Jewish Identities on Strike?

In Annelise Orleck’s Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965, Jewish women are able to seize some sort of political control over their neighborhoods. It seems their success is bound in the strength of their communities. Orleck does not explore directly how their Jewish identities shape their community structure, but combined with class and immigrant-status, it is a significant part of how communities are structured.

Orleck explores how living as Jews in Eastern Europe in the last two decades of the 19^th century led the women and their families abroad. Governments at home targeted socially responsive Jews. Poor and vulnerable, many Jewish communities were toying with socialism, Zionism or a kind of “Yiddish cultural nationalism.” Such movements and ideals bound people together, and many ideas stuck as families moved to America (18).

The women, Orleck notes, were “ushered into a world swept by a firestorm of new ideas, where the contrasting but equally messianic visions of orthodox Judaism and revolutionary socialism competed for young minds” (17) Such a statement made me wonder if immigrants had to choose between their Judaism and socialist revolutionary activism at home or in America. Are there certain ties that bind people away from activism, and what else did these women have to sacrifice?

Though the beginning to the book highlights the Jewish cultural history that may have ignited seeds of discontent and charged the women with a mission. In later chapters, however, their Jewish identities and activities become secondary. I am left wondering if, like other detailed aspects of their social lives, their identities are intentionally left out of the book.

Through the book, women are rounding up not only factory workers and female laborers, but those in their own areas of the city. Immigrant communities were divided by nationality, and their Jewish, European identities held them together.

In chapter six, Clara Lemlich serves as a leading “spark plug” in her neighborhood, and the importance of having community members leading the Kosher meat boycott movements in various part of Brooklyn is clearly important. We learn that her soapbox speeches are in Yiddish and English, a moment that signals that her life is a bit different than the story normally portrays. There are no stories of her putting away her soapbox on the Sabbath, or meeting women at the Jewish women’s club or synagogue, but they may exist and be left out just as the rest of her non-activist activities are. Orlech’s decision of omission an important one, because readers come away with a sense that these women were able to make change by devoting all waking hours to fighting the fight. However, as immigrants in Brooklyn, I am sure these women were in some way connected with their Jewish heritage, though its significance is not clearly explored.