In his political memoirs, The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the American Left ([Humanities Press, 1994], p. 28), Tim Wohlforth reports on the first “Saturday-night social” gathering that he attended of the Independent Socialist League and its youth wing, the Young Socialist League. This was in 1955:
Hal [Draper] and [his wife] Anne went over to the record player and put on a Jewish folk tune, and soon the entire place was dancing Israeli circle dances. I clumsily joined in. I had traveled a long distance from Ohio. I suspect that same night, in a similar hall in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the much-hated Communists were dancing the same dances. Radicalism in New York City in those days was very Jewish.
I wonder if Trotskyists still dance Israeli circle dances at their social gatherings. If not, why not?
