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March 2001 Issue

Harvard's Agitating Jews
The students demanding justice for the ivory tower's proletariat are mainly Jewish, and for many their heritage plays a major role in their activism

By Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

"God is close to all who call upon him; to all those who call upon him with integrity." -Ashrei, Psalm 145

In 1901, there were hardly any Jews or activists at Harvard. While Emma Goldman preached anarchism to the masses and the American Federation of Labor was in its infancy, Henry Adams was still able to say that an alumnus of the New England ivory tower "could not afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned."

In 2001, Jews and activists are both exceedingly visible on campus. And to a fascinating degree, activism here at Harvard is a Jewish occupation--something the activists themselves readily acknowledge. Gabe Katsh, a freshman and a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) at Harvard, puts succinctly what others often echo: "PSLM is like Hillel for non-religious Jews."

PSLM is the main group at Harvard devoted solely to activism, so anyone looking to become involved in activism, Jewish or otherwise, goes there. PSLM is subdivided into Harvard Students Against Sweatshops and the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, both of which are offshoots of national student movements for labor rights.

Neither PSLM nor its constituent campaigns identify themselves as "Jewish" groups, but their memberships are nonetheless heavily Jewish. Harvard is a very Jewish campus--20 to 30 percent by the more generous counts--but even so, the activists of the Harvard Living Wage Campaign are disproportionately Jews. At any given meeting, a majority of attendants are usually of at least half-Jewish parentage, and a significant minority, myself included, have two Jewish parents.

Whether deliberately or not, PSLM is an alternative Jewish community on campus, one that allows non-observant Jews to come together outside the bounds of Hillel. Junior Eleanor Benko explains that she feels "strangely connected to the Jewish community, but not always welcome at Hillel." Rachel Bloomekatz, a freshman, agrees. "It [Hillel] is not a community for everyone; definitely not for all Jews," she says. "I'd never go without bringing someone." Instead, although they don't come together explicitly as Jews, these non-religious Jews find their way together to PSLM.

That Harvard Jews are so well represented in PSLM is not surprising. The New Activism these students embrace is astonishingly similar to the activism of their parents' generation. Just as the tactics of the New Activism resemble those of the New Left--grass-roots organizing, with a slight anarchist bent--the people who constitute our movement are similar to those of our parents' generation. In the Northeast, that means heavily Jewish.

And by and large, my fellow Jewish living wage activists trace their activism, like their Judaism, to their upbringing. Asked why he's an activist, junior Ben McKean says, "My parents brought me up to give a shit [about social justice]. And part of that was Judaism." Eleanor Benko, likewise, says her "strongest association with Judaism was through [her] father," who told her it was "her responsibility to do something when you see injustice."

For Eleanor, Judaism and activism are tightly intertwined. She says her "political leanings come more from [her] mother," but it becomes clear as we talk that her activism comes in large part from her father, a Holocaust survivor. "He told me a few things all the time," she says. "One was that it doesn't matter what you do so long as you can wake up the next morning and look yourself in the face."

There is a moral high ground that's required to be an activist--you have to know what you're doing is right--and the impossibly steep moral cliffs of the Holocaust seem to provide just that for Eleanor. So it is not strange for her to say that having a survivor for a parent has been "a double- edged sword, a blessing and a burden." In some measure, it has made it possible for her to be an activist, but it has also bound her with the responsibility to do something.

Few of us have Holocaust survivors for parents, but many of us are spurred by another aspect of Jewish history--the Yiddish-activist tradition. Rachel Bloomekatz connects her activism to that tradition with a story. She says her parents are both "activist-oriented," and recalls that when she was little they took her to a pro-choice march in Washington, DC. They made her a sandwich board protest sign that had "English on the front and Yiddish on the back," which illustrates the intimate relationship between Yiddish-Jewish heritage and activism.

Freshman Madeleine Elfenbein and others are also connected to the Yiddish activist tradition through the Workmen's Circle, the Yiddish-language activist-cultural organization founded in 1900. According to its Web site, the Workmen's Circle's purpose is to both "foster Jewish identity and participation in Jewish life among its members" and act as a "progressive-liberal organization" devoted to social justice. Madeleine's great-great grandfather was, as she puts it, one of the Circle's "founding dudes" and her paternal grandmother is "the biggest proponent of Jewish culture in [her] family and a raving atheistŠ[with] a long history of radical activism. She was a 'fellow traveler.'"

But not all Jewish activists at Harvard are non-religious. At least three more-or-less observant Jews are active in the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, including myself. I come from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a hotbed of liberal politics and culture; my parents met during anti-Vietnam War protests at Columbia. My parents are also religious, and are now active in a chavruta minyan (without a rabbi) as they were before in a women's minyan in an Orthodox synagogue in the 70's. (The division of labor in that minyan was clear: my dad cooked lunch; my mom led davening.)

The minyan my family is now involved with is similarly interested in the twin questions of social justice and religious practice. I vividly remember my mother standing up one day, after a d'var Torah (a sermon on a Torah portion) in which the speaker had accused Karl Marx of anti-Semitism, and delivering a defense of Marx before the whole group. And people came up to her afterwards and thanked her for doing it. That's the kind of Judaism with which I've grown up. For me, the central demands of Judaism, after love of G-d, are equality and social justice.

The link between Jewish identity and activism has always been a hard one to elucidate. Our identities, like those of our parents, do not fall easily into traditional categories. A few of us are religious, others are strictly atheists; most of us are white and of Eastern European extraction, but some of us are Israeli, some are black; some of us are Zionists, many of us are not. But what all of the Jews I spoke to in the living wage campaign share is a sense that somehow, in some way, our Jewish identities are organically connected to our activism.

For some of us--Eleanor, Madeleine, and Ben for instance--Judaism is one part of a much larger puzzle. For others, like myself and Rachel, it's a major source of our activism. As Ben puts it, Judaism is for all of us at least "one small way of distancing [ourselves] from mainstream American culture," if it is not much more.

This article first appeared on NewVoices.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a freshman at Harvard University.


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