Examines interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression

In the early 1930’s, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. All Together Different revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression.
Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) appealed to an international force of coworkers, Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based cultural pluralism, which Daniel Katz newly terms “mutual culturalism,” back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth century Russian Empire. Built on original scholarship and bolstered by exhaustive research, All Together Different offers a fresh perspective on the nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.

"All Together Different will be a useful text for students of American labor, immigration, Jewish studies, and women's studies. It should also be required reading for any current labor activist or activist on the political left interested in bridging the ethnoracial differences among the '99 percent.'" - American Historical Review

"In All Together Different, Daniel Katz, an associate professor of history at Empire State College of the State University of New York, reveals why and how the predominantly Jewish leaders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union enlisted many black and Hispanic colleagues beginning in the 1930s. Professor Katz mines archives at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and other research organizations to make his case that the recruitment was rooted in the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewis" - The New York Times

"In this fine study, Katz provides a model for how to integrate labor, racial/ethnic, immigration, and gender history." - Journal of American History

"Katz's study makes a contribution to the fields of labor and women's history and discusses a very significant moment in the history of the Jewish labor movement." - The American Jewish Archives Journal