In 1992, historian Howard Sachar, writing in A History of the Jews in America, describes young Jewish radicals as, “impressionable and idealistic…uniquely susceptible to the leagues and alliances…almost any ‘progressive’ movement would have claimed their loyalty.”

Young people indeed led American-Jewish radicalism, just as young people led American-Jewish immigration writ large. About 70 percent of those who arrived between the 1880s and 1920s were between the ages of 14–44, and another 25 percent were under 14. Tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants embraced socialism — organizing unions, attending meetings, conferences, lectures, parades, and social events — strengthening comradeship and their collective political vision.

Over the years, many Jewish scholars, like Sachar, have tried to render the relationship between Jews and socialism as not only obsolescent but illusory. A popular approach has been to say that confused immigrants, aimless and alienated, latched onto whatever ideology they could in order to acclimate to American society. In a sense, these intellectuals contend, leftism was something Jews grew out of as they adjusted to their new host country. William Herberg—an ex-Communist turned proto-neoconservative writer, who served a stint as National Review’s religion editor—first articulated this idea in 1952. Herberg says it was the “spiritual confusion, insecurity, and normlessness” that spurred Jewish leftism, but ultimately, Jews embraced American values “without reservation.” Many prominent intellectuals, such as Moses Rischin and Daniel Bell, have repackaged this storyline over the years.

Irving Howe, the distinguished socialist largely ignored by the Jewish community today, was the one major exception. In World of Our Fathers, the winner of the 1976 National Book Award, Howe writes:

Jewish socialism [has] become a colorful trauma in the process of adjustment, to be stored in the attic of memory, just as religion had been dismissed as a mere sublimated version of unfulfilled historical yearnings or a mere social agency holding in check oppressed masses. In both cases, the explanation explains away too much too easily. The historians refuse to confront Jewish radicalism in its own right.

What would an honest confrontation with Jewish radicalism require? Perhaps most significantly, it would involve disrupting the triumphal narrative that says Jews moved from poverty to achievement and embraced American political liberalism en masse. It would mean challenging the story that says Jews gave up their radical commitments as they became “real” Americans.

In 1914, it was estimated that a majority of the 1,400,000 Jews living in New York were working class and poor. A 1916 survey found over 50 percent of working Jews were employed in factories, tenement apartments, and sweatshops. But by the 1920s, Jews were steadily moving away from blue-collar jobs towards white-collared professions, and by the turn of the 21st century, 53 percent of Jewish men and 51 percent of Jewish women were in professional jobs, compared to only one-in-five among non-Jewish white men and women. Data for adults in the year 2000 also suggests that American-Jews had higher levels of wealth than those raised in other faiths.

This rags-to-riches tale of rising up the economic ladder is the general story young Jews learn today about our immigrant ancestors — we escaped Eastern European persecution and came to America very poor, we worked and studied hard, and ultimately we prevailed despite those anti-Semites who stood in our way.

No doubt, the Jewish political shift from socialism to liberalism was partially grounded in Jewish economic mobility. But such a narrative obscures the reality of the many Jewish individuals who do not fall so squarely into the classic American Success Story, and those who, counter to what Herberg insists, never endorsed American free-market values. As historian Tony Michels documents in A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York:

Historians write a lot about middle-class Jews — their neighborhoods, their synagogues, habits of consumption and so on, but mostly ignore the many Jews who never made it into the middle class or somehow fell from it…American Jewish history has thus been turned into a celebration of winners for whom winning comes easily and without costs. Themes of loss, alienation, ambivalence, disappointment and rebellion — all prominent in American Jewish fiction and autobiography (in Yiddish and English) barely exist in the major works of American Jewish history…In the success story that American Jewish history has become, the radical experience has been made irrelevant.

Take American-Jewish novelist, Anzia Yezeirska.

Anzia Yezeirska (1880–1970)

Yezeirska belonged to a group of Jewish writers who indeed rose out of childhood poverty but never emotionally or politically broke ties with the ranks of the oppressed working class from which they came. (In contrast, many Jews today are far removed from the working class and new immigrant populations.) Yezeirska’s radical politics suffused her fiction; in Salome of the Tenements, published in 1923, Yezeriska harshly critiques the liberal reform movement — settlement houses and the like — which she saw as inherently designed to suppress the poor. Yezeirska was no fan of liberals like Jane Addams and John Dewey, the do-gooders and philanthropists who pioneered these ideas. In one telling scene, Yezeriska’s protagonist, Sonya Vrunsky, watches social workers carry on with “the self-conscious look of virtue in their eyes.”

Jewish socialists, anarchists, and communists did not believe the United States was some wonderful land with boundless opportunities; they saw it as a country full of economic exploitation, its democratic values and capitalist system a blatant contradiction. Moreover, Jewish radicals have always inherently rejected the idea of Jewish unity, or “klal Yisrael.” As Irving Howe puts it, “in a society divided by irreconcilably hostile classes, [radicals] argued, Jewish unity was a chimera that served the interests of the bosses.” To belittle this genuine resentment, or chalk it up to errors made by misguided immigrants, is to disclaim the reality of thousands and thousands of Jews.