David Dubinsky

David Dubinsky was a US trade unionist who led the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

Early life

Dubinsky was born in Brest-Litovsk in 1892. His family moved to Lodz, the also in Czarist Russia, three years later. In the wake of the revolution of 1905, he joined a baker's union, controlled by the socialist Jewish Labour Bund.

In 1908, he was imprisoned for his union activities, but escaped from Siberia. After returning to Lodz, he raised the money to emigrate to America with the help of his family and the Bund.

Dubinsky arrived in New York in 1911, where he joined the ILGWU and the Socialist Party of America. He supported the campaigns of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs and Congressman Meyer London. by 1917, London had lost support from the left-wing socialists, because he voted for war credits following American entry into World War One, and from Zionists because of his refusal to move a motion in support of the Balfour Declaration, but retained Dubinsky's support.

The Socialist Party, along with the Good and Welfare League in Local 10 of the union, provided the powerbases, which enabled Dubinsky to win election to the executive board of the ILGWU in 1918, and its vice-presidency in 1919.

Dubinsky's Bundist background meant that he identified with the Menshevik faction in revolutionary Russia, rather than the Bolsheviks who had ousted them in 1917. As a delegate to the Jewish Socialist Federation convention in 1919. Dubinsky opposed a pro-Bolshevik minority that wanted to disaffiliate from the Socialist Party. This emerging anti-communism, meant that Dubinsky began to attract support from more conservative figures in the ILGWU leadership, despite his socialist credentials.

Dubinsky spent much of early 1925 visiting Europe, travelling to Poland, Germany, Austria, France and Britain. In late 1925, he took part in his first for American Federation of Labor convention, as part of Morris Sigman's ILGWU delegation.

However, at an ILGWU convention opening on 30 November 1925, however, left-wingers led by Charles Zimmerman proved themselves a growing influence, and Dubinsky began to look to Benjamin Schlesinger as a replacement for the conciliatory Sigman.

Dubinsky cultivated Salvatore Ninfo and Luigi Antonini, leaders of Italian locals who regarded the Communists as a threat to their ethnic autonomy.

ILGWU President

Dubinsky was elected President of the ILGWU in 1932.

Jewish Labor Committee

Dubinsky was appointed treasurer of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) at its foundation on 25 February 1934. In deference to the Bundist sensibilities of Dubinsky and others, the committee stated that most Jewish workers, believed that "the Jewish question must be solved in the countries in which the Jews live," a position which met with objections from Poale Zion.

The JLC president, B.C. Vladeck gave a stirring anti-Nazi speech at the 1934 convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which created a Labor Chest to aid the victims of fascism.

According to Roy Godson, Dubinsky was instrumental in winning the AFL's support for the JLC:

Before America became involved in World War II, David Dubinsky and Matthew Woll had feared that if the democratic leadership of Eastern and Western Europe were destroyed by the Nazis, the Russians and the well-organized Communist underground might emerge from the ensuing political vacuum as the new rulers of the continent. With this in mind, Woll and Dubinsky enlisted the support of the AFL's president William Green and its secretary-treasurer George Meany in the Jewish Labor Committee's effort to rescue hundreds of democratic labor leaders, politicians, and intellectuals from the Nazis.

Historian Harvey Levenstein, argues Dubinsky's anti-Communism during this period was informed by Zionism:

Fuelling this bitterness was the fact that the Communists, including most Jewish ones, were vocal opponents of Zionism, something dear to the hearts of Dubinsky and many other garment union Jewish Socialists who formed the backbone of the Labor Zionist Movement in America.

However, according to biographer Robert Parmet, it was only after World War Two destroyed the European Jewish culture of his Bundist roots, that Dubinsky became more sympathetic to the idea of a state in Palestine.

This is arguably reflected in Dubinsky's autobiographical account of his views at the time of his first meeting with David Ben Gurion in the late 1940s, around the time Israel achieved statehood:

We first met at a meeting of the Jewish Labor Committee, and I told him that even though I was sympathetic to the creation of Israel, I was not a Zionist and I did not care much for the way some former Communists were now rallying to the Zionist cause because it was the fashionable thing for American Jews to do. "Now listen Dubinsky," he said to me. "Why should we fight? If I had come to the United States in 1911 when you did and you had come to Palestine when I did, you would be the Prime Minister and I would be the president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union."

Israel

After the election of a Labour government in Britain, Freda Kirchwey of The Nation' asked Dubinsky to write to Clement Attlee requesting the implementation of the Balfour Declaration and the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine. ILGWU pressure led Dubinsky to wire Attlee again in July 1946, calling for conciliation.

In November 1946, Ernest Bevin met Dubinsky and Matthew Woll in New York, where they discussed opening up immigration to the United States as well as Palestine.

Dubinsky accepted the United Nations September 1947 proposal to partition Palestine, into Jewish, Arab and Jerusalem states, and enlisted the support of William Green and the AFL for the plan.

Shortly after the foundation of the State of Israel, Foreign Minister Golda Meir met Dubinsky in New York and requested a $1 million dollar loan, which was paid on 25 June 1948. The ILGWU also donated $220,000 to the Histadrut and $150,000 to the United Jewish Appeal.

After US diplomat James G. McDonald asked Dubinsky to investigate the status of communism, he sent Charles Zimmerman on a visit to the new state. Zimmerman reported that the Communists were a problem but not very dangerous.

ICFTU

In November 1949, Dubinsky was a member of the AFL delegation to the founding conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

Racketeering investigation

In 1957, Dubinsky was compelled to testify to a US Senate investigation on labor racketeering.

Affiliations

• Jewish Labor Committee
• American Labor Party
• Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies
• Liberal Party of New York
• Americans for Democratic Action
• American Committee for a United Europe
• Committee on the Present Danger (1950 version)

Connections

• Jay Lovestone

External resources

• William Weinstone, The Case Against David Dubinsky, June, 1946, archived at American Left Ephemera Collection, 1894-2008, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
• David Dubinsky, Abraham Henry Raskin, David Dubinsky: a life with labor, Simon & Schuster, 1977.
• Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement, NYU Press, 2005.