Tony Michels

Tony Michels is the George L. Mosse assistant professor of American Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published articles in American Jewish History, Jewish History and other scholarly publications. His book A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York will be published by Harvard University Press in 2005.

Articles by this author

Nine women in long dresses, coats, and hats, with their arms linked, most smiling and laughing

Uprising of 20,000 (1909)

In 1909, more than 20,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants launched an eleven-week general strike in New York’s shirtwaist industry, the largest strike by women to date in American history. The strikers won only a portion of their demands, but the uprising sparked five years of revolt that transformed the garment industry into one of the best-organized trades in the United States.
Jean Jaffe ca. 1940

Jean Jaffe

Jean Jaffe was one of the leading Yiddish journalists of her time and covered a variety of subjects, from theater to international politics. She was a field reporter at a time when women were usually relegated to women’s pages and a Yiddish-language journalist at a time when most American reporters wrote in English, making her career doubly remarkable.

Glika Bilavsky

Glika Bilavsky’s activities ran the gamut of secular Yiddish culture, from her political activism to her theatrical career. She fled Poland with her fiancé, Morris Bilavsky, in 1907 and settled in Copenhagen, where the pair married and created a Yiddish theater troupe. In 1921, the couple moved to New York, where Bilavsky performed and volunteered for Hadassah, United Jewish Appeal, and the women’s auxiliary of Mizrahi.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Tony Michels." (Viewed on April 24, 2024) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/michels-tony>.