TOC and Intro from WITH FREEDOM IN OUR EARS

WITH FREEDOM IN OUR EARS

Histories of Jewish Anarchism

Edited by Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer

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© 2023 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Note on Transliteration ix

Introduction Freedom’s Fullness: An Introduction to Jewish Anarchisms 1 Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer

Chapter 1. Johann Most and Yiddish Anarchism, 1876–1906 21 Tom Goyens

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Chapter 2. Political Satire in the Yiddish Anarchist Press, 1890–1918 43 Binyamin Hunyadi

Chapter 3. Jewish Anarchist Temporalities 65 Samuel Hayim Brody

Chapter 4. The Debate on Expropriations in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Anarchism 86 Inna Shtakser

Chapter 5. Translation, Politics, Pragmatism, and the American Yiddish Press 110 Ayelet Brinn

Chapter 6. Jews and North American Anarcho-Syndicalism: The Jewish Leadership of the Union of Russian Workers 131 Mark Grueter

Chapter 7. The Storm of Revolution: The Fraye arbeter shtime Reports on the Russian Revolution of 1905 151 Renny Hahamovitch

Chapter 8. Divine Fire: Alfred Stieglitz’s Anarchism 173 Allan Antliff

Chapter 9. In the Jewish Tower: Prison Stories by a Forgotten Anarchist 194 Ania Aizman

Chapter 10. Jewish American Anarchist Women, 1920–1950: The Politics of Sexuality 217 Elaine Leeder

Conclusion. The Past and Futures of Jewish Anarchist History 233 Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer

Contributors 261 Index 265

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Freedom’s Fullness

An Introduction to Jewish Anarchisms

Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer

In “People in My Family,” the renowned Jewish anarchist poet Grace Paley de scribes how revolution is remembered and longed for across three generations:

In my family people who were eighty-two were very different from people who were ninety-two

The eighty-two-year-old people grew up it was 1914 this is what they knew War World War War That’s why when they speak of the child they say poor little one . . .

The ninety-two-year-old people remember it was the year 1905 they went to prison they went into exile they said ah soon When they speak to the grandchild they say yes there will be revolution then there will be revolution then once more then the earth itself will turn and turn and cry out oh I have been made sick then you my little bud must flower and save it1

Paley declared herself to be a “cooperative anarchist” and spent a lifetime organizing against colonialism, sexism, and militarism. This poem inscribes revolutionary memory and aspirations within one family, making revolution personal. The poetic speaker’s relatives who are ninety-two exclaim “ah soon”; in that breath, they express a different experience of temporality—an expect ant relationship—to the past and future than those born just ten years later. Revolutionariness in this family becomes a term of endearment, a tender hope: “then you my little bud/must flower and save it.” The poem ends without a period, leaving the future open-ended and unmarked.

Paley writes in a popular tradition that includes the Yiddish Sweatshop (svet shop) poets, a literary group of socialists and anarchists in the United States and England during the 1880s and 1890s. Among them was the beloved Russian-born anarchist Dovid Edelshtat, who wrote “A Crumb of Bread’ in 1889:

Everywhere he must carry it in his bones, For freedom, the sacred flame, Every slave and every master he will tell the truth alone, “I want no poison and no chains.”

We want free labor and free reward, The fruits of our very hands, We want blood to be shed no more, And slavery forever banned.

We want this freedom, this world, We see the future with clarity, Every slave is human, every human, a hero, When his weapons are compassion and veracity.2

Edelshtat urgently prophesies a future—hard-won though it may be—where slavery and exploitation are abolished. Indeed, the title for this volume is bor rowed from his poem “My Final Wish,” which expresses his longing to die fight ing “with my banner high, / my rifle blazing.” The radical poet Aaron Kramer translated its final stanza thus:

Not showered by a few late tears— no! But with freedom in my ears roaring the tyrants’ epitaph let me die proudly, with a laugh …3

Paley’s poetic voice converses with the poets who, as her literary relatives, would be of the ninety-two-years-old generation. Paley’s verse is a kind of grandchild poem to Edelshtat’s: after exile, immigration, and suppression, the “sacred flame” of freedom is still carried in the bones, laughter at tyrants on their lips.

Most historical and literary scholarship on the Jewish past has dismissed or ignored the “sacred flame” of anarchism—a “subterranean fire,” as described by Haymarket anarchist August Spies, whose 1887 execution in Chicago directly inspired Edelshtat’s radicalization. The historian Paul Buhle once described the history of anarchism in the United States and of Jewish anarchism in particular as “a hidden text, awaiting the unraveling of the political knot bound up in the Russian Revolution and the generations of Cold War that have followed.”4 This remains largely true today, and as a result, Jewish anarchists have been far more marginalized in historical research and literary studies than during their lifetimes. This collection recovers part of that lost history, which we hope will help launch a resurgence in interdisciplinary, transnational, and multilingual research into the Jewish anarchist past and inform new visions for the future.

