"Another, Multicultural World Was Possible"

The IWO was founded in 1930 by Yiddish speakers when they split off from the Workers Circle. Almost immediately, the Order made a series of choices that set it apart: it decided to be interracial and interethnic, it invited other groups into a fraternal umbrella that did not discriminate on the basis of race or religion, and it took no profit on its safety-net life and health insurance, which notably included reproductive health.

What made it genuinely unusual was its analysis. The IWO insisted that antisemitism in the United States was bound up with Jim Crow, lynching, and anti-immigrant sentiment, and that you could not fight one without fighting the others. It believed in unity in diversity. When you talk about doikayt (hereness), the question becomes: who is your co-territorial cultural other when you're a stranded immigrant or the child of one? The song "Strange Fruit," written by the Abel Meeropol [under the pseudonym Lewis Allan], is one answer to that question. The Rosenberg children, who were adopted by the Meeropols, attended IWO summer camps. That world is closer to ours than people realize.

The insurance was the entry point, not the ceiling. From the start, the founders understood themselves as both Jewish and worker (a fused, naturalized identity), and that framing pulled in Italians, Slavs, Hispanics, and eventually fifteen other groups. Most of these communities had been touched by the promise of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, so they shared a rough ideological vocabulary. One Jewish leader called the United States "the burnt melting pot." For people who had arrived before the gates effectively closed in 1924, who had little social mobility, especially during the Depression, and who were deeply attached to their languages, the conventional American social ladder, in which an immigrant ranked above a Black American but below a "true American," simply didn't make sense. They had lived through pogroms. They knew what lynching was.

It's also worth saying: roughly 90% of the Order's members had no connection to the Communist Party. But the Order was shut down during the Cold War and its members lost their benefits anyway, partly because of its leadership's politics, and partly, I'd argue, because of fear of its interracialism.

Through a combination of material need, shared analysis, and an enormous amount of daily, unglamorous work, much of it done by women.

The material need was real. Black Americans often couldn't buy insurance from mainstream companies, and when they could, it was at higher rates for reduced benefits. The IWO took no markup, and had volunteer members sell policies at cost. Black activists, who had been radicalized by Jim Crow, by the rollback of Reconstruction, and by the race-riot massacres of the Red Summer of 1919, were recruited and genuinely valued within the Party orbit. Spanish speakers in New York were largely Puerto Rican migrants, poorly welcomed and exploited; Mexican-origin Spanish speakers in California were fighting their own legal battles. The IWO offered all of them something concrete.

But the glue was cultural. Kultur-arbet (culture work) was central, alongside cross-group activities that emphasized recreation: baseball, bowling leagues, book clubs, movies. People had to figure out how to be in community while building new, primarily secular identities. The slogans capture the aspiration: "IWO White and Negro Unity". "Immigrants One, Immigrants All". "No Jim Crow in the IWO".

It wasn't simple. The IWO's leadership ideologically conflated socialism/communism itself with the defense of the Soviet Union as "the workers' state," and that automatic defense of Soviet positions alienated many on the broader Left. But we also found many instances of agency: lodges and members who didn't simply follow the Party line. The Order both bucked and reinforced Party politics at a moment when the Party itself wanted to be seen as American.

When you have Ruth Rubin, Itche Goldberg, June Gordon, Ruben Saltzman, alongside better-known figures like Clara Lemlich Shavelson, Paul Robeson, Louise Thompson Patterson, Langston Hughes, and Vito Marcantonio — their intertwined stories dance in your head. It's the stuff of dreams.

Marcantonio is a particularly interesting case for right now. He was an IWO Vice President, head of its Italian (Garibaldi) Society, and a seven-term Congressman from East Harlem who championed the rights of Puerto Ricans, Jews, Blacks, and Italians. He was the only member of Congress to vote against the Korean War. He sponsored numerous anti-lynching and poll-tax bills. He ran the American Labor Party. He appears fifty times in our book. And recently, a mayoral-campaign video invoking him went viral in New York City as a symbol of how diverse New Yorkers had once come together in adversity. The past keeps surfacing.

It's the end of one era and the dawning of another, but the interracialism has a different flavor afterward. We always walk in the footsteps of others. The people who protested segregation and Jim Crow in the 1930s and '40s left their imprint, even if they didn't get credit in the aftermath of the Red Scare.

Jackie Robinson didn't mysteriously appear on Ebbets Field; there were weekly picket lines there. Paul Robeson (a two-time First-Team All-American football player) actively intervened to make the case for integrating baseball. The civil rights organizing of the 1960s was largely the work of organizations that began to talk to each other, although they still red-baited in doing so. We also tell the story of W. E. B. Du Bois, pushed out of the NAACP by 1950, drawing close to IWO figures in his late period as he rethought his earlier theories of race and the color line and what they had to do with Jews and others.

The afterlives matter. The Emma Lazarus Federation (the "Emmas") were former IWO members who kept fighting for social justice for decades. Camp Kinderland survived. The integrated Jewish Young Folksingers chorus kept giving sold-out concerts; its co-founder Maddy Simon worked with Pete Seeger, Serge Hovey, and Bob De Cormier. Sojourners for Truth and Justice was founded in 1951 by IWO Vice President Louise Thompson Patterson, alongside Claudia Jones, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Charlotta Bass, and Beulah Richardson; Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress were members. The threads weren't cut; they were forced underground.

It feels like a necessary challenge for our times. We need to be able to articulate, in new and old ways, how to forge allyship and solidarity, how to find shared goals. The IWO's insistence that antisemitism in the U.S. is intrinsically tied to racism and to anti-immigrant sentiment is something we can learn from. So is "Unity in Diversity" as a frame for thinking about ourselves and others.

The current resonance comes from the ground we're standing on: the suppression of dissent, the active targeting of immigrants, growing interest in mutual aid, and the desire to form new communities that can draw from a toolbox of how people did this before. The federal government's destruction of the IWO and other interracial leftist organizations arguably forestalled support for Black voting and civil rights for a full twenty years. Those Cold War lessons are applicable to our own era.

We want to recuperate an interracial, interethnic past without nostalgia, but with respect for both its achievements and its constraints. Another, multicultural world was possible in the 1930s through the '50s. The archive shows us how it was built, and what it cost when it was taken apart.