In honor of this Labor Day week, here are some reflections on the history of the labor movement, and Jewish heroes who have fought for worker rights.
When I left my former congregation to come here to Stephen Wise, a group of mothers with whom I had shared parenting and activism gifted me a number of children’s books focused on justice. One of those books was “Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909.” It is a children’s biography of Ukrainian immigrant Clara Lemlich Shavelson, the farbrente Yidishe meydle (fiery Jewish girl) who organized women into the International Ladies Garment Workers Union beginning in 1905. At a 1909 strike meeting at the Cooper Union, Shavelson’s fiery speech, in Yiddish, set off the Uprising of the 20,000, the largest strike by women workers to that date.
The book itself focuses entirely on her labor activism upon her arrival in the United States, but as I learned more about her, I was even more interested in her insatiable desire to learn as a young girl, and how that shaped her outlook on the world.
The Jewish Women’s Archive includes Shavelson in their Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, and writes the following:
Like most girls, she was taught Yiddish but was offered no further Jewish schooling. Her parents were willing to send her to public school but found that Gorodok’s only school excluded Jews. Angered by the Russian government’s antisemitism, her parents forbade her to speak Russian or to bring Russian books into their home. The headstrong child continued her study of Russian secretly, teaching Russian folk songs to older Jewish girls in exchange for their volumes of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Turgenev.
Before she was in her teens, Clara was sewing buttonholes on shirts to pay for her reading habit. Already fluent in written Yiddish, she fattened her book fund by writing letters for illiterate mothers to send to their children in America. When her father found a cache of books hidden beneath a meat pan in the kitchen, he burned the whole lot and Clara had to start collecting again. She began storing books in the attic, where she would perch on a bare beam to read. One Sabbath afternoon, while her family dozed, she was discovered by a neighbor. He not only kept her secret but lent her revolutionary tracts from his own collection.
As an avid reader myself, and as a parent trying to raise avid readers—and children committed to making the world a better place—I am struck by the connection that Ms. Shavelson understood between books—of any kind—and the ability to imagine a world different from the one in which she was living.
We Jews have long been called People of the Book, and we too are called upon to imagine a world different from—and better than—the one in which we live … and then to work towards it.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer