Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The main reason that capitalist giants like Henry Ford maligned Jews had less to do with banking than with the fact of their labor militancy. This was the time of the rise of the US Socialist Party and militant trade unionism, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution. By 1915, there were one and a half million Jewish residents in New York City, around 30 percent of the population. The clothing industry employed around a quarter million Jews and some Italians. The pay was by piece produced rather than by the hour, and with sixty- to seventy-hour workweeks in poorly ventilated, dirty, badly lighted work spaces, the work regimen was grueling. Most of the unskilled labor was done by young, single women. Twenty thousand of the young women went on strike in 1909, only to be brutalized and arrested on the picket line and replaced by others. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union had formed in 1900 and gained some contracts after the strike.43 Writer and poet Emma Lazarus, best known for her poem with the lines “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” inscribed posthumously in 1903 at the base of the Statue of Liberty, was born in 1849 to a wealthy industrialist father of Sephardic Jewish heritage and a mother of Ashkenazi roots. She took up the cause of the masses of Jews fleeing persecution in the 1870s. During her short life—she died in 1887 at thirty-eight—Lazarus studied Hebrew and Jewish history, established the Hebrew Technical In...