A history of Jews in the American labor movement

The Forverts covered strikes by non‐Jewish workers for its Yiddish readership, not only for their news value, but to encourage labor solidarity. Lynchings of Black [human]s in the South were denounced as “pogroms.”

[…]

The Jewish labor unions and their network of affiliated institutions made outstanding improvements in the lives of the Jewish working class. Typical Jewish workers in this era could easily belong to a Jewish labor union and/or a mutual aid organization like the Workmen’s Circle, read the Yiddish Forverts, give their children a socialist/Yiddishist education in an after school program and send them to a related summer camp, live in cooperative housing, attend lectures by Yiddish and socialist or anarchist speakers, vote for the Socialist Party and enjoy themselves at its outings.

The only other immigrant communities to establish comparable networks of labor, social welfare, political, cultural and educational institutions were left‐wing German Americans. As previously noted, these were the original role models for the Jewish labor movement and, for that matter, the Workmen's Circle and Forverts. But their heyday was in the 19th century. Finnish immigrant socialists, mainly concentrated in Minnesota and Wisconsin, were organized along the same lines, but far less visible than Jews.

[…]

In addition to the prominent rôle played by women, what was perhaps most remarkable about the immigrant Jewish working class, in the broadest sense of the term, was its desire for education. It began in the sweatshops themselves, where many Jewish workers used their lunch hours to read and argue over books and newspapers. Immigrants of all nationalities attended night school to learn English, but Jewish labor activists also established study groups, libraries, schools and lecture programs first in Yiddish and later in English.

These were created not just to teach the principles of anarchism, socialism, communism, labor unionism etc., but to teach literature, economics, science and civics. According to one immigrant memoir, “I remember going once to a meeting at Cooper Union to protest against the use of the militia in breaking a strike somewhere in the West, and then retiring with a crowd of others to the anarchist reading room on Eldridge Street to hear an informal discussion on ‘Hamlet versus Don Quixote.’”