Yiddish Left

YIDDISH LEFT. As differentiated from the broader but more diffuse Jewish Left, Left Yiddishists have occupied a special niche with their fusion of linguistic, cultural, and political commitments. Yiddishkayt, literally “Yiddishness,” has been a wild card on the Left, unaccounted for by Marxist theories but vital in its successful and unsuccessful applications to the situation of the immigrant Jewish working class in its most influential eras.

A Yiddishist discourse arrived in the 1890s Left unbidden and even unwilled. Rooted in a half-millennium or so of European history, Yiddish (a derivation of Middle High German, with varying elements of Slavic and Hebrew) served as the profane or daily language of shtetl, which is to say village Jews in the Pale. Disapproved by “cultured” (Russian or German, middle-class) Jews who hoped to educate the masses out of a “mongrel” language, Yiddish nevertheless grew up into a mini-literature with the spread of books and literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. The foremost writers—I. L. Peretz and Sholom Aleichem paramount among them—preached a doctrine of ethical uplift, but also a folkish communalism that verged on socialism.

Yiddish came to America with the half-million Jewish immigrants from the middle 1880s, but especially from the early 1890s on. Yiddish-language socialist periodicals appeared almost immediately, often written and edited by intellectuals who had little knowledge of Yiddish before their own immigration. A handful of them would remain important intellectual and political figures of the Jewish Left for decades. Foremost among them was an anarchistic-minded early immigrant from eastern Europe named Abraham Cahan, who was reputedly the first to hold a U.S. radical political meeting in Yiddish, in 1884. Two years earlier the first labor leaflet in Yiddish had been issued, warning immigrants against strikebreaking. The formation of the United Hebrew Trades in 1888 formally announced the emergence of the eastern European Jew (in contrast to the generally middle-class German Jew) as a force in the New York labor movement.

At the same time, a precocious poetic outburst in Yiddish gave the impoverished Jewish immigrants lyrics for the struggle. David Edelstadt (1866–1892), an early fatality to the “proletarishe krank” (workers’ disease, i.e., tuberculosis), wrote verses in his short life that would be sung for generations by Yiddish choruses. Fellow anarchist Joseph Bovshover (1872–1915), who wrote a famous elegy to the dead Edelstadt, penned poetic denunciations of the rich, of religion, and of the stupidity of bourgeois life—before going mad himself.

Edelstadt and Bovshover both failed in one important respect, as Yiddish and Yiddishkayt emerged as an issue, if only covertly, in the fierce competition of the early 1890s between anarchists and socialists. By now Cahan, a leading editor of the weekly Arbeter Zeitung (Workers Press), had begun to attract a circle of poets, prose artists, and semiskilled journalists who could appeal to the Jewish proletarian community (which included sizable numbers of petty merchants, salesmen, and other non-wage laborers) at large. The anarchist Freie Arbeter Shtimme (Free Voice of Labor) of Edelstadt and Bovshover, its prose a mere didacticism offset by a little poetry, offered no serious competition. Nor did the anarchists compromise with the religious sentiments of the immigrant majority, mocking the holy days while the Arbeter Zeitung explained socialist ideas in religious phraseology.

Determinedly adapting to America as well as to their immediate audience, Cahan and his fellow early socialists nevertheless nearly all believed in an assimilation that would eradicate Yiddish. They therefore found themselves in the anomalous position of constructing a presumably doomed sensibility. In this curious way, they came to promote cultural figures with deeper Yiddishist sentiments. Two key individuals, both poets, became deeply beloved in the Lower East Side ghetto. Morris Rosenfeld, the master “Teardrop Millionaire” (so named for an ability to raise emotion in his readers), appealed in virtually Zionist tones for the emancipation of the historically downtrodden Jew. With no Zion in sight (as literary critic B. Rivkin later argued), Yiddish with a messianic socialist content itself became a sort of realm of imagined liberation—a mental homeland. Morris Winchevsky, the “zeyde” (grandfather) of Yiddish socialist journalism, relocated from London to New York in 1894 and soon thereafter roused a rebellion of Yiddish socialists from the political and cultural tyranny of Socialist Labor Party leadership.

