Feb

13

2026

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Two episodes of Henry Louis Gates’s four-part PBS series, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, have aired so far, and, little surprise, they have barely glanced at joint Black-Jewish efforts on the American Old Left. It’s a fair guess that the remaining episodes won’t either. A short series of such broad sweep requires extreme condensation, of course, but abiding liberal disdain for any whiff of Communism is likely also at work. (Perhaps that’s why, at least so far, the show does not tell the tale of the Scottsboro Nine, whose defense was led by Jewish Communists.) Nonetheless, much of the storied 20th century alliance between Blacks and Jews was forged through Communist Party-affiliated organizations, not least the International Workers Order (IWO), a mutual aid society that provided its members with high-quality, low-cost health insurance, medical clinics, summer camps, theaters, language schools, baseball teams, magazines (including Jewish Life, founded in 1946 and renamed Jewish Currents a decade later), and other benefits even as it organized for workers’ rights, racial justice, and progressive social programs.

To fill in TV’s inevitable gaps, pick up the multi-faceted new anthology, From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930-1954, edited by Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker. In 13 chapters (plus a coda by Paul Buhle, the indispensable popular historian of the Jewish left), the book ranges over various aspects of the influential but largely forgotten “fraternal society” that, in its brief quarter-century existence, Sampson and Zecker write in their introduction, offer an “early multiethnic model of intersectional, pathbreaking, militant activism around inequities of race and class that can help bridge the false dichotomy between them and allow us to exit the cul-de-sac of dubious arguments where ‘identity politics’ comes into conflict with supposedly more genuine issues of class.”

The IWO was born of lefty Jewish fractiousness: In 1930, when the socialists of the Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle) froze Communist members out of leadership, the rebuffed radicals (known as di linke, the left) created the new organization. It grew swiftly—within five years it had nearly 70,000 members, and eventually, more than 200,000—building sections for immigrant speakers of different languages, among them Ukrainian, Finnish, Hungarian, Spanish, and, the largest, Yiddish (called the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, JPFO). Explicitly and emphatically antiracist—“No Jim Crow in the IWO” was a key slogan—the IWO’s African American members organized through a section called the Lincoln-Douglass Society. Unlike IWO leadership, the vast majority of members were not connected to the Communist Party, though most “were pro-Soviet and comfortable with the IWO’s mix of benefits and political and cultural activities.”

The anthology focuses largely on the JPFO, with chapters describing Yiddish adult education in the American Communist movement; radical Jewish artists (a legacy extended in the fabulous fantasy cityscape on the book’s cover, by Ben Katchor); the intersectional, feminist Emma Lazarus Clubs; and parallel Jewish organizations in Latin America and Canada. The underlying tension between Yiddish (and other ethnic) particularism and Communist universalism is a running theme, as are the IWO’s moderating efforts, and sometimes ideological about-faces, as it joined the Popular Front during World War II and as the JPFO sought to work alongside more mainstream Jewish organizations to defeat fascism and save European Jews and, later, their culture.

Several chapters address Black activists affiliated with the IWO. One analyzes the fascinating revisions W.E.B. Du Bois made to his theory of the color line after visiting the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto; others take up the work of Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson, including charming scenes of Robeson visiting children at IWO summer camps.

Sampson and Zecker are careful to warn against our being too romantic about seeking a perfect usable past in the JPFO—some members remained diehard defenders of Stalin—but they suggest we may find “solace and inspiration” in the ways the Old Left tackled injustices “with creativity and vigor.” A chapter on the IWO’s demise—it was extinguished by “a Cold War coterie of actors from the House Un-American Activities Committee, the federal Department of Justice, and the New York State Insurance Department”—offers its own implied lessons, as the tactics to crush an anti-racist, pro-immigrant, worker-centered movement sound scarily familiar.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn’s debut memoir Loose of Earth tells the story of her father’s sudden cancer in his mid-30s, and how the disease intensified her West Texas family’s homeschooled, right-wing Christianity. Blackburn’s brilliant disciplinarian and veterinarian mother did her own research, as we now say, and concocted a deranged mix of faith-cures and exorcism, tinctures and crunchy dietary limits, and new religious practices. (For Jews, the oddest may be her printing of scriptural verses on notecards to be affixed on doorways—that is, a reinvention of the mezuzah!) Retrospectively, Blackburn came to wonder whether her father’s disease had more to do with PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” that the Air Force and 3M invented to suppress petroleum fires—that suffuse the aquifers near all the airbases around which her father grew up, and on which he worked before becoming a commercial pilot.

