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multitude of ironies that dot the landscape of Yiddishkeit. But it is an
important one . It helps to explain a great deal about the attitude the Jews
brought to America and which they were to will their children . And it forces
one to recognize the sense of deja vu which lingers about Jewish life in
America . The grandchildren and great-grandchildren are still players of the
Yiddish game-even if they are incapable of recognizing it. Compare this
description of radical Yiddish intellectuals in the 1880s with their Ivy–
educated offspring of the 1960s and' 70s.
They knew little about the conditions of the Jewish working class in
Eastern Europe, still in
its
early stages of formation, and knew next to
nothing about the conditions of the working class in America, either
native or immigrant. Declamatory, impassioned, theoretic, and sectar–
ian to the marrow, these pioneer radicals sometimes called themselves
socialists and sometimes anarchists, but they really had little of any tra–
dition to go by . They were a mixture of socialist, anarchist, positivist,
village atheist, and enlightened young Jews in love with the heroic style
of the Russian populists.
The stereotypes that have been thtust upon the American Jew, from
the much derided "Jewish mother, " to the idea that Jewish socialism was
cultural rather than political, are a useful index to the dissolution of Yiddish
culture in America. Inheriting the culture of contradictions, theJew's adap–
tation to the demands of American life was itself contradictory. And
yet,
the
compromises that he made were fairly
successful.
If Jewish trade unionism
represented the victory of practical politics over f3.ith in messianic socialism,
it was a victory with which the mass ofJewish workers were content to live.
Even in the most radical of the Jewish unions, the leadership had to face the
problem, so common in American life, of sacrificing long-range goals for
short-range interests. Jewish workers were probably more class-conscious
than their native American counterparts. But their class consciousness could
not survive in isolation. The failure of the Jewish Left, if that is what it is,
reflects the wider failure of the Left in America. And the self-educated
Jewish worker, so memorably brought back to life in these pages, remains
one of the more attractive figures produced by any working class . He serves,
too, as a useful reminder of a time when, for the worker, "liberation" meant
both the ability to live without hunger and the time to ponder' 'the connec–
tion between Herbert Spencer and the Vilna Gaon." Like the Jewish mother,
the passion for education that was so vital an aspect of the culture of Yid–
dishkeit has been transformed into a vulgar joke, a transformation accom–
plished by those who benefitted from the passion.