The Jewish Daily Forward, chief product of the split, evolved after a few years into Cahan’s own brilliant journalistic expression. Upholding the cause of socialism and of labor (especially Jewish labor), the Forward rapidly became an example of gele (yellow) journalism to match any in the contemporary New York press. By the mid-1910s, it had reached a circulation of a quarter-million, larger than any socialist paper other than the Appeal to Reason, and by far the most circulated Jewish paper in the world.

Utterly sensationalistic, the Forward was known for its gruesome accounts of murders and its directives on immigrant etiquette as much as its sociological investigation of neighborhood life. And in its quasi-assimilationist manner, it evolved a prose increasingly interlaced with English words and phrases. The paper fairly invented, at least for Yiddish, the one-column short story, often brilliant socialist-realist vignettes from daily life by writers such as Z. Libin, capmaker by trade, or Leon Kobrin, known as the Zola of the ghetto.

In strengths and weaknesses, the Forward fairly represented the mentality of the 1880s–1890s immigrants who had risen to the leadership of the labor and journalistic ghetto spheres. Socialists of a Bundist turn, they had learned that socialism was likely to be very far away, and they had learned to make an institutional accommodation to the realities of the transition. They viewed competitors, especially newcomers or those to the left of themselves, with great suspicion. The Forward notably savaged Cahan’s personal enemies or ignored them and thereby banished them to a corner of Jewish life. “Cahan edits the Yiddish press,” as the saying went, suggested the weight of his personal domination of cultural and political life.

Yiddish theater, heavily influenced by socialist themes, offered another important realm of cultural self-definition. Its very creation, at the dawn of the 1890s, had been shaped by political motives. As it rapidly grew commercially viable, socialist giants arose side by side with schlockmeisters. For twenty years Jakob Gordin, a heavy moralist, uplifted the Yiddish theater and created roles that the outstanding actors and actresses could fill out, to great public approval. Socialist ideas took on new graphic guises and (as Gordin in his own numerous literary essays suggested) escaped the abstractions through which they were too often interpreted.

By 1910, the newer immigrants, “1905ers”—who had in many cases experienced the contemporary Russian uprising and the accompanying pogroms firsthand—began to assert themselves across American Jewish life. In their Europe, Yiddish had gained a greater dignity and literary artfulness, and Jewish identity (for bad reasons as well as good) seemed less an option and more a finality. Over a decade or so, they transformed Left institutional life in several important ways. A leading 1890s figure like Morris Winchevsky, poet, comic monologist, and political activist, had become at once revered and outdated. His disdain of the Forward’s money-grubbing vulgarity, however, was shared by the doyens of the younger Left, such as B. Rivkin, who gained stature as the outstanding commentator of the new Yiddish literature and arguably the finest anarchist literary critic in the world.

In growing numbers, younger intellectuals entered the major fraternal institution, the Arbeter Ring/Workmen’s Circle, and there began to insist (against the inclinations of the older Jewish immigrants) upon a program of Yiddish-language day schools. By the late 1910s, this program became a centerpiece of radical Jewish activities. Their most artistic-minded members (known as di Yunge, the youth) issued a veritable literary manifesto of Yiddish as capable of high artistic, undidactic possibility. Although virtually banned from the Forward, they began their own small-scale publishing, and infiltrated the other presses, including the anarchist Freie Arbeter Shtimme. Their ranks, cultural and political enthusiasts, fed rebellion from the Jewish socialist establishment. Perhaps di Yunge’s chief organizer, David Ignatov, anthologizer and organizer, provided its ultimate fictional expression in his three-volume Euf Veite Vegn (Horizons, 1930–1932), in which a protagonist wanders through American life, discovering its wonders and horrors, and seeking finally a socialism with a spiritual quality lacking in the secular Left.

