This wasn’t only because of what he did in the 1930s. Mr. Levitas was determined to make sure that the lessons of the past were heeded today, in an age when racism and authoritarianism have returned to the forefront of politics in many parts of the world. His life told a story, often left out of official narratives, in which people can come together to take control of their fates.

Image An undated portrait of Mr. Levitas. Credit... Levitas Family

He was born in Dublin in 1915 to Jewish immigrants who had fled poverty and persecution in the Russian Empire. His relatives who stayed behind would later perish in the Holocaust. Max was the eldest of six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. His father worked as a tailor’s presser and the family lived in slum conditions. They were forced to leave Dublin in 1927 when Max’s father was blacklisted by the city’s sweatshop owners for his trade union activism. The whole family was political: Max’s brother Maurice was also a union activist, and even volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

Max left school at the age of 12 to work in the tailoring industry, and he threw himself into the labor movement as a teenager, joining the Young Communist League. He remained a Communist throughout his life. “It was never an issue to forge a Communist state like in the Soviet Union,” he told an interviewer in 2011. “We wanted to ensure that the ordinary working people of England could lead decent lives — not to be unemployed, that people weren’t thrown out of homes when they couldn’t pay their rent.”

Much of his campaigning centered on housing: In 1939, he organized a rent strike in his tenement block that lasted 21 weeks — and would introduce him to Sadie, whom he married two years later. In 1940, during the Blitz, he led an occupation of the Savoy Hotel to protest the lack of air-raid shelters for people in the East End — a campaign credited for the government’s subsequent decision to let people shelter in London Underground stations.

As a wave of radicalism swept Britain in 1945, Mr. Levitas was one of 10 Communist candidates elected to his borough council. He remained a councilor for 17 years — and when I first met him in 2012, he was still able to point out housing estates that had been built as a result of local campaigns. Two years after our meeting, he was still at it, leading a delegation from his apartment block to protest unfair charges for repair work. “He still spoke with all the fire of the young man at Cable Street,” one of his neighbors recalled. “It was astonishing, and none of the officials present dared to challenge him.” He was 99 at the time.