As the Socialist Workers Party’s nominee ahead of the presidential election, Jewish grandmother Rachele Fruit is campaigning for a society led by “the industrial labor force” – not the ruling classes and the parties that represent them. Over drinks in Golders Green (water for her, coffee for me), Fruit – who was last in the UK in 1992 – shares her vision for a world led by workers and talks about why her party backs Israel, describing October 7 as “the worst attack since the Holocaust”. 2 View gallery Rachele Fruit Fruit – who names Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Nelson Mandela as her “heroes” – spent part of her summer in the UK, campaigning from Coventry to Redbridge to hail the “centrality of the working class”.
“We are building an international movement, an international class. We have to focus on the rights of all workers,” she says. A champion of industrial workers, she is one herself.
As well as being a political candidate, the 74-year-old works as a housekeeper at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It’s just one of the many jobs that Fruit has held. She has worked across “four or five industrial unions” since her first job as a clerk sorting mail in the post office.
She had worked in a garment factory in Baltimore, unloaded baggage on the ramp for Eastern Airlines before she was “laid off”, worked as a meatpacker for seven years, and worked in a factory that repaired jet engines. Today, as a housekeeper in a luxury hotel sh.