Max Levitas (1915-2018)
Max Levitas was a towering figure of Britain’s labor movement. A hardened enemy of the Blackshirts in the years before World War II, the Irish-Jewish communist devoted nearly a century to fighting injustice.
Max Levitas in March 2011. Michael Shade / Flickr
With the death of Max Levitas, who passed away on Friday, November 2 at the age of 103, Britain has lost one of its most beloved Communist figures. An adopted son of London, and the East End particularly, Max was a towering figure in his local community, widely respected for his staunch advocacy of working people against racism and oppression.
With his passing, the broader labor movement has also lost one of its last remaining links to the heroic struggles against fascism, mass unemployment, and treacherous living conditions waged by millions of ordinary people in the 1930s. Max was a prominent working-class militant who played a central role in many of London’s great labor upheavals over the course of many decades. Even after his sad passing, his lifelong commitment to the cause of labor is an outstanding example for future generations.
From “Little Jerusalem”
Harry Levitas and Leah Rick both belonged to the generation of young Jews who fled westwards from the antisemitic pogroms and endemic poverty of the Tsarist Empire. Having left their respective homelands of Lithuania and Latvia, they met in Dublin in 1913. There, they married and settled into the tight-knit Jewish community based around the Irish capital’s Portobello neighborhood. Max was born in 1915 in the same “Little Jerusalem” area that James Joyce chose as the home of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.
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