Kulturkamph on the American Jewish Left: progressive artists react to events in the 1920s and 1930s

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Some sources that address the history of the riots and the ensuing controversies over them include: Naomi W. Cohen, The Year After the Riots: American Responses to the Palestine Crisis of 1929-30 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988); Martin Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1928-35 (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1993); and Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, UPNE, 2015).

² Ruth R. Wisse, “Drowning in the Red Sea,” Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2011. Letters responding to Wisse in JRB, Spring 2012.

³ Pauline Zutringer, “Machine Art is Bourgeois,” New Masses, 4 February 1929, 31.

⁴ Other faculty members at the School were Nikolai Cikowsky, Reginald Marsh, Robert Minor, Anton Refregier, Philip Reisman, and Raphael Soyer. Marquardt, New Masses, 70, n. 37.

⁵ Ibid, 67.

⁶ Memo “To all John Reed Clubs,” n.d. [circa 1932]. Records of the CPUSA, Reel 235, Folder (Delo) 3049, Library of Congress Document Center, Washington, D.C.

⁷ Encyclopedia Judaica “Palestine, Inquiry Commissions,” vol. 13 (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972), 31.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Freiheit, Sunday, 25 August 1929, 1.

¹⁰ Freiheit, Thursday, 29 August 1929, 4.

¹¹ Freiheit, Thursday, 5 September 1929, 1.

¹² See Wisse, 190–192.

¹³ The number went from a high of 22,000 to less than 20,000 in the immediate aftermath. By 1951, approximately two decades later, the Freiheit retained only 14,000 subscribers – which still exceeded the Daily Worker's circulation – and by the beginning of the 1960s, it had 8,000. This, as Arthur Leibman points out, can be attributed as much to the decreasing numbers of Yiddish readers as to the declining acceptance of Communism. Arthur Leibman, “The Ties that Bind: Jewish Support for the Left in the United States,” in Ezra Mendelsohn, ed., Essential Papers on Jews and the Left (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1997), 341–344.

¹⁴ See Freiheit cartoons from, respectively, September 19, 1929, 8; September 6, 1929, 8; September 13, 1929, 8; and September 12, 1929, 8.

¹⁵ The illustration, by leading Kundes illustrator LOLA (Leon Israel), accompanies a satiric article entitled “Dem ‘Forverts’ arbeiter-freindlikhkeit” (“The Forward's friendliness to the worker”), Der groyser kundes, December 29, 1916.

¹⁶ Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1984), 382--83.

¹⁷ Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 51–59.

¹⁸ Ibid, p. 75. Diner also counts 104 articles—more than on any single event dealing with race relations in America—written about the Scottsboro case in two Yiddish papers from 1931 to 1935. Diner, p. 42.

¹⁹ Diana Klebanow and Franklin L. Jonas, People's Lawyers: Crusaders for Justice in American History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.), 173--185.

²⁰ This sculpture is part of the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in New York. The photo is from the exhibition catalog edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York 1900–1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 59.

²¹ See Der Hamer covers from March/April 1931, November 1932, and January 1936. The journal's own masthead can be read as an exercise in subterfuge; its Yiddish subtitle is “Komunistisher khoydesh-zhurnal” (Communist Monthly Journal), while the English text—required by US Postal Laws in order to identify mass mailings sent through its system—reads “Der Hamer, Workers’ Monthly.” It is possible that the editors felt that an English-language banner headline identifying their magazine more clearly as a Communist organ might have created impediments to its distribution and, thereby, to the dissemination of their ideology.

²² Klehr, p. 171.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Also, by 1935–1936, the Gropper family had moved away from the center of radical activity to their home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and William began to devote himself much more to oil painting—which did not offer the same opportunities to respond quickly to current events as his cartoon had always provided. See Patricia Phagan's unpublished dissertation, “William Gropper and ‘Freiheit’: A Study of his Political Cartoons, 1924-1935,” (UMI, Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 231.

²⁵ Jeffrey Sharlet, “Troublemakers,” Pakn Treger 26 (Fall 1997), 17–27, http://www.alba-valb.org/resources/lessons/jewish-volunteers-in-the-spanish-civilwar/jewish-volunteers-in-the-spanish-civil-war, and https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/spanjews.pdf.

²⁶ See my dissertation, “Painting the Town Red: Jewish Visual Artists, Yiddish Culture, and Progressive Politics in New York, 1917-1939,” (UMI, Ann Arbor, MI, 2004), especially chapter 8.

²⁷ Liebman, Jews and the Left, 352.

²⁸ Earl Browder reportedly mocked such reports, saying: “There is as much chance of Russo-German agreement as of Earl Browder being elected President of the Chamber of Commerce.” Klehr, 387.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid, 400--401.

³¹ Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1979), 352.

³² Helen Hiller, “Portrait of an Artist,” Citizen Register, Ossining, NY, October 1, 1964. Clipping from Gropper file at A.C.A. Gallery, New York, NY.

³³ Andrew Weinstein, “From International Socialism to Jewish Nationalism: The John Reed Club Gift to Birobidzhan,” in Milly Heyd and Matthew Baigell, eds., Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 156.