Workers of the Diaspora

...My remedy is, we should not allow them to come over...

...Women, loyal to moyenne and petite couture, stuck by their dressmakers, or their own sewing machines, through thick and thin...

...The vast majority of these emigrants, though, left the lands of their birth during a mere half that time, 1880-1930, leaving behind a population of no more, perhaps, than seven million...

...And in the United States, African-Americans and Puerto Ricans filled the gap left in the mid-twentieth century by the anti-immigration laws...

...THESE TWO books, both the work of Nancy Green (an American professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris) belong to different genres and each has a very different focus, but it is where they overlap that they are perhaps most interesting...

...Both of Green's books revolve around a shared fulcrum: the mass migration of the Jews from Eastern Europe and their proletarianization in the burgeoning cities of the West...

...Similarly, from very early on a high degree of social and geographic mobility came to be associated with this immigrant group—a perception not necessarily of the kind to win friends among the rest of the population...

...As internationalists, they were pledged to class solidarity across frontiers...

...The surprisingly liberal policy of France is explained by Green as a response to the catastrophic losses suffered during the First World War and to the country's extreme demographic stagnation...

...With some 120,000 Jews from Eastern Europe settling in the country in the three decades before the First World War, the public had apparently had enough, and a series of laws in 1905, 1914, and 1919 brought such immigration to a "virtual halt...

...and in part by the cost-cutting logic of industry, did much to speed up the process...

...IN READY TO WEAR, Green focuses her attention specifically on the relationship between mass immigration and the development of the garment industry in modern times...

...JONATHAN FRANK EL teaches Russian and Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem...

...New York long dominated the "sartorial revolution" in the United States, and it was the Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe that from the 1890s until the 1920s provided most of the men and women who made the clothes: the cutting, sewing, and pressing (tasks often broken down into many sub-units in order to increase the always frenetic speed...

...120 DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS It is thus in no way surprising to find that the socialist and trade-union movements tended in the past—as they still do today—to demonstrate a kind of political schizophrenia when it comes to the issue of immigration (as indeed to that of free trade...

...Green refers to the "seemingly inexorable trend .. . from housedresses to slacks to jeans to jogging pants...

...But, as these books demonstrate, the immigrant experience was marked also by major differences...

...Asked to explain why he was unemployed for eight months a year while having to slave "day and night" for the rest of the time, he said that "the trade lies mostly in foreigners' hands and there are too many—and they are coming over every day...

...But, of course, while the historian can discern such long-term continuities, what the already entrenched workers saw at any given moment was that their wages were being undercut by the latest wave of newcomers desperate for any job at any price...

...In contrast, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-toWork is a monograph in which Green compares the history of the garment industry (with emphasis on women's clothing) in New York and Paris from the late nineteenth century until today...

...In the one case, the immigrant experience is set in the context of modern Jewish history...

...But the ethnic— like the gender—factor was always highly fluid in this industry of endless hours and cutthroat pay during the "season" and of lack of work during the off-season...

...Even though the Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe came, for the most part, from small towns and villages, they tended to concentrate not only in very large cities but also in very specific districts within those cities...

...And the truth is that, as in the past, there are no easy answers now in the age of globalization regarding freedom of movement and freedom of trade...

...Dozens of [the women] were left bloodied in fights...

...The invention of the sewing machine combined with the rapid emergence of mass marketing (department stores, advertising, and mail order) to set in motion the ready-to-wear revolution...

...and in the other it is taken as a salient example of DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 117 BOOKS how wave after wave of migrants have fed into, and been fed by, the garment industry in the two world centers of ladies' fashion: Paris and New York City...

...ASED ON A consistently comparative approach, the two works are designed to highlight both similarity and difference, whether within the increasingly dispersed Jewish diaspora or within the ever-lengthening line of migrations to the West from across the globe...

...In most of their new countries, for example, the immigrants found long-standing Jewish communities (of German or Sephardi origin) already in place...

...The net result has always been much confusion and inconsistency...

...Nor, perhaps, can anything else be expected from a historian dealing with the Jews of Eastern Europe and their fate before, during, and after the Second World War...

...Now, a century on, piece work and low pay for limitless hours of sewing, whether in the sweatshop or in the home, are back again...

...And what was to be done...

...and, in part, the ability to recruit cheap labor from one wave after another of immigration and migration...

...And what has been true of America is by now equally true of France and of Europe generally: this is globalization at its most extreme...

...Similarly in France, garment manufacture provided the primary source of work for the Jewish immigrants of the inter-war period...

