Socialist Zionism

SOCIALIST ZIONISM. The Socialist Zionist movement, and the larger Labor Zionist movement of which it can be considered a part, played a unique role within North American Jewish radicalism. Linked to both anarchist-utopian and Marxist-nationalist tendencies within the Yiddish-speaking community, it sought to resolve the dilemmas of modern Jewry through socialist activism and active Jewish self-defense in the Diaspora, the territorial concentration of the Jewish people, and the development of a sovereign Jewish polity in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel). Long a small but significant force in the United States, it retains its status as an advocate of humanistic Jewish values, culture, tradition, and education, in a just society. It stands for Arab-Jewish rapprochement in the Middle East, and peace and active cooperation between the State of Israel and its neighbors.

The formation of Socialist Zionism goes back to the first years of the twentieth century in Eastern and Central Europe. In contrast to other Left movements within Jewish communities, including Bundists and, later, Communists, the Socialist Zionists believed that while socialist theory was important, valuable, and generally correct, the problems of anti-Semitism, social dislocation, and Jewish vulnerability required a particularistic (i.e., Zionist) solution.

Local groups of Poalei Zion (Labor Zionists) developed throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, and what was apparently the first the American branch of the worldwide movement was founded in New York in 1903, although it was only at a convention in Baltimore in December 1905 that the national Labor Zionist Organization of America was founded. Its Yiddish-language organ, Der Yiddisher Kempfer (The Jewish Fighter, 1906–1990s), was widely read in the Jewish community, and rapidly became known for its high literary quality and emphatic political views. (After a rocky start, it followed a roughly weekly schedule from 1907 to 1923, then came out as a biweekly from 1924 to 1931 [during which period it was called Yiddisher Arbeter]. For many years thereafter, it was a weekly with its original name, then from 1990 a biweekly again. It was a bimonthly magazine from the mid-1990s until its last issue appeared at the end of the decade.) In 1912, the LZOA established its own mutual aid society, the Yiddisher Nationaler Arbeter Farband (Jewish National Workers Alliance [JNWA], renamed the Farband Labor Zionist Order in 1950), which operated in overlapping circles with the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeiter Ring. The JNWA organized cooperative insurance, medical plans, and cemeteries and sections in larger Jewish cemeteries for its members and their families, and organized cooperative housing in the Bronx, near similar housing cooperatives established by unions and other organizations. While mainly based in New York, the JNWA was active throughout the United States and Canada, forming local chapters and summer camps in many cities with sizable Jewish communities. The summer camp for the New York chapter, Camp Kinderwelt, in upstate New York, had an adjoining adults camp called Unser Camp. The JNWA ran a network of secular, radical Zionist schools in the US and Canada called Folkshulen (people’s schools), which promoted Yiddish and Hebrew study of Jewish and international literature, a model later adopted with marked political modifications, by the Workmen’s Circle and by the Communist-related International Workers Order schools. In 1934, the LZOA began to publish Jewish Frontier. This respected Labor Zionist magazine, founded by Marie Syrkin and Hayim Greenberg, continued publication until its final issue in 2005.

The Labor Zionist youth organization, Habonim (the Builders) was established in London in 1929. By 1931, in the United States, the Folkshulen’s Farband Yugnt Clubs, joined with Young Poalei Zion to form the Young Poalei Zion Alliance as the official youth wing of the entire Labor Zionist movement in America. In 1935, Habonim in North America was born out of a YPZA Convention. With branches (kenim) in a number of Jewish communities across the U.S., Habonim organized its own summer camps, some of which exist today. In 1982, the North American Habonim movement, which had organization ties to the Ihud Kibbutz Federation in Israel, merged with a similar North American Labor Zionist youth movement, Dror, which had ties to the Meuchad Kibbutz Movement, and thus Habonim Dror North America was created.

In 1971, the Farband Labor Zionist Order joined with the Labor Zionist Organization of America, and the American Habonim Association to form the Labor Zionist Alliance, which in 2004 re-branded and renamed itself as Ameinu.

The Socialist Zionist movement in America, similarly, had a complex trajectory. In 1913 another Left-Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair (The Young Guard), developed in Europe, drawing on currents as diverse as the German Wandervogel, the British Boy Scouts, and Marxism-Leninism. A totally youth-led and youth-oriented movement, Hashomer Hatzair shunned Yiddish for Hebrew and stressed aliya (literally “going up” to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel). In 1923 immigrants to the United States launched branches, which deprecated formal higher education in favor of internal “movement” education and collective self-development. Like other Socialist Zionist organizations, they were closely tied to their “world units,” which had organizational bases in Europe, and, later in Israel.

