HISTORICITY (was already taken)

Jews, Food, and Socialism

I spent the last two weeks reading 13 books in preparation for a 20-page historiography paper about how Jewish women experienced acculturation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then writing said historiography paper. So you are all are in for at least three related posts.

In traditional Eastern European Jewish society, and specifically within the Russian Pale of Settlement (for the purposes of this post), communities were bound together by food: everyone followed the kosher laws, from the richest person to the poorest. Because of this, all members of these Jewish communities felt entitled to eat well regardless of class. Since the consumption of kosher food was divinely commanded, no one had the right to deny it to another. The poor felt as though that the wealthy owed them food, and the wealthy felt obliged to supply it.

That said, this society was hardly egalitarian; on the contrary, it was heavily stratified and class lines were rigidly upheld—one of the primary purposes of arranged marriages was to uphold these class lines. However, the attitudes towards food created a communal consciousness in which the idea that the poor somehow deserved to have a harder time in life by virtue of their poverty was not present.

This society also had a very rigid concept of proper gender roles. Men were expected to be Talmudic scholars and dedicate their lives to the study of the holy texts. Certainly not all men were or could be scholars, and not all families had the funds to allow their sons to dedicate themselves to this study, but the figure of the Talmudic scholar was the masculine ideal.

Women, on the other hand, were not allowed access to the holy texts. They were expected to venture out into the public sphere to earn a living for their families while their husbands were at home studying. Thus, young women were given a secular education to prepare them for their role as breadwinners. Some families sent their daughters to public schools, if there were any available, while others paid for a private education, or private tutors.

Because secular education was prized for women, and because nineteenth century Russia was a multi-lingual society, many of these girls were fluent in both Russian and Yiddish, and sometimes French and German as well. Over the course of their secular educations, they encountered modern and revolutionary literature written in these European languages which their male peers were not encountering in the cheder (pre-yeshiva Jewish elementary schools for boys). It was in this literature that these young girls and women, raised in communities which rejected the notion that the poor deserved to be punished for their poverty, encountered socialism. This socialism did not inform, but rather cemented the world view of these women.

As established in the Clara Lemlich Shavelson post, 2.5 million Jews emigrated from the Pale to America between 1880 and 1920, and most settled in New York City. The vast majority of the young women who came to America with their parents found work in the factories and workshops of the garment industry.

These young women became rapidly dissatisfied with the unsafe and unregulated conditions in which they had to work. Because of the views on class which they had learned in Russia, it never would have occurred to these women to think that they deserved to work in awful conditions by virtue of their low socio-economic status. When the management was unresponsive to their concerns, they went on strike. As these women went on to marry and become housewives, they channeled this conception of class into protests against unaffordable grocery prices, exploitative renting practices, and other such working class concerns.

These women were distinctive. They weren’t revolutionary socialists, and they weren’t American capitalists. While these women were eager to Americanize and showed great enthusiasm for consumer culture, they rejected the tenet of American capitalism which dictated that poverty was a result of personal failings. They combined the socialist class conceptions of their lives in Europe with consumerist aspects of working class America to form their own distinct reality.

Thus, I would argue that the class consciousness instigated by the necessity of observing the kosher laws in the tightly knit Jewish communities of the Pale allowed these women to take the socialism they encountered in Russian revolutionary literature, and make it their own. This socialist consciousness traveled with them across the Atlantic to America where they used that consciousness to create their own working class experience.

I do not argue that the American Jewish experience was informed by the kosher laws—in the face of Americanization, many once Orthodox families became far less zealous about their upkeep, sometimes leaving them by the wayside entirely—but that the kosher laws informed the consciousness from which the distinctive experience of pre-WWII American Jewry rose.

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Social Constructs and the Idea of History Repeating Itself

Part of liking history is having the ability to think critically about how stuff that happened before we were born continues to affect our present. Nothing simply dies and goes away; it stays with us and it can only go away once we acknowledge it and start taking it seriously. All of us.

I truly do not believe in the sentiment that “history repeats itself.” Rather, I believe that humans will continue to act in the same manner, believe the same things for hundreds of years at a time, and commit the same awful acts over and over until they learn to think critically about themselves.

