Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

200 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
immigrants considered unskilled, shared in many ways the bottom-most situation
of African American laborers: starvation wages, brutish labor, and public execration
as less-than-human "Hebes," "Hunkies," and "Dagos." Ethnic revolutionaries,
scorning the ethnocentricity of the AFL leaders, led in effect a struggle within
the working class between those who sought the broadest definitions of class
and the most anti-capitalist of solutions, against those with a more collaborative
approach to employers. Gompers himself set the tone in many respects for Jewish
Socialist (and other) AFL leaders, including those who objected to his growing
disdain for socialism. While they rejected the AFL's opposition to new immigration
(i.e., of hard-pressed European Jewry) and usually continued to support the
Socialist party at election-times, Jewish labor leaders increasingly sought amicable
relations with employers and they mistrusted as impractical and disruptive
the radical universalism of the Industrial Workers of the World and later that of
the Communists. At least until proven wrong, these same Jewish labor leaders
considered women workers and other Jewish workers in the lowest paid lines to
be unsuited for organizing. They thereby left a gap for ardent Jewish radicals to
embrace a larger vision of working class unity and anti-capitalist offensive. Here,
for two generations, militant Jewish anti-racism found a political milieu.
The mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States, during the
1890s and again after 1905, significantly coincided with historic moments of
lynching campaigns, Black Populist political insurgence, and deepening racism
in American society at large. Concentrated in a handful of industrialized northern
cities and limited largely to immigrant ghettos and sweatshops, proletarian Jews
had limited actual contact with Blacks. Instead, images of African Americans
were brought to Jewish ghettoes through the Yiddish press. Papers such as the
socialist-oriented_/wz'.r^ Daily Forward, Morgn Journal, and the Tageblatt carried a
range of articles about African Americans, from essays that chronicled Black
achievement to the sensational stories about Black rapists and criminals which
were commonplace in the white Gentile press. For the most part, the Yiddish
newspapers represented Black people as victims of racist oppression, focusing on
the history of American slavery and racial violence. Jewish working-class identification
with Black suffering is partly a product of the culture of Yiddishkayt
("Yiddishness"). Dwellers in a friendless and dangerous Diaspora, seekers of
redemption (interpreted, almost until the foundation of Israel, more as the
promise of world socialism than of a Jewish State), they felt a kinship with others
viewed as similarly dispossessed and disinherited. Intellectual autodidacts to a
surprising degree, they created socialist institutions far out of proportion with
their numbers, and by the 1890s had already begun to mull the status of Blacks
and Jews in a dominant culture both racist and anti-Semitic. 8
Given the parallels between pogroms Russian Jews experienced prior to
fleeing to the United States and the lynching of Southern African Americans, stories
of lynching remained a dominant theme in Yiddish articles about Black life.
Often, they made their socialist point by scoring the indifference of Jewish insti-