A number of major international figures on the Jewish Left lent their talents to the Socialist and Labor Zionist causes in the United States. Ber Borokhov (1881–1917), described as the most rigorous of the Russian Labor Zionist intellectuals, founded the founded the Jewish Social Democratic Workers Party – Poalei Zion, sometimes known as the Zionist Socialist Workers Union, in Russia in 1906. He stressed that the extremely distorted class structure of the Jewish people in the Diaspora necessitated a radical change; Jews should strive for control of their own economic infrastructure through participating in all strata of a state’s economy, thus liberating the Jewish people as a distinct nationality, prepared to participate in a final class-emancipation through the larger worldwide socialist struggle. Nachman Syrkin (1868–1924), another “founding father” in Europe, was a less doctrinaire socialist, holding that an organized mass settlement of the Jewish proletariat in Eretz Yisrael, with cooperative enterprises and trade unionism, would lay the socialist foundations for a new, free Jewish society. Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865–1943), a commanding figure on the lecture podium and regarded by many as the greatest Yiddish popularizer of cultural and political ideas in his time, moved from a “Diaspora nationalist” perspective to that of the Poalei Zion movement and offered his pen to Labor Zionism.

Polish-born David Ben-Gurion joined the Social-Democratic Jewish Workers' Party – Poalei Zion – in 1905, as a student at the University of Warsaw, 18-year-old was a teacher in a Warsaw Jewish school at the time. The next year, he moved to the Yishuv (the Jewish community living in pre-state Israel), and became involved in the creation of the first Jewish agricultural workers’ commune, a predecessor of the kibbutz), but, following the outbreak of World War I, he was deported by the Ottoman authorities. He traveled on behalf of the Labor Zionist cause to New York. His speeches around the country strengthened the Labor Zionist movement in the U.S., enhanced his political standing in the Diaspora and allowed him to meet influential American Jewish leaders.

During and after World War I, the Labor Zionist movement engaged in desperate efforts to effect a solution for the suffering European Jewish masses. A foremost Poalei Zion leader during his American years, Ben-Gurion led Labor Zionism into official support for World War I against the anti-war sentiments of many Jewish Zionists and nearly all Jewish socialists. Ben-Gurion, and others, hoped that Britain’s Balfour Declaration would usher in a Jewish state, but this proved a disappointment. Despite Russian Left-Labor Zionist support of the Bolshevik Revolution, which led him to turn momentarily toward the new Soviet regime for support, a plan he abandoned in the 1920s, the Bolshevik Revolution proved another disappointment for the Labor Zionist movement – although a small section of the movement, “Left Poalei Zion,” called for participation in the Third International – and indeed much of the Jewish left.

At the time of World War I, American Labor Zionism began to experience major demographic and political changes, with native-born members taking leadership positions, and both immigrant and native Jewry becoming more involved in mainstream Jewish organizational life. For a brief period, 1917–1921, the Labor Zionists published a Yiddish daily paper (one of four Yiddish dailies in North America at the time) and waxed strong. Important socialist labor leaders—notably former Socialist Labor Party activist and Amalgamated Clothing Workers leader Joseph Schlossberg—embraced the Zionist cause and established it firmly within the Jewish trades. In the 1920s, Labor Zionism steadily became less a working-class and more a transclass movement, attracting middle-class members. This was especially true among its younger, largely American-born members.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, once-fervent opposition to right-wing (Revisionist) Zionism –– long attacked for its worship of militarism, its chauvinism, and its overt antagonism to socialist values –– eased to a degree as left and right Zionists found some common ground in the struggle to ease the plight of European Jewry and support for Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael. This turn mirrored the move of the majority of the larger Jewish labor movement in the Yishuv (the Jewish community living in Mandatory Palestine) to shift the focus from “class” to “nation,” and a broad drift within American Jewry from socialist to liberal politics. Many of the original Poalei Zionists in the United States felt a kinship to and remained members of the Socialist Party, based in part on hostility to Jewish Communists, and had a competitive relationship with other organizations within the larger Jewish left in the USA. In time, a majority of Labor Zionists in North America drifted out of explicit socialist political activism, while retaining their ethical commitments as many became active in mainstream Jewish organizational life. American Labor Zionism - noted especially in the 1930s–1940s for their English-language publications (Jewish Frontier of the LZOA and Pioneer Woman of the Women’s Labor Zionist Organization of America, now known as Na’amat USA) - supported liberal and labor causes, but in a general sense its socialist commitment waned, echoing the larger move of American Jewry from loyalty the USA’s Socialist Party to support for FDR’s Democratic Party. Habonim Dror retained stronger connections with older socialist ideas and inculcatedin its members connections with its Israeli counterparts, the Israeli Dror movement and HaNoar HaOved veHalomed (the Union of Working and Studying Young Adults), and the Israeli labor movement broadly speaking, especially its cooperative and communal sectors. It encouraged members to consider moving to Israel, but not in a dogmatic way.

In 2003, the Labor Zionist Alliance (LZA) began a process of self-evaluation and strategic planning to see how it could better serve the American Jewish community. This reevaluation and rebranding resulted in the establishment of Ameinu, its successor Labor Zionist organization, “working for a progressive Israel and America.”

In contrast to the Labor Zionists, who were always part of the socialist and social democratic world, Hashomer Hatzair had always, until the Khrushchev revelations of 1956, held a position of critical support toward the Soviet Union, regarding the Bolshevik Revolution as a struggle for a new world order complementary to that of Socialist Zionist struggle against Jewish life in Galut (exile).

