I knew a different kind of socialist, a man who ran for vice-president of the United States as the Socialist Party candidate. He sought office once before I was born (1952) and once when I was two (1956). I doubt he would have been comfortable with the direction taken by today’s American socialists and self-identified progressives as they maneuver to realign the Democratic Party into an illiberal and anti-Zionist orbit.
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| Sam Friedman |
My old school American socialist was Samuel Herman Friedman -- שמואל פריעדמאן – who died on March 17, 1990, at age 93. His yahrzeit according to the Hebrew calendar is 20 Adar I 5779 or Monday, February 25, 2019.
Lower East Side
Friedman was a recognized Lower East Side character. Our paths first crossed in the 1970s when he began coming to shul on Saturday mornings at Rabbi Seymour Nulman’s East Side Torah Center on Henry Street not far from his apartment on Grand Street and the FDR Drive.
He was a presence. A big whitehaired balding man usually dressed in a rumpled light grey suit, white shirt with black tie askew. My friend Aaron who sat upfront remembers him vaguely as "the guy who looked like Col. Sanders."
His eyesight was failing, and he walked with a cane purportedly presented to him by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo.
Did I need to know more? Nasser. Socialist. Cairo.
I also understood that he had married out – scandalous in my parochial world especially for a man of that age.
The Pull of an Old Socialist
In shul, he would stand in the back, without a tallit prayer shawl but with a flimsy black yarmulke on his head, against the wood-paneled wall and almost visibly absorb the sounds of the prayers.
I have always had a soft spot for old people, for their vulnerability so it was only natural that I struck up an acquittance with Mr. Friedman and tried to make him as welcome as possible. He and I had the back of the sanctuary mostly to ourselves. I had a pew of my own. He had the wall. Nasser, socialism, Cairo, and out-marriage somehow never came up.
Almost no one else spoke to him, and he would never be given an aliya to the Torah or any other religious honor.
Later I discovered that he loved show biz and theatre songs especially if they came with a political message. He had a melodious (once booming ) voice and had been active with the Theatre Union and the Rebel Arts theatre group.
Presumably, he found Rabbi Nulman’s sermon engaging at some level and the melodies that accompanied the service reassuring.
So, there he was with -- from my point of view -- all this Nasser, socialism, Cairo, out-marriage baggage in an orthodox synagogue on Shabbes. Not that there was any other kind in our immediate neighborhood.
Childless
We became friendly enough for me to occasionally visit him and his wife Mary, who turned out to be gracious, at their home. The couple had no children.
Mary Hough Freedman died on November 16, 2006, by which time I was already living in Israel.
Up to his semi-retirement in the 1960s, he made his living mostly in journalism as a writer and editor at The New Leader and The Call, socialist newspapers, and as a teacher.
In 1917, during World War I and the year of the Balfour Declaration, he was the editor of The College Mercury a student newspaper at City College. His editorials controversially championed student pacifism.
Bear in mind that many Jews in the US and Europe opposed the war because America and Britain were allied with the despicable Czarist Russian regime, a fountainhead of anti-Semitism. And at that juncture in history, the Germans were the good guys.
Bear in mind that many Jews in the US and Europe opposed the war because America and Britain were allied with the despicable Czarist Russian regime, a fountainhead of anti-Semitism. And at that juncture in history, the Germans were the good guys.
Working life
It did not fit the persona I had of him, but in the course of his career, he had been an editor at Women's Wear Daily magazine. With a graduate degree from Columbia, he also taught social science in high school and – this is worth underscoring – later in life working on behalf of the United Jewish Appeal.
His sister Elizabeth Singer had made aliya.
He was the kind of socialist who had to work for a living, kept kosher after a fashion, and implicitly (at the very least) recognized the right of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine.
Politics
Foremost, Friedman was a labor union activist. Politics was his passion. He and Mary would vacation in Putnam Valley, NY at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society with other socialists. Friedman was on the board of the Young People's Socialist League. In the 1940's he ran for one NYC or NY statewide office after another – state senator, comptroller, lieutenant governor, City Council president and so on. He was the socialist Harold Stassen – running frequently and never winning because the only viable election vehicles in the zero-sum US political system were and are the Democratic and Republican parties.
