Researcher: Ellis Thompson, Stuyvesant '26

Joseph Streisand was born in 1908 in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father, Moses Streisand, was of Austrian and Jewish descent and died in 1914 when Joseph was only 6 years old. Sometime soon after, Joseph, now an orphan, moved to New York City and was taken in by the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphans Association, an organization through which he forged bonds with others who would, like him, later volunteer to fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War (while no date can be found to confirm when Streisand moved to NYC, this is the point at which it seems most likely). After aging out of the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphans Association, Streisand likely attended either the Boys School, an academically rigorous school located very near the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphans Association. Unfortunately, records of graduates from the Boys School, or the other high schools nearby, Erasmus Hall High School and the Eastern District High School aren’t publicly available for the years around when Streisand would have graduated (yearbooks are only available for the Boys High School starting in 1949, after Streisand was long since passed), but many graduates of the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphans Association went on to attend these schools, especially the Boys High School.

From these early hardships, Streisand rose to become a bright and committed educator. He started his career in New York City as a teacher and statistician by working as a research professor at Columbia University’s Speyer School, an experimental school run by the Columbia University Teachers College. Established in 1935 as an educational “laboratory” under the Teachers College, the Speyer School was designed to study child development under different ability groupings. Given that Streisand was 27 years old when the Speyer School was established, he could not have attended. After working at the Speyer School, Streisand started to become involved in leftist and labor groups.

Streisand started his journey towards leftist activism by working in FDR’s New Deal programs funded by the WPA in the early 1930’s. Soon after, he joined the WPA teachers union which organized instructors employed in FDR’s educational WPA programs.

Hit hard by the Great Depression, New York City had an unemployment rate of almost 33% during parts of the early 1930’s. Because of that, not only were programs like the WPA educational programs desperately needed, but many New Yorkers became highly sympathetic to leftist politics. In fact, the WPA Teachers Union often overlapped with leftist activism; its members, including Streisand, were frequently involved in the Communist Party, the unemployed councils, and the anti-fascist movement. The union’s newsletter and meetings rallied support for Spain, raised funds for Spanish aid, and, when volunteers like Streisand fell in battle, helped commemorate their sacrifice. Thus, Streisand’s dual identity as a teacher–statistician and a communist volunteer was very much in line with the many radicalized New Deal-era teachers in New York.

Streisand, like many others in his position, joined the communist party in 1936 as a stepping stone towards volunteering in Spain. In late 1936, Streisand decided to volunteer to fight in Spain. He obtained his passport on December 22, 1936, listing addresses in NYC and Chicago, and then sailed to France aboard the SS Normandie on December 26, 1936. Once in France, Streisand, like so many volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, slipped across the border into Spain, evading the strict border protections set up by the United States and France which aimed to stop international volunteers from entering the Spanish conflict.

Tragically, once in Spain, Streisand served for only a limited time before being killed in action at the Battle of Jarama. He immediately joined the Lincoln Brigade, serving in Company 1 of the brigade. Eventually, Streisand was assigned the critical role of courier between companies during battle. At the Battle of Jarama, the first major offensive carried out by the Lincoln Brigade, he and another volunteer, Robert Pick, volunteered to deploy an aviation signal to guide friendly aircraft to their position. They dashed onto an exposed road behind the front-line trenches to lay out a large “T” signal marker pointing toward the enemy but were immediately cut down by Nationalist machine-gun fire before they could return to cover

Among his peers in New York’s education and labor community, Streisand was honored as a fallen hero once news of his death reached New York City. After his death, colleagues helped raise funds for the Spanish cause in memory of volunteers like Streisand. At a year-end 1937 gathering of Hebrew Orphan Asylum alumni (many of whom were in the Teachers Union or related circles), speakers paid tribute to Streisand’s sacrifice and resolved to continue supporting the Spanish Republic, even circulating petitions for a comrade captured by Franco’s forces​. These later memorial efforts underscore the extent to which Streisand’s idealism and death resonated with his community back home in New York City.
Joseph Streisand’s story is truly inseparable from the city that shaped him, New York City. New York’s radically leftist intellectual and labor communities, its immigrant neighborhoods, of which the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphans Association was a part, and its experiments in public education all played a major role in his transformation, contributing to his leftist radicalization and activism. Both in life and in death, he fully reflected the ideals of a generation that believed the fight against fascism was also a fight for a better world.

Sources

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“Honor Roll: Those Who Were Killed in Action, Captured and Executed; or Who Died of Illness.” 2008. Americans in the Spanish Civil War. July 2, 2008. https://brooksarp.wordpress.com/honor-roll/.
"How the WPA Expanded Education for Adults & Children During the Great Depression." GG Archives. Accessed June 1, 2025. https://www.ggarchives.com/WPA/Books/InventoryAppraisalOfResults-1938/08-EducationalProjects.html.
"Letter from WPA Teachers Union to Governor Herbert Lehman." New York State Archives. 1937. Accessed June 8, 2025. https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/10829.
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"Saving Abraham’s Children – Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum." Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative. March 2023. Accessed May 14, 2025. https://brooklynjewish.org/2023/03/brooklyn-hebrew-orphan-asylum/.
“Streisand, Joseph | the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.” 2019. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. December 11, 2019. https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/joseph-streisand/.
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