CSJO-CU8.8

=CSJO-Grade 8 Lesson 8.8 (CSJO-Template)=

To note that their identity as Jews was often associated with political radicalism rather than with religion. (Analogous to Secular Humanistic Judaism.) To understand the differences between social service (ameliorating bad conditions), social action (advocating policies that reduce the institutional causes of bad conditions) and social justice (a status of the political and social environment where people have the ability to realize their potential in society). To recognize that though most US Jews have since become middle or upper class, many still continue to work for social justice for poor and often immigrant workers. 2. Relevant past learning: Last week we explored the difficult living conditions of immigrant Jews in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. This week, we will explore the heavy Jewish involvement in social justice efforts to make their living and working conditions better. 4. **Provide guided practice**: Tell students to think individually for a minute about some of the things they would like changed in our Sunday School class. Have students try to convince the teacher/leader to make the changes. Next have students get together in one big group to select something they want changed in the class and then try to convince the teacher/leader to make the changes. Together, their arguments should be much more convincing. Introduce the concept of a union. 5. **Provide independent practice**: Play the song, Union Maid, and discuss its meaning. Then split class into groups and have them write a parody of the song telling the history of unions, as discussed in new material. 6. **Close the lesson**: What would you protest today? 7. **Vocabulary**: 8. **References**:
 * TITLE:** **Changing the Social System: Working for social Justice**
 * GOALS:** To explore the efforts of Jews around the turn of the 20th century to improve conditions by organizing unions, going on strike, etc., using the garment industry with its high proportion of Jewish owners, workers and organizers as an example.
 * MATERIALS:** Union Maid lyrics, pens, paper,
 * LESSON:**
 * 1. Gain the attention of the learner:** Simulate a 1911 workshop where students have a menial task and are harassed to do it. Teacher says, "It is 1911. Congratulations immigrants, you have all been hired to work in the Triangle Garment Factory. Your starting salary is 50 cents/day. You desperately need this money to provide for your families so listen to and obey your boss, . Are you ready for your first day?" The boss has the students sort markers by color, size, etc and perfectly align each group of markers. The boss, preferably not the class teacher, should harass, rush and criticized their work. Teacher says "Freeze" to stop the demo. Afterwards, teacher says, " Thank you  for your acting skills. This was a mild simulation of the terrible working conditions experienced by Jewish and non-Jewish laborers at the turn of the 20th century. Bosses used fear and intimidation to make them work harder.
 * 3. Introduce new material:**
 * Working for social justice.
 * Definitions
 * **Social justice** is achieved when people have the ability to realize their potential in society. It requires a set of institutions that enable people to lead fulfilling lives and be active contributors to their community. These institutions provide services such as education, health care, social security and labor rights as well as a broader system of public services, progressive taxation and regulation of markets to ensure fair distribution of wealth, equality of opportunity, and no gross inequality of outcome. (adapted from Wikipedia; Social_Justice)
 * **Social Service** - provide services directly to those in need (e.g., food, clothing, housing, counseling and medical services).
 * **Social Action** - advocacy to change institutions as a way to increase social justice and thereby decrease need for social services.
 * Compare social service which cleans up a park with social action which lobbies for more staff; compare bringing food to a food pantry with working to eliminate the need for a food pantry.
 * The strength of social service is that it provides recipients with immediate help and our students with a first hand awareness of social problems. The strength of social action is that it provides recipients with longer term solutions and our students with a sense of what is necessary for institutional change.
 * Social Action Efforts
 * Workplace - unions
 * Significance of Bund (Jewish socialist organization)- never developed strong following in US
 * Jews in New York City were often employed by other Jews - thus, Jews were the oppressors as well as the oppressed
 * Striking - dangerous to the strikers
 * Job of police was to protect rich from the poor. They would physically attack strikers and arrest them on spurious charges of loitering and prostitution.
 * Jewish women's garment workers were the core of the National American Women's Suffrage Association in New York (Sachar 3900)
 * Rose Schneiderman - a leader of the NYC's Suffrage Party
 * 1909 - 1914 - Garment industry workers' great revolt lead by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU):
 * 1909 - Jewish women were 70% of labor force in shirtwaist factories. An industry-wide strike begun in 1909 gained huge popular support (rich men's wives would serve tea to strikers, went to court to bail out arrested strikers, rabbis and ministers gave sermons in support of the workers)
 * The strike was a violent one. Police routinely arrested picketers for trivial or imaginary offenses while employers hired local thugs to beat them as police looked the other way. (Wikipedia, ILGWU)
 * Strike was considered a partial success:
