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Julius Bernstein Papers

Call Number

WAG.116

Dates

1920-1984, inclusive
; 1950-1977, bulk

Creator

Bernstein, Julius, 1919-
Walter P. Reuther Library (Role: Donor)
Bernstein, Arthur (Role: Donor)
Bernstein, Stanley (Role: Donor)

Extent

52 Linear Feet
in 45 record cartons, 6 flat boxes, 5 oversize folders in shared boxes, and 1 oversize flat file folder.

Language of Materials

Materials are in English and Yiddish.

Abstract

Julius Bernstein (1919-1977) served for more than twenty-five years as a field representative of the Jewish Labor Committee based in Boston, but with responsibility for all of New England. A tireless advocate of civil rights, he served on the Massachusetts Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Human Rights and was appointed as a labor representative to the Boston Housing Authority (which he later served as Chairman) in 1968. An active member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party, Bernstein was also a member or officer of the Workmen's Circle, the American Veterans Committee, the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and many community-based organizations. The collection includes correspondence, reports, flyers, photographs, and clippings reflecting the range of Bernstein's interests and political involvements. Also included are four banners, and a variety of pennants and insignia. Of note are rare materials documenting housing, school desegregation and other political struggles in Boston.

Historical/Biographical Note

Julius ("Julie") Bernstein (1919-1977) served for more than twenty-five years as a field representative of the Jewish Labor Committee based in Boston, but with responsibility for all of New England. A tireless advocate of civil rights, he served on the Massachusetts Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Human Rights and was appointed as a labor representative to the Boston Housing Authority (of which he later became Chairman) in 1968. An active member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party, Bernstein was also a member or officer of the Workmen's Circle, the American Veterans Committee, the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and many community-based organizations.

Bernstein was born in New York City to Solomon ("Sam") and Rose Kimmel Bernstein. His father was born in a small town near Odessa in Russia, and his mother in Halicz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; both came to the United States in their teens. He was trained in Orthodox Jewish observance, and though he soon abandoned religious commitment, he retained a passionate interest in traditional Jewish culture. The family moved to Boston, where his father was a partner in a used auto parts business and his mother worked in garment shops, during his primary school years. Julius attended Boston Latin School, Roxbury Memorial High School, and, during another brief sojourn in New York, graduated from James Monroe High School; in the Bronx. He later attended the Boston University School of Journalism for one year, while steadfastly resisting his father's efforts to interest him in a business or civil service career.

He was drafted by the U.S. Army in December 1941. In his son Stanley's words, "He prided himself on never rising above the rank of private first class, and for his G.I.'s disdain for officers." He was honorably discharged in 1945. He had married Bess Belle Luff in 1940, and the couple had two sons, Stanley, born in 1941, and Eugene Debs, born in 1943.

After holding a few short-term odd jobs, Julius Bernstein found his vocation in life when we he went to work, in 1948, at the Boston office of the Jewish Labor Committee at 27 School Street. He started as an assistant to the JLC's field representative for Boston, Rose Parker. When Parker relocated to Detroit Bernstein succeeded her. The JLC, whose mission was to act as a bridge between the labor movement and the organized Jewish community, had a national office in New York and field offices in major fifties across the country. Field office work was coordinated by JLC National Secretary Emanuel Muravchik and one of his chief assistants, Betty Kaye Taylor. Another JLC staffer who became a close friend and eventually relocated to Boston, where he did civil rights work, was Jacob Schlitt. Always a self-starter and something of a maverick within the JLC, Bernstein in the early years aimed to make the JLC-Boston the education arm of organized labor in New England on human rights issues. An annual Human Rights Awards Dinner, held throughout the 1960s and 70s, became the primary fund-raising vehicle for the JLC-Boston. He produced literature for display and distribution and conducted seminars at countless state, regional and local labor gatherings. A dynamo of activity, he soon branched out to become a key player in a long list of state and local organizations, on a host of related issues, from housing and education to police-community relations, immigrant rights and the campaign for Soviet Jewry. His School Street office became a hub of community and radical activism, especially in the strife-torn years of intense civil rights and anti-war struggle in the city. He became a court-appointed community mediator during the period of Louise Day Hicks's anti-school-busing campaign. Along the way Bernstein built strong connections to the varied ethnic, religious, labor, neighborhood and political constituencies of the city, while maintaining his personal ties to secular and progressive Jewish groups such as the Workmen's Circle and to the democratic socialist movement.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Bernstein served as a member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (also known as the Massachusetts Commission on Human Rights). The Advisory Committee was then chaired by Father (later Congressman) Robert F. Drinan; its work included path-breaking studies of segregation in housing, employment and public schools; investigations of civil rights violations; and involvement in the defense of Native American rights. An early supporter of "fair housing" measures, Bernstein was appointed in 1968 by Mayor Kevin White to a five-year term as a "labor representative" to the Boston Housing Authority. He went on to become Chairman of the Authority, in which capacity he became involved in the Doris Bunte Case, dispute in which Bernstein sought to defend the Authority against the Mayor's efforts to exercise political patronage and arbitrarily replace Mrs. Bunte. The case was finally decided in the Authority's favor by the Superior Court; Mrs. Bunte was reinstated and went on to serve under successive mayors until 1992. As a consequence of the case Bernstein was not reappointed to a second term.

Among the many organizations of which he was supporter, a member or an officer were Mothers for Welfare Rights, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Mattapan-Dorchester Jewish Committee, the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, the Civil Rights Committee of the Massachusetts State Labor Council, and the Ernie Pyle Chapter of the American Veterans Committee. He also amassed files on right-wing extremists and their organizations, in particular the Massachusetts-based John Birch Committee.

