Jewish Americans

JEWISH AMERICANS. The Jewish role within the American Left has been so intense, varied and contradictory that it defies a narrative, let alone a brief summary. Between 1890 and 1980, Jewish radicals played a central role in most Marxist organizations not otherwise designated racially or ethnically. But Jews were also active before the 1890s. After 1980, even as the proportionate role of Jewish participation and in particular Jewish workers declined, the stamp of multigenerational Jewish participation remained. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the crises besetting young people’s careers and the return of a large-scale, reform-minded socialist movement brought back large numbers. Indeed, the electoral success of Democrats calling themselves socialists owed enormously to the rebirth of a Jewish Left.

The German American Left of the 1830s–1890s involved relatively few Jews, but those participants included noted immigrant free thinkers of the Forty-Eighter generation and several of the best-known socialist journalist-editors. Meta Stern Lilienthal, an editor of the free-thought journal Neue Zeit and an advocate of woman suffrage, gained avid support from other German Jews. Alexander Jonas, whose editorial career with the New Yorker Volkszeitung spanned the 1880s to 1910s, opened doors for the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the new immigration. As the century drew to a close, the wrongs done to the Haymarket martyrs, pervasive anti-Semitism, and the Russian agitation of the 1890s stirred the economically suffering new immigrants.

By the later 1890s Jews and German immigrants within the organized socialist and anarchist movements far outnumbered the dozen or so other immigrant groups of the Left combined. In the following decade, Jews provided intellectual leadership of the Hungarian American Left and the political leadership of the Russian Americans, as well as of the Yiddish-speaking branches and the English-speaking sections in certain neighborhoods. In the wake of the tumultuous 1910s, Jews supplied both the rank-and-file militants and the cautious bureaucrats of large sections of the needle, fur, and jewelry trades as well as of other light industry in the Northeast. As such, they represented insurgent women activists, social democrats, and anarchists. The breakup of the Socialist Party in 1936 prompted the movement of its institutions (principally the weekly New Leader and New York radio station WEVD) into a semi-socialist, liberal direction.

In essence, radical Jews of various national origins and a considerable portion of their offspring continued to dominate Left circles well into the 1940s. Other immigrant groups never achieved similar importance. The attachment of the Left’s hopes to the Soviet Union, the temporary flourishing of Russian Jewish culture, and then (despite Stalinism) the struggle against Fascism riveted Jewish concern. Toward the end of the 1930s, indeed, the proportions of Jewish Communists rose as the Party added numbers fastest in New York State and among hard-pressed professionals rather than blue-collar workers. Likewise, young Jewish Communists “colonizing” industries during the early and middle 1930s often found themselves leading union locals of large size and importance by the end of the decade. Still more often, they provided speeches and political documents for Gentile leaders.

After World War II, Jews populated virtually the only self-described social democratic milieu of intellectuals and activists. Although progressive by American standards, it was among the most conservative social democratic milieux in the world. The formation of anti-Communist intelligence networks involved erstwhile socialists in considerable numbers, from embittered Menshevik refugees to upwardly mobile intellectuals. These social democratic circles, devoting themselves less to domestic issues than to support of Israel, dominated the Social Democratic Federation, the Jewish Labor Committee, and later the Social Democrats, USA. Ardent anti-communists since the 1920s, they supported the hawkish and conservative AFL leadership of George Meany and Lane Kirkland. More and more, “socialism” was viewed in these circles as an idealistic movement of the past, useful to the immigrant generations but completely outmoded for modern times.

Communists and participants in the fading Popular Front milieux staggered into the Cold War era, with a small consolation: electing Leo Isaacson, a Jewish congressional representative from the Bronx on the American Labor Party ticket, and providing Henry Wallace with half of his national vote total, thanks to running on the Labor Party ticket in New York. Disillusionment with Stalin and the Soviet Union, thanks to the legacy of Russian anti-Semitism and the heavy-handed persecutions of the McCarthy era at home, damaged but did not destroy Jewish attachments to the broad causes of the Left. Support for an Israel led by the Labor Party remained compatible with various Left sentiments. Thousands of erstwhile Communists, abandoning the Party but forswearing cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, threw themselves into civil rights and peace causes along with their children. Many awaited the return of socialism’s vision: the undying inspiration of their younger years.

