16 Facts About Vera Shlakman

Vera Shlakman was a 20th-century American professor of Economics and Marxism and author of a 1935 book on women factory workers.

Vera Shlakman was best known in 1952 for her firing by Queens College for refusing to testify to the McCarran Committee whether she was a card-carrying Communist, as well as for apology and restitution she received in 1982.

Vera Shlakman was born on July 15,1909, in Montreal, Canada.

Vera Shlakman received a doctorate in economics at Columbia University.

Vera Shlakman obtained a research fellowship at Smith College and then taught briefly at Sweet Briar College.

In 1938, Vera Shlakman became an instructor at Queens College, where she taught about labor, Social Security, and concentration of wealth.

Vera Shlakman was vice president of the college division of a Teachers Union local, rebuked for Communists domination.

On September 24,1952, during testimony at a public hearing of the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator Pat McCarran, Vera Shlakman pled the First and Fifth amendments with regard to any membership in the Communist Party.

Vera Shlakman's firing by Queens College "banished her to academic obscurity" at the time.

In 1960, Dr Vera Shlakman started to teach again at Adelphi University's School of Social Work.

Dr Vera Shlakman's enduring connection to Columbia's School of Social Work led her to establish a scholarship, and to leave a bequest to the School in her will.

Scholar Marjorie Heins has assessed that Vera Shlakman was a socialist-anarchist but not necessarily a communist.

Vera Shlakman believed that fears of "communism" fell prone to exaggeration.

Vera Shlakman died aged 108 on November 5,2017, at home in Manhattan.

Vera Shlakman published only one major book, of which historian Alice Kessler-Harris of Columbia University later wrote:.

Vera Shlakman had an extraordinary effect on my work and on that of a generation of labor historians.