Stephen H. Norwood

Organizing the neglected worker: the Women's Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950

From 1930 to 1950, the New York and Boston Womens Trade Union League (WTUL) chapters focused on organizing poorly paid female service employees, many of them African American or Hispanic, whom the AFL and CIO largely neglected. Scholars who studied the WTUL generally confined their work to the period before 1920. Drawing on new primary sources, this article challenges previous characterizations of the WTUL as moribund after 1920, revealing the WTULs vitality and innovative organizing methods. The WTUL maintained that New Deal protective legislation would prove largely unenforceable if workers remained unorganized. The article examines how the WTUL combined energetic organizing and legislative lobbying on behalf of laundry workers, domestic servants, cafeteria workers, hotel chambermaids, textile workers, and teachers, considered among the most difficult workers to organize.

Seth Forman. Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism. New York: New York University Press, 1998. x, 274 pp.

This is a welcome corrective to the many recent polemical and scholarly—but tendentious—studies of black-Jewish relations that portray Jews as differing little from other whites. As Seth Forman indicates, many of these studies bear the imprint of the Black Power movement, whose influence mounted in the late 1960s. Seeking to undermine the integrationist civil rights coalition in which Jews occupied a leading role, the writers of these works severely minimized or denied any special Jewish empathy for the African-American cause. David L. Lewis claims that Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement was motivated by self-interest rather than by heightened sensitivity rooted in a memory of antisemitic persecution. Jews allegedly “us[ed] Blacks as surrogates” (p. 12) to eliminate discrimination against Jews, blacks deriving little benefit from the alliance. Harold Cruse similarly portrayed Jews in the civil rights movement as opportunistic, as a privileged group that had not suffered in the United States and therefore had nothing in common with African Americans. According to Forman, Taylor Branch even cites Israels refusal to grant citizenship to members of Ben-Ami Carters “Black Hebrew” sect as evidence that Jews have been “perpetrators of racial hate” (p. 14). But Branch ignores the invalidity of the sects claim to be Jewish as well as its virulently antisemitic and anti-white theology.