Irving Howe’s Socialist Reflections on Jewish Life in the US
Irving Howe was the child of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1920s. He helped to forge the democratic socialist tradition in the US and offered a defense of universalist politics.
Irving Howe chronicled the breadth of social transformation as European Jews became Americans. (Wikimedia Commons)
Nearly fifty years on from its publication, Irving Howe’s 1976 World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made remains relevant. Those who pick up a copy in 2025, during ongoing and volatile debates in American Jewish communities over Palestine and Israel, may recognize something in the bitterness and sincerity of the struggles over the relationship between politics and identity that it recounts. Through Howe’s narrative, World of Our Fathers harmonizes the socialist anthems of early Jewish immigrant culture with a requiem for America’s Old Left.
Howe was the founding editor of Dissent, author of many books, and a reputed literary critic. But the reception of World of Our Fathers, including a National Book Award, marked the critical and commercial peak of his career. With a journalistic attention to minutiae, the book details the lives of European Jewish immigrants around the turn of the last century, foregrounding the stories of migrants who fled across contested borders in and around the region of current-day Ukraine, surviving armed conflict, revanchist imposition, and the threat of statelessness — many of the same postcolonial issues that remain pressing throughout the world today.
From the 1880s to the 1920s, some 2.5 million Ashkenazi Jews left Europe, mainly from the Russian empire, bound for America and Palestine. It was “one of the highest rates of emigration recorded in the history of modern migrations,” according to the historian Liebmann Hersch.
Howe, the child of these migrants, resurrects the sociopolitical milieu of his parents. These communities of refugees helped to form the cultural and political world of American Jews in the 1970s. Almost half a century on, World of Our Fathers remains a peerless amalgamation of European Jewish stories passed down in America.
The context in which Howe wrote was one in which Jewish identity was in flux. Some young American Jews in the New Left — contemporary shorthand for people Howe and his peers deemed “campus radicals” — decried the archaism of European socialism and the precarious politics of immigrant identity, much in the way that Zionists have sought to displace diaspora consciousness with Jewish nationalism. Howe stuck to his guns as a bastion of opposition in the face of New Left campus activism and other movements that radicalized Jews in American politics. These movements were, he argued, guilty of disowning their cultural heritage.
Ultimately, the lasting effect of Howe writing World of Our Fathers was to sustain a stripe of argumentation critical to Jewish life, one responsible for cultivating impassioned ideals that continue to stimulate generational and ideological diversity in American Jewry. What began with Abraham Cahan, the future founder of America’s oldest Jewish news outlet, the Jewish Daily Forward, critiquing emigration to America in a Russian newspaper in 1882, “How many lives you have broken. . .” would carry over to a teenage Clara Lemlich’s agitating for labor rights in 1909, as Howe chronicled, by her “flow of passionate Yiddish which would remain engraved in thousands of memories.” These progenitors of radical Jewish activism established the foundations of the Old Left that Howe lionized and identified with as part of a multigenerational class struggle from the factory to academia.
Between Nostalgia and Assimilation
Howe was born in the East Bronx in 1920 to Russia parents. They would gain their US citizenship two years later, and lose their grocery store during the Great Depression. Howe’s radicalization as a leftist intellectual grew out of what he called the “Jewish slum” of his upbringing. Although poor, his childhood community took pains to realize the ideals of Jewish socialism, identifying its values with the Yiddish concept of menschlichkeit — the upkeep of humanness and decency.
Howe studied at the City College of New York in 1936, and quickly befriended those, like himself, who felt their chances of employment after graduation were slim to none. That lack of career opportunity was counterintuitively liberating, as Howe remembered, allowing him to find his way into socialist circles. He was particularly inspired by Socialist Party of America leader Norman Thomas, who had gained a national reputation as an antimilitarist conscientious objector during World War II as well as a critic of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of Arabs.
Empty-handed and jobless after graduation, Howe was drafted into the US Army in 1942, but, as a conscientious objector himself, he served with Quaker pacifists, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Jewish Labor Committee. Between 1943 and 1944, he began writing while deployed outside Anchorage, Alaska.
He soon cemented his reputation as a public intellectual by writing for Commentary, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books as well as more than thirty books. At Brandeis University, he taught Yiddish literature and introduced Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer to Anglophone readers. His political commitments remained a throughline of his work, which considered the shifting issues and ideas shaping the Left in America, as well as the Jewish diaspora worldwide. Eventually, it led him to chronicle the breadth of social transformation as European Jews became Americans.
Howe was not a Zionist and, in his telling, the Jewish socialism around which he came of age was more influenced by the Bund than religious nationalism. This group, whose name literally means “union” in Yiddish, is given considerable space in World of Our Fathers. In Europe, it offered an affirmation of diaspora identity in contrast to the territorial politics of Zionism, encouraging pluralist integration in host societies rather than exclusionary settlement in Palestine, ultimately setting the stage for a new political fault line dividing Jews of various allegiances to the state of Israel.
After the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 led to a violently antisemitic tsarist crackdown against the opposition, a significant contingent of the Bund was forced to flee, leaving a power vacuum amid pogrom-afflicted Russian Jewry that was filled by Zionist propagandists. The Bundists quickly established sixty chapters in America, where they could continue organizing in the interest of fostering global networks among the population of some 1.5 million Eastern European Jews who had already immigrated to the United States.
