If I were to describe an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist organization with tens of thousands of members, Yiddish schools, and arts clubs, which operated under a climate of severe state repression until it was finally disbanded by force and its leaders jailed, you might be forgiven for thinking I had a European organization in mind, the Jewish Labor Bund. But the International Workers Order (IWO) Jewish section, otherwise known as the Jewish Peoples’ Fraternal Order (JPFO), was one of the largest Jewish socialist organizations in the world for the two decades of its existence.

While the Communist Party and the Bolshevik revolutionaries were historically at odds with the Jewish Labor Bund of Eastern Europe, in the United States, the rise of “Bundish” politics was not isolated to a single tendency or organization on the Jewish left. The IWO was formed in 1930, following a series of internecine and sectarian ruptures with the Arbeter Ring, or Workers Circle, a socialist-aligned mutual aid society started in the late nineteenth century by newly arrived Yiddish-speaking Jewish socialists, who blended their socialism with advocacy for Jewish language and cultural autonomy.

Like many new immigrant mutual aid societies, or landsmanshaft, the Ring administered low-cost health and burial insurance and served as a social club for Jews who must have found America to be a strange and bewildering country. Yet unlike other mutual aid societies, the Arbeter Ring took its socialist and culturalist politics seriously.