All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism(Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)

In the early 1930s, 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 ILGWU appealed to an international force of co-workers, Daniel Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based cultural pluralism, which he 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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Abbreviations Introduction Part I 1 "Harmoniously Functioning Nationalities": Yiddish Socialism in Russia and the United States, 1892-1918 2 The Revolutionary and Gendered Origins of Garment Workers' Education, 1909-1918 3 Political Factionalism and Multicultural Education, 1917-1927 4 Reconstructing a Multicultural Union, 1927-1933 Part II 5 All Together Different: Social Unionism and the Multicultural Front, 1933-1937 6 Politics and the Precarious Place of Multiculturalism, 1933-1937Part III 7 From Yiddish Socialism to Jewish Liberalism: The Politics and Social Vision of Pins and Needles, 1937-1941 Epilogue: Cosmopolitan Unionism and Mutual Culturalism in the World War II Era Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :

Daniel Katz is Professor of History and Dean of Labor Studies at the National Labor College. A former union organizer, he is a member of the Board of Directors of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York City.