Benjamin Balthaser
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| Alguns dos 149 membros da Brigada Abraham Lincoln, logo após chegarem a Nova York a bordo do navio S.S. Paris, em 15 de dezembro de 1939, vindos da Guerra Civil Espanhola. Talvez o ato mais heroico e eficaz da International Workers Order tenha sido ajudar a organizar recursos financeiros, apoio e, sobretudo, voluntários para a luta contra o fascismo como parte da brigada. |
Resenha de From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954, editado por Elissa Sampson e Robert Zecker (Cornell University Press, 2026).
Se eu descrevesse uma organização socialista judaica antissionista com dezenas de milhares de membros, escolas de iídiche e clubes de arte, que operou sob um clima de severa repressão estatal até ser finalmente dissolvida à força e ter seus líderes presos, seria compreensível que você pensasse em uma organização europeia: o Jewish Labor Bund. No entanto, a seção judaica da International Workers Order (IWO) — também conhecida como Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO) — foi uma das maiores organizações socialistas judaicas do mundo durante as duas décadas de sua existência.
Se eu descrevesse uma organização socialista judaica antissionista com dezenas de milhares de membros, escolas de iídiche e clubes de arte, que operou sob um clima de severa repressão estatal até ser finalmente dissolvida à força e ter seus líderes presos, seria compreensível que você pensasse em uma organização europeia: o Jewish Labor Bund. No entanto, a seção judaica da International Workers Order (IWO) — também conhecida como Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO) — foi uma das maiores organizações socialistas judaicas do mundo durante as duas décadas de sua existência.
Embora o Partido Comunista e os revolucionários bolcheviques estivessem historicamente em conflito com o Jewish Labor Bund da Europa Oriental, nos Estados Unidos a ascensão da política de orientação "Bundista" não se restringiu a uma única tendência ou organização da esquerda judaica. A IWO foi formada em 1930, após uma série de rupturas internas e sectárias com o Arbeter Ring (ou Workers Circle), uma sociedade de ajuda mútua de orientação socialista fundada no final do século XIX por socialistas judeus recém-chegados que falavam iídiche e que conciliavam seu socialismo com a defesa da autonomia linguística e cultural judaica.
Como muitas sociedades de ajuda mútua de novos imigrantes — ou landsmanshaftn —, o Ring administrava seguros de saúde e auxílio-funeral a baixo custo e servia como clube social para judeus que, certamente, viam a América como um país estranho e desconcertante. No entanto, ao contrário de outras sociedades de ajuda mútua, o Arbeter Ring levava a sério sua política socialista e culturalista.
De maneiras que podem parecer bastante atuais, a ruptura final entre Di Rehkt e Di Linke ocorreu por causa da questão da Palestina.
Como muitas sociedades de ajuda mútua de novos imigrantes — ou landsmanshaftn —, o Ring administrava seguros de saúde e auxílio-funeral a baixo custo e servia como clube social para judeus que, certamente, viam a América como um país estranho e desconcertante. No entanto, ao contrário de outras sociedades de ajuda mútua, o Arbeter Ring levava a sério sua política socialista e culturalista.
De maneiras que podem parecer bastante atuais, a ruptura final entre Di Rehkt e Di Linke ocorreu por causa da questão da Palestina.
O grupo apoiou o crescente movimento trabalhista judaico na indústria do vestuário e formou o Jewish Labor Committee, que estava alinhado à Federação Socialista Judaica. Esses grupos auxiliavam em greves, boicotes a aluguéis e campanhas eleitorais socialistas, fortalecendo o crescente movimento socialista nos centros urbanos. O Ring também ajudou a fundar aquele que, por muitas décadas, seria o jornal de maior circulação — originalmente socialista e publicado em iídiche e inglês — chamado Forward.
Culturalmente, o Ring foi fortemente influenciado pelos primeiros pensadores do Bund, como Chaim Zhitlovsky. Em uma série de artigos, ele argumentava contra o establishment judaico — frequentemente conservador e burguês — defendendo que a assimilação à identidade branca não deveria ser o objetivo do movimento trabalhista judaico. Organizações como a recém-criada Anti-Defamation League e o American Jewish Committee foram fortemente influenciadas pelas ideias eugênicas do início do século XX; elas acreditavam que apenas ao adotar não apenas a língua inglesa, mas também outras formas de retidão típicas da classe média WASP (branca, anglo-saxônica e protestante) — incluindo o anticomunismo —, os judeus poderiam prosperar nos Estados Unidos.
