Citizens of the Whole World by Benjamin Balthaser

Author:Benjamin Balthaser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2025-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Thus their formulation that “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” does not imply that the liberation of Black women is at the expense of Black men, the working class, or other marginalized groups.30 Rather, they stated, since Black women are “triple-oppressed” as women, African Americans, and workers, then by freeing working-class Black women one would by necessity have to end capitalism. Yet the CRC also understood that if they organized under the banner of other causes or groups, their own perspectives and needs would likely go unmet. Breaking with the National Black Feminist Organization for its inattention to both gender and class in its attack on white racism, the CRC understood their version of identity politics as a means to expand the analysis of capitalism, rather than to restrict it.

In the year after the dissolution of SDS, some Jewish veterans of the New Left—from SDS, the Venceremos Brigades, radical feminist collectives, and anti-war mobilization—formed socialist collectives as at least one way to form Jewish answers to questions and invitations raised by the Rainbow Coalition and CRC. The organizations formed spontaneously and seemingly independent of one another yet nonetheless articulated very similar core principles and beliefs about Jewish culture, its relationship to the left, and the need to organize within their own communities. Jewish Radical Community in Los Angeles, Chutzpah Collective in Chicago, and the New York City Brooklyn Bridge Collective are the three largest and most influential of the radical Jewish collectives formed between 1969 and 1971, and emerged as a means to keep New Left momentum growing after the collapse of SDS as well as to answer the challenge the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had posed a year earlier: What would it mean for white people to organize in their own communities? The three organizations also formed out of a sense that the New Left—while central to their formation as activists—was not only fragmenting, but could not address the needs and challenges of its Jewish members, from the nature and structure of antisemitism, to communal belonging, a sense of continuity, and a nuanced anti-imperialist politics that could engage what seemed to them a then-promising Israeli New Left.

Such organizations are sometimes referred to as the left fringe of the Jewish Renewal Movement, an attempt by religious members of the Jewish community in the US to find a more spiritual, diverse, and relevant form of Jewish practice in light of postwar Jewish assimilation. While there are overlaps between these Jewish collectives and Jewish Renewal, Chutzpah founder Miriam Socoloff recalled, “We thought of ourselves as part of the New Left; I was not even aware of Jewish Renewal until much later.”31 Creating vibrant newspapers and pamphlets, organizing protests and trips to Israel and Palestine, educating community members about radical Jewish history, and exploring the radical content of Jewish ritual, these groups not only attempted to rebuild a new New Jewish Left, they also formed a bridge between SDS and later Jewish progressive organizations such as New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s and Jewish Voice for Peace in the 1990s.

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