"Commitment and Crisis: Jews and American Communism"

Tony Michels

(Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison)

Introduction

During the 1920s, Jews formed the American Communist Party’s most important

base of support. The party’s Jewish Federation, its Yiddish-speaking section, claimed

around 2,000 members or 10% of the party’s overall membership in mid-decade. Yet

that figure hardly conveys the extent of Jewish involvement with Communism during the

1920s. To begin with, a significant number of Jews were members of the party’s

English-, Russian-, Polish-, and Hungarian-speaking units. Moreover, Communism’s

influence among Jews extended far beyond the narrow precincts of party membership.

The Communist Yiddish daily, Di frayhayt, enjoyed a reputation for literary excellence

and reached a readership of 20,000-30,000, a higher circulation than any Communist

newspaper, including the English-language Daily Worker. Jewish Communists built a

network of summer camps, schools for adults and children, cultural societies, theater

groups, choirs, orchestras, and even a housing cooperative in the Bronx that encompassed

tens of thousands of Communist Party members, sympathizers, and their families.

Finally, Communists won a strong following among Jewish workers in the needle trades

and even came close to capturing control of the International Ladies Garment Workers

Union between 1923 and 1926. (A remarkable seventy percent of ILGWU members

belonged to Communist-led locals during those years.) Viewed through the lens of

immigrant Jewry, then, Communism's golden age was not the Great Depression but

rather the preceding decade.