The Jewish Working Class in America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walkowitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Consumer Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
Garment Industry ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Between 1881 and 1924, when federal immigration restrictions were introduced, two and half million Jews from East Europe entered the United States. Approximately half of them settled in New York City where they soon comprised the largest Jewish settlement in the world. The Lower East Side, where families crowded into tenements, became the densest place on the globe. Possessing few skills, Jewish immigrants took jobs with which they had some prior familiarity as peddlers and as workers in the burgeoning garment and textile industries. With the rise of clothing as a mass consumer good, the garment industry emerged as the leading industrial sector in the city. Jewish workers predominated in it. But conditions of sweated labor in shops and factories propelled worker protest. A Jewish labor movement sprung up, energized by the arrival of socialist radicals in the labor Bund. Women workers played a major role in organizing the Jewish working class, spearheading a series of major strikes between 1909 and 1911. These women also staged “meat riots” over inflated beef prices in 1902 and “rent wars” in the early 1930s. To be sure, garment work and the labor movement also shaped the experience of Jewish immigrants in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Jews notably worked in other apparel industries, but the alternative for many (especially in small cities without a garment industry) was peddling and shopkeeping. Self-employed, but situated within and integrated in the working-class community, both sectors reflected the nontraditional nature of the Jewish working class. Jewish peddlers and petty shopkeepers increasingly morphed in a second generation into a middle class in higher status white-collar work. But despite this mobility, Yiddishkeit, a vibrant Jewish working-class culture of Jewish proletarian theater, folk choruses, journalism, education, housing, and recreation, which was particularly nourished by Bundists, flourished and carried a rich legacy forward in the postwar era.

Labor in the Time of Trump

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
The Right ◽  
Underlying Processes

This book critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions in the United States and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The book shows that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. The chapters examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

Italian and Jewish Intergenerational Mobility: New York, 1910

1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne W. Model
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Occupational Structure ◽  
Industrial Experience ◽  
Entrepreneurial Skills ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Although most Italian and Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States during the same turn-of-the-century period, the occupational trajectories of their descendants have been very different. Many writers have emphasized that Jews brought with them urban-industrial experience, entrepreneurial skills, a determination to settle in America, and a reverence for education (Joseph, 1969, orig. 1914; Glazer, 1958). Italians were more often peasants or farm laborers, though their familiarity with commerce and the crafts should not be underestimated (Briggs, 1978; Gabaccia, 1984). Some have also argued that familism and disdain for education further delayed Italian participation in the upgrading of the American occupational structure (Covello, 1972; Child, 1970).

scholarly journals “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Eva Peron ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Key Resources

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

Polish Immigration and the American Working Class

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Pacyga
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Community ◽  
Rust Belt ◽  
Radical History ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Over Time

In the years after the Civil War, Polish immigrants became an important part of the American working class. They actively participated in the labor movement and played key roles in various industrial strikes ranging from the 1877 Railroad Strike through the rise of the CIO and the post-1945 era of prosperity. Over time, the Polish American working class became acculturated and left its largely immigrant past behind while maintaining itself as an ethnic community. It also witnessed a good deal of upward mobility, especially over several generations. This ethnic community, however, continued to be refreshed with immigrants throughout the 20th century. As with the larger American working class, Polish American workers were hard hit by changes in the industrial structure of the United States. Deindustrialization turned the centers of much of the Polish American community into the Rust Belt. This, despite a radical history, caused many to react by turning toward conservative causes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

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