While some of the elements of the Jewish labor movement are still operative, “the jewel which crowned the movement”–the Big Four needle trade unions–“no longer consists of large numbers of Jewish workers,” Prof. Hyman Berman, historian, and member of the faculty of the University of Minnesota, told a joint meeting of the American Historical Association with the American Jewish Historical Society here.
“Attempts to ascertain the exact proportion of Jewish members in these unions have been thwarted,” Prof. Berman said. “But an educated guess would be that less than 10 percent of the workers currently employed in the needle trades and enrolled in its unions are Jewish. A large proportion of the union leadership, however, continues to be Jewish, and in fact, their Jewish interests have increased almost to the same degree that the Jewish membership declined in importance in the unions.”
Professor Berman recommended that a history of the Jewish labor movement be written “without fear or favor” with the purpose of describing “a vibrant experience of immigrant workers which clearly affected the history of this country.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