The Bernsteins' home in Jamaica Plan served as a welcoming social venue for his many political friends and allies, and was a way-station for visiting speakers and political notables of labor and the left. As Stanley Bernstein wrote, "Oftentimes, labor leaders and political and civil rights activists from other cities and foreign countries (including Norway, Austria, India, and Great Britain) stayed the night…. The guests included… Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Joe Glazer, Don Slaiman, Michael Harrington and…Hugh Gaitskell." Harrington and Rustin, along with garment-union leaders Sol Chaiken and Jacob Sheinkman served as chairmen of a testimonial dinner honoring Bernstein in 1974.

Bernstein suffered from cardiac disease from an early age, and suffered a mild heart attack in his early fifties. He died of a massive heart attack at age 58 in November 1977 and is buried in the Workmen's Circle Cemetery in Peabody, MA.

Sources:

Stanley Bernstein, "Biographical Essay on Julius Bernstein," c.1992 (unpublished, copy in Bernstein accession file, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU).

Arrangement

Folders in Series I and II are arranged alphabetically. Series III has not been arranged by an archivist. The collection has three series, one of which has been divided into subseries:

Series I: Subject Files, 1920-1984

Series II: Non-Print Materials, 1940-1973

Subseries IIA: Photographs, 1947-1971

Subseries IIB: Artifacts and Ephemera, 1947-1973

Series III: Unprocessed Materials, 1938-1977

Folders are arranged alphabetically.

The files are grouped into two series:

Missing Title

  1. I, Subject Files, 1920-1984
  2. II, Unprocessed Materials, 1938-1977

Scope and Content Note

The Bernstein Papers reflect the full range of organizational connections and political contacts of a man whose interests ranged from right-wing extremism to Yiddish culture. In addition to the correspondence, reports, official analyses and privately funded studies of urban issues, flyers, clippings and notes documenting his own activity, he collected political ephemera and kept up a private correspondence with activists all over the country. His frankness and his tendency to embrace positions somewhat to the left of his socialist and labor contemporaries is well illustrated in his freewheeling (sometimes acerbic) correspondence with JLC staffers Emanuel Muravchik and Betty Kaye Taylor; in his long exchanges with Young People's Socialist League activists, especially on the Vietnam War; and in many letters he exchanged with his friend Bill Kelmsley, who kept him posted on the labor scene in upper New England.

Another friend, Jack Plunkett, writing a memorial tribute in the Yankee Radical (1980), produced a colorful picture of Bernstein's office at 27 School St.: "… a half-dozen four drawer file cabinets whose drawers stuck, almost bulging with files of organizations: the Massachusetts Committee on Discrimination in Housing, the American Veterans Committee, the Massachusetts Commission on Human Rights, the Workmen's Circle, Citizens Housing and Planning Association, the state Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, four years of minutes of meetings of the Boston Housing Authority, complaints of migrant workers, Socialist Party records from the 50's, two entire file cabinets of every right-wing organization that had cropped up in two decades and on and on. Piles of clippings and reports tower from every horizontal surface… on the wall, a dusty picture of Karl Marx, askew, and near it another of Eugene Debs… [and] a large sketch of Norman Thomas. Nearby a rickety wooden pigeon-hole file crammed with pamphlets, notes, books, balanced on a table littered with papers." Not every piece of paper survived to be transferred to the archives, but enough remains to reflect the main outlines of Bernstein's activism and enthusiasms.

As Plunkett noticed, in addition to archival materials Julius Bernstein accumulated a very large number of books, pamphlets and periodicals. Hundreds of serial titles, representing a wide range of organizations and subject-matter, were found in the collection. They included national, regional and local labor periodicals, publications of student and community groups in the Boston area, the underground and alternative press of the 1960s and 70s, journals devoted to progressive Jewish politics and culture, newsletters of the many organizations Bernstein supported or joined, civil rights, civil liberties and peace movement publications and a substantial cross-section of publications emanating from extreme right-wing groups.

Conditions Governing Access

Materials are open without restrictions.

Conditions Governing Use

Copyright (or related rights to publicity and privacy) for materials in this collection, created by Julius Bernstein was not transferred to New York University. Permission to use materials must be secured from the copyright holder.

Preferred Citation

Published citations should take the following form:

Identification of item, date; Julius Bernstein Papers; WAG 116; box number; folder number;
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012, New York University Libraries.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

The Julius Bernstein Papers were transferred to the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, from the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, Detroit under an agreement with the Bernstein family in 1995. The transfer was facilitated by Julius Bernstein's brother Arthur and his elder son, Stanley. The accession numbers associated with this gift are 1995.003 and 1995.014. The papers had originally been deposited at the Reuther Library in 1978; when the transfer to NYU occurred a substantial portion of Bernstein's books, pamphlets and periodicals remained at Wayne State.

Separated Materials

Posters seperated from this collection during processing can be found in the Tamiment/Wagner Poster and Broadside Collection (GRAPHICS 002).

Collection processed by

Jessica Weglein and Gail Malmgreen, 2001; 2003; 2007

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-02-06 14:06:39 -0500.
Using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language: Finding aid is written in English

Processing Information

Photographs separated from this collection during processing were established as a separate collection, the Julius Bernstein Photographs (PHOTOS 168). In 2014, the photograph collection was reincorporated into the Julius Bernstein Papers (WAG 116).

Edition of this Guide

This version was derived from Bernstein Wag 116.doc

Repository

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012