Tais atitudes também não eram incomuns entre líderes trabalhistas socialistas, que viam o iídiche com desdém, considerando-o um dialeto camponês, e acreditavam — muitas vezes por razões pragmáticas — que a assimilação era o melhor caminho para os judeus americanos. O movimento Yidishe Kulture não apenas abraçou a língua iídiche, como também ofereceu uma fonte de orgulho cultural em uma sociedade dominada por visões frequentemente racistas e antissemitas a respeito dos novos imigrantes.
A primeira grande divergência no Ring ocorreu em torno da Revolução Bolchevique. Essa divisão — que encontrou paralelos em toda a esquerda e precipitou a ascensão do Partido Comunista Americano — foi sentida intensamente na esquerda judaica americana. O Bund apoiou o primeiro-ministro do governo provisório da Rússia, Alexander Kerensky, e a continuidade da guerra, enquanto outros se aliaram aos bolcheviques, que defendiam uma paz imediata com a Alemanha. A facção do Ring favorável à revolução, Di Linke, incapaz de assumir o controle da organização, acabou fundando seu próprio jornal, o Morgen Freiheit ("Liberdade Matinal"), e passou a administrar suas próprias escolas de iídiche.
Tais atitudes também não eram incomuns entre líderes trabalhistas socialistas, que viam o iídiche com desdém, considerando-o um dialeto camponês, e acreditavam — muitas vezes por razões pragmáticas — que a assimilação era o melhor caminho para os judeus americanos. O movimento Yidishe Kulture não apenas abraçou a língua iídiche, como também ofereceu uma fonte de orgulho cultural em uma sociedade dominada por visões frequentemente racistas e antissemitas a respeito dos novos imigrantes.
A primeira grande divergência no Ring ocorreu em torno da Revolução Bolchevique. Essa divisão — que encontrou paralelos em toda a esquerda e precipitou a ascensão do Partido Comunista Americano — foi sentida intensamente na esquerda judaica americana. O Bund apoiou o primeiro-ministro do governo provisório da Rússia, Alexander Kerensky, e a continuidade da guerra, enquanto outros se aliaram aos bolcheviques, que defendiam uma paz imediata com a Alemanha. A facção do Ring favorável à revolução, Di Linke, incapaz de assumir o controle da organização, acabou fundando seu próprio jornal, o Morgen Freiheit ("Liberdade Matinal"), e passou a administrar suas próprias escolas de iídiche.
De maneiras que podem parecer bastante atuais, a ruptura final entre o *Di Rehkt* e o *Di Linke* ocorreu por causa da questão da Palestina. O massacre de Hebron em 1929 — resultado de tensões latentes desde a Declaração Balfour de 1917 e do aumento da colonização judaica em Jerusalém — dividiu a esquerda judaica. O jornal *Forward* denunciou os ataques como atos de antissemitismo, enquanto o *Morgen Freiheit* defendeu o que via como uma revolta anticolonial. A verdade sobre os ataques em Hebron talvez estivesse em algum ponto intermediário. Embora a revolta tenha sido inegavelmente provocada por colonos sionistas militantes — incluindo uma marcha liderada pelo direitista radical Ze’ev Jabotinsky —, a comunidade judaica de Hebron atacada na revolta já existia antes da colonização sionista: com mais frequência, seus membros foram protegidos por seus vizinhos árabes de longa data do que atacados por eles. De qualquer forma, era inegável que uma divisão em torno do sionismo, bem como de outras questões, já vinha se desenhando há muito tempo no movimento socialista judaico.
A IWO traça seu próprio caminho
À medida que Joseph Stalin consolidava seu poder no Politburo no final da década de 1920, ele ordenou a "bolchevização" das seções comunistas estrangeiras, visando particularmente a absorção dos clubes linguísticos pelo partido principal. No entanto, do Canadá à América Latina, as seções judaicas dos partidos comunistas traçaram seu próprio caminho. Elas se recusaram a se dissolver e se reorganizaram como a International Workers Order (IWO), alinhada e liderada por membros do Partido Comunista, embora permanecessem, em grande parte, organizações independentes.
