Book Review

Canada and the United States

Hadassa Kosak. Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905. (SUNY Series in American Labor History.) Albany: State University of New York Press. 2000. Pp. x, 220. $16.95.

What do a 1902 boycott of kosher meat by housewives on the Lower East Side of New York and a riot in 1882 on Ward's Island, where indigent Russian Jewish immigrants were housed, have in common? Hadassa Kosak links these examples of communal solidarity and violent political action to labor organizing in the garment industry. They constitute what she terms the "oppositional cultures" of immigrant Jews in New York at the turn of the century.	1
Kosak's work focuses on a subset of Eastern European immigration from 1881 to 1905. Those Jews who immigrated to the United States before 1905 were more likely to live in small towns without access to a secular culture and to have no experience with industrial labor. Rather than viewing these immigrants as "stunned," as did Irving Howe and others, Kosak argues that they were highly politicized. She succeeds at reframing the nature of political activism and analyzing the conditions that enabled it, and in so doing she has made a powerful contribution to Jewish labor history.	2
Kosak builds on the scaffolding of more than thirty years of labor history that explores the relationship between culture and class formation. She integrates this scholarship with recent sociology that views culture as a dynamic process on which political actors draw. From this theoretical loom she weaves a compelling story about the development of an immigrant Jewish political culture that departed from traditional trade unionism. Immigrants' new "cultural code" of radical and militant democracy devoted to justice created an American Jewish culture whose perspective on work and citizenship integrated elements of the old and new worlds.	3
Kosak draws together several contexts necessary to understand this political culture. In addition to the more familiar historical work on immigration in the period from 1881 to 1905, she explains with admirable economy the complexities of the period's garment industry. Unlike their American counterparts, immigrant Jewish garment workers were not united by "craft," given the industry's fractionalization of work. Therefore, Jewish workers created a political language devoted to social and economic rights rather than simply fair wages. The shop became a social space creating solidarity between more and less skilled workers as well as subcontractors and workers. Ethnic and neighborhood ties led to widespread support for workers and their demands for justice.	4
Immigrants relied on self-help organizations (Landsmanschaften), which offered an effective, democratic civic tradition and encouraged mutual reliance. The geography of New York's Lower East Side further supported that civic tradition of mutual support. Jews' overwhelming presence in one neighborhood and one industry enhanced their awareness of their own poor conditions, which intensified the development of a shared political culture and language. They also drew on a shared biblical tradition that provided a framework for understanding oppression.	5
Kosak concludes that long after a Jewish working-class and community disappeared, its political language of militancy and solidarity persisted. What political culture evolved is the question raised by Marc Dollinger's history of Jews and liberalism in modern America. Dollinger examines the understudied period from 1933 to 1975 from the perspective of public policy positions taken by the major national Jewish organizations. His close analysis of those positions allows him to map the changing nature of Jews' commitment to liberalism and hence Jews' relationship to the nation.	. . .