Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 213
ships. In a few cases, the mix of old Left Jewish labor leaders and dynamic Black
militants inspired by Civil Rights and Black Power movements created some of
labor's few bright spots during the 1960s and 1970s. The best-known example
was the New York-based Hospital Workers Union, Local 1199. Initially made up
of primarily Jewish male pharmacists, clerks, soda men, and Black porters and
retail hospital workers in Harlem, 1199 was founded in the 1930s by Jewish
Communists active in the CPUSA Trade Union Unity League. Its composition
changed dramatically by the late fifties when a left-wing breakaway group within
the union began organizing Black and Latino hospital service workers and
waged a partially successful strike in 1959. Although it eventually abandoned its
ties to the Communist Party, leaders like Leon Davis and Elliot Godoff (both Old
Left Russian emigres) as well as Moe Foner (brother of noted radical historians
Jack and Philip—the latter emerging as one of the leading scholars on the history
of labor and African Americans) ensured that 1199 would not take the complacent,
apolitical road of most AFL-CIO unions. Like Cesar Chavez's United
Farm Workers Union, 1199 retained a left-wing political culture, struggled
against racial and gender inequality at the workplace and beyond, opposed the
Vietnam War, actively supported the Civil Rights movement, aided the legal
defense of the Black Panther Party, protested Israeli occupation of the West Bank,
and pledged solidarity with democratic movements in Central America and South
Africa. The union celebrated its multicultural make-up by sponsoring annual
events such as "Salute to Freedom" (replacing its "Negro History Week" celebration),
"Salute to Israel," and "Latin American Fiesta Night." 44
Local (later District) 1199 remained a shining light of Black-Jewish-Latino
solidarity and a remarkable example of progressive unionism until the early
1980s. A leadership secession crisis created by the retirement of president Leon
Davis—the dominant force in the local for half a century, rising racial tensions
within the union, economic recession, and cutbacks in the healthcare profession
all contributed to a massive split in the once vital union. Unlike most other socalled
Jewish unions, 1199's African American leadership turned out to be the
more conservative force, resorting at times to red-baiting Black and Jewish
activists aligned with Davis. On the other hand, aging giants of the traditionally
Jewish garment trades, above all David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, had already
established themselves as partners with international intelligence operations
against the rebellious Third World nationalisms. Apart from visceral hatred of
Communists and all who wavered in anti-Communism as an indispensable primary
political issue, Jewish labor leaders increasingly viewed Israel as the beloved
child of a West whose treatment of Palestinians and Arab populations was probably
not harsh enough. Thus the idea that Arabs and African Americans alike
were ungrateful, hopelessly backward troublemakers began to make its way into
the respectable corridors of Jewish discourse in the 1950s. 45
Mainstream Jewish leaders who might be properly regarded as the successors
to the garment union dynasty did not at first place their institutional energy