From Popular Front to Cold War

Join the Chicago YIVO Society for a virtual book talk with contributors to the new volume From Popular Front to Cold War. The book tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an interracial, interethnic organization with a strong Yiddish-speaking contingent that was founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members.

Authors Elissa Sampson, Robert Zecker, and Jennifer Young will discuss how garment workers in the Yiddish-speaking "fraternal" left such as Clara Lemlich Shavelson (1909-1911 Triangle Fire organizer) worked to organize with other critical IWO figures such as Paul Robeson, June Gordon, and Louise Thompson Patterson (Harlem, South Side Chicago). They worked with members to build community labor and cultural institutions across New York, Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere but were shuttered during the Cold War due to their pro-Soviet orientation and uniquely interracial, interethnic composition.

Dr. Elissa Sampson is a geographer who studies how…