Rose Schneiderman

All the good Rosas.

So you know, she's Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Parks, uh, Rose Schneiderman, this amazing Jewish labor activist in, uh, in New York City who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on, and was responsible for some of FDR's great labor, uh, great...

So yes, they all, all three of them were invoked at her britbat, at her naming, and yes, they're always invited into the Sukkah.

I'm thrilled because the question I wanted to ask gets at, I guess, the, the multiplicity of Rosas.

Tonight, I am very excited to welcome David Conrad Perez for his new book, Fire in the Heart of the City, The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Charity.

Fire in the Heart of the City details the riveting story of what happened when a tragic fire in Greenwich Village through Adolph Okas, the ambitious new publisher of the New York Times, and Rose Schneiderman, a defiant young labor organizer, against each other in a momentous conflict.

Following the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, the worst disaster New York City had ever experienced, a significant feud emerged between New York's wealthy elite and labor rights activists over who should organize the city's response.

a nascent charity sector led by the city's wealthiest bankers, or the reform-focused unions of lower Manhattan.

She previously co-founded and led the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

She is the author of Unbound, How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It and Finding Time, The Economics Work-Life Conflict.

At the end of the event, we will also have Annie Schneider Valeri, the great niece of Rose Schneiderman, join us virtually to sing the original labor song, Bread and Roses.

So please give our guests a round of applause.

The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.

That is from Rose Schneiderman, the feminist labor leader in 1912.

So bread represented the necessities of life, like home, shelter, security.

But the roses represented things like music and art, education, nature, books, the things that make a life beautiful.

No one was calling for responsibility.

Until that is, Rose Schneiderman got up to the podium to speak.

So Rose was 29, I believe at this time, and she was one of the lead organizers of the uprising of 20,000 and so many of the other strikes.

And she was by all accounts the shortest person on the stage, at about 4'6", and she had this famous red hair.

You know how they lived, not how they died.

Yeah.

One of the most meaningful parts of this book has been the conversations I've had with the great niece of Rose Schneiderman, who is doing her own historical work to keep the legacy of her great aunt alive.

And one tragic reality is that because many of the women in the labor movement had romantic, often lifelong relationships with other women, many of their letters have been destroyed by family members.