Opening a Confiscated Archive: A View of the Interracial Yiddish Left’s Origins and Impact, with Elissa Sampson
Please register for this free online program, co-sponsored by the Workers Circle/Arbeter Ring of Northern California.
The International Workers Order (IWO), founded in 1930 as a mutual benefit insurance society by leftist Yiddish-speaking garment workers who had split from the Workmen’s Circle, rapidly became an umbrella organization that opened its membership benefits to others. It was organized chiefly along ethnic lines, of which the Jewish section, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, was the largest. They tied their support for creating a new Yiddish culture to fighting antisemitism, Jim Crow, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The IWO became uniquely interracial and multiethnic, championing early civil rights campaigns, and battling for labor unions and social reforms during the Great Depression and World War II. At its height, it had almost 200,000 members, drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the
working class. Its members included Clara Lemlich Shavelson, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson Patterson, Vito Marcantonio, Ruth Rubin, and Itche Goldberg.
Although its membership was not connected to the Communist Party, the IWO was declared a subversive organization during the Cold War, and it was liquidated in 1954. Nevertheless, even after their legal shutdown, the bonds from working together remained visible in Camp Kinderland, the integrated Jewish Young Folksingers chorus, and other efforts.
Cornell University’s archive of the IWO and the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order includes a huge body of materials seized by the State of New York in 1954. As she discusses the organization’s history, Dr. Elissa Sampson will draw visually from the archive to show its rich cultural and historic resources on interracial relationships and early civil rights advocacy.
Dr. Elissa Sampson is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage, and activism. She has pursued a life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization, and immigrant culture on New York’s Lower East Side, and in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, and Paris, making visible dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places. As a research associate in Cornell University’s Jewish Studies Program, Dr. Sampson worked extensively with Cornell’s Kheel Center archives on the International Workers Order, including its partial digitization. She co-organized a public, online academic conference, “Di Linke” (the Left), based largely on its archival Jewish Section holdings and has taught labor and gender history, including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, its memorialization, and relationship to current activism.nSampson is the co-editor of the book From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954 (Cornell University Press, 2026), noting that “Ben Katchor’s cover captures the humor and fervent beliefs of a movement whose resonance can be heard today.”