Foremost, Friedman was a labor union activist. Politics was his passion. He and Mary would vacation in Putnam Valley, NY at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society with other socialists. Friedman was on the board of the Young People's Socialist League. In the 1940's he ran for one NYC or NY statewide office after another – state senator, comptroller, lieutenant governor, City Council president and so on. He was the socialist Harold Stassen – running frequently and never winning because the only viable election vehicles in the zero-sum US political system were and are the Democratic and Republican parties.
A good government reformer who went up against Tammany Hall (the corrupt Democratic machine) he got himself arrested lots of times – once in 1949 for supposedly speaking too loudly at a demonstration.
VP candidate
VP candidate
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| Norman Thomas |
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| Darlington Hoopes |
In 1952 and 1956 the country’s leading socialist Norman Thomas (a Christian but no friend of Israel's) argued against expending limited resources on another national presidential campaign, but the party decided otherwise.
Friedman, a member of the Socialist Party's national executive board, was tapped to run for vice president with Darlington Hoopes (born to a Quaker family), who once served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, heading the ticket.
They never garnered more than 20,000 votes countrywide in either attempt.
However, Mr. Friedman was running to spread the message that capitalism, as embodied by the two major parties, was not primarily interested in working people. Winning elective office was not his primary goal.
Campaigning for Civil Rights
Friedman like many left-leaning Jews during the 1960s engaged in civil disobedience on behalf of African-American and Puerto Ricans.
To my mind, at the time, this agenda seemed perverse. Yet in this respect, he was very much in the accultured Jewish mainstream.
To my mind, at the time, this agenda seemed perverse. Yet in this respect, he was very much in the accultured Jewish mainstream.
Here is the place to point out that for poor working-class Jews like me living in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side -- it was not the blacks and Puerto Ricans who needed help from the Jews; we needed to be saved from them.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the minority community was the main source of violent anti-Semitism in New York City.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the minority community was the main source of violent anti-Semitism in New York City.
There were 10,000 mostly elderly Jews living under the poverty level in my neighborhood. Most Jewish establishment organizations (the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, for instance) were spending the money they raised within the Jewish community on programs and institutions (like the Educational Alliance) that mostly catered to non-Jews – at a time when these monies were needed, desperately, in our community to fight poverty, to relocate at risk elderly people, and help with yeshiva tuition.
Only after journalist Paul Cowen exposed the plight of the Jewish poor in the Village Voice did funding priorities eventually and incrementally change – but by then for many elderly Jews, it was too late.
Mississippi Burning
In 1964, Sam Friedman was arrested with another younger New Yorker named Michael Schwerner. This was the Schwerner who was viciously murdered along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman later that year by white racists in Mississippi.
Friedman had planned to be in Mississippi with Schwerner to register blacks to vote. However, as fate would have it, he was drawn to visit Egypt (I suppose to lobby for peace) which is when, presumably, he got that walking cane from Nasser.
Of course, Nasser was not interested in peace with Israel. Earlier in 1964, Nasser and the Arab League had created the Palestine Liberation Organization to legitimize their efforts to destroy Israel. The Arab League itself had been established in 1945 to block the emergence of a Jewish state, and when that failed in 1948-49, it organized a boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against a fledgling Israel. All this, of course, long before the West Bank came under Israeli control.
But I digress.
Communists
Besides campaigning across America, Friedman frequently went abroad including as a delegate to the Socialist International no fewer than 16 times. (*)
Like all democratic socialists, he loathed Stalin for creating a genocidal totalitarian polity. In contrast, the US Communist Party led by Gus Hall was slavishly pro-Moscow.
Besides campaigning across America, Friedman frequently went abroad including as a delegate to the Socialist International no fewer than 16 times. (*)
Like all democratic socialists, he loathed Stalin for creating a genocidal totalitarian polity. In contrast, the US Communist Party led by Gus Hall was slavishly pro-Moscow.
