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).