Gerber headed the important Socialist Party unit for New York City and its environs from 1911 through 1922.
The Gerbers were Jewish, and as members of a persecuted minority, the family fled Tsarist Russia in 1886, landing in New York.
Gerber was active in the publishing group which issued the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung and served as Financial Secretary of that organization.
[5] Gerber remained in this full-time, paid position for over a decade, standing down only in 1922, probably due to the Socialist Party's declining financial fortunes.
[6] Julius was a delegate to the 1917 Socialist Party Convention, a gathering which passed the aggressively anti-militarist St. Louis Manifesto.
[9] Gerber was elected to the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1921, serving a one-year term.
[11] Gerber was strictly a party functionary rather than an agitator or a theoretician and did not publish any books or pamphlets in his lifetime.