So, because I’ve been very disappointed by a lot of discourse of late, I’m going to discuss race to illustrate the point I am attempting to make, however, the same points can be made for all forms of oppression and marginalization.

You may hear or see people referring to the “construct of race.” Some of you may not know what that means; it refers that the idea that there are inherent differences between people of different skin colors. There is also a construct of gender. Basically a social construct is a thing which dictates that some human beings are inherently different from others based on external characteristics.

In the American context, the construct of race was created to support an economic system. Before the tobacco boom, the American colonial economy was based primarily on indentured labor, and status was determined by economic level. However, as tobacco boomed and indentured servants came to be seen as economic drains, the American colonial economy became based nearly solely upon slave labor. Large parts of the American economy were based on this system until the Civil War, and, in many cases, long after this conflict concluded.

So, every time you tell someone that they’re over-reacting, every time you playfully use racial slurs with your friends and then accuse others of bullying you when you get called on it, every time you accuse someone of “being divisive,” remember that you are perpetuating a construct based on a dehumanization of human beings enacted to further the economic needs of others.

You are ensuring that history will repeat itself.

Remember, though I am addressing Western racism here, this applies to all forms of oppression and bigotry.

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Hey everyone, I’m going to be on a self-imposed end of semester induced exile from the internet for the next twelve days. All questions and messages and stuff will be answered/responded to upon my return.

In the meantime, I posted a new, longer than usual fierce historical ladies post the other day (which I am not sure many people saw because it was posted at an awkward time) which you should check out en lieu of new posts.

See you on the other side~

Fierce Historical Ladies post: Clara Lemlich Shavelson

Clara Lemlich Shavelson (1886-1982) never backed down. She never gave up. No obstacle, from the czarist regime to the House Committee on Un-American Activities could stand in her way. I can only hope to scratch the surface of her massive contributions to American society over the course of the twentieth century in this post, and I have left out many of her contributions in the interest of brevity.

Early Years and Union Involvement

Clara was born in the Pale of Settlement, the geographic area—encompassing most of modern day Western Russia, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, and Ukraine—to which Russian Jews were confined under the czarist government. Specifically, she was born in the Ukrainian village of Gorodok. The primary language spoken in the Pale was Yiddish.

Lemlich was forbidden from learning Russian by her parents. In her first act of rebellion, she studied the Russian language behind their backs, and built up a library of Russian revolutionary literature in similar secrecy. Her exposure to this socialist, revolutionary literature would determine her lifelong political trajectory. 

In 1903, after a pogrom swept through a nearby village, Clara and her family emigrated to the United States—in the period between 1880 and 1920, 2.5 million Jews from the Pale would make the same journey. Clara and her family, like the vast majority of Jewish émigrés, settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There Clara and her Jewish female peers found work in the garment industry; so many female Jewish and Italian immigrants took jobs in the garment industry because New York was the center of that industry and the factories needed workers.

These female workers had to work long and unregulated hours in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. They had no rights as workers, and their earning abilities existed very much at the whims of their employers. Lemlich, observing her surroundings, and unwilling to simply accept them, joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). A contemporary referred to her as “a pint of trouble for the bosses.”

Once in the union, she was frustrated by the sexist attitudes and general complacency of the male leadership. When they would not listen to her or take her seriously, she went over their heads to actively court female membership and involvement. She did not merely coax other women into action; she was there with them in the front lines. During a strike in 1909, she returned to a picket line after several of her ribs were broken by her employer’s hired goons.

“Come at me, bro.” (Image courtesy of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center Collection, Cornell University)

In November of 1909 at a meeting at Cooper Union, after listening to inconsequential male speech after inconsequential male speech, Lemlich became fed up with the inaction of the leadership. She demanded that they let her speak, took the podium, and said “I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.”

Over the next weeks, between 30 and 40 thousand young, female, and predominantly Jewish garment workers walked out of their jobs (this has come to be rather romantically known as the Uprising of the 20,000). The strikes were partially successful in that many Union contracts were produced as a result. However its limitations were thrown into tragic relief when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned on March 25, 1911.

Suffrage and Working-Class Advocacy

Finding herself blacklisted within the garment industry after calling the industry to strike, Lemlich could no longer work effectively within the union. In its absence, she turned to the fight for female suffrage. In her eyes, the fight for the rights of working women and the fight for the female vote were one and the same.

