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About the Event
On October 12, Elissa Sampson, a Research Associate in Cornell's Jewish Studies Program, will visit UVA Jewish Studies for a book talk entitled "Opening a Confiscated Archive: A View of the Interracial Yiddish Left's Origins and Impact." Dr. Sampson will draw her research from her 2026 book: From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954 (ILR Press). The event is free and open to the public for in-person attendance in Gibson Hall 341 at noon; lunch provided. This event is co-sponsored by The Corcoran Department of History and The Carter G. Woodson Institute and promoted by the UVA Department of American Studies.
About the Book
From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 by leftist Yiddish speakers to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. The IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.
At its height, the IWO had almost two hundred thousand members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the US's entry into World War II, the IWO was ahead of its time in championing the nascent Civil Rights movement and Black leadership. Its leaders and activists included Clara Lemlich Shavelson, Ruth Rubin, Itche Goldberg, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Congressman Vito Marcantonio. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its leadership's ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.
About Elissa Sampson
Dr. Elissa Sampson is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage, and activism. She has pursued a life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization, and immigrant culture on New York’s Lower East Side, Brooklyn and Paris, making visible dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places. As a Research Associate in Cornell University’s Jewish Studies Program, Dr. Sampson worked extensively with Cornell’s Kheel Center confiscated Cold War archives on the International Workers Order (IWO), including their partial digitization. She co-organized a public, online academic conference, “Di Linke” (the Left), based largely on its archival Jewish Section holdings. Dr. Sampson has taught labor and gender history, including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, its memorialization, and relationship to current labor activism. She is the co-editor and contributor to a new book about the IWO.