Embora esse ato de resistência ao stalinismo fosse notável por si só, o que tornou a IWO uma organização verdadeiramente pioneira foi a expansão do modelo de organização judaica baseada na Yiddishkayt — socialista em conteúdo e iídiche em forma — para outros clubes linguísticos e étnicos na órbita comunista. Embora a seção judaica da IWO (renomeada como Jewish People’s Fraternal Order na década de 1940) tenha permanecido a maior, com mais de 50.000 membros em seu auge, a IWO incluía sociedades finlandesas, húngaras e carpato-russas, bem como a Sociedade Cervantes (de língua espanhola), a Sociedade Lincoln-Douglass (afro-americana), a Sociedade Polonia, uma sociedade tcheca, a Sociedade Garibaldi (italiana) e muitas outras.
No auge de sua existência, o grupo contava com duzentos mil membros antes de seu fim durante o Segundo Red Scare (o período de paranoia anticomunista nos EUA). Embora as seções da IWO funcionassem como clubes semiautônomos, com seus próprios acampamentos de verão, sedes e eventos culturais, a organização frequentemente promovia bailes inter-raciais, apresentações teatrais, piqueniques na praia e jogos de softbol. O grupo também se mobilizou em torno de campanhas de apoio aos "Scottsboro Boys" — jovens negros falsamente acusados de estuprar duas mulheres brancas —, à República Espanhola e à oposição à invasão da Etiópia.
A obra From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954 — uma coletânea de ensaios de quatorze historiadores e especialistas em estudos trabalhistas e étnicos — coloca o caráter pioneiro da organização inter-racial da IWO no centro da discussão. Como aponta o historiador Paul Mishler, enquanto "as sociedades étnicas de esquerda anteriores eram vistas como pontos de passagem temporários para trabalhadores imigrantes, até que eles e suas famílias aprendessem inglês, a IWO via... a identidade étnica como um caminho para o radicalismo, e não como um obstáculo a ele". A IWO incorporou as lições do movimento Yidishe Kulture, conectou-as aos nascentes movimentos de poder negro e pardo e integrou tudo isso em uma estrutura socialista e marxista que valorizava a diversidade e as particularidades culturais, sem perder de vista a unidade mais ampla da classe trabalhadora. Conforme observam os editores Ellissa Sampson e Robert Zecker, a IWO praticava a "interseccionalidade" como estrutura de atuação muito antes de o termo se tornar comum na esquerda, o que ocorreria apenas cerca de oito décadas mais tarde.
“No Jim Crow in the IWO”
In 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech at the 1952 Jewish Life magazine’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, an event cosponsored by the IWO. Du Bois’s speech recounted how he was mistaken for a Jew by a cab driver in 1930s Western Ukraine and taken to the Jewish quarter for lodging. This experience of mistaken identity leads him to reflect that racialization is not only a question of the “color line,” as he had written in The Souls of Black Folksome half-century before, but rather that race “cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status.”
Du Bois concluded his talk by remarking that the “problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had long conceived it.” This experience “enlarged” Du Bois’s sense of race and also solidarity. The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), another organization very much tied to the fate of the Communist Party and IWO, modeled its “We Charge Genocide” petition on the United Nations Convention on Genocide, taking its insights to claim that African Americans faced violent erasure as a people in the United States. The core mission of the IWO was to use Marxism to draw these analogies between Nazism in Europe and racism in the United States and to create a multiethnic mosaic of organizations that could support such “intersectional” struggles.
While the JPFO founded the IWO, the core of the collection is four essays each about a singular figure on the African American left and their profound relationship to the shaping of both organizations: W. E. B Du Bois as mentioned above, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Louise Thompson Patterson. Of the four, probably the least well known is Thompson Patterson, who was the longest-serving cochair of the organization, along with Max Bedacht. The two did more than any other figures on the Left to make the IWO into an organization that advocated for black freedom. Raised into a middle-class family in Chicago and then Harlem, Thompson Patterson first encountered black radical politics on hearing Du Bois speak at the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving her teaching position at small historically black college in Virginia, she moved back to Harlem, where she met Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance.