 * Reduced workday to 52 hours
 * Four legal holidays with pay
 * Tools provided by employers (employees no longer had to supply their own tools)
 * 1910 - Strike of cutters and pressers in the garment industry, mostly men, failed to gain popular support. Jacob Schiff got Louis Brandeis to mediate between the Jewish owners and workers which resulted in:
 * Reduced workday to 50 hours
 * Ten legal holidays with pay
 * Time and a half pay for overtime
 * Joint sanitary control committee to monitor working conditions
 * Acceptance of a union shop - preference in hiring union over nonunion workers, as opposed to a closed shop with only union workers
 * Most important result from the workers' point of view
 * Other workers achieved the rights of these garment workers including cigar makers, butchers, painters and the other garment workers.
 * Differing views of unions (Howe p308)
 * American Unions - usually "focused on immediate bread and butter issues, . . . hostile to heterodox ideas"
 * Jewish Unions - "not merely bargaining agencies, they were centers of socio-cultural life, serving same function as the //landsmanshaftn,// though with a much more enlightened outlook." Dealt with "a wide range of [other] interests from social insurance plans to co-operative housing, educational programs to Yiddishist cultural activitity."
 * Triangle Fire - March 25, 1911
 * Business owned by Jews who locked the doors to keep the union organizers out.
 * Oil-soaked rags caught fire and 147 women and 21 men were killed plus 200 other with severe burns and broken limbs.
 * Led to a commission and laws in New York State and later, in 1930's, to US Dept of Labor occupational safety laws and regulations covering the whole country.
 * Some Jews rose to prominence in unions.
 * Samuel Gompers - in 1886, founded the American Federation of Labor and became its first president. The AFL was one of the largest federations of unions.
 * Politics
 * Republican Party
 * Progressive Policies - progress in natural and social sciences can inform public policies to improve the human condition.
 * Teddy Roosevelt - President of the United States from 1901 - 1909, implemented many progressive policies.
 * Created National parks system.
 * Worked to eliminate business monopolies.
 * Socialism and Communism (Marxism)
 * Appeal
 * Focused on the oppression resulting from capitalism.
 * Very low wages, long hours, dangerous and unsanitary workplaces, no job security.
 * Provided ideology based on increased sharing of wealth to solve the problems.
 * Many Jewish leaders who came from Russia were Bundists and other Russian radicals dedicated to socialism as the way to relieve oppression.
 * Most immigrants were ignorant of socialism while in the old country.
 * Non-Jewish German immigrant socialists on Lower East Side helped Jews organize into unions and socialist groups with money, publicity, organization models and ideological guidance (Tony Michaels p2)
 * Communism loses its appeal by the 1950's
 * Faults of communism became more obvious
 * Evidence of antidemocratic, vicious totalitarian regime in Russia
 * Russia promoted virulent antisemitism and cold war antagonism to Western democracies.
 * Marx missed that reform could forestall revolution
 * Marx's view of inevitable march of history to communism was wrong
 * Development of virulent anti-Communist attitude in US
 * America was seen as an alternative to fascism and communism, as a place where racism as well as antisemitism were being eliminated (in 1930's, rampant US antisemitism was accepted because of the economic depression and Jews were an easy scapegoat).
 * Jewish situation in America improved
 * Many of the most egregious workplace problems were eliminated (e.g. child labor) or ameliorated (e.g.12 hour workday days) - Capitalism adapted
 * Jews stopped seeing themselves as an oppressed minority
 * Economic boom of the 1950's: many Jews became professionals and business owners with comfortable middle class lives
 * Many Jews gave up their radicalism - became more moderate - giving up their utopianism
 * Democratic socialist ideas of Western Europe never became popular in US
 * Anarchism - appealed to some Jews, but not most because of its tendency toward violence
 * Union (worker's union): A union is an organized group of workers who collectively use their strength to have a voice in their workplace. Through a union, workers have a right to impact wages, work hours, benefits, workplace health and safety, job training, and other work-related issues. Under U.S. law, workers of all ages have the right to join a union. Having support from the union to ensure fairness and respect in the workplace is one of the key reasons workers organize.
 * Howe, Irving (1976). **World of Our Fathers**, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, New York and London
 * Michaels, Tony. **A Fire In Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York**, Harvard University Press, 2005 Cambridge Mass,
 * Sachar, Howard M. (2013-07-24). **A History of the Jews in America** (Vintage). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice (2014-4-29)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILGWU (2014-05-21)
 * Muraskin, Bennett. Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews from Hillel to Helen Suzman (2004-3-18). Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations, publisher
 * Marx, Karl. Communist Manifesto https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

//Notes for continuing writing the lesson: Goals to understand what a union is and the progression of the union, in accordance with activists like, Rose Schneiderman (Spiderman...make a superhero comic about Rose "Spiderman" and her cronies saving women workers)//