Must a Jewish Nonprofit Choose Sides? The Workers Circle featured in The NY Times
Above: Reverend Mark Thompson at the 2023 Workers Circle Annual Benefit
Photo credit: Mark S. Kornbluth
December 10, 2023
By Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture and life of New York City. Link to the New York Times article can be found here.
“It would be hard to exaggerate the Workers Circle imprint on the American Story.”
Must a Jewish Nonprofit Choose Sides?
In an example of the political flexibility now absent from public life, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stepped outside the boundaries of standard Republican sympathies in 1954 to honor a Jewish fraternal organization with deep historical ties to labor and the Socialist Party. The occasion was the annual convention of the Workmen’s Circle. In a written message, the president praised the organization for spending the preceding half-century promoting and strengthening “our democratic ideals by helping immigrants adjust to their American environment.”
It was a succinct appraisal of an agenda that could be hard to explain because the group’s work straddled so many facets of the 20th-century urban experience. Founded on the Lower East Side in 1900, the Workmen’s Circle created branches around the country and fought all the various maladies of industrialization — the exploitation of children in factories, punishingly long workdays, unlivable tenement conditions.
It would be hard to exaggerate its imprint on the American story. Beyond its activism, the organization provided medical care, life insurance, elder housing, summer camps, schooling and burial assistance to tens of thousands of members. It managed to do all this while deftly balancing the need for assimilation with the preservation of Yiddish identity.
The war in Gaza has brought a kind of existential reckoning to a community whose work has had almost nothing to do with Israel. In more recent years the organization — now known as the Workers Circle — has fought for fairly mainstream causes like a $15 hourly minimum wage and an end to voter suppression. It has operated under the abiding principle that the immigrants it was created to serve were often fleeing authoritarian governments and that fighting threats to democracy in this country ought to remain central to its mission.
At its annual benefit held in Tribeca on Monday night, it honored the group Black Voters Matter. The Workers Circle has never been driven by religious zeal (in its earliest days it kept its schools open on Yom Kippur) or tribalism or even more modest expressions of self-interest.
If anything, it recognized that its early successes grew from a commitment to defuse the ethnic rivalries that characterized poor and working-class life in turn-of-the-century New York and build strength through coalition. Today, 123 years later, it is left to operate in a world in which pluralism does not necessarily play well.
If neutrality has become unpopular within academic and corporate communities, it has seemed even less tenable for institutions affiliated with Jewish life — including secular institutions that operate at a distance from foreign policy interests.
“There is a lot of pressure to make statements,” Ann Toback, chief executive of the Workers Circle, said recently, “and I am not a huge fan of statements.” The organization issued a single declaration on the war, delivered on Oct. 9, two days after the terror attacks by Hamas, condemning them but urging “all parties to uphold international law and create a pathway forward for human rights and peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
The Workmen’s Circle supported the founding of Israel after the Holocaust but has leaned away from Zionism since the beginning. It has long stood for a two-state solution as the best way forward, but remains a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on what is happening to people who live here. “We have always focused on a domestic agenda. It’s not anti anything,’’ Ms. Toback, whose great-grandfather was a Workmen’s Circle member, said. “This is our history.”
The current challenges have chiefly involved fund-raising. What was striking about the gala was not who was there — the actor Jesse Eisenberg was — but who was not, notably major figures in the city’s charity circles who so often generously contribute to Jewish causes. The event was underwritten in large part by the United Federation of Teachers and Tito’s vodka.
Like other Jewish groups focused on social welfare, Ms. Toback told me, the Workers Circle finds itself in a precarious place. “We’re all seeing donors pausing because they are focusing their philanthropy on Israel and the needs that have come out of Oct. 7, and we are struggling.’’ The numbers are expected to be significantly lower this year than they have been in the past, but what worries her is not just the money but the engagement. “We’re seeing a change,” she said.
“We say to people that we are living in a moment when U.S. democracy is in peril and that Oct. 7 is tragic and continues to draw so much of our attention, but even as that is going on there are ongoing attacks on democracy here,” Ms. Toback continued. “We never seem to have the luxury to focus on one thing.”
At a moment when labor is once again ascendant, the Workers Circle offers a long, instructive history in the value of focusing on many things. In the early 1900s, it joined Irish and Italian groups to fight for safer working conditions, campaigned to ensure women’s suffrage and opened treatment centers for sufferers of tuberculosis. In 1947, it raised more than $100,000 to acquire a French château to convert into an orphanage. During the 1960s, members threw themselves into the civil rights movement where they found an ally in Bayard Rustin.
They saw little value in siloing their own ambitions. What has inspired Ms. Toback is a Yiddish term, “doykayt,” that underlies some of these philosophies. Roughly, it translates to “hereness.”
About the Workers Circle
The Workers Circle is a national, secular, Jewish social justice organization founded by Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States fleeing autocracy and persecution, and seeking democratic freedoms and economic opportunities at the turn of the 20th century. That history drives our work for an inclusive democracy and human equality today. Our activism is rooted in 1,000 years of Yiddish culture and tradition. Through strategic social justice campaigns, vibrant Yiddish language classes, and interactive educational programs, we power a multi-generational community of activists that is building “a better and more beautiful world for all.” Learn more at www.circle.org.