Like many African American radicals in the 1930s, Thompson Patterson turned to the Communist Party as the party placed the struggle for African American self-determination at the center of its theory of American capitalism. Claiming African Americans are an “oppressed nation” not only appealed to former black nationalists; in more practical terms, it dignified the struggle against racism as equivalent to, or even more important than, the struggle against class exploitation.
Thompson Patterson organized support for the Scottsboro trial, was arrested in an early demonstration against segregation organized by the Communist Party in the 1930s, returned to New York to for fight for the Costigan–Wagner anti-lynching bill, and wrote about the “Bronx slave markets” in which mostly African American women were hired for domestic day labor. This prompted Thompson Patterson to be the first to theorize the “triple oppression” of black women, declaring that black women are oppressed by race, gender, and class in complex ways simultaneously. “Intersectionality before intersectionality” as the editors of the collection write — its difference lay in her observation that capitalism was the structure that bound all three. This observation opened the door for solidarities while not erasing difference or specificity and became, one could say, the logic behind the IWO’s structure and organizing philosophy.
Thompson Patterson also convinced her longtime friend Langston Hughes to get involved with the IWO, inviting him to direct the Harlem-based “Suitcase Theater,” housed and sponsored out of its 124th Street offices. As part of the popular theater company, Hughes staged a half-dozen plays, including many of his own, one of which, Em-Fuhrer Jones, became a major film starring Paul Robeson. Like Hughes, Robeson was involved with the cultural life of the IWO, singing before integrated audiences at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (which may have been perhaps the only fully integrated summer camp in the United States at this time) and even singing in Yiddish at the JPFO’s Camp Nitgedaiget (Yiddish for “No Worries”). As Felicia Bevel puts it in her essay, to the multiethnic IWO, Robeson “was their hero,” and he would sing folk songs dedicated to the many nationalities represented by the order, bringing the message of multiethnic socialism with him wherever he performed. Indeed, one of the IWO’s final public acts of protest was to organize self-defense squads at Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York, which was assaulted by racist, right-wing vigilantes two nights in a row. “No Jim Crow in the IWO” was the slogan the group lived and, ultimately, died by.
In 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech at the 1952 Jewish Life magazine’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, an event cosponsored by the IWO. Du Bois’s speech recounted how he was mistaken for a Jew by a cab driver in 1930s Western Ukraine and taken to the Jewish quarter for lodging. This experience of mistaken identity leads him to reflect that racialization is not only a question of the “color line,” as he had written in The Souls of Black Folksome half-century before, but rather that race “cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status.”
Du Bois concluded his talk by remarking that the “problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had long conceived it.” This experience “enlarged” Du Bois’s sense of race and also solidarity. The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), another organization very much tied to the fate of the Communist Party and IWO, modeled its “We Charge Genocide” petition on the United Nations Convention on Genocide, taking its insights to claim that African Americans faced violent erasure as a people in the United States. The core mission of the IWO was to use Marxism to draw these analogies between Nazism in Europe and racism in the United States and to create a multiethnic mosaic of organizations that could support such “intersectional” struggles.
While the JPFO founded the IWO, the core of the collection is four essays each about a singular figure on the African American left and their profound relationship to the shaping of both organizations: W. E. B Du Bois as mentioned above, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Louise Thompson Patterson. Of the four, probably the least well known is Thompson Patterson, who was the longest-serving cochair of the organization, along with Max Bedacht. The two did more than any other figures on the Left to make the IWO into an organization that advocated for black freedom. Raised into a middle-class family in Chicago and then Harlem, Thompson Patterson first encountered black radical politics on hearing Du Bois speak at the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving her teaching position at small historically black college in Virginia, she moved back to Harlem, where she met Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance.
Like many African American radicals in the 1930s, Thompson Patterson turned to the Communist Party as the party placed the struggle for African American self-determination at the center of its theory of American capitalism. Claiming African Americans are an “oppressed nation” not only appealed to former black nationalists; in more practical terms, it dignified the struggle against racism as equivalent to, or even more important than, the struggle against class exploitation.
Thompson Patterson organized support for the Scottsboro trial, was arrested in an early demonstration against segregation organized by the Communist Party in the 1930s, returned to New York to for fight for the Costigan–Wagner anti-lynching bill, and wrote about the “Bronx slave markets” in which mostly African American women were hired for domestic day labor. This prompted Thompson Patterson to be the first to theorize the “triple oppression” of black women, declaring that black women are oppressed by race, gender, and class in complex ways simultaneously. “Intersectionality before intersectionality” as the editors of the collection write — its difference lay in her observation that capitalism was the structure that bound all three. This observation opened the door for solidarities while not erasing difference or specificity and became, one could say, the logic behind the IWO’s structure and organizing philosophy.