What Is Anarchism?

The core of anarchist ideology and practice is refusal of social domination.5 Anarchism opposes the inequitable system of capitalism and all centralized governments, whether Left- or Right-wing regimes: it critiques the hierarchical structure of state power itself. In Emma Goldman’s definition, anarchism is a “philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”6 But anarchists’ critique of author ity extends well beyond just the state and capital. They take aim at all political, economic, and social hierarchies based upon force or coercion, including state communism and forms of domination based upon race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship. As summarized by contemporary Jewish anarchist Cindy Barukh Milstein, “Anarchism contends that people would be much more humane under nonhierarchical social relations and social arrangements.”7

Anarchism’s total rejection of the state as a political form or tool for systemic change separates it from most other leftist movements. As the Jewish feminist and anarchist Martha A. Ackelsberg notes, so does its “insistence that the focus of analysis (and of resistance) need not be on any single relationship of domi nation and subordination (i.e., one based on class, on race, on gender, on age, or on religious affiliation, for example), but rather on relations of domination and subordination as such.”8 Anarchism’s condemnation of capitalism distin guishes it from modern-day Libertarianism (a word that, ironically, originates as a nineteenth-century synonym for anarchism), and its rejection of both capital and the state differentiates it from all forms of liberalism—be it classical, mod ern, or neoliberal.

As a positive doctrine, anarchism holds that it is both desirable and possible to reorganize society and institutions according to principles of individual and group autonomy, self-determination, and mutual aid. Its constellation of aspira tions includes bodily autonomy, gender and racial equality, and a world without borders or prisons. According to Goldman, “Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him.” This freedom is not merely negative (the absence of restraint), but also positive (creating conditions that allow for needs and desires to be met). It is also not individual freedom to do whatever one wants, but freedom reconciled with, and mutually constitutive of, the freedom of others. Rather than a society of self-interested individuals, Goldman argues, the freedom provided by anarchism would al low individuals to fully “realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together.”9 This, in the words of Yiddish anarchist poet Joseph Bovshover, represented “freedom’s fullest gleam.”10

Anarchists, like members of most political movements, have long differed among themselves regarding how best to transform existing conditions and structure the ideal future society.11 Nevertheless, they broadly agree that anarchist praxis—the pursuit and implementation of ideological aims through actions— must itself reflect the movement’s core principles. Rather than declare that the ends justify the means, anarchists hold that the means must be consistent with the ends. Thus anarchist practices in the present must reflect or “prefigure” the future they aim to create.12 Rather than seizing state power, anarchists aim to model and transform social relations through the cultivation of mutual aid and comradeship. Anarchist organizations, therefore, seek to implement forms of nonhierarchical decision-making and non-domination, and pursue social change through practices of direct action—whether in the form of education, nonviolent protest, or armed resistance—rather than through electing state officials or taking power. As Emma Goldman argued in her critique of the Communist dictatorship in Russia, “human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”13

What Are “Jewish Anarchisms”?

This volume traces multiple and capacious Jewish anarchisms, each of which shares certain features and influences in common with some, but not neces sarily all, others. Rather than an irreducible quality of Jewishness, individual

Jewish anarchists shared a multivalent matrix of secular, cultural, and religious influences, some of them distinctly Jewish and some of them not, that they selectively drew upon within specific circumstances and contexts. As con tributors illustrate, these adaptations ranged from the mystical anarchism of Gustav Landauer discussed in Samuel Hayyim Brody’s chapter, to participa tion in the ethnically mixed, militantly atheist revolutionary cells discussed by Inna Shtakser and Ania Aizman. Even a seemingly coherent category such as “Russian Jewish anarchists” obscures regional and ethnic diversity, as the anarchist movement in the Russian Empire “had specific characteristics in its Polish, Russian or Ukrainian versions.”14 The main sources of Jews’ libertarian convictions might be the Talmud, the works of Mikhail Bakunin (despite his antisemitism), or the words of the Yiddish-speaking German gentile Rudolf Rocker, who was dubbed by admirers an “anarchist rabbi”—demonstrating that one did not, in fact, have to be ethnically or religiously Jewish in order to belong to the ranks of “Jewish” anarchism.15 Some of the most significant “Yid dish anarchists” were either not Jews (Rocker) or not speakers of the language from youth (such as Edelshtat). The contributions to the volume reflect this diversity, with some chapters focusing on individuals and groups for whom Judaism or Jewish culture and identity were central to their self-conceptions and ideas, and others for whom Jewishness was clearly secondary. It is worth noting, however, that Jewish anarchism has, seemingly everywhere and always, overwhelmingly been a phenomenon among Ashkenazi Jews, and this fact is reflected in the coverage of this volume.

