All Together Different

In the early 1930’s, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. All Together Different revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression.Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) appealed to an international force of coworkers, Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based cultural pluralism, which Daniel Katz newly terms “mutual culturalism,” back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth century Russian Empire. Built on original scholarship and bolstered by exhaustive research, All Together Different offers a fresh perspective on the nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.

All Together Different will be a useful text for students of American labor, immigration, Jewish studies, and women's studies. It should also be required reading for any current labor activist or activist on the political left interested in bridging the ethnoracial differences among the '99 percent.', In All Together Different, Daniel Katz, an associate professor of history at Empire State College of the State University of New York, reveals why and how the predominantly Jewish leaders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union enlisted many black and Hispanic colleagues beginning in the 1930s. Professor Katz mines archives at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and other research organizations to make his case that the recruitment was rooted in the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewis, In this fine study, Katz provides a model for how to integrate labor, racial/ethnic, immigration, and gender history., This exciting book upends the conventional wisdom that puts ethnic identity and class identity at odds. Katz recovers a rich legacy of Yiddish socialist wisdom that saw how the one could animate the other, and he shows how women organizers, in particular, applied this understanding to rebuild their union in the Depression era. Cultivating mutual cultural appreciation among struggling African American, Latino, Italian, and Jewish workers, they fostered union loyalty and labor militancy. A surprising story full of timely insights for todays readers., All Together Different is an inspired title for this pathbreaking study in ideological transference from Russia to America, from Jewish Bundism to interracial unionism. With insightfulness and distinctive nuance, Daniel Katz recovers the ILGWU's complicated and consequential worldunited in its differencesof inter-racialism and gendered tensions.

Daniel Katz is Professor of History and Dean of Labor Studies at the National Labor College. A former union organizer, he is a member of the Board of Directors of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York City.