Author comment on Facebook: My original title for this review-essay was: an American Bund? I always find it funny when people say there was no Jewish Labor Bund in the United States, since American Bundists helped found two Yiddishkayt Jewish socialist organizations, the Arbeter Ring and the IWO, the first aligned with the Socialist Party and second, the Communist Party. Both individually were larger than the European Bund (the Ring had at its peak 80K members and the Jewish section of the IWO 50k), and since both were Yiddishkayt socialist organizations, they did much to nullify the hard European distinctions btw Marxism and cultural autonomy/anti-racism. Further, the IWO did something that neither the Bund nor Ring was able to: find a practical way to create an intersectional socialist organization comprised of semi-autonomous ethnic/language clubs while tied to an internationalist socialist project. The Jewish section of the IWO, the JPFO, helped builed a dozen other socialst language and ethnic clubs, including the African American Lincoln-Douglass Society, the pan-Spanish language Cervantes Society, the Italian American Garabaldi Societ and so on.
I say this without hyperbole, that the federal govt's banning of the IWO during the Red Scare was perhaps one of the greatest catastrophes for an inter-racial Marxist left and also, a Jewish-Yiddishkayt left in the U.S.
Would encourage everyone to read the new collection of essays by Elissa Sampson and Robert Zecker on rise and fall of the IWO, From Popular Front to the Cold War, from Cornell UP.
"If I were to describe an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist organization with tens of thousands of members, Yiddish schools, and arts clubs, which operated under a climate of severe state repression until it was finally disbanded by force and its leaders jailed, you might be forgiven for thinking I had a European organization in mind, the Jewish Labor Bund. But the International Workers Order (IWO) Jewish section, otherwise known as the Jewish Peoples’ Fraternal Order (JPFO), was one of the largest Jewish socialist organizations in the world for the two decades of its existence.
While the Communist Party and the Bolshevik revolutionaries were historically at odds with the Jewish Labor Bund of Eastern Europe, in the United States, the rise of “Bundish” politics was not isolated to a single tendency or organization on the Jewish left. The IWO was formed in 1930, following a series of internecine and sectarian ruptures with the Arbeter Ring, or Workers Circle, a socialist-aligned mutual aid society started in the late nineteenth century by newly arrived Yiddish-speaking Jewish socialists, who blended their socialism with advocacy for Jewish language and cultural autonomy.....
...At its peak, the group had two hundred thousand members before its demise during the Second Red Scare. While IWO chapters existed as semiautonomous clubs with their own summer camps, halls, and cultural events, the IWO would often hold interracial dances, theater performances, beach picnics, and softball games. The group also mobilized around campaigns in support of the Scottsboro Boys, black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women; the Spanish Republic; and opposition to the invasion of Ethiopia.
From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954, a collection of essays by fourteen historians and labor and ethnic studies scholars, places the ground-breaking nature of the IWO’s interracial organizing at the center of the book. As historian Paul Mishler frames it, while “previous left-wing ethnic societies were imagined as being temporary way stations for immigrant workers until they and their families learned English, the IWO saw . . . ethnic identification as a road to radicalism, rather than a hinderance to it.” The IWO took the lessons of Yidishe Kulture movement, connected them to nascent black and brown power movements, and threaded them together within a socialist, Marxist framework that emphasized cultural diversity and particularity, yet within a wider working-class whole. As editors Ellissa Sampson and Robert Zecker put it, the IWO practiced “intersectionality” as a working structure long before the word and come into common left use some eight decades later."
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