H eadlines
established a bank to provide
credit and loans to workers and
built thousands of cooperative
housing units in New York City
to provide them with decent
living conditions. By World
War II, union members began
looking at labor rights as a
holistic vision of quality of life
for the working class, including
natural light, green space,
plumbing and sanitation.

Although May Day as a
workers’ holiday originated
in the United States, the
celebration and the workers’
movement it represented were
also widely popular in the
Soviet Union, which conse-
quently led to popularity
among Soviet Jews and Israelis
during the 20th century.

Armin Rosen, a staff writer
for Tablet, wrote in his 2017
article “When May Day Was
a Major Event in Israel” that
while the USSR eventually
became one of Israel’s enemies,
there was initially no tension
between left-wing politics and
Jewish nationalism. Many
members of Israel’s commu-
nist kibbutzim were raised
The holiday was also
popular among mainstream
Israeli labor unions that were
not aligned with communism,
but it began to fall out of favor
as tensions rose between Israel
particularly in response to the
dangers workers have faced
during the pandemic.

Michael Hersch, director of
the Philadelphia Jewish Labor
Committee, cited the fights
They were responding to the realities of a brutal labor situation in
which people — by which I mean men, women and also children because
this is a period before regulations on child labor — were working crazy
hours, 12, 14, 16 hours a day or more.”
KATE ROSENBLATT
to admire the USSR and the
tenets of communism.

“The ties went deeper than
any political alliance: For many,
Zionism was an avowedly
secular pro-labor movement
with the same utopian aims as
Communism itself,” Rosen wrote.

and the USSR and Israeli
politics shifted to the right.

In the present day, popular
Jewish observance of May Day
has waned, but Jewish labor
leaders view the holiday as an
opportunity to focus on the
labor fights of the modern era,
response to essential workers
like grocery store employees
and nurses during the last
year. “Calling someone a hero
is great, but how about paying
them? The hope is that you’ll
see workers rewarded with a
different level of compensa-
tion and appreciation, not just
being called a hero.”
The national JLC did not
host a May Day celebra-
tion this year, opting instead
to commemorate Workers
Memorial Day, which is
observed on April 28 to honor
the victims of workplace injury
and illness, in light of the
pandemic. The organization
held a virtual event on April
29 to mark the occasion as
well as the 50th anniversary
of the Occupational Safety and
Health Act. l
for paid sick leave, raising the
minimum wage and a return
to collective bargaining as
contemporary versions of the
eight-hour workday campaign.

“You’ve heard workers
lauded as heroes in this spanzer@jewishexponent.com;
country,” Hersch said of the 215-832-0729
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