For labor scholar Daniel Katz, the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park provides not only a look at contemporary America but a look back to the 1930s.

At both times, the nation and a declining labor movement were divided by issues of race and gender equality and immigration. "That's the way it was in the 1930s and that's the way it is now, in many ways," Katz said at a Nov. 8 talk at the ILR School.

Katz explained how the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union transcended these issues by welcoming racially and culturally diverse members, then creating structures to celebrate differences.

The garment workers' union relied on education, culture and community involvement to build a revolutionary class-based conception of multiculturalism Katz called "mutual culturalism."

Union leaders -- militant immigrant Jewish women and male allies born into a society controlled by the Russian Empire -- identified with the idea of autonomous national cultures, Katz said in an interview.

Katz, a history professor at the State University of New York Empire State College, has been exploring the mutual culturalism phenomenon since 1997.

His principal archive has been the ILR School's Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives. "It's such a large collection, and the archivists there are so well versed," Katz said, crediting the staff with guiding "in rich and interesting ways" his forays into the collection.

Katz was in the Kheel Center when he saw a circa 1934 photo of a New York City parade float topped by unionists in native dress. That photo crystallized his interest in mutual culturalism as a dissertation theme, which led to a book, "All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism."

During the Great Depression, garment union members were encouraged to identify with their cultural groups, and it worked, Katz said.

But it didn't last. As the 1930s wore on, male union leaders moved away from mutual culturalism, and by World War II the union's broad social agenda had narrowed.

Mary Catt is assistant director of communications at the ILR School.