...But somewhere in the subtext of Ready- to - Wear, it is possible to sense that the author's sympathies lie with the feverish scramble, the hustle and bustle, the sheer anarchy of the open market, even if it is based so largely on sweated labor and illegal immigration...

...But while these communities in the United States were largely atomized and inchoate, in Great Britain the Jewish establishment was centralized and powerful, decked around with quasi-official institutions (the Board of Deputies, the United Synagogue, the chief rabbi, and the Board of Guardians) and glorying in the prestige of the Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Montagus...

...as spokesmen for the organized workers at home, they more often than not felt dutybound to support closed-door policies...

...By the mid-1930s, first- and secondgeneration Italians constituted the largest ethnic group in the New York area (some hundred thousand out of a quarter of a million) within the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), then still known anachronistically as a "Jewish union...

...Set against this backdrop, the sheer scale of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe is astonishing...

...At a furious rate, the new arrivals founded synagogues and prayer houses (there were twenty-nine Jewish congregations in New York in 1872, eight hundred in 1914), home-town fraternities (landsmanshaftn), trade unions, and Yiddish newspapers (in New York, of course, with huge success, but also, for example, in France, where no less than 130 periodicals in Yiddish appeared in the inter-war period...

...So it is not surprising that when the women of the Lower East Side decided in 1902 to organize a protest against the inflated prices of kosher meat, they turned directly against the butchers...

...Proportionately, the only other exodus from Europe that surpassed it was that of the Catholic population from Ireland...

...and Paris witnessed a very similar rise during these same years: from 35,000 to 150,000...

...But the ILGWU from very early on in its history was accused of excessive collaboration with the bosses and—to drive home just how complex these issues were and are—in its anxiety to keep the competitive edge of the organized work force, it actually opposed the minimum wage in the 1960s...

...That number jumped over the next twenty years to perhaps 135,000...

...Today in both Paris and New York, Chinese immigrants have become the dominant ethnic group in the industry...

...In general, though, the resistance in France was fierce...

...Thus, while the American Federation of Labor (for decades led by Samuel Gompers, an immigrant from Central Europe, himself Jewish) generally favored severely restricting immigration, the ILGWU usually worked in the opposite direction...

...Equipped with an impressive scholarly apparatus, Ready-to-Wear is a readable history with a happy minimum of social science jargon...

...Changing fashions, dictated in part by new ways of life (how could you get into a car wearing an exuberantly large hat...

...His edited volume Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy has recently been published by Oxford University Press...

...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 121...

...These and many other such regularities clearly justify Green's plea that the historians should study the modern Diaspora as a unity...

...Jews had first come from the Russian empire to Argentina in the 1890s under the auspices of Baron Maurice de Hirsch and his Jewish Colonization Association in order to settle as farmers, but by 1914 "many of the Jewish gauchos had left . . . for the city," bringing the number of East European Jews in Buenos Aires up to some fifty thousand...

...In Paris, the industry has employed Turks, Dominicans, Yugoslays of various kinds, Armenians, Mauritians, and Pakistanis...

...Police wagons flew continually, loaded with arrested women...

...Or, as Green puts it, the Jewish tailor can serve as "a metaphor for other immigrants in the garment labor market...

...In America, the ,advance of ready-to-wear clothing was celebrated as a triumph for democratization (on a Sunday in Central Park it was becoming hard to distinguish between the poor and the middle class) and this view was even shared, in the spirit of de Tocqueville, by one or two maverick French people...

...Her central thesis involves a paradox...

...Thousands of women," the socialist daily, the Forverts, reported excitedly, "clashed with the butchers and their customers...

...Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora is a collection of documents, many translated into English for the first time, selected to give an immediate sense of what daytoday life was like in the densely packed Jewish quarters of Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Paris, London, and New York in the years 1880-1939...

...On the one hand, Green shows how the clothing industry has followed the standard pattern dictated by the logic of technological innovation and market competition...

...Mixing technical and statistical detail with local color, it belongs to the same species (to take a classic example) as David Landes's history of the Swiss watch industry, Revolution in Time...

...Four million Jews moved westward between 1830 and 1925 to Central and Northern Europe, North and South America, South Africa, and Palestine (to this, one could add Australia...

...but it was a losing battle, and since the Second World War this last bastion of production for, DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 119 BOOKS or by, the individual has been steadily destroyed...

...The consequent resentment could easily undermine any sense of ethnic unity—as was graphically illustrated by the following replies given to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration of 1903 by an old-time Jewish immigrant about those of his own kind following in his footsteps...