We once had a conversation about Lower East Side Congresswoman Bella Abzug who served in the US House of Representatives from 1971-1977 and had made her mark as an opponent of the war in Viet-Nam.
Friedman disparaged Abzug as a Stalinist fellow-traveler perhaps because as a lawyer she defended Moscow-aligned American communists against the US government and had been a founder of Women Strike for Peace, a Soviet front-group.
I am not sure where Mr. Friedman stood on the war in Viet-Nam (I myself flip-flopped on the war) but I do know that he supported NATO as a bulwark against Soviet aggression.
Being a political junky, I took satisfaction in the company of a man who rubbed shoulders with Norman Thomas, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Sidney Hillman of the rival Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
In 1973, I moved to the more upscale Grand Street section of the Lower East Side into Co-Op Village constructed by the ILGWU and the ACW. Friedman lived in one of these buildings as well.
In 1973, I moved to the more upscale Grand Street section of the Lower East Side into Co-Op Village constructed by the ILGWU and the ACW. Friedman lived in one of these buildings as well.
The New Left
Still, we came from different worlds, and our politics were informed by different eras and experiences. Born the previous century in Denver, he seemed to me to be genuinely American. I a New York-born baby-boomer was less secure in my skin. My father had survived Hitler's war against European Jewry. My mother had arrived from Poland before WWI. In her younger years she worked in a sweatshop. But Socialism was not on my horizon.
As a teenager in the early 1970s, my route of political passage came via the Jewish Defense League not some socialist youth group. I took part in neighborhood safety patrols on Passover and raucous protests against Soviet treatment of Jews in the USSR outside Moscow’s UN Mission on East 67 Street.
As a teenager in the early 1970s, my route of political passage came via the Jewish Defense League not some socialist youth group. I took part in neighborhood safety patrols on Passover and raucous protests against Soviet treatment of Jews in the USSR outside Moscow’s UN Mission on East 67 Street.
By then it was clear that the new left (alongside reactionary chauvinist demagogues of color) had spawned a new anti-Semitism to complement the Jew-haters on the old right.
I wish I had raised all this with Mr. Friedman, but I didn't. Maybe I thought it would seem unnecessarily contentious.
At some point he became infirm and moved to a care facility in the Bronx and regrettably I did not stay in touch.
At some point he became infirm and moved to a care facility in the Bronx and regrettably I did not stay in touch.
Post Ideological
If there is one thing, I learned in the decades since meeting Mr. Friedman -- and especially since I moved to Israel -- it is not to let ideology straitjacket my thinking.
If socialism means Americans today benefit from old-age pension insurance (Medicare) and maybe – one day – universal health coverage such as we enjoy here in Israel than who cares if socialists pushed the idea?
If socialism means Americans today benefit from old-age pension insurance (Medicare) and maybe – one day – universal health coverage such as we enjoy here in Israel than who cares if socialists pushed the idea?
My politics do not always have to be either/or. Ideological consistency is not an end in itself.
For instance, I can oppose the criminalization of abortion while morally against abortion as a form of birth control. I can accept that some steps taken by Donald Trump are right and proper even though the president, unscripted, has caused grave damage to American political culture (and is a nasty piece of work).
Synagogue or socialism? Maybe by coming to shul, Mr. Friedman was late in life tacitly signaling against the world of either/or.
Synagogue or socialism? Maybe by coming to shul, Mr. Friedman was late in life tacitly signaling against the world of either/or.
As for me, I’ll take a dash of Madison’s republicanism, a sprinkle of Jabotinsky’s iron wall liberalism, and, yes, a pinch of Samuel H. Friedman's socialism.
May his memory be for a blessing.
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| View of New York City when Sam Friedman was in his 30s. |
(*) As of 2019, the Jewish Labour Bund, Meretz, Labor, and the World Labour Zionist Movement are still members of the Socialist International.