With a Nod to ’68, Columbia Grad Students Strike
Fifty years after the student occupation, Columbia's graduate union goes to the picket line in its fight for recognition.
Read MoreTag Archives: Strikes
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart (Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz), who became a household name through his work on The Daily Show, was born in New York City on this date in 1962. Stewart hosted, wrote for, and executive-produced the comedy show from 1999 until 2015, turning it into a major source of news, information and progressive political perspectives for the cable TV […]
Read MoreOctober 21: Sharon’s Death Sculpture
Israeli installation artist and sculptor Noam Braslavsky unveiled a life-sized, “breathing” sculpture of Ariel Sharon in a coma at the Kishon Gallery in Tel Aviv on this date in 2010. Sharon had been in a coma since suffering a massive stroke in 2006, and Braslavsky proposed that the sculpture “allows people in Israel to mourn […]
Read MoreA Short History of Jews in the American Labor Movement
by Bennett Muraskin THINK OF the greatest strikes in U.S. labor history and, apart from the garment workers strikes in New York and Chicago before World War I, none come to mind in which Jews played a major role. The railroad workers strike in 1877, the strike for the eight-hour day in 1886, the Homestead […]
Read MoreDecember 29: A Socialist in Congress
Meyer London, one of only two Socialist Party members elected to Congress (the other was Victor Berger), was born in Lithuania on this date in 1871. He came to New York at age 20 and worked as a tutor and printer while acquiring a law degree. London was a fundraising activist for the Jewish Bund […]
Read MoreJune 6: Up on Cripple Creek
The governor of Colorado (Davis H. Waite) dispatched the state militia on this date in 1894 to protect striking workers at the Cripple Creek gold mine — the only instance in American history in which soldiers were mobilized not as strikebreakers but to protect strikers against a private corporate militia. Cripple Creek was a thriving […]
Read MoreMay 15: The Winnipeg General Strike, 1919
Sam Blumenberg, Michael Charitinoff, and Moses Almazov were among five immigrants arrested for instigating the Winnipeg General Strike, which began on this date in 1919. The strike originated on May Day in the building and metal trades, which had organized into industry-wide unions with which management refused to negotiate. By the 15th, the city was […]
Read MoreMay 13: Myron Brinig’s 21 Novels
The first American Jewish novelist to write about gay life with any depth (and one of the first of his generation to write in English instead of Yiddish), Myron Brinig died at 95 on this date in 1991. Brinig grew up with shopkeeper parents in Butte, Montana, where his early books are set. As a […]
Read MoreRemembering the Waistmakers General Strike, 1909
In Memoriam: Clara Lemlich Shavelson (March 28, 1886 — July 25, 1982) Originally published in the November, 1982 issue of Jewish Currents. Read the original, in PDF with footnotes. WHEN CLARA LEMLICH SHAVELSON DIED in a Los Angeles nursing home July 25th, the death notice of the family in the New York Times July 30th […]
Read MoreMarch 20: Boris Reinstein and the Passaic Weavers
Newspapers reported on this date in 1912 that Boris Reinstein, an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer in Detroit, had taken command of the Passaic, New Jersey strike involving some 10,000 mill workers. Reinstein had fled Russia’s tsarist police in 1901 and settled with his obstetrician wife Anna in Buffalo, where he worked as […]
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