In this series we are featuring profiles of
leading secular and humanist Jews from various
countries and eras. These profiles are written by
Bennett Muraskin, a regular contributor to
Outlook, Humanistic Judaism and Jewish Currents.
Many of these profiles appear in Bennett's book
Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews
from Hillel to Helen Suzman, published by the
Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations and the
Centre for Cultural Judaism. (For ordering
information contact CSJO at csjo@csjo.org.)

Few female Jewish immigrants to the U.S. have led
lives as dynamic and eventful as Rose Pesotta.
She was born Rokhl Peisoty in a Ukrainian
shtetl and became a rebel early in life, joining
the anti-Czarist revolutionary movement before
she became a teenager. At age 16 she emigrated to
the U.S. to escape an arranged marriage and join
her older sister. Their father was murdered in a
pogrom in 1919, perpetrated by Ukrainian
nationalists.
Arriving in New York in 1913, Rose's sister found
her a job in a shirtwaist factory organized by
Local 25 International Ladies Garment Workers
Union (ILGWU). Before long she became an
organizer for the union. She participated in many
strikes and was elected to the executive board of
the local, where she established one of the first
worker education programs. Meanwhile, she learned
English at night school and continued her studies
at the Bryn Mawr School for Workers in Industry,
the Rand School of Social Science and the
Wisconsin Summer School for Workers. In 1926 she
graduated from the Brookwood Labor College, which
existed from 1921 to 1937 as a residential school
for social activists belonging to the
non-Communist left.
In 1933, she became a general organizer for the
ILGWU and the next year she was elected a
vice-president, the first woman to hold such a
high post. She accepted the position, believing
that "the voice of a solitary woman on the
General Executive Board would be a voice lost in
the wilderness." Her prediction proved correct,
as no other women were chosen, even as their
percentage of the general membership rose to 85%
by the 1940s.
Pesotta was an anarchist. She attended anarchist
conferences, wrote for the anarchist press and
opposed World War I as an imperialist war. She
was befriended by fellow anarchist Emma Goldman,
who was arrested in the notorious Palmer raids,
along with thousands of other radical "aliens,"
and deported to the USSR. Pesotta considered
Goldman a mentor, and engaged in a long, futile
campaign to lift the ban on her returning to the
U.S. Pesotta's fiancée, a Russian anarchist, was
also deported, and she never saw him again.
Pesotta was arrested in 1927 for protesting the
execution of Italian immigrant anarchists Sacco
and Vanzetti.
Pessota had a flair for the dramatic. During a
strike in Los Angeles against a manufacturer of
sportswear, she dressed some of the young female
workers in evening gowns and had them march in
front of a posh hotel wearing their picket signs.
She made sure the press was there. The favorable
publicity this event received softened the
position of the employer, who did not want to be
seen as the exploiter of beauty queens. The
strike ended in a victory for the ILGWU.
Pesotta was such an outstanding union organizer
that the ILGWU loaned her to the CIO for its
organizing drives in heavy industry. In the late
1930s, she assisted the rubber workers during
their sit-down strike at Goodyear in Akron, Ohio
and the auto workers during their sit-down at
General Motors in Flint, Michigan. Despite
language and cultural differences, she also
achieved success organizing for the ILGWU among
Mexican workers in Los Angeles, French Canadians
in Quebec and in Puerto Rico.
Her union activism took its toll, both physically
and emotionally. She was beaten so seriously by
anti-union thugs that she suffered permanent
hearing loss. Constantly on the move, she
suffered from loneliness and was unable to
establish a stable personal life. In 1940, she
resigned from the leadership of the
ILGWU,disillusioned with male domination of the
union. She returned to the rank-and-file as a
shop worker, where she vigorously supported the
Allies in World War II. At the same time, she
opposed the no-strike pledge taken by the
leadership of both the AFL and CIO, because it
tied the hands of workers while employers
benefited from rising prices and profits.
Pesotta's life took a different turn with the
onset of World War II. Shaken by the news of the
slaughter of European Jewry, including many of
her relatives, she joined the B'nai Brith
Anti-Defamation League and began speaking
throughout the country against anti-Semitism and
racism. After the war, she traveled to Poland and
visited the Majdenek concentration camp, where
she met with survivors. She worked tirelessly to
resettle them in the U.S.
In her earlier years, she had an ambivalent
attitude toward her Jewishness. Echoing Tom
Paine, she declared, "The world is my country and
to do good is my religion." But the impact of the
Holocaust turned her into a Zionist. She became
Midwest Director of the American Trade Union
Council for Histadrut and identified with the
Labor Zionist movement for the rest of her life.
In this way, she achieved a synthesis of her
devotion to the labou movement and to the Jewish
people.
Pesotta also distinguished herself as an advocate
for civil rights for African Americans. During
her entire public life, she remained true to the
lesson she learned from a private tutor back in
the Ukraine: "The people come first. It is their
actions that bring about changes in society."
Pesotta had literary interests as well. She wrote
an unpublished novel about a Yeshiva student who
became a revolutionary and two volumes of
memoirs, Bread Upon the Waters (1944) and Days of
Our Lives (1958). She dedicated the second volume
to the memory of the Jewish civilization
destroyed by the Nazis.

For further reading, see The Gentle General: Rose
Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer, by Elaine
Leeder, State University of New York Press,
Albany, NY, 1993.