“The People’s Judge”: Jacob Panken, Yiddish Socialism, and American Law†

2018/12/21 by Britt P. Tevis · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

paper · doi:10.1093/ajlh/njy026

openalex publication_date 2018/12/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05

Abstract

This article explores the career of Jacob Panken, the first judge elected on a Socialist Party ticket in the United States. Situating Panken in an early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant milieu and analyzing some of the cases over which he presided, it shows how he employed legal realism to weave Yiddish socialism, a political philosophy espoused by turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jews in New York City, into his judicial decisions. Illuminating Panken’s unique place in the American judiciary, it contributes to scholarship on American socialism, twentieth-century American Jewish lawyers, and local legal histories.

Cited by

• Jacob Panken [wikipedia]

Related

• Judgments of Peace Montreal’s Jewish Arbitration Courts, 1914-1976
• The internal politics of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, 1933–1939
• The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000
• Weber in Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Debate over the Establishment of the Rabbinical Court of Appeals, 1918–1921
• Flogging Jack Nafte: Corporal Punishment, Imperial Assimilation, and Jewish Whiteness in Pre-Apartheid South Africa