The Legacy of Jewish Worker Organizing That Brought Us to This May Day
A century of Jewish labor organizing centered on solidarity has helped lead us to this moment.
Ann Toback
When fascism is on the rise, celebration may feel beside the point. It isn’t. Workers who organized before us understood that coming together in solidarity, in struggle, in joy, was not a break from the fight. It was the fight. This May Day, we carry their defiance and their solidarity forward.
One movement that embodied that defiance was the Jewish Labor Bund, founded in 1897, which organized Jewish workers across Eastern Europe. After coming to the United States in the early 1900s, the Bund’s members were at the heart of the American labor movement. The Yiddish-speaking Bundists believed that dignity and liberation begin where you stand. They called it doikayt—hereness. Bundists didn’t wait for a better world somewhere else. They built it where they lived, for everyone around them. Today, the Bund’s vision is experiencing a resurgence. Artist and writer Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, a New York Times bestseller, has brought their story to a new generation. That resurgence belongs to all of us.
The Workers Circle was born out of this Bundist tradition in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1900. The organization was founded by Eastern European Jews who fled violence and authoritarianism and came to this country seeking the protections and economic opportunities of a democracy. They organized and fought exploitative labor practices and built community among newly arrived immigrants. That tradition drives us still — more than 125 years later, building coalitions and demanding a multiracial, multicultural democracy for all. The Workers Circle operates in coalition with groups including the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, Declaration for American Democracy, Not Above the Law Coalition, United for Democracy, Protecting Immigrant Families and the May Day Strong coalition.
Our country is under assault. The Trump administration and the oligarchs who enable it are systematically eroding the foundations of our democracy, eliminating our rights and freedoms in plain sight. They are funneling billions of dollars to fund ICE’s rapidly expanding network of warehouse detention centers, even as tens of thousands, including more than 6,000 children, are detained in inhumane and torturous conditions, and the death toll inside these facilities continues to rise.
The billionaire class and the president they have purchased are running a playbook the Bund would have recognized: crush workers, dismantle democracy, and keep people too exhausted, economically desperate, and divided to fight back. This is not a coincidence. An attack on workers is an attack on democracy. The Bund knew this. So do we.
We march on May Day because this is exactly the moment that demands it. May Day was not born as a holiday. It was born as a declaration: that working people have power, that solidarity is strength, and that we are not alone. This May Day we reclaim that declaration. We celebrate because celebration is itself an act of resistance. We march because marching is how we build community and power.
Labor activism runs four generations deep in my family, from the garment sweatshops of the 1920s to the unionized workplaces of today. Before leading the Workers Circle, I served as assistant executive director of the Writers Guild East. That history, personal and inherited, has taught me one thing above all: workers do not sit outside systems of power. They are central to them. And the strength we build together — in struggle, in celebration, in hope — is how we win.
The Workers Circle has always united celebration and struggle. That is our Bundist legacy. This May Day, our 250,000 activists are marching in New York City and across the country, joining a national day of action declaring workers over billionaires and saying “no work, no school, no shopping.”
We show up because showing up is what we have always done, in the streets, in the workplace, and in the community. We have marched for over a century under one banner: a shenere un besere velt far ale. A better and more beautiful world for all. Not a slogan. A promise.
The Bund organized under repression and violence, and kept organizing when they came to America. They built power in the places they lived, for everyone around them. They marched in the streets and celebrated their solidarity in the face of those who wanted them broken. We are their inheritors. This May Day, we take to the streets not because victory is guaranteed but because the fight demands it. We march, we sing, we stand together. That is how movements are built. That is how democracy is won. A shenere un besere velt far ale. We are still here. This is our moment.
Ann Toback is CEO of The Workers Circle.
