Executive Committee of Branch 692 in Miami Beach. Leon Elkin, the author of this report, is seated third from the left in the front row.
The excerpt below comes from a history of Branch 692 of the left-wing Yiddish fraternal organization Workers Circle (also known as the Workmen’s Circle, and in Yiddish as der Arbeter Ring). The essay appeared in a 1949 issue of the bilingual conference journal In dorem land/In Southern States, and recounts the activities of the branch—originally formed in Miami in 1926, during a period of rapid growth for the local Jewish community—from its founding, through the turbulent period of its Communist-Socialist split, and into a vibrant period in the 1940s. This text, and other local histories from the journal describing Workers Circle life in cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and San Antonio, Texas, reflect a commemorative effort on behalf of an aging leadership that hoped to assert the organization’s historical and ongoing relevance in the face of its overall decline.
Nationally, the Workers Circle reached peak membership in the mid-1920s, before internal conflicts between Socialists and Communists split the organization. That schism, referred to in the 1949 conference journal as a struggle between the group’s “left” and “right,” hinged on the question of whether the Workers Circle should affiliate with the Communist Party of America and the global Communist movement, or remain an independent organization roughly aligned with the Socialist Party of America. According to another essay in In dorem land, the Miami branch “bled heavily” as a result of the conflict and took several years to recover. National participation stabilized in the 1930s, but the organization began a long decline around 1940 due to the death of its founding cohort, successive generations’ diminishing attachment to Yiddish, and the overall weakening of the left in the United States.
However, even as the stories of most southern branches reflected the Workers Circle’s overall trends, South Florida, whose Jewish population boomed in the postwar era, proved an anomaly. The rise of Jewish Miami allowed Branch 692 to become the largest and most active Workers Circle branch in the Southern District. In 1940 the branch moved to Miami Beach, where many of its membership lived. By 1945, the Miami Beach group boasted 218 members, and eventually expanded to a second branch in Miami proper. When local leader Leon Elkin wrote the history below, the branch had just constructed a new “lyceum” building with seating for 600 guests. Elkin noted that the branch hosted a variety of Yiddish cultural events around Hanukkah, Purim, and Passover, including a “Third Seder,” a progressive, secular reimagining of the traditional meal. The group also hosted prominent leaders and thinkers from the Yiddish world, including Vladka Meed, a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, and the celebrated Yiddish singer Hertz Grosbard. Politically, Elkin highlights the branch’s work on several local and national causes: its involvement with price and rent control campaigns; activism against discrimination in the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed Europeans uprooted by World War II into the United States but favored Christians over Jews and other groups; and protests against the Taft-Hartley Act, which curtailed the power of labor unions across the country.
The Miami group remained active much longer than most southern branches, with one of the city’s branches managing to reestablish local Yiddish classes for youth in the 1950s. The older Jewish community that thrived in Miami Beach starting in the mid-century helped sustain an active Workers Circle group into at least the late 1980s. But the group eventually declined along with the overall Yiddish-speaking community as some of the elderly died, while others left following an influx of Cuban migrants, or were pushed out by the rising gentrification of Miami Beach.
Josh Parshall is a nonprofit professional based in Columbia, Missouri. He holds a PhD in American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his dissertation research focused on southern branches of the Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle).
Jessica Kirzane is the associate instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She is a literary translator from Yiddish whose work includes Diary of a Lonely Girl, Judith, and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories, all by Miriam Karpilove.
