Socialist Affiliation, and Zionism

Indeed, as Louis Brandeis put it, off from its practical consequences for those who wished to give-up the ghost in Palestine, Zionism was important to American Jews--who were sightly demoralized by a decline in common "moral and spiritual support" in free America--as a means of developing a "sense of noblesse take for . . . in those who regard their great deal as destined to live and to live with a bright future" (497).

Among the earlier generations of Judaic immigrants the principal left crosstie was with the Socialist labor Party, direct by Daniel De Leon. The party was popular among Gentile German immigrants in the Midwest exactly the adherence of New York Jews, beginning in the 1880s, made it a semipolitical force in the vitamin E as well. De Leon's authoritarianism, however, drove away numerous supporters and by 1900 the more than moderate Socialist Party, under the leadership of Eugene Debs, attracted the majority of Jewish socialists. The party's appeal for Jews was based on their familiarity with socialism's reputation of opposition to heaviness in Europe, on its willingness "to let them register quasi-independently in their throw foreign-language federations," and on the party's "solid American base" which made them whole step a

Howe, Irving. A border of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Irving Howe described the weightlessness and excitement felt by the young Jews who joined the socialist and communist movements in the 1930s. At the time radical political involvement had become somewhat suspect to many senior immigrants, such as Howe's parents, since they felt it worked against their children's chances of successful assimilation. Howe, who described his socialist enthusiasm as a neo-conservative of the 1980s intent on apologizing and minimizing his past, claimed that young socialists had no hope of changing the system but were moved by exciting despair derived from their belief that "the 'death curse of capitalism' was now at hand--by no means a hollow conclusion in the thirties" (Howe 14).

Yet, as even he admits, under leaders such as Norman Thomas, American socialism in the 1930s did undertake numerous fights against attacks on the Bill of Rights and corrupt politicians and on behalf of the laboring poor such as the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and other "people who had never before dared speak for their rights" (Howe 20).

The anarchists were, however, widely regarded by Jewish immigrants as an aberration. The connection between the state of people's scotch prospects and their breaker point of political activism--rather than commitment to specific ideology or, with the anarchists, generalized pugnacious opposition--points up how practical most Jewish political affiliation was. The arrival of economically unstable times always tended to contain with them an increase in nativist anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic behavior and, taken together, the need to protect themselves as well as their economic interests motivated greater involvement in politics. As Hyman points out, the broadly politicized nature of Jewish immigrants led to an interplay among those with various political affiliations and interests to which "the variety of the im
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