Yiddish and the Left

Papers of the Third Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish

Gennady Estraikh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351198219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios judíos

"For over a century Yiddish served as a major vehicle for expressing left-wing ideas and sensitivities. A language without country, an ""ugly jargon"" despised by assimilationist Jewish bourgeoisie and nationalist Zionists alike, it was embraced as genuine folk idiom by Jewish adherents of socialism and communism worldwide. Following the Holocaust, Yiddish was the primary language of education, culture and propaganda for millions of people on five continents. This volume examines the diversity of relationships between Yiddish and the Left, from the attitude of Yiddish writers to apartheid in South Africa to the vicissitudes of the Yiddish communist press in the Soviet Union and the USA."

Part I
Politics

Chapter 1
The Question of Human Rights in American Yiddish Journalism: The Example of Di tsukunft

Steven Cassedy

From the moment it was founded in 1892, the American Yiddish socialist monthly Di tsukunft sought to represent the vanguard of intellectual activity among Yiddish-speaking Jews in New York and, eventually, the world. From its early years as a doctrinaire publication in the service of Marxist social democracy to its glory years (1913—38) under Abraham Liessin (1872—1938), who adopted a more tolerant editorial policy than his predecessors, Di tsukunft maintained a commitment to two goals: (1) to be a highbrow intellectual journal, rising above the level of less sophisticated weekly and daily Yiddish publications, and (2) to serve as a forum for politically progressive thought, whether or not that thought was strictly social democratic. To the extent that Di tsukunft met these goals, it provides us with a valuable record of some of the American Yiddish-speaking community's finest thinking on a range of progressive issues. One of these issues is the concept of human rights, which underwent an important stage in its growth in the first two decades of the twentieth century. As we watch Di tsukunft respond to this growth, we see that the immigrant intellectuals who contributed to the journal were reflecting not only the peculiar character and history of their own community but also a set of significant ideological shifts in that community.

The Evolution of the Modern Conception of Human Rights

There is considerable diversity of opinion on how and when the modern conception of human rights evolved. There is less diversity of opinion on what those rights are. Most current discussions of human rights use as a model the definition and list of rights included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948.¹ The key features that emerge from the definition and the list are (1) that the rights in question are universal and inalienable, (2) that they belong to the individual not in virtue of citizenship in a particular state but simply in virtue of the individuals status as a human being, (3) that they must thus be conceived of internationally, not nationally, and (4) that they include not only entitlements to be free from undesirable social and political circumstances and activities but also the positive entitlement to 'dignity' in work and in standard of living. The opening sentence of the Preamble refers to 'the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family'. Article 28 refers to a 'social and international order' to which everyone is entitled and in which the rights and freedoms listed in the Declaration can be realized. Articles 22—6 affirm rights to social security; work and equal pay for equal work; rest and leisure; a standard of living adequate for health and well-being; and education.

For purposes of this paper, I shall adopt the following very brief and simple account of the evolution of the modern conception of human rights.

1. The notion of natural and inalienable rights was established shortly before and during the European Enlightenment and promulgated in classic political documents like the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Two factors distinguish natural rights as understood in the Enlightenment from human rights as understood in the late twentieth century: (1) Enlightenment-era philosophers spoke of the universality of natural rights but did not seriously include women or most non-Europeans under the implicit rubric 'human', and (2) though they spoke of a civil society (body politic, commonwealth, and so forth) and recognized that people live as citizens of states, they generally did so in the abstract, without taking into account the specific differences between actual states.
2. Nineteenth-century nationalism established the nation as a category to be reckoned with but also to be transcended if the goals of an international movement were to be realized. The category 'nation' in this period refers not only to the nation-state but also to minority groups living within nation-states, groups that we would term today ethnic groups or religious groups. The Jews in Russia, for example, were routinely called—and willingly called themselves—a nation.
3. Several events and movements established rights as a specifically international goal. No doubt the earliest such event of great consequence was the French Revolution, which (viewed, of course, in the most sympathetic light) sought to export to other nations the Enlightenment principles on which it was founded. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of (1) an international anti-slavery movement, (2) an international socialist movement, and (3) an international women's rights movement.
4. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a series of high-profile issues that were international in character and thus focused attention on human rights (rights belonging to all human beings, regardless of nationality), as opposed to purely civil rights (rights belonging to citizens of a particular state). Among these issues were anti-Semitism (the Dreyfus case in France, the Mendel Beilis blood-libel case in Russia, the lynching of Leo Frank in the United States), women's rights (especially the voting rights movements in England and the United States), imperialism and abuses against subject peoples (as in Belgian colonial control of the Congo), immigration rights (as in the United States Congress's use of racial stereotyping to exclude 'undesirable' groups), and genocide (the Turkish massacres of Armenians during the First World War).
5. The Covenant of the League of Nations, included as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, contained a brief section devoted to human rights and established international law as a 'rule of conduct among Governments', something far more extensive than any previous conception of a law extending beyond the boundaries of an individual nation. In addition, the International Labor Organization, created by the Treaty of Versailles as an agency of the League of Nations, established the concept of social justice as the foundation for universal peace and thus gave that concept an international context.
6. In 1948, the Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, completed work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

