Itche Goldberg - Leftist

Leftist

Goldberg, a secular Jew, had been closely associated with left-wing causes for many years. There were probably several threads to his attraction to a radical cause. His close associates in Toronto were Communists, including his brother-in-law, who shared his revolutionary world view of social justice. He saw the Soviet Union as the salvation for the Jewish national and social problems. Also, he described an embedded rebelliousness in the those doubly alienated, "suffering and benefiting from 'rejection by the Gentiles, but also their own rejection of the narrowness of the rabbi and merchant dominated shtetl life'".

Shortly after moving to New York City, he became director of the Arbeter Ordn Shuln, and helped set up a nationwide network of these schools, reaching a peak number of 140. Best described as supplemental schools, they aimed at promoting Yiddish identity, as well as inculcating the concepts of class consciousness and social justice. Goldberg saw two function of the shuln; "to revolutionize Yiddish education and to separate religion from education for the first time in Jewish history; and on the other hand to ensure that progressive secularism is carried forward from generation to generation." For decades beginning in the 1920s, including two as director, he was associated with Camp Kinderland, known as a red diaper baby camp. From 1937 to 1951, he was national school and cultural director of the Jewish People's Fraternal Order, a branch of the pro-Communist International Workers Order. At its peak after World War II the JPFO had 50,000 members. When the IWO was about to be liquidated during the Red Scare in 1954 by the Department of Insurance of New York State (IWO was a fiscally sound fraternal benefit insurance company with close 200,000 members in its peak years, 1946–1947), Itche withdrew the Yiddish shules from the JPFO in order to preserve them, creating the independent Service Bureau for Jewish Education so that the schools could continue to function. In the anti-left atmosphere of the period, this effort was only partially successful.

Over time he made a transition to democratic socialism, eventually seeing the Soviet Union as an anti-model. By the 1950s his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union had completely evaporated, particularly after the Soviets executed Jewish writers in 1952. Beginning in 1957 Yiddishe Kultur co-sponsored an annual public remembrance of the 12 August 1952 murders. Nevertheless, he remained a central figure in the Jewish left for decades. In contrast to literary critics on the right who saw in Soviet Yiddish literature enforced or servile obeisence to Soviet ideology, Goldberg wrote and lectured frequently on the proud Jewish content he found in the works of such Soviet Yiddish writers as Perets Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Dovid Bergelson. The Yidisher Kultur Farband (YKUF) in whose leadership Goldberg served for many years published numerous works by these authors when other Yiddish publishers in the west rejected them as outside of the Yiddish canon.