ABSTRACT
The mass immigration of East European Jews into the United States in the 1880s quickly changed the social composition of American Jewry. The attention of the general US public as well as of the Jews themselves moved from the outstanding individual, prominent in business, civic, social, political and cultural life, to include, and for a time emphasize, the anonymous immigrant mass, which soon, of course, pushed forward new individuals as leaders. The main point of the pamphlet is Marx’s explanation of capitalist “exploitation”: that the capitalist appropriates the surplus value added to the raw material by the wage-laborer. These studies reflected themselves in the principles of the United Hebrew Trades. The platform of the United Hebrew Trades was adopted at the second meeting of the United Hebrew Trades, on October 16, 1888. This platform is a vigorous, concrete, and eloquent statement of socialist principles, many of them Marxian, as they apply to trade union work.
