Goldberg, Itche

GOLDBERG, ITCHE (1904-2006). An educator, journalist, and scholar of Yiddish literature, Goldberg taught and mentored multiple generations of American Jews to combine progressive values with proud identification with Jewish history and Yiddish language and culture. He directed a system of supplementary Yiddish-oriented Jewish schools on the left flank of the American Yiddish school movement from 1935 until the close of the twentieth century, authoring, editing, and publishing educational texts and materials, and providing support and inspiration for generations of students and teachers. From 1966 until its final issues, in 2002, Goldberg also edited the monthly Yidishe Kultur, the journal of the Yidisher Kultur Farband (YKUF), a Yiddish cultural organization and publishing house founded in Paris in 1937.

Goldberg was born into a middle-class family, in Opatów, Poland, (in Yiddish, Apt). The family resettled in Warsaw in about 1910. In Warsaw, he rejected traditional religious education, studying in mostly modern Hebrew-language institutions, culminating in two treasured years in S.A. Posnanski’s newly established State Seminary for Teachers of the Mosaic Religion. His father and his eldest brother had emigrated to Toronto in 1913; his father sold secondhand furniture and refurbished coal stoves there. Goldberg and his mother and four other siblings stayed behind, waiting to be sent money for their passage. In 1914, they gave up their apartment, booked ship tickets, and packed their possessions in a trunk. The trunk reached Hamburg, but the war began, and the family remained in Warsaw, bunking until 1920, often hungry, on a cousin’s kitchen floor. Goldberg reached in Toronto in 1921. (Miraculously, the trunk soon followed.) In 1924, after three years studying philosophy, political economy, and German at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, he was invited to organize a class for young adults in the Toronto Yiddish schools of the socialist Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle). He soon left university to begin his lifelong participation in the cultural work of the Jewish labor movement.

Goldberg relocated to Philadelphia in the late 1920s, and in 1932 settled in New York. In the 1920s, the fraternalist Arbeter Ring was bitterly divided, as was most of the socialist movement, between pro- and anti-Soviet wings; Goldberg joined the pro-Soviet Arbeter Ring faction in 1927. In 1930, he was among Arbeter Ring members who broke with the organization to establish the International Workers Order (IWO), a competing fraternal society and not-for-profit insurance provider whose Jewish division would remain its largest branch. By 1935, Goldberg was writing and lecturing regularly about the parallel needs he saw in American “proletarian Jewish education”: to strengthen the teaching of Yiddish and to expand the study of Jewish history and culture.

From the 1930s forward, as a leader of a Communist-affiliated organization, Goldberg negotiated the complex duality of a “fellow traveler.” In the words of a close friend and colleague, Shirley Novik (1909-2011): “He wouldn’t join the party. We called him a collaborator because he wanted to work with everyone, but no one else would work with him, because to them he was a Red.” The IWO was liquidated as a “Communist front” in 1955. The split on the left within the Yiddishist movement (i.e., between the Arbeter Ring and the Jewish Labor Bund, on the one hand, and the organizations and publications of former members of the IWO, on the other) was bitter and enduring. The left’s near decade-long deflection of credible reports, beginning January 1949, of the repression of Soviet Jewish institutions and the arrests and murders of Yiddish cultural figures was, to the right, particularly galling.

Through the 1960s, Goldberg’s at-first tentative criticism of the Soviet Union in Yidishe Kultur became increasingly direct, as he continued to work closely (if at times, contentiously) with the editorial boards of the soon-to-be-former-Communist-affiliated publications, Jewish Life (later, Jewish Currents), and the daily Morgn Freiheit. In August 1976, Goldberg sat out an international conference in Jerusalem on the future of Yiddish, waiting in his hotel room in Tel Aviv for the Arbeter Ring-controlled American delegation to reverse its decision to bar him from attending as an official US delegate; Israeli colleagues had arranged a press pass, a compromise that he declined. In protest, he organized two United Conferences on the Survival of Yiddish, in New York, the first in July, preceding the Jerusalem conference, and the second in December 1976. The New York conferences were well-attended by the left–250 delegates registered for the June conference–and largely ignored by those outside former-IWO circles. Only towards the conclusion of the century, with the Yiddish world heavily reduced in numbers, was this rift sometimes bridged through mutual reevaluation, revised positions, and new friendships.

In 1985, Goldberg was awarded the prestigious Israeli Itsik Manger Prize for his contributions to the study of Yiddish literature; in 1990, he received the David Hofstein Prize in Yiddish Literature in Israel as well. In the U.S., his work was honored by the Congress for Jewish Culture and the Dora Teitlbaum Foundation. As a Polish national, and an official in an organization labeled a Communist front, Goldberg, ultimately designated “stateless,” lived for twenty years with the threat of deportation over his head, under the provisions of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. He reported annually to a parole officer of the Deportation Branch of the Immigration and Naturalization Service until 1975 and was denied US citizenship until 1979.