In about 200 pages of prose as clean (and occasionally as sublime) as the flat, semi-arid land around Lubbock, Loose of Earth is an exceedingly ambitious book. Blackburn is, all at once, reckoning with her domineering mother (who carried around a spoon to beat her children, and who pretended that she learned that Kathleen shaved her legs by divine revelation, fusing in her daughter the fears of both God and herself), with the entanglement of the military-industrial complex and a hypertropically rationalistic Christianity (in which, as among many Evangelicals, scripture seems to be not the Bible but the more rigorous Bible Concordance), and with broader legacies of environmental degradation.

As an eco-memoir placing a dysfunctional family against a landscape ravaged by the deep state, Loose of Earth reminds me of Full Body Burden, Kristen Iversen’s telling of her childhood in the shadow of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. And in probing an austere Protestantism in military West Texas, Blackburn’s book resembles A.G. Mojtabai’s Blessèd Assurance, which grapples with how clergy in Amarillo understood the assembly of nuclear bombs in their backyard. Blackburn’s memoir is a worthy successor to both of these wonderful books.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The name George Templeton Strong might ring a bell for those who watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War series, which aired in 1990. Strong was a New York lawyer who kept a diary from the age of 15 until he died at 55 in 1875. Excerpts from the diary’s Civil War years were used by Burns to provide the civilian point of view. If I remember correctly, and I’m not sure I do, Strong came off as a bit of a snob. Even so, I’ve been curious since then about his diaries—four million words recounting daily life in New York during a crucial period in its history. Sadly, a four-volume condensation from the 1950s is long out of print.

But thanks to the irreplaceable Library of America, Strong now gets his partial due, in a generous collection of entries from the years 1860-1865, George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries, edited by Geoff Wisner. It’s an engrossing volume that I tore through in just a few days, one providing insight into the mindset of an educated resident of the city at a trying time.

The book begins with the secession crisis of 1860. I was won over early by Strong’s unabashed hatred for the seceding states of the South, which he hates with a burning passion. Never before had I felt just how relevant that period was to today, both in the issues it raised and in the emotions it stirred, then and now.

I was hooked early in the book, in the entry for December 20th, 1860, when Strong said he was already “inexpressibly weary of the subject” of North vs. South. And then he voices a sentiment I felt could have been uttered almost any day of our own sad era of Cold Civil War: “Could these Algerine states [i.e., the uncontrollable and troublesome South] be cut out of our map & transferred to any unoccupied region of the Indian Ocean, it would be good riddance.” How many among us feel the same way about the same states Strong is referring to 165 years later, a region now rotted not by secessionism and slavery but by Trumpism.

Throughout this volume, Strong is unstinting in his hatred of the South, and for all the right reasons. He regularly describes it as “woman-flogging and child-selling,” as a hotbed of baseless “chivalric” braggadocio and rural imbecility. He wishes nothing but ill on Southerners, and regards the hangman’s noose as too good for a section brimming with treasonous yahoos who brought on national ruin.

Strong uses some antiquated and offensive language, but he is full of admiration and sympathy for African Americans. He’s proud and impressed with the escaped slaves, known as “contrabands”, who served with bravery in the US army. He’s righteously angry, enraged in fact, by the New York draft rioters of July 1863 and their murderous actions towards defenseless Blacks. It increases his hatred of the “Keltic” working-class, who carried out the riots and murders. Slavery and treason must be stopped. Anything that impedes these things is worthy of the noose. The unreliability of war information is a constant. Battles are won or lost in different editions of daily newspapers. Friends are killed in battle, then said to be wounded, then unharmed. Strong comes to trust nothing he reads or hears; this is a very modern book.

We also get to see Abraham Lincoln up close, since Strong met with him several times as a member of the US Sanitary Commission. Strong admired Lincoln beyond measure, despite his “plebeian” bearing and longwinded tall tales and jokes. He correctly predicted that Lincoln’s second inaugural address would live forever.

