Freedom Songs: Socialist Multiculturalism and the Protest Lyric from Percy Shelley to Chaim Zhitlovsky

By Benjamin Schacht 

As protests exploded around the United States in the wake of the excruciating police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor last June, the venerable New York City-based Yiddish daily the Forward ran a story with the headline “‘We Shall Overcome’ sung in Yiddish.” Highlighting the ongoing dialogue between American Jews and the civil rights movement, the article mostly focused on a recently adapted Yiddish version of the classic civil rights anthem. But it also touched on a somewhat more obscure Yiddish contribution to the movement, Un du akerst, un du zeyst (“And you plow, and you sow,” also known as “The Hammer Song”), a song that Theodore Bikel performed for a movement audience in the early 1960s. Bikel, a Jewish refugee who fled Austria with his family in the 1930s, was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and became integral in organizing folk musicians and other performing artists — including a young Bob Dylan — on behalf of civil rights during the early 1960s.

How did a Jewish labor song find its way into the civil rights movement? One might suppose that Bikel simply brought it with him from his native Europe; however, the song’s history is much richer and more suggestive than this rather banal explanation indicates. As the Forward explains, “Although written by the Yiddishist political theorist and philosopher Chaim Zhitlovsky, [Un du akerst] has a much longer history of transcultural adaptation.” Unpacking this transcultural history not only opens a window onto a remarkable process of cultural transmission and adaptation; it also reminds us of the historical successes of multicultural, democratic socialist politics, arguably the type of politics best suited to confronting today’s intertwined challenges of persistent racism and economic inequality.

This portrait of Chaim Zhitlovsky was found in a Polish literary newspaper in 1927. https://yiddishkayt.org/view/zhitlovsky/

Chaim Zhitlovsky, who penned the original Yiddish lyrics to Un du akerst, was an early 20th century Jewish socialist and exponent of a secular Jewish cultural ideal, yidishe kultur (Yiddish culture). Born in Russia in 1865, Zhitlovsky earned a doctorate in philosophy and was active among exiled Jewish radicals in Switzerland before ultimately relocating to New York City in 1906, part of a much larger process of transatlantic interchange that shaped the Yiddish socialist movements of the 20th century. According to historian Tony Michels, a leading authority on Zhitlovsky, New York City was a hotbed of Jewish socialism in the early 20th century. Beginning in the late 19th century and building on preexisting German-immigrant socialist and anarchist movements, Yiddish socialists in New York developed their own distinctive culture of lectures, debates, newspapers, schools, and social clubs.[1] As a well-known proponent of socialism and the Yiddish language, Zhitlovsky was an influential figure within this milieu.

By the time he permanently settled in New York, Zhitlovsky was already a veteran of the burgeoning Yiddish socialist movement in Europe. He was still living there when he composed — or to be more precise, translated — Un du Akerst in the 1890s. Zhitlovsky’s Yiddish lyrics were based on a German poem by Georg Herwegh called “Bundeslied,” which Herwegh composed in 1863 for General German Worker’s Association, Germany’s first labor party. (The Association was led by Hewegh’s friend, the German-Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lasalle.) Herwegh in turn was adapting poems by the British romantic poet Percy Shelley and the German poet Heinrich Heine.[2]

Shelley had first dramatically depicted the exploitation of the common laborer in several poems of the eighteen-teens — notably “Song to the Men of England” and the Masque of Anarchy — exhorting the workers to unite against their oppression, a sentiment summed up in the Masque’s closing stanza:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

Inspired in part by Shelley, whose poetry Moses Hess had helped to disseminate throughout the German radical scene in the early 1840s, Heine composed “Die armen Weber” (The Poor Weavers) to commemorate the Silesian weavers’ uprising of 1844, borrowing Shelley’s imagery of workers weaving their own winding sheets to depict the rebellious weavers weaving a winding sheet for “Old Germany.”[3] As Jen Morgan, a scholar of Shelley’s influence on the British labor movement has argued, Shelley’s image is probably the source of Marx’s and Engels’s proclamation in the Communist Manifesto that “what the bourgeoisie produces above all is its own gravediggers.”[4]

Herwegh’s “Bundeslied” shows the influence of Heine and Shelley, possessing allusions to the former’s weavers while sporting an epigraph from the latter, “You are many, they are few.” Translating and loosely adapting Herwegh, Zhitlovsky, gave an already transcultural poem an extra Yiddish twist. Like Shelley, Heine, and Herwegh before him, Zhitlovsky used imagery of labor to argue that because society ultimately depended on the workers’ efforts, their exploitation had the potential to become their point of leverage.[5] Zhitlovsky’s final stanza follows Shelley and Herwegh in calling for the workers to realize their power, put down their tools, and compel the machinery of exploitation to grind to a halt:

Ale reyder shteyen shtill
Oyb dayn shtarker orem vil!

 (All the wheels stand still
If your strong arm wills!)