American Jews as a group increasingly moved to suburbs, partaking in the privileges of social mobility and acceptance as “white.” Urban or suburban, prosperous or not, many nevertheless became involved in opposition to the Vietnam War. But it remained largely to the young generation to attach refurbished socialist visions to the New Left and to Feminism. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Jewish Americans were frequently found in college campus revolts and in newly formed feminist, gay, and lesbian groups and very often in leadership. “Red Diaper Babies” had learned their lessons early, with the folk music of Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson played at home by their parents, and they had the self-confidence to lead the first waves of campus activity.

Efforts to attach a more specifically Jewish character to leftish efforts had little success in the short run. Israeli support for the Vietnam War mainly succeeded at throwing large parts of the Jewish establishment into disarray, given overwhelming American Jewish opposition to US involvement, especially after 1967. Campus Hillel institutions offering shelter for Jewish undergraduates bashed by police could not avoid being at odds with the institutions’ chief financial supporters: a political contradiction that recurred in one form or another for following generations, across a range of Jewish associations, fraternities and sororities to Jewish Community Centers. The need to interest young people and engage older people once attached to the Left or the labor movement did not correspond with the heavily Israel-oriented and politically conservative leanings of the boards of directors in institution after institution. Nor did the boards welcome the demands of staff for better pay and advance of women stuck in lower positions.

The Old Left also had little to offer in Jewish specifics. Paul Novick, editor of the Soviet-leaning Yiddish Morgan Freiheit, was expelled from CP leadership in 1972 primarily due to differences on Israel, an act with more than symbolic consequences. The “soft” left around Dissent magazine and the small, factionalized Socialist Party, dithered on calling for the US to withdraw from Vietnam and attacking the New Left, while not hesitating to support Israeli wars of any kind. The disarray of liberalism, indeed, presaged a rightward shift among a significant number of formerly socialistic Jewish intellectuals, within the milieu of the New York Intellectuals and beyond, into what would become known as neo-conservatism. The new Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), seeking to fill a vacuum within the leftward edge of the Democratic Party, seemed to mark a significant advance of Jewish progressive influence despite the impulse to support Israeli behavior, good and bad alike. DSOC made little progress until decades had passed.

The role of the Jewish Left, old and new, within the urban settings of “New Politics,” meanwhile offered great hopes, linking Jewish unionists and liberal reforms with former New Left activists and minority populations, among wider alliances. Mayors Paul Soglin, in Madison, Wisconsin of the 1970s and Mike Rotkin, in Santa Cruz of the 1980s, offered examples of how New Politics drew upon Jewish community resistance to neoconservatism. In these settings, history-minded observers noted that making careers and gaining financial security had pulled older Jewish leftists rightward into cautious liberalism, while thousands of erstwhile New Leftists and their immediate successors moved leftward. They could afford to devote time and money to support local and national causes.

This hope revived in the 1980s most vividly in Chicago, under Harold Washington’s mayoralty, once again bringing large numbers of prosperous Jews into a coalition with impoverished non-whites, in a common mobilization for a different city and a different society. The hope crashed on the shoals of Jimmy Carter’s rightward turn, confirmed and finalized by Reagan’s electoral victories, and may be said to have returned only in recent years, with new generations of Chicago Jewish socialists and their multiracial allies.
The fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, along with steady decline of the labor movement and a general rightward drift of the “center” in politics, compelled the diverse components of the remaining Jewish Left to reinvent effective movements. Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky epitomized the grounded Jewish voice since the 1970s and remained so into the new century.

New options emerged through the engagement of a younger generation. New urban radical communities of younger Left Jews emerged, such as the Brooklyn Bridge collective. Organizations and communities that bucked the post-1967 consolidation of unconditional support for Israeli policies include Breira, whose opposition was deeply informed by Jewish rhetoric and symbolism, as was its successor New Jewish Agenda (NJA). More recent groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and If Not Now have their antecedents in the 1970s-1980s, including the left-wing activities of Israelis and Palestinians. What was, perhaps, uniquely American in this new fusion was that “radical” should not be confused or wholly identified with “secular.”

The founding of New Jewish Agenda in 1980 brought a zest to Jewish survivors of the New Left feminist and gay movements and buoyed younger activists in the vicinity of the less conservative Jewish institutions on campus and in the community. Especially active in opposition to the Israeli assault upon Lebanon in 1982, vibrant for several years, it met with opposition and active repression (that is, the firing of NJA-affiliated employees) in Jewish institutions, Jewish Community Centers and campus Hillels. Interest faded, and only in Seattle did NJA thrive, by achieving accommodation with the mainstream.