Thompson Patterson also convinced her longtime friend Langston Hughes to get involved with the IWO, inviting him to direct the Harlem-based “Suitcase Theater,” housed and sponsored out of its 124th Street offices. As part of the popular theater company, Hughes staged a half-dozen plays, including many of his own, one of which, Em-Fuhrer Jones, became a major film starring Paul Robeson. Like Hughes, Robeson was involved with the cultural life of the IWO, singing before integrated audiences at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (which may have been perhaps the only fully integrated summer camp in the United States at this time) and even singing in Yiddish at the JPFO’s Camp Nitgedaiget (Yiddish for “No Worries”). As Felicia Bevel puts it in her essay, to the multiethnic IWO, Robeson “was their hero,” and he would sing folk songs dedicated to the many nationalities represented by the order, bringing the message of multiethnic socialism with him wherever he performed. Indeed, one of the IWO’s final public acts of protest was to organize self-defense squads at Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York, which was assaulted by racist, right-wing vigilantes two nights in a row. “No Jim Crow in the IWO” was the slogan the group lived and, ultimately, died by.
Nem mesmo o Partido Comunista foi formalmente dissolvido dessa maneira.
Perhaps the most heroic and effective act of the IWO was to help organize money, support, and especially volunteers for the fight against fascism as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade/International Brigades (ALB/IB). Over one-third of the American volunteers in Spain were Jewish, many if nearly all of whom were recruited from the JPFO. For the Jewish members of the IB, such a journey was not only the political culmination of their affiliation with the communist movement. They expressed it in deeply cultural terms as well: that the “over-civilized barbarians of Spain — far ahead of Hitler . . . drove the Jews from country. . . . They little thought . . . Jews would return . . . to help defend Spain from an outburst of the old terror.” More than a fight against antisemitism, the ALB represented the highest ideals of multiculturalism: it was quite literally the first integrated army fielded by Americans. Many of the African American volunteers were also IWO members and expressed not only their desire to fight fascism but also to pay back Italy for its invasion and colonization of the free African state, the kingdom of Ethiopia.
It was, as one ALB veteran put it, a “multi-racial army to defeat Hitler’s racial theories.” And as Langston Hughes said on an IWO-sponsored trip to Spain, the ALB was fighting America’s racial theories as well: fascists are “Jim Crow people,” as Hughes told an audience of ALB soldiers, and “here we can shoot ‘em down.”
A Fraternal Order Sentenced to Death
The downfall of the IWO was swift and relentless. At the end of the 1940s, IWO and JPFO members “were confident their organization was part of the social democratic coalition working to make Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms a reality,” as historian Robert Zecker phrases it. While the Four Freedoms — free speech, religious freedom, freedom from want, and freedom from fear — were only a “foretaste” of a socialist America, to quote historian Michael Denning, even the most radical IWO members believed they were swimming with the current of an increasingly more democratic, less racist, more egalitarian United States.
Yet by the beginning of the 1950s, hundreds of IWO leaders had been deported under the McCarran–Walter (“anti-subversion”) Act, dozens had been jailed under the Smith Act, and many were facing eviction under new “anti-Red” ordinances that prevented members of radical organizations from renting apartments or even living within city limits. Paul Robeson was nearly lynched in Peekskill, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca was raided and set on fire before shutting down, and most dramatically, one IWO member attempted to stab himself to death in the streets in Erie in protest of the repression.
The downfall of the IWO was swift and relentless. At the end of the 1940s, IWO and JPFO members “were confident their organization was part of the social democratic coalition working to make Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms a reality,” as historian Robert Zecker phrases it. While the Four Freedoms — free speech, religious freedom, freedom from want, and freedom from fear — were only a “foretaste” of a socialist America, to quote historian Michael Denning, even the most radical IWO members believed they were swimming with the current of an increasingly more democratic, less racist, more egalitarian United States.
