Yom HaShoa, Labor and the Holocaust
Poster by Mitchell Loeb, 1934. The Jewish Labor Committee, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the Labor Chest to Combat Nazism and Fascism, and others made use of it in outreach campaigns.
April 21, 2020: New York, NY - On this day of commemoration of the Holocaust, we remember the origins of the Jewish Labor Committee, founded on February. 25, 1934, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, to provide a presence for the activists of the mostly Yiddish-speaking, mostly immigrant Jewish labor movement, in the American labor movement and in the mainstream Jewish community. The JLC's aim was to mobilize labor in the struggle against the rising threat of Nazism in Germany, and, more generally, of fascism in Europe.
You can learn about the JLC's Holocaust-era history at this online exhibition, prepared by the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, NYU. The exhibit is based on "Labor and the Holocaust: the Jewish Labor Committee and the Anti-Nazi Struggle," by Gail Malmgreen.