It may be tempting to distinguish between religiously and culturally Jewish anarchists on the one hand, and anarchists who happen to be of Jewish descent (“non-Jewish Jews,” in Isaac Deutscher’s phrase) on the other. These categories are not mutually exclusive, however, but poles of a spectrum on which most Jew ish radicals probably clustered near, but not all the way at, the extremes.16 Jewish anarchists were compelled to negotiate ethnicity, nationalism, and capitalism, like their non-Jewish comrades, as well as the added burdens of assimilation pressure, ethnic violence, and antisemitism enacted both from state policies and some fellow radicals. And, as Deutscher notes, even the “Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition.”17

Individuals and entire movements have shifted along this spectrum in re sponse to events: the French writer and anarchist Bernard Lazare, for example, went from a fully “assimilated” Jew to an advocate of an anti-statist version of Jewish nationalism, emphasizing secular Jewish culture and solidarity (but not the creation of a Jewish state) in response to the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906). “I believe that for internationalism to take root,” he later wrote, “it is necessary that human groups should previously have won their autonomy; it is necessary for them to express themselves freely, it is necessary for them to be aware of

what they are.”18 The goal of his anarchist-inflected “nationalism” was simply to “participate in the human enterprise while remaining oneself.”19

For some religious anarchists, affirming the sacred was a form of resistance to the pressures of assimilation.20 By analyzing domination along multiple axes rather than a single one, such as class, anarchism resonates with recent theo rizations of intersectionality developed by Black feminism, which in turn has strongly influenced many contemporary anarchists.21 In other words, Jewish anarchists were never not Jews, but they were also never just Jews. Their con cerns and comradeships extended well beyond the Jewish world, as this book’s chapters by Ania Aizman, Allan Antliff, Tom Goyens, Mark Grueter, and Inna Shtakser illustrate.

Histories of the Jewish experience have largely overlooked the robust cor pus of material on Jewish anarchism. An authoritative three-volume history of New York’s Jews published in 2012, for example, contains no substantive discussion of anarchists or the city’s major Yiddish anarchist newspaper, the Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Voice of Labor), within its 1,000 pages.22 Even more surprisingly, Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg’s Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism, first published in French in the 1980s and in English translation in 2016, does not mention a single Jewish anarchist.23 The causes of such neglect appear to be both ideological and linguistic. Outside of anarchists’ own ranks, chroniclers of the Left and labor movements have typi cally been Marxists of various stripes who proved untrustworthy caretakers of the anarchist past. Beginning with Morris Hillquit, a founder of the Socialist Party of America and the most prominent Jewish American socialist of his day, many attempted to literally write anarchists out of history. Hillquit’s History of Socialism in the United States, first published in English in 1903, only mentions anarchists in reference to the Haymarket Affair of 1886, and declares that “an archism was henceforward confined to a few insignificant ‘groups’ in the East with little power or influence.”24 Yet at the time of the book’s publication, the “insignificant” anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime reached an estimated 20,000 read ers, a number nearly on par with the circulation of the socialists’ popular daily Forverts (Forward) of 21,100 copies per issue in 1902.25 Although the circulation of the Forverts more than doubled within a few years—and eventually peaked at nearly 200,000 copies in 191726—the Fraye arbeter shtime’s also continued to increase up until 1914. Regardless, in Hillquit’s later memoir, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (1934), he again dismisses anarchism as “a movement of reprisal and violence” and “a simple creed and a romantic movement,” which played no constructive role in Jewish life and “gradually declined” after the 1880s.27 Other accounts of the Jewish labor movement written in Yiddish in the first six decades of the twentieth century begrudgingly acknowledge anarchists’ prominence in the 1880s and early 1890s, but similarly portray anarchism as in steep and

inevitable decline thereafter.28 In 1945, prominent Russian American Jewish anarchist Joseph Cohen lamented: “Our comrades did not write history; they made history. The recording systematically of events they left to others. Often these ‘others’ were fiendish and ignored the anarchist contributions; sometimes they maliciously misrepresented the facts. They tried to give the impression that we disrupted the work, that like Don Quixote we fought windmills, that we made no constructive contributions.”29