Un du akerst was in fact one of several poems that Zhitlovsky translated from German during this period. Other poems included Heine’s previously mentioned “Die armen Weber” as well as Heine’s poem Der Sklavenschiff (The Slave Ship), a moving and graphic depiction of the middle passage.[6] (The latter indicates Zhitlovsky’s attunement to slavery and racist oppression as  integral parts of a broader system of capitalist exploitation.) Around the same time that he was translating Herwegh and Heine, Zhitlovsky was also developing his ideas about Jewish nationalism and yidishe kultur, which he articulated in writings such as “Yidn un Yiddishkayt” and “Sotsialism un natsionalism.” In these texts Zhitlovsky expressed an idiosyncratic conception of Jewish identity which was secular, historical, and cultural rather than religious or biological, but which he nevertheless differentiated from assimilationism through his peculiar brand of progressive Jewish nationalism, which was neither chauvinistic nor militaristic.[7]

As Michels explores in detail, a key part of Zhitlovsky’s advocacy of secular Jewish identity politics was his emphasis on the Yiddish language. Michels summarizes Zhitlovsky as “a man of high learning and yet a Jewish nationalist who championed the lowly zhargon—in both Russian and Yiddish—as a language of civilized culture.”[8] Whereas other Jewish socialist leaders adopted Yiddish for the instrumental purpose of communicating with the Jewish masses and saw no particular use for it thereafter, Zhitlovsky envisioned Yiddish as a language of science, art, and literature.[9] In accordance with this ideal, Zhitlovsky wrote original works of scholarship in Yiddish and translated classic works of philosophy and literature, including Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, texts on Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Marx, and even Einstein’s theory of relativity.[10] In translating Un du Akerst Zhitlovsky was accomplishing both his aims at once: the advancement of yidishe kultur and the dissemination of socialist ideas.

Zhitlovsky’s Yiddish poetry translations and the broader cultural program to which they belonged possess historical interest in their own right, but they also hold lessons for our current cultural-political moment in which protests against widening economic inequality have coincided and interacted with a growing movement against racist forms of discrimination, exclusion, and denial of full-citizenship rights. Zhitlovsky’s foregrounding of issues of class and economic exploitation without disregarding the struggle against racial oppression as incidental to the broader class struggle provides one model for how today’s movements might unite around a common agenda that furthers the interests of all its participants.

Indeed, the fact that Bikel incorporated the song into the culture of the civil rights movement is one indication that an ethos of multicultural socialism has already been a vital part of successful social movement struggles. Labor and folk songs of the type to which “Un du akerst” belongs played an important role in the civil rights movement. Known as “freedom songs,” the anthems of the movement were not only vehicles for ideas of justice and equality, but they also provided strength, courage, and nourishment to those engaged in the slow, difficult, and often dangerous work of advancing social justice and political change. As Bernice Johnson Reagan eloquently explains, “Freedom songs are documents created by a collective voice. Often when we think of masses of people we actually think of inarticulate people and we look for a speaker to let us know what is going on. During this Movement, the masses came singing and the songs they sang are essential documents.”

Some of these freedom songs were captured by another son of eastern European Jewry, Moe Asch — son of the famous Yiddish writer Scholem Asch — on his label Folkways, which in 1965 put out the album Freedom Songs: Selma, Alabama. One of the songs heard repeatedly on the album is “Which Side are You on?,” a song which originated in the labor struggles of the miners in Harlan County, Kentucky. The inclusion of this song hints at the influence of the labor movement on the civil rights movement. While we remember the March on Washington today for Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, we usually drop the latter part of its original title, “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The march tactic itself had been pioneered earlier by one of the demonstration’s organizers, the Black socialist leader A. Philip Randolph. Like “Which Side Are You On?” and Randolph’s contributions, Un du akerst reveals the presence of the labor movement ethic at work in the civil rights movement; it is also an example of how the culture of protest can integrate myriad experiences of oppression around a liberatory vision of a democratic socialist society in which all forms oppression and exploitation are abolished. Such examples are worth remembering today as the twin forces of racism and economic inequality threaten to undermine the precarious democratic advances of the recent past.

Benjamin Schacht is an independent scholar and public humanist. He holds a PhD in comparative literary studies from Northwestern University. 

[1] Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 41-49.

[2] The best account of the genesis of Un du akerst, un du zeyst that I have read is Ruth Rubin’s “History of an American-Yiddish Folksong” Jewish Quarterly, no. 2 (1954), 51-60. Rubin situates the history of the poem within the larger pattern of Jewish migration to the United States, as well as the romantic poetic tradition of Shelley and Heine, and draws suggestive parallels between Zhitlovsky’s lyrics and those of African American folk songs recorded by Frederick Douglass.

[3] On Hess, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke Univesity Press, 2001), Ch. 2, n. 38; On Heine, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 162.

[4] Jen Morgan, “The Transmission of P.B. Shelley in Owenite and Chartist Newspapers and Periodicals” (PhD thesis, University of Salford, UK, 2014), 167. For more about Shelley's lasting influence on the labor movement, see Michael Demson and Summer McClinton, Masks of Anarchy: The Story of a Radical Poem from Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire (Verso: New York, 2013). 

[5] Rubin, “History of an American-Yiddish Folksong,” 55. 

[6] Chaim Zhitlowsky, Gezamelte Shriften (Warsaw: Ch. Brozoza, 1931), 212-222.

[7] Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 128-136.

[8] Ibid., 139-40.

[9] Ibid., 144.

[10] Ibid., 148-50.