"Di Linke: the Yiddish Immigrant Left from Popular Front to Cold War" explores the history, cultural and political activities of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO), a significant component of the Yiddishist immigrant Jewish Left. The JPFO, the Jewish section of the Soviet-oriented multi-ethnic International Workers Order (IWO), was shut down with the IWO during the Cold War when its funds and organizational archives were confiscated. Much of the material discussed is from the now partially-digitized IWO/JPFO archive housed at Cornell’s ILR School Kheel Center.
In this session: Tour the Cornell Kheel Center Archives, Cornell and Syracuse Special Collections, with Wesley Chenault, Steven Calco, Patrick Stevens, and Petrina Jackson. Collections hold materials about the IWO/JPFO and its relationship to Yiddish art, poetry, publishing, the Soviet Union, postwar Poland, the Communist Party and American Left, black and feminist activism, and the Cold War.