Today's JLC's 82nd anniversary
February 25, 2016: New York, NY - Today's our 82nd anniversary - the Jewish Labor Committee was founded on this day, Feb. 25th, 1934, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, to provide a presence for the Jewish community, specifically the activists of the mostly Yiddish-speaking, mostly immigrant Jewish labor movement, in the councils of the American labor movement and in the larger mainstream Jewish community "establishment," and to mobilize labor in the struggle against the rising threat of Nazism in Germany, and, more generally, the rise of fascism in Europe.
Its founding meeting, at Central Plaza on Second Avenue, brought together more than a thousand delegates representing the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, United Hebrew Trades, Workmen's Circle, Jewish Daily Forward Association, and a number of smaller groups. Baruch Charney Vladeck, general manager of the Forward, was chosen president; David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, treasurer; Joseph Baskin of the Workmen's Circle, secretary; and Benjamin Gebiner, also of the Workmen's Circle, executive secretary. Holding that only a broad-based workers' movement could overthrow Hitlerism, the JLC emphasized its labor orientation and nonsectarian philosophy. Its aims were to support Jewish rights everywhere, support all progressive and democratic anti-fascist groups, aid refugees, and educate the American labor movement (and the general public) about the Nazi threat.
Back in 1985, some 850 boxes of historical records of the JLC were deposited at the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, part of the Tamiment Library at New York University. This vast collection contained more than three million pages of documentation and ten thousand photographs, posters, and graphics, recording the work of the Committee from its founding in 1934 through the early 1980s.
For several years, the Archives' staff worked on cataloging and microfilming the earliest portions of the JLC collection -- preserving for scholarly use a rich and unique record of the American Jewish labor movement's anti-Nazi activity, support of Underground resistance movements, and aid to Holocaust survivors. Researchers using the collection have given us new insights into Holocaust history, and altered our understanding of American Jews' - and American labor's - responses to the rise of Nazism.
This online exhibit, prepared in 1996-'97, presents a portfolio of a hundred photographs and documents from the JLC Collection; the text has been adapted from an article by JLC archivist Gail Malmgreen, originally published in Labor's Heritage (October 1991). The exhibit's seven pictorial sections take the viewer on a chronological journey, from the origins of the JLC, through its anti-Nazi activity of the 1930s, to early rescue efforts and wartime assistance to the anti-Nazi Underground, and then examines three aspects of postwar aid and reconstruction. A final section offers a bibliography of resources for further study.