Rejecting the middle and upper class gentile perspective of many of the female suffragists, Clara helped to found the Wage Earners League for Woman Suffrage, a group concerned with the situation of working class women. The tension between herself and the upper class suffragists came to a head when she was fired from her position as organizer in 1911, when her radical politics clashed with the more moderate views of her employers.

In 1913, Clara was married to Joe Shavelson. The two moved to Brooklyn and had three children together. Once settled, Clara continued who fight for equality, this time with the women of her working class neighborhood. This period of her life was spent fighting to better the conditions of the working class—specifically working class women—across racial, religious, and ethnic lines.

She was active throughout the teens and the twenties, and in 1926 she both joined the Communist Party and founded the United Council of Working-Class Housewives. In 1929 she co-founded the United Council of Working-Class Women—an organization which led rent strikes, anti-eviction demonstrations, price boycotts, and sit-ins and marches on Washington; and in 1935 the UCWCW’s name was changed to the Progressive Women’s Councils.

The PWC formed a coalition with other women’s organizations to alleviate issues faced by the female, working class community. This coalition organized a boycott on the high price setting of the meat industry which was so effective that it shut down 4,500 butcher shops in New York City alone. It was also instrumental in passing rent control laws. These are only two examples, but they are indicative of the PWC’s effectiveness and influence, much of which, in my opinion, may be attributed to the very force of Lemlich’s will.

The PWC was effective in alleviating some of the worst effects of the Great Depression on working class communities. The attention Clara and her coalition of housewife activists paid to the concerns of working class women laid the groundwork for the focus on the concerns of women working within the home in the feminist movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Communist Involvement and the Later Years

After the Second World War, Clara’s activism changed yet again. This time, her work was much more directly influenced by her Communist beliefs than it had been during her PWC years. She served on the American Committee to Survey Trade Union Conditions in Europe, and was an organizer for the American League against War and Fascism while remaining a visible member of the Communist Party.

She came to the attention of the American government after her 1951 visit to the Soviet Union with the American Committee. This resulted in the revocation of her passport. Later that year she was summoned to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her entire family was investigated and would remain under surveillance for the next 20 years.

But that didn’t stop her. In 1953 she loudly and publicly protested the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs. In 1954 she protested the US intervention in Guatemala. She spoke out against nuclear proliferation, worked with civil rights organizations, and was active in early anti-Vietnam organizing. All while living under the watch of federal surveillance.

Her husband died in 1951, the same year that she was called before the House Committee. She re-married an old union acquaintance, Abe Goldman, in 1960, and lived with him until his death in 1967. After his death she moved to California to be closer to her children.

She lived in the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. There she harangued the management into joining the United Farm Worker’s Boycott of grapes and lettuce, and helped the orderlies organize a union.

She was 96 when she died.

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A historical perspective on fascism

Historically speaking, fascism tends to rise during times of economic instability. Often in these times, majority groups actively vote away the civil rights of others, and even democratically authorize the revocation of their own constitutions. Fascinatingly, this process was expounded upon by Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt in his 1922 essay, Political Theology (later to be picked up, expounded upon, and attacked in some regards by contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his work State of Exception).

Coincidentally, American majorities are currently voting away the civil rights of others while highly placed officials are referring to the Nineteenth Amendment—the Amendment which grants American women the right to vote—as one of the greatest mistakes ever made, all against the backdrop of the media termed “Great Recession.” Also coincidentally, in Greece—a nation currently experiencing a massive economic crisis—neo-Nazi groups are gaining political force, and are violently harassing minority groups while the authorities do nothing.

Fascinating.

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Another thought on the erasure of certain WWII victims

Note: This post is centric on the Western historical canon/historical perception.

A huge amount of the people killed over the course of the Second World War were Russian: Russian civilians, Russian armed forces, and Russian citizens. We don’t hear about this much. In fact, we very rarely hear about the victims of Stalin in the WWII period. This obviously causes a great deal of consternation. However, I would very strongly argue that this was not caused by actual intentional historical erasure.

