Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism

During the Great Depression, Jewish radicals throughout the Left, and most prominently in the garment industry, sought to establish cultural activities and institutions among their own radical co-ethnics and to encourage those activities and institutions among workers of other racial-ethnic groups as well. Inspired by Yiddish socialism, Jewish intellectuals labored to recover and elevate their own Yiddish culture and envisioned a class-based revolution in which all workers would be rooted in venerated ethnic folk cultures.
    The clearest expression of this form of multiculturalism in the United States can be seen in a movement of union building in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) that began in the 1900s, climaxed in the 1930s, and had a far‑reaching influence on American social and political culture. In addition to Jews and Italians that populated the union, the ILGWU organized and retained thousands of Black and Hispanic workers through formal classes, athletic and artistic activities, vacation retreats and dances that celebrated the cultural diversity of the membership.
    Drawing political strength from their social bonds, these garment workers and their kin wove a chain mail organization equipped to respond to a complex and rapidly changing industry. In so doing, they pushed the boundaries of interracial socialization and demonstrated an alternative model of unionism that inspired union building throughout the 1930s. All Together Different puts the spotlight on an alternative vision of unionism that coexisted in the ILGWU along with, and for a while held sway over, the more moderate vision that eventually eclipsed it.

    A writer in residence in the Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room, Daniel Katz, PhD, is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Master of Arts in Policy Studies program at The State University of New York, Empire State College.  He received his doctorate from Rutgers University, and a BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism is being published by New York University Press in the Autumn of 2011.  A former union organizer, he is co-editing a book of essays on the future of labor with the New Press, to be published in the fall of 2012.

All Together Different will be available for sale and signing after the lecture.

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