Jewish Workers University

JEWISH WORKERS UNIVERSITY. The first and only Marxist school to conduct classes in Yiddish, the Jewish Workers University prepared hundreds of activists to occupy positions in organizations such as the Yiddish schools of the International Workers Order, unions, Left choruses, and the Left Yiddish theater. Founded in 1926 in New York City, the university began with about two hundred students, immigrants for the most part formally uneducated, save in rudimentary Hebrew (and only for the boys). It taught reading and writing in Yiddish, the history of the Jews and the working class, anthropology, political economy, and other subjects. It also founded its own chorus.

The school’s primary director, Israel Ber Bailin (1883–1961), had been an ardent Bundist and political prisoner in czarist Russia, a translator-secretary for the pre-1919 Socialist Party, and a founder of the Chicago Gezangs Farein along with Jacob Shaefer. Educational director of the Workmen’s Circle during the 1920s, he helped establish hundreds of Jewish Children’s Schools throughout the nation and edited the fraternal monthly Der Freind. Driven out for his support of the Soviet Union, he became editor of Der Hammer from 1933 to 1939 and, on its closing, a staff member of the Morgen Freiheit.

Under Bailin’s leadership, the Jewish Workers University continued until 1941, when it was replaced by the School for Jewish Studies, located in the same building (and sharing staff) with the Communist Party’s Jefferson School of Social Science. The School for Jewish Studies, headed by Chaim Suller, closed with the Jefferson School in 1956 because of McCarthyite pressures.

Ten Years of the Jewish Workers University, Anniversary Almanac, 1937 (in Yiddish). Cornell University Library Digital Collections. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19042997