Jeanette DiLorenzo

Nov 8, 2004 4:25 PM

UFT members can still catch Jeannette Dilorenzo's act as she regularly blastsNewt Gingrich and the rest of Capitol Hill's mob on the retired teacher'spage of the New York Teacher. But, union oldtimers will say, "you shouldhave seen Jeannette back when ... " Born Jeannette Blumenfeld, she grew upamong the pushcarts and the protests on New York's "magnificent" Lower EastSide. "All the people around us were committed to the notions of trade unionismand socialism," she told the UFT Oral History project in 1986, "to the ideaof building a better world; the idea of belonging to the working class."Her parents had come from Romania in 1907, her father one step ahead of armyconscription. She remembers her older brother taking her to the Rand SocialistSchool for Sunday morning classes studying Karl Marx. "The religion of myhouse was (socialism), the Jewish Daily Forward the bible." DiLorenzo'sintroduction to political struggle wasn't always so cerebral. She recallsmarching on the piers in support of striking maritime workers in the mid-1930sand being "chased by scabs with knives." Or the time she was "pelted witheggs and garbage" by pro-Mussolini fascists. Says Dilorenzo: "It was partof the cuture to help the downtrodden and the weak."