Joe Rapoport
The Life of a Jewish Radical
Joe Rapoport’s experiences span a half century of American radicalism, from the trade union movement to the protests against the war in Vietnam. Through interviews with Kenneth Kann, Joe tells the story of his life: growing up in a shtetl during World War I and the Russian Revolution, emigrating to America in 1920, organizing the knitting trade and needle trades workers in New York City during the twenties and thirties, encountering “the Jewish Question” before and after World War II, McCarthyism, joining the postwar Jewish chicken ranching community in Petaluma California, and the civil rights movement.
Most other accounts of the American left wing have focused on leaders and party policies. This is one of the few accounts of the labor movement from the viewpoint of the rank-and-file. It also provides an unusual view of the relationship between Yiddish culture and politics.
Praise for Joe Rapoport
“Here is an inspiring book.”
— San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Kann’s biography of Rapoport…is a fast reading and broadening account of a Jew, radical and worker who participated in major world events of the 1900s with his eyes, mind and his heart open.”
— Santa Rosa Press Democrat
“While Rapoport talks about his childhood in the Russian shtetl of Stanislavchik, his “conversion” to socialism, his years as a union organizer and much, much more, Kenneth Kann remains in the background, changing the reels on the tape recorder and then forming the results into this extraordinary book.”
— American Jewish Congress Monthly
“In a life as old as the century, Joe Rapoport has experienced many things: Czarism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the infancy of the Soviet system; persecution and perseverance, anti-Semitism, the preservation of the Yiddish culture, U.S, trade unionism from the ‘20s onward; the Old Left and the New Left of the multi-faceted movement including labor organizing, civil rights, anti-war, ecology, nuclear disarmament, community activism; the weighing of ideals with realities in three visits to the USSR; careers as a handknitter in New York’s pre-mechanized textile industry and as a family chicken rancher in Petaluma. There is a book that covers all of this: Joe Rapoport: the Life of a Jewish Radical, which is a collaboration between Rapoport and labor historian Kenneth Kann. ‘My own historian,’ Rapoport quite proudly introduces Kann.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“A portrait of Jewish socialism’s left wing, etched in small brush strokes and loving detail.”
— American Jewish Congress Monthly
“Joe Rapoport’s political consciousness will speak to progressives, his attachment to his people will stir members of minority groups, and his ties with his homelands-Russia and Israel-will touch every immigrant’s child.”
— Nell Painter
“Kenneth Kann’s oral history of Joe Rapoport introduces the world and values of part of the Jewish left in this century. With Kann’s encouragement, Rapoport not only recounted the high points of his life as a union organizer in the New York City knit good industry and his later years as a California chicken rancher in Petaluma, but he also reflected on the meaning of his political struggles…Here is a fine fruit of oral history: the life story of an authentic man of the people, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States dedicated to the Communist cause.”
— The Journal of American History
“The collaboration of these two men has proven highly successful – the eighty year old seasoned radical and the young man who acknowledges that he was seeking through Rapoport’s experience ‘an inquiry into my cultural roots and attempt to understand my own generation’s rebellion in the 1960s.’”
— Pacific Sun