My first encounter with Emma Goldman occurred in the late 1960s while I was researching a doctoral dissertation. I found her in the pages of the Arbeiter Zeitung [Arbayter Tsaytung], standing on a platform in Union Square and shouting in Yiddish to a crowd of onlookers, “If you need bread, take it.” It was early in the depression of 1893 – and Goldman, an anarchist, was one of many speakers trying to stir up garment industry workers to take action against the bosses. At the time, I passed over her. I was working on the Jewish labor movement in the nineties. She was a woman, an anarchist; I was not yet tuned to questions of gender.

It did not take long for me to regret that oversight, and to regret as well all the other women I had missed while I was searching for pattern and shape in an incipient labor movement. I had wrongly assumed that paying attention to the largely male leadership would open the doors to Jewish trade unionism. But when, encouraged by an emerging women's movement, I turned to find out more about the participation of women, I was horrified to discover that I had simply overlooked major female figures. Some of the American Jewish women whom I and others then identified have since become folk heroes whose inclusion in histories of the American Jewish left has altered our understanding of early organizing campaigns. The turn-of-the-century socialists and left-wing anarchists (Jewish and not) whose reclamation we effected are now familiar among historians of women, but in the literature of American socialism and the left most remain marginal. Similarly, Jewish historians, who pay lip service to the courageous stands of such figures as Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman, still have a hard time acknowledging their larger roles. Important figures including Theresa Malkiel, Fannia Cohn, Pauline Newman, Theresa Wolfson, Rose Pesotta, and Becky Edelsohn, remain peripheral in the literatures of labor and the left.

I have puzzled over the question of whether there is anything in their culture that particularly attracts Jewish women to left-wing, radical, or rebellious activity. As the chapters in this volume suggest, Jews in general have a special relationship to the left. But American Jewish women appear as agents of acculturation to American values as often as they do as rebels against it.