The Young Friends Pleasure and Benefit Society

Here is a link to the essay I wrote about my visit to my grandparents’ cemetery in Queens. They belonged to a burial society called The Young Friends Pleasure and Benefit Society. The day I went was the day after the collapse of the textile factory in Bangaldesh, and it turned out that many of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were buried in the same cemetery as my grandparents. This led me to meditate on the fact that my grandfather and my son were/are both Socialists, but that Socialism in America has somehow become a laughable political position . In the following essay, which just came out in Tikkun, I try to figure out why:
“The Young Friends Pleasure and Benefit Society.”