From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. But as the essays gathered by Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker make clear, the IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.
At its height, the IWO had almost 200,000 members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class—Jews, Blacks, Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Hispanics, and others—it operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the US's entry into World War II, the IWO was also ahead of its time in championing the nascent Civil Rights movement. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.
Contributors: Felicia Bevel, Paul Buhle, Matthew Calihman, Annabel Cohen, Dylan Kaufman-Obstler, Paul C. Mishler, Ben Ratskoff, Elissa Sampson, Henry Srebrnik, Lauren B. Strauss, Nerina Visacovsky, Jennifer Young, Robert M. Zecker
1. Forging Jewish Unity in Wartime Platforms
2. The Jewish Workers University: Yiddish Communist Education
3. Portrait of a Radical: June Gordon, the Emma Lazarus Clubs, and Communist Jewish Women's Activism 1920-1970
4. A Tale of Two Revisions: The Color Line and the Jewish Problem, From Galicia to Dougherty County
5. Langston Hughes and the International Workers Order
6. Staging the Interracial Left: Paul Robeson, Black Artistry and the International Workers Order
7. Fighting for Black Rights Through the Fraternal Arena: Louise Thompson Patterson in the International Workers Order
8. Di progressive: YKUF in Argentina and South America
9. A Constellation of One's Own: Canadian Jewish Communists & their Mass Organizations
10. "Dancing at Two Weddings": Radical Jewish Artists and their Relationship to Yiddishkayt from the Popular Front to the Post-War Era
11. We'll stay here 'til the fascist tomb is made" – the IWO and the International Brigade
12. "A Fraternal Order Sentenced to Death":: The Legal Persecution of the International Workers Order
13. From Many Roots, One Tree: Jews and the Origins of Multi-Ethnic Communism in the U.S., 1921-1972
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