All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism

Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History

by Daniel Katz

In the early 1930’s, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. All Together Different revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression.

Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) appealed to an international force of coworkers, Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based cultural pluralism, which Daniel Katz newly terms “mutual culturalism,” back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth century Russian Empire. Built on original scholarship and bolstered by exhaustive research, All Together Different offers a fresh perspective on the nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.

Genres: History, Labor, Judaism, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Daniel Katz is provost, professor of history, and dean of labor studies at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland. A former union organizer, he sits on the boards of the New York State Labor History Association and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. He is a co-editor, with Richard A. Greenwald, of Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America (The New Press) and the author of All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Inna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had really mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I fully accept the main premise, which is that the late 19th-early 20th century Jewish immigrants to US from the Russian Empire brought with them notions of multi-cultural socialist, anarchist, and labor activism. These notions assisted in creating militant labor, socialist, and anarchist organizations in US. Organizations which, according the author, compromised both on multi-culturalism and on militancy at the same time in order to become part of a mainstream America. I also enjoyed the results of oral history project the author engaged in. Some of the interviews are amazing. But then, there are too many problems with the book itself. I do not know much about US history, but the amount of mistakes the author made while discussing Russian history is staggering. Since the author grounds his notion of multi-cultural Yiddish socialism in the particular experiences of the Jews in the Russian Empire, I would expect him to do a much more serious research on what these experiences actually were or, alternatively, to just concentrate on post-immigration period. As for the US experience, I felt that the author emphasized personal issues excessively. The story reads as a losing struggle of good, mostly female, militants against bad, mostly male, union bureaucrats. Surely it was more complicated than this. Indeed, the author refers to external circumstances occasionally, but these references somehow get lost in the vivid description of the struggle. To summarize, I am still waiting for a modern revision of Arthur Liebman's wonderful Jews and the Left. This could be it, but is not. A pity.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting read

The book provided and interesting insights into the Jewish labor movement of the early 20th century particularly in regards to the international ladies garments workers Union. This book also highlights the importance of building Union culture in the labor movement. This book really made me think about how we need to go about rebuilding the labor movement.