Meanwhile NJA veterans joined others in the vitally important, New York-based Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, a collective of several hundred experienced activists engaged in activities of every kind and perhaps more pronounced in its feminism than any previous Jewish Left movement. The new journal Bridges, which featured Adrienne Rich’s poetry, was advertised as a “Journal for Jewish feminists and Our Friends.” A type of intersectionality that combined older Bundist tropes of doikeyt (local orientation, as opposed to Zionism) and promotion of Jewish culture with the Old Left’s focus on racial justice started taking shape. Cultural and political activists such as Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz articulated the importance of addressing multiple oppressions, while Jewish identity, gender, privilege, race as well as anti-Semitism were explicitly addressed. A parallel and related development coalesced around queerness, Yiddish and diasporist Left politics. While each of these generations and groups has had to deal deeply with the politics and remembrance of Nazi genocide against Jews, a larger acknowledgement of the connections to racial genocides in America and enslavement broadened the framing.

The founding of Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine in 1986 raised prospects for a different approach to the issues of Jewish progressivism. Taking its name from the Rabbinic notion of “Tikkun Olam,” which originally meant something like functional social order but came to be understood as “healing the world,” Tikkun sought to intervene in an ongoing communal debate on many issues including the eschewing of an Israel-centric identity. The magazine’s spiritual content, the dialogue and search for Talmudic and post-Talmud prophetic precedents and subjects, struck a chord, perhaps most of all in the small but liberal Reconstructionist/Renewal congregations. Tikkun advanced further through attacks on it by hard-line supporters of the Israeli Right. Tikkun stumbled early in its fumbled embrace of women’s issues and of Socialist Feminism in particular, but sought to catch up later.

The return of Leftwing activity in popular opposition to the US invasion of Iraq elicited sharp controversy but also the emergence of new generational forces and newly active or more militantly leftwing personalities. Seen in retrospect, this development foreshadowed new levels of Jewish-American engagement to follow in the leftish edges of the 2007-2008 Obama presidential campaign, in Occupy, in Black Lives Matter, in the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the newest Left active as socialists near the centers of the political mainstream. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was to absorb much of this activity, making it arguably the most Jewish of major leftwing organizations since the Popular Front.

For a moment during 2006-2007, a “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with the prominent participation or support of aging, prominent Jewish former SDSers such as Al Haber seemed to ignite campus activities to the Left of DSA and less bound to the Democratic Party. This project dissipated even before the beginnings of the Obama campaign swept up progressive enthusiasms.

Occupy found its center on Wall Street, with heavy Jewish participation including newer Russian immigrants and former Israelis, young people drawn to the causes often resented and rejected by their immediate elders. The proliferation of local imitators around the country gathered the usual Jewish disproportion across age groups. The same could be said for the white supporters in the crowds and support groups of Black Lives Matter, first version.

At the same time, Jewish demographics and political alignments shifted. The persistence of Jews in the Left worked to counter a decided shift to the right, notably but not exclusively in Haredi religious communities that often echoed the racial politics of Trumpism, claiming acceptance into a reconfigured America unsympathetic to people of color, feminism, gay and lesbian issues, and environmental issues among others. On the Jewish Left, organizing around social, racial, economic and environmental justice, often explicitly as Jews, replaced or was added to the earlier form of organization into a range of general left causes. The Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2015-2016 and 2019-2020 roused idealists throughout American society and also roused a socialist impulse in the vicinity of DSA. “The [ethnic] Jewish Candidate” found avenues long closed open to him and to claims for a different kind of society.

Twenty-first century Jewish activists, galvanized by white nationalist anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant actions, Trumpism, racism and the Black Lives Matters movement, sought to attend to issues that the older Jewish Left had addressed with vigor. But the reconfiguration of the Jewish Left no longer could be described as necessarily associated with a secular critique of religion. Contemporary US social justice groups such as Jews for Racial Equality and Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, Bend the Arc, Never Again Action, Open Hillel, If Not Now and the circle around Jewish Currents, among others, have made themselves heirs to the Jewish Left. As these groups responded to White Nationalists who target Jews as “puppet masters” aiding and abetting the undesirable immigration of Latinx or Muslim “non-whites,” they productively examined how anti-Semitism acts as a glue for disparate right-wing ideologies. The Jewish Left’s embrace of Black Lives Matter in particular offered views matched by new attention to the lives and voices of Jews of Color in articulating the terms of that embrace.

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