The Right Wing Club
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York celebrating the four cooperative apartment complexes that went up in the northern Bronx early in the 20th century provides a glimpse of the world whence I sprang – and from which I rescued one of the most remarkable political documents I’ve ever seen.
The complex my parents and I lived in was the Sholem Aleichem Houses, opened to tenant-owners. The others that are subjects of this wonderful exhibit are the Amalgamated Housing projects, and the communist and Labor Zionist co-ops (koops, we called them) across Moshulu Parkway to the east.
It is important that the communist glorification of their own record is not accepted as historical truth. The communists were a minority except in their own co-op. They did not answer fund-raising appeals for the Jewish workers in Palestine, because the socialists did not harbor the same animosity to expressions of Jewish particularism. My father broke with one of them, a sculptor named Goodleman, in 1939 when Goodleman, remarking on the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, told my father, “they’re killing your Jews.” My father vowed to never speak with him again, a vow he honored for the next five decades.
It was from my father that I first learned of the Right Wing Club. He was giving me a tour of the cellars, which wound like warrens beneath the buildings, spread around a central courtyard. All the cellar rooms were empty by then, devoid of life, but for my father they were still the scenes of Yiddish classrooms for the children and of various different caucuses. As we passed one room, beneath B section, and with windows facing out to Sedgwick Avenue, my father pointed and said, “This was the Right Wing Club.”
By this point – it must have been around 1964 – “right wing” summoned images of Barry Goldwater, and this made no sense in the context of the Sholem Aleichem Houses. So I asked my father what he meant, and my father told me that this was the meeting place of the Norman Thomas socialists. In their world, that was the right wing.
Years later, I’d heard tales from a friend about a fellow called Moishe Katz, who had become a leader among the Jewish communists in New York. When I returned to the Bronx for a visit, I asked my father whether he had ever heard of Moishe Katz. “That son of a bitch,” my father murmured. He retreated to his study and emerged with a pamphlet, published by the Right Wing Faction. In it the Right Faction explained why it supported the decision to deny Moishe Katz of the staff of the communist daily “Freiheit” the use of the Sholem Aleichem public platform to defend the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Our neighbors have been roused by the appearance of an “innocent placard” stating that Moishe Katz of the “Freiheit” staff will explain the Hitler-Stalin Pact and will expound on its “advantages for Jews.”
As soon as this announcement was made known, it called forth heated protest on the part of the majority of the neighbors. It was immediately apparent that far from clarifying the situation, such a lecture would only serve the purpose of provocating and intensifying the pain and heartbreak of the majority of our neighbors.
At a time like this, with the world on fire, enflamed by the Hitler-Stalin Pact; at a time like this, when Jewish blood flows in Poland; NOW, at a time like this, there are still those to be found in our midst who feel it incumbent upon them to come before US and justify the inhuman Hitler-Stalin Pact and by this means, in dastardly and shameless fashion, they expose our deepest and most painful wounds.
The civilized world, the international workers’ parties, the intelligentsia of all nations, even those who were inclined to the Soviet regime, have all placed their condemnation upon the Hitler-Stalin Judas kiss. And now we have neighbors attempting to justify this situation-justify it before people, many of whom are now in mourning over their brothers and sisters who have fallen victims of this holocaust; many of whom come from those same towns and villages which are now being destroyed under the scourge of Hitler’s band, and where Jewry is being drowned in an ocean of blood and tears.
Perhaps the ugliest and most contemptible feature of their propaganda is the fabricated alibi that only through the Agreement can World Peace be maintained – at a time when we are aware that Hitler would never have commenced his slaughtering had he not had the support and received his instruments of murder and destruction from his newly acquired comrade. Today, Stalin’s armies have crossed the borders of Poland to descent upon a defenseless land and grab a robber’s share. “Stalin and his partner Hitler stand ready to free the oppressed minorities”!
And just who is this liberator? Hitler, with Stalin as his aide!!
Is not this the lowest form of treachery? Is not this the most contemptible betrayal of mankind?
And who are the ones who endorse this policy? The Jewish Communists! And where do they dare to attempt to justify this policy? In the Sholom Aleichem Houses!
The document went on in that fashion and tone for some paragraphs and was signed, “The Right Faction” or, in Yiddish, “Der rechte fraczia.” This is a cry from the radical past of the Bronx that has meaning now, at a time when Jews are endangered, when the hard left betrays us and we seek again a political position which puts us squarely on our own side, on the side of democracy, and on the side of progress.
Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.