The internationalism of the American-Jewish labor movement and its limits

The Russian-Jewish socialists generally became more nationalist after their arrival in Palestine. But in the United States, the trend was toward internationalism. As described above, the youth who came over from Russia in the 1880s, imbued with theories in part populist and in part Jewish nationalist, largely ended up as orthodox Marxists and strict anarchists, in both cases, firmly hostile to nationalism in any shape or form. This evolution was illustrated by the names they chose–the earliest group came in 1881–2 as members of Am Olam (the Eternal People); the first radical Yiddish journal in New York was Di yidishe folks-tsaytung (The Jewish People's Journal) of 1887; but later journals were given titles that emphasized a class, not a national commitment: Di arbeter tsaytung (The Labor Journal), Di fraye arbeter shtime (The Free Labor Voice), Forverts (Forward), Di tsukunft (The Future).

However, from the late 1890s and more dramatically from 1903 this tendency became less all-embracing. The factors that encouraged counterforces (a more national current in the Jewish socialist mainstream; nationalist groupings on the socialist periphery) were for the most part not locally engendered, not American in origin. Rather, events in Europe imposed themselves from without, forcing ideological and organizational change upon the American movement.