David P. Shuldiner

The Jewish Labor Movement was a radical subculture that flourished within the trade union and political movements in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Jewish immigrant activists—socialists, communists, anarchists, and labor Zionists—adapted aspects of the traditions with which they were raised in order to express the politics of social transformation. In doing so, they created a folk ideology which reflected their dual ethnic/class identity. This book explores that folk ideology, through an analysis of interviews with participants in the Jewish Labor Movement as well as through a survey of the voluminous literature written about that movement.A synthesis of political ideology and ethnic tradition was carefully crafted by secular working-class Jewish immigrant radicals who rediscovered and reformulated elements of Jewish traditions as vehicles for political organizing. Commonly held symbols of their cultural identity—the Yiddish language, rituals such as the Passover seder, remembered narratives of the Eastern European shtetl, and biblical imagery—served as powerful tools in forging political solidarity among fellow Jewish workers and activists within the Jewish Labor Movement.

A resource guide by and about elders and the process of aging, this volume provides a list of over 1,500 references, all annotated, covering a wide range of subject areas. It is organized under such topics as Customs and Beliefs, Narratives, Traditional Arts, Health and Healing, and Applied Folklore, and is further divided into regional and topical subheadings. It also features works on methods and concepts in field research in folklore, oral history, and community studies, a chapter on general works from other fields of interest, as well as a chapter on films. The introduction offers not only a description of the nature and role of elders as creators and carriers of culture, but also a challenge to readers—reflected in the broad range of materials cited—defying both narrow conceptions of aging and the aged, and limited notions about the full scope of expressive culture addressed by folklore studies.

Aging Political Activists is at once a series of political autobiographies, a set of personal narratives of social commitment, a model for qualitative research, and a challenge to current theory and practice in the social and behavioral sciences. It presents and examines the life stories of four individuals—close friends and former members of the Communist Party USA—revealing the ways they have developed and sustained their personal values and political outlook through a lifetime of involvement in movements for social change. Shuldiner approaches the interviews as a collaborative effort with his subjects who both describe their identities and experiences and critique the interview process, offering alternate readings of the content of their narratives or new directions for inquiry. These portraits of older activists challenge notions about the role of the personal in the development of political identity, while shifting the debate among gerontologists between activity versus disengagement in old age to a discussion of the dialectical relationship of these two aspects of human behavior throughout a lifespan.