But implementing their ideals, as Howe details in World of Our Fathers, was hampered by a combination of assimilative trends and nostalgia for the Old World. The Bund did not distinguish themselves from Zionism with as clear a promise of equal Jewish citizenship in an independent sovereign state, as did those who opted to settle in Palestine. At the same time, the Bund’s foundational focus on political and economic issues gradually came to accommodate cultural self-determination as well. “For them, too, Yiddish became a language to be loved, the very marrow of their experience,” Howe wrote.
This characterization reflects Howe’s embrace of cultural work as a core tenet of socialist activism among the Old Left of Jewish American immigrant communities, as well as their descendants, genetic and intellectual alike. Throughout his prolific output, and especially in World of Our Fathers, he espoused a secular vision of America, in which the liberating forces of democracy and equality are naturally complemented by critical literary education.
Howe sought to prioritize literature and history as fundamental aspects of political and academic life in America, using the historical detail at his disposal to frame the story of East European Jewish immigration in America as an example of how cultural acquisition is essential for sociopolitical progress, be it in the society at large or on campus. Howe became a professor at Hunter College in 1963, and his faith in the power of education frequently put him at odds with the New Left. As he explained in a 1974 interview on CUNY TV, students should prioritize their studies in academic life, rather than organizing.
There is room for that in the university but not if it, in my judgment, undermines the essential task of learning and scholarship. I don’t think the university is by itself a very good agency for social change. I think if you want social change you have to go out into the world and fight for it there.
The last chapter of World of Our Fathers, “At Ease in America?” contextualizes the New Left within Howe’s historical subject. Naming names — Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin — Howe soberly notes how many Jewish American radicals benefited from bourgeois comforts of suburban life that would have been impossible were it not for the back-breaking toil of prior generations. At the same time, Howe believed, these young activists were indifferent to the sociopolitical diversity of their immigrant heritage, that the Old Left’s dedication to internationalist solidarity among the working class could align with New Left protests against the Vietnam War. Old Left perspectives continued to recede as American-Israeli military ties grew alongside the Jewish right’s alliance with Christian Zionists. The Old and New Left continued to be at odds.
Howe’s grappling with the force of Israel in American Jewish politics was part of his appraisal of the boomers’ social awakening. For East European Jewish immigrants witnessing their first-generation children, the specter of allegiance to Russian communism was eclipsed by the rising star of Israeli nationalism. This became a sticking point, dividing fathers from sons and brothers from sisters. As a devotee of universal socialist ideals and their achievement through an integrated democracy, Howe was able to maintain intellectual and political distance from both Zionists and the New Left.
World of Our Fathers deepened its criticism of the New Left in a chapter titled “The Suburbs: New Ways to Live,” in which Howe reminds his readers that the experience of growing up in a rural American setting further disenfranchised young Jews from the urban immigrant contexts of their parents’ class struggles. As fully assimilated Americans with more of a direct recourse to greater qualms facing their nation, the Jews who adhered to the New Left were, according to Howe, absorbed into the general leftism that transcended the parochialism of earlier Jewish concerns and fought to address all of America’s issues of underrepresentation. But Howe also saw the Old Left in the new, a familiar story reframed for a new generation.
They refused, on principle, to consider the experience, the sufferings, of the older generation, for they were sick and tired of stories about immigrant ordeals which, as they saw it, masked present-day privilege and indifference.
A few of these young people, driving themselves to ideological excess, became enemies of Israel, which they saw as an accomplice of Western imperialism, proclaiming themselves Trotskyists or Maoists or Weathermen, they collected funds for Al Fatah, the Palestinian terrorist movement. Exasperating such a posture may have been, and insufferable too, but was it really without precedent in the immigrant world?
Was there not a line of continuity, however faint, between the Jewish anarchists of the 1880s who had ostentatiously held Yom Kippur balls and the Jewish New Leftists of the 1960s who aligned themselves with the Arabs? Was there not a long-standing tradition of violent dissociation, postures of self-hatred, and contempt for one’s fathers? In new circumstances, of course, everything took on new forms, but behind these new forms it was always possible to detect the materials of the past.
For the New Left, Howe’s politics of cultural integrity was at odds with the complexity of society in the second half of the twentieth century. Writers like Michael Harrington, author of The Other America: Poverty in the United States and Howe’s associate in the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as feminist Ellen Willis and Students for a Democratic Society leader Todd Gitlin, took issue with the Old Left conservatism, its moderate approaches to assimilation and reform, that Howe maintained and represented.
Examining Howe’s personal and professional reputation as a colleague eight years his younger, literary critic Jules Chametzky noted in his cultural memoir, Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers, that New Left critiques of Howe were not unfounded as he maintained a prickly, proud haughtiness even among his peers, defaming him as “tone deaf or imperious toward the Other.” But it was near his death when Chametzky ran into him with his wife in Manhattan that he realized the nature of his character:
It came to me then that he was just another New York kid growing up and out of the Depression, aspiring to and ultimately arriving at that other world more attractive: literature, high culture, high ideals, as so many others had and would. He had left the streets [. . .] he did come home, after a long and honorable life’s work, enriched and enriching. We’ll not see his like again.