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by Bennett Muraskin To read Part One, click here. THE JEWISH LABOR MOVEMENT was not only about great deeds. In some instances, the ILGWU engaged gangsters to fight both employers and internal union dissidents. Corruption and nepotism were not unknown. Women in the union shops did not receive equal pay for equal work, or the […]
Read Moreby Nicole Bindler This is a revised and much-expanded version of a piece first published by thINKingDANCE June 9 (2015) I arrive in Tel Aviv at 2:30 a.m. I get through security without a hitch. I was advised to say that I’m going to Israel to hang out with friends because many people (including Diyar’s […]
Read MoreNone Shall Escape, a film that anticipated the post-war Nuremberg War Crimes trials, was released on this date in 1944. The film portrayed a Nazi officer on trial for his misdeeds and confronted by several witnesses, each of whom triggers a flashback scene. One shows the deportation of the Jews and other minority groups who […]
Read MoreRussian artist, graphic designer, and architect El Lissitzky, an important avant-garde creator who strongly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, died at 51 on this date in 1941. Born in Lithuania, Lissitzky was barred by the anti-Semitic quota system from attending an art academy in Saint Petersburg, so he took himself to Germany in 1909 […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. Yale University Press, 2015, 645 pages. THE VAGARIES OF TRANSLATION have resulted in huge gaps in our knowledge of world literature, leaving English-language readers ignorant of essential writers and books. The result is regular bouts of head-scratching when the Nobel […]
Read MoreSocialist poet and editor Abraham Liessin (Walt) died at 68 on this date in 1938. He was a well-known socialist writer in Minsk, Belorussia, and came in 1896 to New York, where he worked as writer and editor for the newly-founded Jewish Daily Forward. Liessin was active in the Social Labor Party as a fierce […]
Read MoreThe leftwing painter Raphael Soyer, the best-known of three artist brothers (including his twin Moses and Isaac), died at 87 on this date in 1987. Soyer was admired for his realistic street scenes and his intimate paintings of people in face-to-face circumstances or states of introspection during the Great Depression. He was also known for […]
Read MoreMagnum photographer Leonard Freed, who documented the realities of racial segregation and ghettoization — and the struggle against them — was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1929. Freed moved to Amsterdam in 1958 and began to document the life of the city’s Jewish community. In the 1960s he captured the energies of the […]
Read MoreThe New York Times reviewed George Eliot’s proto-Zionist novel, Daniel Deronda, on this date in 1876, describing it as inferior to Eliot’s previous works, especially Middlemarch, but with a “Hebrew character” to whom “the author does full justice… a fact which we are pleased to notice in contrast to what, in the mildest language, we […]
Read MoreHollywood director and producer Stanley E. Kramer, who shepherded into existence numerous successful films with progressive social messages, particularly about racism — including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Caine Mutiny, and High Noon — was born in New York on this date in 1913. His […]
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