| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Hadassa Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 (Albany: State University of New York, 2000)

THE BEST LABOUR HISTORY recognizes the totality of workers' lives; in the workplace, association, home, markets, church, and diverse community settings. Hadassa Kosak's Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 seeks to utilize this breadth of perspective in analyzing the lives of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants in the turn-of-the-century metropolis but in a particularly ambitious manner. Specifically, Kosak uses this historical perspective both to re-emphasize the continuing efficacy of the labour-cultural nexus suggested by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, and revise traditional labour historiography concerning late-19th-century Jewish working-class immigrants. Kosak's ambitious scope may largely explain the study's few problematic areas, while the author's skillful discussion of historiography, cultural expression, community identity, and ethnic relations makes many of the author's bold assertions appear quite persuasive.	1
Kosak introduces the study as one specifically describing "the character of labor activism and how it reached new heights in the garment industries of New York in the 1880s and 1890s," (12) which, in itself, is an important contribution but hardly does justice to the following narrative. The six chapters and conclusion that follow a heavily historiographical introduction describe a sequential evolution of the immigrant experience. Kosak's initial chapter on the Russian experience is especially vital since it establishes several of the author's key points: the foundational culture that both mediated and responded to the immigrant experience, experiences with oppression that gave cultural expression to resistance, and the distinctive economic reality of the homeland that proved so radically different from the new country. The following chapters explore in succession the processes of migration, new economic realities, emergence of an ethnic enclave, cultural responses to oppression, and the creation of a new "language" of cultural expression that linked workplace, association, family, identity, and community in an activist working-class consciousness. From the interaction between immigrant culture and American material realities, Kosak concludes that the Russian immigrant experience created new opportunities for democratic participation, transformed traditional ways of life, included women as full participants in the process of historical change, articulated new expressions of mutuality, and, in short, defined "new political agendas" reflecting the interplay of the several realities emerging from the historical immigrant experience. (160) Fundamentally, the outcome of the Russian Jewish immigrant experience was to create a political consciousness anticipating equality and liberty in material and cultural realities that would contribute significantly to a continuing commitment to social progress and justice in labour organization and left politics.	2
The thrust of Kosak's interpretation centers upon a politicized working-class culture as evinced through historical political action. Citing both Thompson and Gutman, the latter of whom the author acknowledges as an inspiration for this study, Kosak attributes class-consciousness among the immigrant Russian Jews to the interplay between their cultural heritage and the material and social realities of New World industrial capitalism, which manifested itself in diverse forms of collective behaviours, associations, and rhetoric. This process, according to the author, resulted in the invention of a new language "based on a dynamic reinterpretation of different cultural components." (4) This concept of a "new language" for the Jewish immigrants fits nicely with recent emphases upon rhetoric and symbol in negotiating power relations, and Kosak is quite comfortable employing it as a central focus for the work. One wonders at times whether or not the concept may be a bit amorphous, particularly when linked to perceived immigrant democratic yearnings in a fundamentally undemocratic epoch. Nevertheless, the correspondence, periodicals, and other text-based sources upon which the author relies heavily reflect the significance of language and its evolution from 19th-century Russia to 20th-century New York, at least in this narrative form. Yet, as important as the creation of a new language may have been to these immigrants, the incorporation of symbolic consciousness into specific political actions in the workplace and community in the latter part of the study proves to be the more gripping analysis and suggests a need for revising traditional labour historiography.	3
In creating a new political language and putting it into daily practice, the Russian Jewish immigrants of turn-of-the-century New York proved these historical actors to be activists constantly seeking their just due and not victims of oppression. Here, Kosak posits a need for a new historiographical lens for the pre-1905 generation of immigrants since analyses of workplace and labour organization experiences fail to fathom the much more complex nature of immigrant working-class consciousness and class formation. In this aspect of the study, the author weds the experiences of the Russian Jewish immigrants to those of the already established Jewish German Americans, whose relations to the former often reflected patriarchal and/or exploitative patterns, and shows how inherited cultures and differing economic agendas, in fact, divided rather than drew these different immigrant generations together. For Kosak, Russian Jewish orientation toward social justice and even militancy, at least for the pre-1905 generation, who did not experience the material transformations in Russia later generations did, resulted from a communitarian-based struggle for social equity and cultural expression and not primarily from workplace struggles or labour organization. In this regard, non-wage workers, particularly women among the Russian immigrants, appeared as visible agents of community action.	4
Cultures of Opposition represents a solid piece of scholarship, effectively combining perspectives from labour, ethnic, and urban historiography. Kosak's work contributes to the continuing examination of working-class people as historical actors actively engaged in the shaping of both their individual communities and the broader social milieu. While Kosak's readiness to assign a democratic consciousness to immigrants for whom neither homeland culture nor American reality evinced such a democratic ethos is, at times, dissatisfying, the author's discussion of immigrant self-empowerment seems more convincing, especially when located in a collectivized sense of community. Also, the author's penchant for downplaying material forces of history as opposed to cultural ones seems belied by the later emphasis of the book, where workplace issues appear as principal factors in promoting political and social activism among the immigrant community. Certainly, material and cultural forces can not be disassociated from one another in the historical experience, but one may argue persuasively for the primacy of industrial relations and forces in shaping class formation and consciousness.	5
For scholars of the immigrant and working-class experience at the turn of the 20th century, Cultures of Opposition is a useful tool in uncovering the dynamics of community networks, class identity and behavior, and inter-ethnic relations. Kosak's inclusion of diverse intellectual sources, including Thompson, Gutman, Werner Sollors, Margaret Somers, and others, evidences the continuing efficacy of the inter-disciplinary basis of social and cultural history. This work succeeds in giving voice to the pre-1905 Russian Jewish immigrant generation, which reinforces the need for scholars to avoid viewing immigrant groups as monolithic entities but instead as discrete communities identified by generation, nationality, class, and the like, and that fed into other diverse immigrant streams. Hadassa Kosak's Cultures of Oppression truly recognizes the totality of workers' lives, in the workplace, association, home, markets, religious institutions, and diverse community settings, and serves as a model for not only labour history but immigrant, ethnic, and community history as well.	6
Tim Draper Waubonsee (IL) Community College

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