Race and the Jewish Radical Left

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

In Clare Hemmings’s groundbreaking work, CONSIDERING EMMA GOLDMAN: FEMINIST POLITICAL AMBIVALENCE AND THE IMAGINATIVE ARCHIVE, she pinpoints the discrepancy between the “subjective archive” (Goldman’s writings, published and unpublished, as well as her life) and the “critical archive,” that is “the contradictory sequence of affective and theoretical presumptions” assigned to Goldman in existing scholarship. At the heart of Hemmings’s study lies not so much Goldman per se, but a critical reflection of how different generations of scholars have attempted to [re]claim her as valuable to the feminist project in what Hemmings views as an attempt to mask their own ambivalence about the same, unresolved questions that plagued Goldman throughout her life. Central to Hemmings’s study (which was published in the age of #Blacklivesmatter) are the various criticisms of Goldman’s ambivalence about race and racism, or more simply put, the shocking (or not) belief that Goldman somehow “missed race” in all of her condemnations of the American government, capitalism, and society.

Hemmings’s reflections on a long celebrated feminist icon provide a provocative point of departure for reconsidering the early twentieth century Jewish radical left and its unresolved relationship to the race question. The historiography has often wavered between a celebration of past personalities who drew connections between American racism and the persecution experienced by Jews in Europe and condemnations of those who failed to speak up, in addition to how Jewish labor organizations did or did not stand in solidarity with Black workers. At a time when scholars are engaging with the effect of racism and whiteness in the American Jewish past and present, critical questions surrounding race on the American Jewish left remain unresolved. Our panel considers the ways Jewish activists and writers on the left were grappling with American racism at a time when Blacks and Jews were encountering one another for the first time as members of the urban working-class and Jewish identity was anything but stable. In doing so, we invite reflections on what role contemporary academic probings of race and racism might play in the creation of a “critical Jewish Studies archive” moving forward.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in the Americas

Individual Presentations

• What Does a Black Theater Group and a Jewish Furniture Salesman Tell Us about Race and the Radical Left? - Tony E. Michels, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• “Artificiality of color line”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the Limits of Black-Jewish Solidarity in Early Twentieth Century America - Jacob Morrow-Spitzer, Yale University

• “Reading Lincoln through the Russian Revolution” - Ashley Walters, College of Charleston