Strong was wrong on a couple of major counts, particularly in his faith in the repulsive Andrew Johnson. But his fear of a revived South trying to impose its will was spot on. It took a hundred years to shake the Confederacy’s death grip on national politics, and its zombie hand is still at our throats.

From the stories of Hagar and Joseph in Breishit to the grand tale of liberation from Egypt that unfolds over the first third of Shemot, slavery is one of the Torah’s major concerns. In our parshah, the subject once again takes center stage: Mishpatim’s collection of commandments begins with regulations regarding the “eved Ivri,” or “Hebrew slave.” The appearance of these laws seems incongruous or even shocking, coming so soon after the Exodus. How can we understand the perpetuation of this heinous institution by a society that has just been freed from its bonds?

Many commentators have framed this legislation as transitional, meant to slowly move society away from slavery toward an ultimate goal of abolition. These commentators often emphasize that the Torah mandates a six-year term limit that distinguishes this system of servitude from perpetual chattel slavery, and that later law collections in Vayikra and Devarim make it clear that the Hebrew slave deserves compassionate treatment. As the Bible scholar Robert Alter puts it in the notes on his own translation of this passage, “What is clearly involved is not chattel slavery but what amounts to a kind of indentured servitude. The Bible does not question this institution but sets certain limits on it, and, as one can see in the subsequent laws, the slave retains basic human rights.” This position has some merit, in part due to the semantic flexibility of the Hebrew term “eved,” which is applied to a wide spectrum of arrangements, including chattel slaves, personal servants, royal courtiers, and even the Israelite relationship to God. As the French anthropologist Alain Testart writes of the details supplied in Vayikra, “the respect owed them, the time limits on their service, their remaining among their fathers’ kinsmen, their inalienability, their redeemability—so many traits . . . make it impossible to consider them slaves.”

It would be nice if we could accept this argument, contentedly concluding that the Torah softens even the harshness of slavery. But to understand a given law, we must look not only at what it dictates directly, but also at the social reality it implies. And indeed, when we take a closer look at the underlying societal dynamics of the Hebrew slave, things get more complicated. Notably, the Torah does not directly answer the question of how this Hebrew slave came to be available for purchase. Rashi raises two possibilities: This person was either a thief who could not pay the penalties for stealing or a person who put himself up for sale out of economic desperation. In both cases, the Hebrew slave is a person facing harsh pressure and a hostile social world; beneath the comparatively gentle terms of his servitude lies a bleak reality.

The six-year term limit is also deceptively generous. At the end of his term, the Hebrew slave is given a choice: He may go free, or “if the slave should solemnly say, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go free,’ his master shall . . . pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him perpetually.” It may be hard to imagine why one would elect to remain a slave forever, rather than try his luck out in the world. But it’s important to remember the relevant social contexts that may be at play: For one, familial attachments developed within his master’s household do not exist independently of his slave status, and he may be forced to choose between family and freedom. Moreover, his prospects for avoiding debt and poverty might be no better than six years ago. He may have made a sober assessment that servitude is his best chance at stability.

But coercion framed as choice is not really a choice; it renders its cruelty invisible and holds its victims responsible for their own submission. To be marked as a slave—in this case, physically so by a pierced ear—means forever advertising consent to one’s own degraded status. We can see a twisted moral order taking shape in the Hebrew slave’s path to permanent servitude: The slave is unfree because he has forsaken freedom. There is something ineluctably chilling about the slave’s utterance, which binds him to enslavement: “I love my master.” The Hebrew slave is not someone who already inhabits what the historical sociologist Orlando Patterson describes as the state of social death that defines slavery, but someone at risk of that condition, who must assess whether his best option is to relinquish his social belonging forever.

Perhaps Mishpatim, in opening with this legal scenario, is trying to teach us something about the ambiguity of law. The Hebrew slave could be a transitional figure, as many readers have hoped—but only if a strong social safety net were to protect him from true desperation. Mishpatim also presents the real possibility of a grim alternative: the formation of a Hebrew slave class, an impoverished group of quasi-criminal debt slaves marked as inferior. The law only serves the social good if people work to create a good society; otherwise, it entrenches injustice. If we read Mishpatim placidly as a progressive text, we may overlook the signs of persistent material need and coercive hierarchies that lurk beneath it. If we accept that it is a difficult text that does not easily resolve social challenges, it might help us illuminate the invisible cruelties that animate our world today.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.