The fourth stage, the one containing high-visibility international issues, is the crucial stage separating the natural-rights theories of the Enlightenment from the modern, international conception of human rights. This is the stage in which our story is set. The general notion of rights was certainly not new to the immigrant Jewish intellectuals in America. For those who had cut their political teeth in Russia before emigrating, 'equal rights' (ravnopravie in Russian), referring to equality among ethnic and religious groups or equality between the sexes, was one of the most frequently heard slogans in the revolutionary movement. For those who embraced the moderate Marxist world-view of social democracy in the United States, there was an implicit rights issue in the labour movement's concern for working conditions and standard of living. But it is during this fourth stage that the immigrant Jewish intellectuals in America begin to take account of international rights issues other than equal rights in Russia and the issues that were implicitly part of their Marxist world-view.

Human Rights and Di tsukunft

Two circumstances are worth pointing out. First, within this period, Di tsukunft came to human rights rather late, addressing the issue primarily in 1913 and after. Second, it passed certain issues over in silence. One can find hardly a word, for example, about the Dreyfus case in the pages of Di tsukunft. This is no doubt pardy because the period that saw the most frequent references to the case in other American Yiddish publications (1898-9) fell within the five-year period (1897—1902) during which Di tsukunft was closed. But the affair was back in the news in 1904, when Dreyfus was granted a new trial, and in 1906, when he was cleared on appeal. Di tsukunft took almost no notice on either occasion.

The journal's silence on another issue seerns just as puzzling at first glance. From late 1901 to 1910, the New York Times (a source of news that Dt tsukunft's contributors frequently tapped) ran stories on the atrocities that Belgian troops were committing against the native population of the Congo Free State under the rule of King Leopold II. The issue attracted the greatest attention between 1906 and 1909 (the year after Leopold sold the territory, which had been his personal possession since 1885, to his own country), inspiring dozens of articles and editorials each year.³ Di tsukunft, which took pride in championing the rights of the poor and dispossessed, never said a word about this human catastrophe. In fact, between 1902, when Di tsukunft resumed publication after a five-year hiatus, and 1912, the year before Abraham Liessin began his twenty-five-year stint as editor, the journal published almost no articles on any non-European foreign nation, and so almost nothing on the subject of imperialism.

What human rights issues did the journal confront, why did it choose these issues instead of others, and why did it begin to confront them when it did instead of at another time?

The year 1913 was a turning point for Di tsukunft. Before that, if the journal dealt with rights issues, it was almost always obliquely or merely implicitly, in connection with the labour movement in America, with international socialism, and with Russia. But in 1913, the journal's contributors begin to turn their attention to human rights issues in and for themselves. Articles on anti-Semitism appear in Di tsukunft in 1913, as do articles on Negro rights in America and the general question of race; immigration rights and policy; and women's voting rights and voting rights in general. One reason for the shift was no doubt Abraham Liessin's assumption of the journal's editorship in 1913. Though his upbringing was in some respects typical for an immigrant Russian Jewish intellectual (he received a traditional religious education, was self-taught in Russian, and became involved in socialist agitation in the old country as a young man before emigrating), Liessin had always been something of a maverick, embracing from an early age the notion of a socialism specifically for the Jews. In addition, by the time he became editor of Di tsukunfi, he was far less doctrinaire and rigid in his own views than many other immigrant Jewish progressives of his era. In a marked departure from the editorial policies of his predecessors, Liessin introduced tolerance and diversity to a publication that for much of its existence had been overdy parochial in its viewpoint and its choice of topics. Another reason for the journal's shift in 1913 and succeeding years was simply the high-visibility events, both in the United States and in Europe, that focused attention on human rights. The notorious blood-libel case against Mendel Beilis in Russia—and thus anti-Semitism—was in the news in 1913 because that was the year when the trial and Beilis's eventual acquittal took place. Negro rights, anti-Semitism, and Jewish-Negro relations were in the news in 1915 because of the death of Booker T. Washington, the Supreme Court finding that the infamous Grandfather Clauses in Southern states were unconstitutional, and the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia.

But a shift in editorial policy and the force of events do not entirely explain either the choice of issues or the timing. Why, for example, when Di tsukunfi has occasion to refer to politics in Belgium after 1913 is there never any mention of that country's colonial policies or its monarchy? And why is women's suffrage largely ignored until 1913?

To a considerable extent, the journal's contents tell their own story. In the rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• PART I: Politics
• PART II: Culture