Yidishe Kultur was among the premier Yiddish literary journals of the latter half of the twentieth century. It had only two editors: Nakhmen Meisil, 1938-1965, and Itche Goldberg, 1966-2002. It published, and in its later years, republished, original and classic work by prominent Yiddish authors, literary and cultural critics, memoirists, and public intellectuals from around the world. It was, from its early decades, the central international vehicle for the publication and republication of Soviet Yiddish writers. Although intended at its founding to be broadly inclusive and to welcome debate, the journal’s pro-Soviet stance quickly alienated important voices in the Yiddish world, particularly as its founding was followed almost immediately by the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, which inflamed the split between the pro-Soviet left and the majority of the Jewish community. It was not until the 1980s that Goldberg was able to bring the pages of Yidishe Kultur closer to the inclusivity that the journal had originally intended.

In 1935, Goldberg was appointed director of the Yiddish Schools and, later, Cultural Director of the Jewish branch of the International Workers Order. “You have no idea how hungry for Yiddish culture the immigrant generation was when they came to the United States and Canada,” he said in a 2005 interview. In 1939, the IWO sponsored more than one hundred afternoon and weekend Yiddish schools. At its height, at the close of the 1940s, the IWO claimed about 200,000 insured members; the Jewish branch (renamed the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order-JPFO in 1944), made up a quarter of IWO membership. From 1935 until 1941, Goldberg edited the Yiddish pedagogical organ of the IWO, Proletarishe Dertsiung, Proletarian Education, (renamed Heym un Dertsiung, Home and Education, in 1937). Between 1937 and 1951, Goldberg also edited Yungvarg, a Yiddish monthly for the IWO schools, to which he occasionally contributed his own romantic stories for children. He authored, edited, and coauthored textbooks, grammars, and readers for the students of the IWO/JPFO schools throughout the 1940s. When it became apparent that the New York State Insurance Department, which licensed the IWO, was intent on its dissolution, Goldberg removed the schools from the organization, reestablishing them as the independent schools of the Service Bureau for Jewish Education. As such, the schools continued to educate many hundreds of students well into the 1980s and beyond.

Goldberg continued to publish and edit history texts, now in English; an extensive anthology tracing the history of the Yiddish theater (Undzer Dramaturgye, 1961); an updated New Haggadah for Passover; a songbook (1961); a students’ dictionary (1968); an English reader, Yiddish Stories for Young People (1987); and other educational materials. The schools of the Service Bureau absorbed many who had taught in the IWO schools, and trained new generations of young teachers, no less passionate than their teachers’ generation, in their dedication to passing on a Yiddish-based Jewish identity imbued with progressive, secular, and socialist values; these new generations, by and large, were far less competent in Yiddish. The Service Bureau, with the YKUF and other former IWO organizations, also sponsored annual memorial mass meetings, beginning in the late 1940s, to commemorate the martyrs of the Holocaust, and to celebrate anti-fascist resistance, and the April 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

From 1970 to 1985, Goldberg taught Yiddish language and literature in Queens College, in the City University of New York, and compiled and authored more than a dozen cantatas celebrating classical Yiddish writers for New York’s Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus. In the last decades of his life, he wrote and lectured frequently about social, progressive, and universal themes in Yiddish literature, and about the Jewish themes and spirit that he celebrated in the works of Soviet Yiddish novelists and poets. His talks and essays are collected in two volumes, Eseyen, [Essays] (1981), and Eseyen II, (2006).

The grief and dismay with which Goldberg and his circle had greeted Khrushchev’s 1956 20th Party Congress acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes gave way, for Goldberg, in the 1960s and the decades following, to an unmitigated break with the Soviet Union’s lethal hostility towards Jews and Jewish culture. This did not signal a disruption of his earlier enthusiasm and mourning for the bright stars of Soviet Yiddish creativity, terrorized and murdered in the Great Terror of the 1930s, and those murdered in the period culminating on 12 August 1952. In 1960, Goldberg founded the Zhitlovsky Foundation, which, together with the Service Bureau for Jewish Education and the YKUF sponsored annual commemorations of the murdered Soviet Yiddish writers and artists; the YKUF journal, Yidishe Kultur, published annual memorial issues every August, a tradition formalized with Goldberg’s assuming editorship in 1966.

Goldberg’s formal break with his early pro-Soviet enthusiasm did not extinguish his hope for an equitable, peaceful world in which Jews and Socialism could together play a part. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he called on the Soviet Union to reinstate once-vibrant Jewish institutions: Yiddish schools, publications, and theater. At the height of Soviet reforms, in 1988, he wrote, “Despite everything, I still want to believe in an ethical, humanist Socialism. I am for Perestroika, but, I wonder, is Perestroika for me?” But his central focus remained on the Jewish community of the United States. Goldberg’s vision of Judaism, separate from Zionism and religion, bonded instead to the celebration of Yiddish language and culture in concert with humanist values, was instrumental in bringing thousands of American progressives and social activists–through almost three-quarters of a century–to a proud, secular Jewish identity.

Estraikh, Gennady, “Metamorphosis of the Morgn-frayhayt.” In G. Estraikh and M. Krutikov, Yiddish and the Left. Oxford: Legenda, 2001.144-166.

Kadar, Naomi. Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950. Brandeis UP, 2016.

Reiter, Ester. A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016.

Stillman, Yankl, “Itche Goldberg on Khayim Zhitlovsky.” Jewish Currents, November, 2006. Pp. 26-29.