The leftward edge of di Yunge made the Yiddish “revolution of the word” a call for political-economic revolution as well. They shared the rage of young Jewish radicals against the institutional conservatism of Jewish labor leaders who considered themselves cautious socialists. They expressed their special resentment at assimilationism, as a fatal break with a thousand years of cultural tradition and willful abandonment of a tongue equal to the finest literary possibilities. In their Yiddishkayt, they also offered an alternative to the undercurrent of Hebraism (predominantly conservative or Zionist in implication) as well as the overwhelming fact of Americanization. The Russian Revolution, opening up the promise of an institutionalized, socialist Yiddish renaissance, evoked their enthusiasm. Moshe Leib Halpern, one of the most engaged and talented of the younger poets, gladly dedicated himself to the new hopes stirred by Russia. H. Leiveck, another of the famed circle, wrote stunning proletarian dramas in the 1920s. Even the less political, such as aestheticist Mani Leib, could for a time be sufficiently entranced by such Left (and ostensibly non-Jewish) causes as the Sacco-Vanzetti case to write stirring social lyrics. Such figures provoked great pride among Yiddishists at large, and during the era of their radical commitment, also provoked a gnawing uneasiness among the powerfully situated Jewish critics of Bolshevism.

The Yunge rebellion, in one sense, led directly to the founding of the Yiddish Communist daily newspaper in 1922, Morgen Freiheit Perhaps the most aesthetically successful of the new Communist dailies, its early columns included a handful of the outstanding Yunge, poets and dramaturges, and its supporters included many of the outstanding Yiddish pedagogues and fraternal activists. During the 1920s their circles established the Jewish Folk Chorus, with its outstanding leader, Jacob Shaefer, and Camp Kinderland, a largely Yiddish-inclined summer center. After a split in the Workmen’s Circle, Yiddish Communists created their own International Workers Order (IWO) schools as well.

No one author so well symbolized the long-term shift of individual writers and artists toward the Yiddishist Left as did Moshe Nadir (1885–1943). Known as the “bad boy” or the “great cynic” of Yiddish literature in the 1910s, Nadir wrote comic sketches and aesthetic-erotic verses, mocking the self-seriousness of Jewish political and social life. After the Russian Revolution, he swung to the Left and he remained with the Freiheit almost to the end of his life, faithful to designated political positions and (to a lesser degree) favored aesthetic modes. Notwithstanding his notoriously bohemian personal life, the Freiheit and its associated institutions made him an idol with an intense following for his voluminous output—poetry, feuilletons, travelogues, and children’s books running to nearly fifteen volumes. For his part, Nadir usually carried the “party line” fairly lightly and in his own peculiar fashion. The 1920s found him honestly enraged at xenophobic American capitalism, the Depression sorrowful at the human waste and hopeful for the Soviet experiment, and the later 1930s thankful for American cultural pluralism. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Nadir lost heart, and died a broken man.

The Freiheit never remotely rivaled the Forward in circulation, peaking at no more than ten thousand. But its readers regarded it almost as a sacred organ for the mission of socialism and Yiddishkayt. It suffered terribly as a result of Communist-style “proletarian literature,” which drove away some of its notable writers (although a few, including the fine novelist Isaac Raboi, adapted themselves remarkably to it), and the Palestinian uprising of 1929, whose welcoming by the Communist Party drove away others. A core of talented enthusiasts always remained, strongly influencing Yiddish art, theater, music, even puppet shows (the modernist Zuni Maud created, with writer Yosel Kotler, a Modicut puppet troupe that toured widely), but, above all, literature. At the Freiheit itself and to a lesser degree at Der Hammer, its monthly sister cultural publication (a sort of Jewish New Masses), fine prose flourished almost regardless of shifting political line and, at times, a vulgar general approach to cultural questions. The Freiheit's own publishing company brought out many volumes of centrally important Yiddish literature, including extensive collections of work by Winchevsky.

In the Popular Front era, this approach reached its maximum influence. The Yiddishe Kultur Farband (YKUF) was founded in 1937, an international body to consolidate and further Yiddish efforts. A distinguished journal, Yiddishe Kultur, and a scholarly publishing company demonstrated the Left Yiddishists’ seriousness even as the Hitler-Stalin Pact drove out many allies. When the details of the Holocaust began to become known, the leaders of the YKUF demanded and received a greater measure of autonomy within the IWO Yiddish schools, but also a commitment that Communists had never previously made, to a multilinguistic American society.

