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December 8: AFL Is Launched
Lawrence Bush
December 8, 2009
On this day in 1886, the American Federation of Labor was created by 26 craft unions with Samuel Gompers (a Dutch-born Jew) as president. During his 37-year tenure, procedures for collective bargaining and labor-management contracts were established and trade unionism became an established feature of the American capitalist system. Gompers was a labor conservative who worked to pass anti-immigration legislation, which ultimately would help doom the Jews of Europe years after his death in 1924.
“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge . . . more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”
—Samuel Gompers
Lawrence Bush edited Jewish Currents from 2003 until 2018. He is the author of Bessie: A Novel of Love and Revolution and Waiting for God: The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist, among other books. His new volume of illustrated Torah commentaries, American Torah Toons 2, is scheduled for publication this year.
Also by Lawrence Bush
History
How Jewish Currents Covered the Soviet Jewry Movement
Even once the magazine accepted the evidence of Soviet antisemitism, it continued to distrust the politics of the mainstream campaign.
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JEWDAYO Rocks: Jewish Rock and Roll Dates for August
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