Solidarity in Question: Critical Theory,Labor,and Anti-Semitism

Abstract

During World War II, Frankfurt School researchers studied attitudes in factories across America, finding high levels of anti-Semitism. Since the CIO’s birth in 1935, labor had grown meteorically and seemed fundamentally progressive. But the Frankfurt study of Labor anti-Semitism showed the other side of the coin — namely, that many workers held anti-Semitic views of a kind familiar from fascist propaganda, even during an anti-fascist war. In this issue of Critical Sociology, we excerpt Paul Massing’s contribution to this large unpublished study. Massing’s findings, and those of his co-authors, went almost entirely unnoticed and the corrosive bias they exposed has now largely vanished in the USA. Yet the findings of this study remain pertinent at a moment when, after many shifts of register and key, both labor and anti-Semitism remain significant global forces. The articles by present-day authors that accompany Massing’s article address related issues.