...The Jews had been preceded by the Irish and by 1905 were already being joined by Southern Italians, particularly unmarried young women...

...But, above all, it was the needle trades that consistently provided the newcomers, or "greenhorns," with their best chance to find an opening and some kind of minimal pay...

...East European Jews were not made welcome in the German empire prior to 1914...

...At the most fundamental (and ultimately fateful) level was the question of how easy it was to enter and settle in any given country at any given time—an issue raised, if only tangentially, in Jewish Workers...

...In economic terms, what made this massive movement of mostly penniless people possible was the range of opportunities open, except in slump years, in manufacture (sweated labor) or in retail (peddling, street vending, carting...

...But it then moved into the area of men's clothing and finally into women's wear (starting with such items as suits and blouses, but only after much resistance reaching dresses...

...And there, as Jewish Workers amply illustrates, in the East End of London, the "Pletzl" (Marais) in Paris (the subject of yet a third book by Green published in 1986), the eleventh district in Buenos Aires, the Lower East Side of New York, and other smaller centers around the world, similar social patterns and processes reproduced themselves...

...Everywhere that they settled in significant numbers, they brought with them the party politics and ideological feuds developed in the czarist empire: the militantly orthodox against the no less militant atheists, Marxists against anarchists, Zionists against Bundists, and, in the inter-war years, communists against socialists...

...Be that as it may, by the mid-1930s, restrictions were in place even in these two countries of refuge (as in Palestine also), leaving nowhere for the Jews of Eastern Europe to go...

...Green does not take up the cudgels for one side or the other in this ongoing conflict between the restrictionists and their opponents...

...Or is it rather, as Green suggests, that these soul-destroying modes of production were never actually suppressed...

...But, he was pressed, "if that had been done 13 years ago, [would not] that have stopped you...

...Freedom of movement and its gradual foreclosure overshadow all else in this chapter of twentieth century history...

...The United States, which in the parallel period saw the arrival of by far the greatest number of Jewish immigrants, as many as 118 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS two million, followed suit with its own legislation in the early 1920s, cutting down entry from among all the populations of Eastern and Southern Europe to a mere trickle...

...Here we are very much in the world as predicted (more or less) by Karl Marx...

...In contrast, Great Britain enjoyed an exceptionally positive image in the eyes of the Jews in Continental Europe, though the reverse was all too often not the case...

...Ethnic replacement, moreover, was joined early by geographic mobility as manufacturing was shifted at ever shorter intervals in order to seek out lower labor costs, to escape higher taxes or to flee the unions...

...But there were other points of contrast within the new Diaspora...

...That left Argentina and France (apart from Mandatory Palestine) as the two major countries with their doors still ajar...

...What has made this apparently illogical development possible has been, in part, the competitive advantage provided by proximity to the fashion designers and buyers...

...Naturally enough, the manufacture of clothing in standardized sizes was first introduced in order to meet the growing needs of the armed forces as conscription became the norm in Europe...

...No less striking was the speed with which profound linguistic and social gaps opened up in all these centers between the immigrants and the second generation, parental authority eroding together with the use of the Yiddish language...

...In 1970, there were still some fortyfive thousand dressmakers in France, by 1985, only six thousand...

...Drawing on newspaper articles, leaflets, poetry, and fiction, it provides an important supplement to The Jew in the Modern World, the bynow standard anthology of Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, which concentrates more on political and intellectual than on social history...

...Looking back over a span of more than a century, the longue clurde, what is striking is how beneath all the flux, the same cyclical patterns have recurred, preserving Seventh Avenue and le Sentier, if not in all their former glory, at least still in active contention, employing many tens of thousands of workers...

...I would not be sorry," he replied...

...For all the efforts of trade unions and progressive politicians to introduce order into the chaos, to control working conditions and impose sanitary regulations, the "inside-shop" never became entrenched enough to render the jobbers, contractors, and apidceurs superfluous...

...Nor would Holland, with its indigenous and largely impoverished Jewish population in Amsterdam, have been an attractive option...

...The logic of the market took production out of New York to Chicago or Rochester, on to the West and Southwest, and thence overseas, particularly to the Far East...

...AND YET, on the other hand—here is the paradoxical twist in this narrative—for all the inexorability of change, of flight from the high-cost center to the low-cost periphery, a highly significant part of the women's clothing industry has actually maintained itself in New York and Paris...

...In contrast, when thousands demonstrated in the East End of London in 1889 to protest unemployment, they marched to the Duke Street Synagogue at the time of the Friday night service, demanding—in vain, as they had expected—to be addressed by the chief rabbi...