Yet by the beginning of the 1950s, hundreds of IWO leaders had been deported under the McCarran–Walter (“anti-subversion”) Act, dozens had been jailed under the Smith Act, and many were facing eviction under new “anti-Red” ordinances that prevented members of radical organizations from renting apartments or even living within city limits. Paul Robeson was nearly lynched in Peekskill, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca was raided and set on fire before shutting down, and most dramatically, one IWO member attempted to stab himself to death in the streets in Erie in protest of the repression.
The IWO was finally brought down through bureaucratic means. Using a broad interpretation of insurance law, the IWO and the JPFO were legally disbanded and bankrupted by the state in 1954, their assets and offices seized. While the editors of the collection are keen to point out how many IWO members went on work in the civil rights movement, participated in the Freedom Rides, educated new generations of activists, and helped organize anti–Vietnam War protests, the collection offers little meditation on the meaning of the IWO’s loss.
Few other organizations of its size and cultural influence have been shut down by fiat of the state, with its members deported and leaders arrested and hauled before federal tribunal, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not even the Communist Party was formally disbanded in such a way. While Paul Mishler is correct — the communist movement writ large and the IWO in particular were instrumental in constructing both theories and practices for a radical multiculturalism — one can only speculate what liberal multiculturalism, to say nothing of Jewish identity, might look like if the IWO and JPFO were still a robust presence.
Speaking to the long arm of neo-McCarthyism, it is also curious that the edited volume has little to say about Zionism or Palestine, especially considering the large role splits over Zionism played in the JPFO’s breakup with the Workers Circle. Beyond one mention of this split in an essay about the career of JPFO artist William Gropper, the only other mention of Palestine in the collection is a brief aside by ALB soldiers who remarked on the racism of troops from the Yishuv, the Jewish-only settlements in Palestine. While part of the explanation for the absence in the collection may be the complexities of the IWO’s and JPFO’s adherence to the zig-zags of the Soviet line on Palestine — rejecting its earlier anti-Zionism in 1947 only to embrace it again it in the early 1950s — the long presence of communist-aligned anti-Zionism not only left its mark but reemerged as a cultural resource in the 1960s. During those heady years, the student New Left began asking similar questions about Zionist colonialism and the fate of Palestinians.
Few other organizations of its size and cultural influence have been shut down by fiat of the state, with its members deported and leaders arrested and hauled before federal tribunal, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not even the Communist Party was formally disbanded in such a way. While Paul Mishler is correct — the communist movement writ large and the IWO in particular were instrumental in constructing both theories and practices for a radical multiculturalism — one can only speculate what liberal multiculturalism, to say nothing of Jewish identity, might look like if the IWO and JPFO were still a robust presence.
Speaking to the long arm of neo-McCarthyism, it is also curious that the edited volume has little to say about Zionism or Palestine, especially considering the large role splits over Zionism played in the JPFO’s breakup with the Workers Circle. Beyond one mention of this split in an essay about the career of JPFO artist William Gropper, the only other mention of Palestine in the collection is a brief aside by ALB soldiers who remarked on the racism of troops from the Yishuv, the Jewish-only settlements in Palestine. While part of the explanation for the absence in the collection may be the complexities of the IWO’s and JPFO’s adherence to the zig-zags of the Soviet line on Palestine — rejecting its earlier anti-Zionism in 1947 only to embrace it again it in the early 1950s — the long presence of communist-aligned anti-Zionism not only left its mark but reemerged as a cultural resource in the 1960s. During those heady years, the student New Left began asking similar questions about Zionist colonialism and the fate of Palestinians.
Embora esta coletânea continue sendo uma das obras mais importantes dos últimos anos sobre a ascensão e a queda da "Velha Esquerda" multirracial, tal ausência, no entanto, reproduz a cultura de silêncio em torno da Palestina — uma cultura que gerou consequências catastróficas tanto internamente quanto no exterior. Considerando o propósito da IWO — que envolve a análise de formas múltiplas e interseccionais de opressão dentro de uma estrutura socialista global —, abordar a despossessão da Palestina e o complexo engajamento da esquerda judaica americana com essa questão parece ser mais do que necessário como complemento a este projeto.
Colaborador
Benjamin Balthaser é professor associado de literatura multiétnica dos EUA na Indiana University, South Bend. Seu trabalho mais recente é o livro Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, publicado pela Verso Books.
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