David Dubinsky

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

Dubinsky was appointed treasurer of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) at its foundation on 25 February 1934. 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.

According to historian Harvey Levenstein, 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, Dubinsky's autobiography gives a different 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."

Affiliations

• Jewish Labor Committee
• Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies
• 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.