By 1936, Hashomer Hatzair had reached its maximum size of three thousand members in the United States and Canada. With the approach of war, the movement was rent with dissension over the proper response. A hard-line Trotskyist-influenced faction insisted on “revolutionary defeatism,” that is, no support for the coming “imperialist” world war. The majority insisted on “fighting fascism within and without” (a position that emerged dominant with the news of Nazi atrocities and attempted genocide), and a significant proportion of its membership left the movement.

On the very eve of World War II, Hashomer Hatzair continued to call for the creation of a binational Jewish-Arab state in Mandatory Palestine. After 1947, with the evident impossibility of that solution, it continued to insist upon amity between the Jews and the Arabs in what some called Israel and others called Palestine, joint victims of a tragic conflict between two peoples, one returning to its homeland and another already living on that same land. With the conclusion of the War, and the realization of the massive tragedy inflicted upon the world Jewish community, Socialist Zionists and Labor Zionists supported and participated in the underground immigration of Jews from war-torn Europe to Mandatory Palestine, and the smuggling of arms to Jewish defense forces.

In 1947, the US branch of Hashomer Hatzair created an affiliated “adult organization,” the Progressive Zionist League, and a less ideologically stringent support organization, Americans for Progressive Israel (API). PZL’s magazine, Israel Horizons (1952–present) began publication under the stewardship of Richard Yaffe, a former PM foreign editor and European correspondent, together with Avraham Schenker, Valia Hirsch, Moshe Kagan and Zvi Lurie. It was successively published under the auspices first of PZL, then API, later Meretz USA. While the print version ceased publication in 2011, it was revived in online form in 2017, and currently is published by Partners for Progressive Israel.

With the founding of the State of Israel, a number of American Socialist Zionists and Labor Zionists moved to Israel, many to live on kibbutzim of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation of Hashomer Hatzair, affiliated with Israel’s Mapam (United Workers Party), or one of the two Labor Zionist kibbutz federations, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, or Ihud HaKvutzot VeHaKibbutzim. The drain on leadership seriously affected Hashomer Hatzair in the United States, as did the group’s principled opposition to the Korean War. Attacks on it spread through mainstream Jewish organizations, not excluding the Labor Zionists, and it was subjected to investigations and harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The growth of the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, and affirmative ethnic and cultural self-identification in the United States and Canada, especially among African Americans, sparked a resurgence of Jewish progressive activism and a revival of interest in the writings of Borokhov, Syrkin, and other Socialist and Labor Zionist pioneers, especially on college campuses. The Jewish Liberation Project on the East Coast, and the Radical Zionist Alliance, were just two examples. In the 1990s, Socialist and Labor Zionists joined hands with other progressive Jewish organizations, such as New Jewish Agenda, the Progressive Zionist Caucus, the International Jewish Peace Union, and the Jewish Peace Fellowship, in opposition to the rightward drift of Israeli politics, the invasion of Lebanon, and Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank.

In 1997, Americans for Progressive Israel merged with two overlapping organizations, American Friends of Ratz –– formed to provide financial support for the Ratz party in Israel –– and the Education Fund for Israeli Civil Rights and Peace –– formed as a non-profit to promote Ratz's values in the United States. The merger of these three groups gave birth to Meretz USA.

In the early 2000s, Meretz USA collaborated with the Labor Zionist Alliance (today Ameinu), as well as college-aged members of Habonim Dror North America and Hashomer Hatzair, to create the Union of Progressive Zionists (UPZ), a college and university campus arm of the Progressive Zionist movement. By 2007, the UPZ had chapters at 60 universities and colleges across the United States. In 2009, UPZ members chose to affiliate with J Street and become J Street U.

In mid-2011, Meretz USA changed its name to Partners for Progressive Israel, to clearly differentiate itself from the Israeli Meretz party, with which it held many common beliefs, and to better reflect the organization's objective of bringing together Israelis and Americans who support a progressive Israel and Zionist movement.

In late spring 2019, the Progressive Israel Network was formed by ten organizations including Ameinu, Hashomer Hatzair, Partners for Progressive Israel, Habonim Dror North America, and others, to represent Americans “who are committed to pursuing democracy, equality and peace in Israel.” The new coalition vowed to “provide a strong, unified voice in support of its members’ common goals: democracy and equal rights, religious freedom and pluralism, and a two-state solution that would secure a peaceful future for Israel and end the 52-year-long occupation.”

Arian, Charles L. “Zionism, Socialism, and the Kinship of Peoples: Hashomer Hatzair in North America.” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew Union College, 1986.

Hurwitz, Ariel. Against the Stream: Seven Decades of Hashomer Hatzair in North America. Association of North American Shomrim in Israel in conjunction with Yad Yaari, 1994.

Katzman, Jacob. Commitment: The Labor Zionist Life-Style in America [New York: Labor Zionist Letters 1975].

Raider, Mark A., “From Immigrant Party to American Movement: American Labor Zionism in the Pre-State Period,” in American Jewish History, Vol. 82, No. 1/4 (1994), pp. 159-194.

Shpizman, Laib. Geshikhte fun der tsyonistisher arbeter bavegungin Tsofen Amerike [The Story of the Zionist Labor Movement in North America]. Vol. 1. [New York: published by “Yiddisher Kempfer,” 1955].