In the early 1930's, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
(ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a
broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community
involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming
majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and
created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. All Together
Different revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building
and worker education during the Great Depression.
Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the International
Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) appealed to an international
force of coworkers, Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based
cultural pluralism, which Daniel Katz newly terms "mutual culturalism,"
back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These
militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity
derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of
autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth century Russian
Empire. Built on original scholarship and bolstered by exhaustive
research, All Together Different offers a fresh perspective on the
nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and
contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.