Years before the Triangle disaster, she was well aware of the deadly implications of capitalists’ labor abuses, and fought to end them through collective action. Schneiderman’s life was typical in this respect. Born in 1882 in Poland, Schneiderman moved with her family to the Lower East Side in 1890 and found work as a seamstress.
Jews had fled pogroms in Europe only to find themselves risking their lives in US factories. Jewish women immigrants were in a particularly difficult situation: they loved the social freedom that the US offered compared to life in the Russian Empire, but the price of independence was often working in a sweatshop. The dire economic straits many found themselves in further nurtured that radicalism. (The Jewish Labor Bund - which became the preeminent socialist Jewish group, representing a significant proportion of Jewish workers in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia - was founded about 250 miles from Schneiderman’s birthplace.) These nascent Americans came from places with strong radical political currents, where socialism and left ideas were always in the air.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, radical politics permeated Manhattan’s Lower East Side - especially among Eastern European Jews. Today, as the board members and administrators of powerful Jewish institutions marshal support for the Israeli government and other reactionary agendas, the legacy of radical Jews like Schneiderman - who saw the fight against antisemitism and patriarchy as inseparable from the fight against capitalism - offers a stirring alternative vision for Jewish activists and the Left more broadly. Many of the most prominent leaders of the post-fire mobilization - including the seamstress, lesbian, and feminist socialist Rose Schneiderman - were Jewish-American women.
Triangle carries a particular significance for Jewish-American radicals. More than a century later, March 25 stands as a pivotal date in the history of feminism and organized labor in America. In the wake of what went down as the worst industrial disaster in New York history, labor activists mobilized the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the wealthier Women’s Trade Union League to win worker protections that we still enjoy to this day. The youngest victims, Kate Leone and Rosaria Maltese, were just fourteen years old. Today marks the 108th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which in twenty minutes consumed the lives of 146 people, mostly young immigrant Jewish and Italian women and girls who worked in the New York City factory.
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