Rather, Russian archives have only been open to historians for the past 20 years; the USSR sure as hell didn’t let Western historians into the archives. And because these archives have only been open for 20 years, historians still have to figure out which repositories hold which documents on a fairly independent basis (and sometimes after locating the correct repository they have to lie about what kind of history they’re writing).

Now, it takes a really long time to actually write a work of academic history. You have to figure out your question, your argument, locate the repositories which may have the archival materials you need, acquire travel grants, conduct the actual research, write the manuscript, submit it for peer review, make revisions, submit it for publication, etc. That doesn’t just happen in a year; why do you think it takes 5-7 years to write a dissertation? And dissertations aren’t even manuscripts.

It was only around the late 1990’s/2000’s that academic histories of Russia during the WWII period began to come out. And in some subfields, there are very few English language works of history (almost everything that has been written about the particulars of the Holocaust in Russia, for example, is in German). That is incredibly recent, so recent that that material hasn’t had time to make its way into the mainstream historical canon, let alone into k-12/general education course curricula.

When looking at cases of historical erasure, it is not always productive to jump straight to the assumption that the erasure was conducted at the benefit of some Western person. Sometimes historians are simply unable to access the sources necessary to write work of history as a result of factors beyond their control. Like the Cold War.

Now, on the actual subject of Russian and general Eastern European victims of WWII et al, read this: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Just read it.

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I collected facts that kind of blew my mind…

…Until I had enough to constitute a post. I love it when history is like “Hey remember that thing you thought and those narratives you made up in your brain even though you hate narratives? WELL THINK AGAIN.”

-Spain’s Edict of Expulsion (the thing that kicked Jews out of Spain) was left standing from its enactment in 1492 (same year as the Reconquista) until 1968 when Spain opened diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Edict of Expulsion, signed by Ferdinand and Isabella; courtesy of the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora

This does not mean that there were no Jews in Spain in the twentieth century. In fact, there were about 40,000 of them living in Spain during Franco’s rule, and he handled it by pretending that they simply weren’t there. Later when Hitler was like, “Hey, Franco, give me your Jews,” Franco was all like “What Jews?” In all, Franco’s policies saved the lives of 200,000 European Jews.

-In their attempt to fully assimilate into American society, the Cherokee Nation adopted many of the trappings of American society, from political structure to print culture to religion to language. Unfortunately, they underestimated the power of the white supremacy and the assholery of Andrew Jackson, and were forced off of their lands anyway.

The Trail of Tears by Pawnee artist Brummet Echohawk; courtesy of the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art

As a part of this attempted assimilation, they adopted American labor systems, which in this instance meant the usage of slave labor. When they were forced off of their land and began their journey down the Trail of Tears, they were accompanied by their slaves. 

-The Secretary of State of the Confederate States of America was a Sephardi Jewish man named Judah P. Benjamin. 

Judah P. Benjamin; photo courtesy of the Gamble Plantation Mansion

Delegate to the Arkansas secession convention, colonel in the Confederate States Army, and territorial representative in the Confederate Congress was Elias Cornelius Boudinot, a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Elias Cornelius Boudinot; photo courtesy of the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society

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Further Reading (and some housekeeping)

Housekeepingwise, I just had a few reminders/re-announcements.

-For anyone who didn’t see the post, I now have a secondary tumblr: historicity-reblogs. It’s basically where I reblog and reply/comment on historical material from either my dash or the unedited history/everything tag; I made it separate to avoid clogging up everyone’s dash with that sort of thing. So, that’s there if you’re interested.

-It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned that you can also follow me on facebook and twitter; I made those primarily for people who don’t want to miss posts, but aren’t on tumblr frequently enough to catch them all.

Okay, now onto the books! If you’ve been interested by the stuff I’ve been posting about, you might like these books:

The Federalist: with Letters of Brutus (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) edited by Terence Ball, written by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton

The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Making of the Modern World) by Julian Jackson

The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Studies in Jewish History (Oxford Paperback)) by Marion A. Kaplan

Hitler: Profiles in Power by Ian Kershaw

The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day by Walter Laqueur

The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany translated by Terence F. Cole, written by John C. G. Röhl

The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation by Richard Vinen

Past recommendations may be found on the Further Reading page.

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