communism. Among the Verband’s prominent speakers in the interwar era were Raphael Abramovitch, a prominent Russian Bundist and spokesman for the Menshevik tendency in the Russian Social Democratic Party and Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, leaders of the Polish Bund who would be executed by Stalin’s regime in 1941.

Almost all JSF leaders had noteworthy subsequent careers. Moissaye Olgin became the most prominent spokesman for American Jewish Communism, editing the Yiddish newspaper Morgen Freiheit until his death, mourned by a large Manhattan following. Max Goldfarb became a Red Army general under the pseudonym Petrovsky and then a Comintern official as “A. J. Bennett.” He was executed in the purges of 1937. Schachno Epstein managed to survive the purges and headed the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II.

Among the socialists, Baruch Charney Vladeck became a prominent figure in New York City politics. Serving as a Socialist alderman in the aftermath of World War I, he was a leader of the pro–La Guardia coalition on the City Council in the 1930s and the first chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee. J. B. Salutsky maintained political independence from the Socialist and Communist Parties alike, took the name J. B. S. Hardman, served Sidney Hillman’s union in various posts, and became a widely respected scholar of the American labor movement, editing the publication Labor and Nation.

Epstein, Melech. Jewish Labor in U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement (1950–1953). 2 vols. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1969.

Menes, Abraham. “The Jewish Labor Movement.” In The Jewish People Past And Present, vol. 4. New York: Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks/CYCO, 1955.

Orenstein, Eugene. “The Jewish Socialist Federation of the U.S., 1912–1921.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1978.

J.B.S. Hardman Papers. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_050/

Epstein, Melech. Jewish Labor in U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement (1950–1953). 2 vols. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1969.

Menes, Abraham. “The Jewish Labor Movement.” In The Jewish People Past And Present, vol. 4. New York: Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks/CYCO, 1955.

Orenstein, Eugene. “The Jewish Socialist Federation of the U.S., 1912–1921.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1978.

J.B.S. Hardman Papers. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_050/