This commitment arrived too late, both for Yiddish and for the Left. The Cold War and Stalin’s attack on Soviet Yiddishkayt uprooted and ultimately discredited, to a large degree, Left Yiddish institutions just as they had reestablished themselves in the years following the war. The number of IWO schools rapidly shrank (as they did in the Workmen’s Circle milieu, for nonpolitical reasons as well: suburbanization and assimilation made the schools both impractical to organize and less desirable). The U.S. government destroyed the IWO, although the Jewish Clubs and Societies maintained an insular existence.

In the same years, the creation of Israel detracted seriously from Yiddish concerns. The Poale, or Labor, Zionists, ardent in their own Yiddish literary pursuits even if less determined about the language’s ultimate destiny, had been since the 1920s a small milieu increasingly focused solely on the Middle East. The sabotage of Yiddish presses by “revisionist” Hebraists, and the official adoption of Hebrew as the sole official language of the new land, shut off Yiddish as a less-than-desirable element of the past.

At this juncture, Yiddish began to acquire a scholarly life that deemphasized but did not by any means neglect its socialist connections. The YKUF, especially under the leadership of Kalmon Marmor and, later, Nakhman Meisel, published outstanding historical studies of Yiddish literature (in Yiddish), and comprehensive anthologies. No other American radical literature, until the 1970s–1980s, received nearly such close critical attention, notwithstanding the shrinking number of Yiddish writers and readers. Amerike in Yiddishe Vort (America in Yiddish Word), edited by Meisel, provided five hundred quarto pages of poetry and prose, an unparalleled bit of Left-literary scholarship. In English, Irving Howe began his efforts at cultural recuperation via translation and explanation of context. Slanted against the Communist Left, they had nevertheless a great importance in reaching a Jewish audience with the historical validity of the Yiddish experience.

The step-by-step departure of the Freiheit from the Communist milieu encouraged this development, and made the paper a pantheon of Left Yiddishkayt until its demise in September 1988. By that time its editor, Paul Novick, on hand since its founding sixty-six years earlier, had become the most distinguished senior figure of Yiddish journalism in the world, his own writing long a beacon on independent socialistic Yiddishkayt.

Among socialists, and the smaller allied scatterings of Bundists and Labor Zionists, a modest Yiddish revival also took place during the 1970s–1980s. The Forward, down to a circulation of twenty-five thousand, had become in old age a champion of Yiddish-language circles and even paid close attention to Yiddish in the hated Soviet Union. It also offered, along with fervent denunciations of Communists and other perceived opponents of Israel, strident criticisms of Israeli warmaking in Lebanon and brutality in the West Bank. Unlike the later generation’s roughly neoliberal Jewish publications, it kept somewhat of a radical edge. Its editors, most former editors at the Freiheit, had not entirely left behind the socialism of their youth. By contrast, an English-language Forward edition, edited by a former staffer at the Wall Street Journal, showed a certain nostalgia for Yiddish institutions and historical interest in Jewish socialist tradition, but hostility toward the contemporary Left.

By the latter 1990s, Yiddishe Kultur, still edited by erstwhile Left pedagogue Itche Goldberg, remained one of the finest Yiddish literary publications in the world. A flurry of linguistic efforts around the National Yiddish Book Center, founded and headed by Aaron Lansky, formally distanced itself from any political traditions but inevitably revived a vanished Left ambience. Perhaps most important, klezmer music bands staffed by New Left veterans and younger progressive musicians constituted a major public presence within Jewish festivals and institutions, at once more accessible and more political than any other form of Yiddish activity.

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

Epstein, Melech. Jewish Labor in the USA. 2 vols. New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950

.Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976'

Maisel, Nachman, ed. Amerike in Yiddishe Vort. New York: Yiddishe Kultur Farband, 1953.