The 1960s launched a scholarly reevaluation of Jewish immigrant life and labor, propelled by a new interest in social history and inspired in part by the emergence of the field of Ethnic Studies.30 These new histories were written en tirely in English, and most of them neglected the vast body of Yiddish literature produced by anarchists and instead embraced the narrative pioneered by Hill quit, which was in turn popularized by Irving Howe’s bestselling book World of Our Fathers (1976).31 To borrow a term from Brody’s contribution to this volume, we might dub this a “supersessionist” model of Jewish radical history, in which the early Jewish labor movement’s “naive” and “extremist” anarchism quickly and inevitably gave way to a “mature” and “pragmatic” democratic socialism, Communism, and/or Zionism.32 Even Tony Michels’s award-winning 2005 study of Yiddish-speaking radicals in New York, although firmly rejecting many of Howe’s arguments, largely follows his chronology of Jewish anarchism’s rise and fall.33 This presupposition is so entrenched that many historians studying Jewish American labor in the 1920s have been unable to recognize anarchists when they find them, and instead misidentify prominent anarchist labor leaders like Morris Sigman and Saul Yanovsky as “right-wing socialists” and “conservatives” due to these figures’ opposition to Communist Party influence in the garment trades unions.34 Likewise, library systems have mis-cataloged some anarchist Yiddish newspapers as socialist or communist, adding further practical obstacles to conducting research.

Much work falls into a larger, Marxist-informed tradition of labor and radical history with strong sympathies for the Communist Party. Anarchists’ early and strident opposition to Soviet Communism made it difficult for many otherwise scrupulous historians to take the movement and its ideas seriously. Instead, anarchism in these writings is either explained as an individual rebellion against oppression and trauma—common tropes in biographies of figures like Mikhail Bakunin, Johann Most, and Emma Goldman—or it is cast as a millenarian or “pre-political” ideology of the “petite bourgeoisie” and peasant “primitive rebels.”35 As historian Davide Turcato notes, “within that pattern of analysis, anarchism is always found on the losing side of the march of history. Hence, the typical master narrative has been about the ‘end,’ ‘death,’ or ‘liquidation’ of anarchism.”36 Such reports of anarchism’s death, however, inevitably prove premature and fly in the face of all available evidence.

For every Yiddish-speaking radical like Forverts editor Abe Cahan, who gave up “youthful” anarchism for “practical” socialism, there can be found an anarchist like longtime Fraye arbeter shtime editor Saul Yanovksy who began as a socialist before “maturing” into a lifelong anarchist. Moreover, Jewish an archist activism and literature did not disappear after the 1890s—just the op posite. In New York City alone, at least a dozen new Jewish anarchist groups representing more than 500 members formed between 1899 and 1918, and an observer noted that in 1913 “anarchism still had a mass following among the Jewish sweatshop workers of New York.”37 A dozen new Yiddish anarchist pe riodicals likewise appeared in this era, though none had the staying power of the Fraye arbeter shtime which, under Yanovsky, achieved its peak circulation of 30,000 in 1914, reaching an estimated 50,000–150,000 readers. Yanovsky became one of the most influential Yiddish newspaper editors in the country, and could “rightfully be characterized as the spiritual mentor of a generation of Jewish journalists, writers, artists, trade union leaders, and public men in various fields of communal activity.”38 Even after its pre–World War I peak, America’s Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement continued to exercise outsized influence within the garment workers’ unions and the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), a left-wing mutual aid and cultural society that by 1922 counted 85,000 members in 750 branches—including two dozen explicitly anarchist branches.39 Emma Goldman, meanwhile, became an American household name prior to her deportation in 1919. Her magazine Mother Earth influenced a generation of modernist writers, artists, and activists, and her unceasing lecture tours reached 50,000–75,000 people per year.40 As discussed in Mark Grueter’s chapter, in the 1910s Russian-speaking Jews also played an outsized role in the anarchosyndicalist Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada before it was targeted by federal authorities during the postwar Red Scare. Even though they were outnumbered by socialists and, later, Communists, these generations of Jewish anarchists remained a significant and actively engaged sector of the United States Left well into the twentieth century. And if their vocal critiques of the centralization of power within institutions such as American labor unions and the Soviet state went largely unheeded at the time, they are far less easily dismissed in retrospect.

In London, the “golden age” of the East End’s Jewish anarchist movement similarly spanned from 1904 to 1914, during which the anarchist newspaper Arbeter fraynd (Worker’s Friend) reached its own peak of 5,000 copies and an archists “achieved such popularity that they became almost respectable” within the Jewish community and labor movement.41 In France, Jewish anarchist groups did not even begin to form until the 1890s, and their influence likewise declined only with the onset of the First World War.42 In Russia, neither Jewish nor multiethnic anarchist groups existed until 1903–4, and these briefly became

influential during the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917.43 In Argentina, Jewish anarchism appeared only in the first decade of the twentieth century, par tially in response to the radical upsurge in Russia. Jews were soon significantly overrepresented within Argentina’s powerful anarchist movement, and Buenos Aires remained an important international center of Yiddish anarchism until the 1970s.44 Consigning Jewish anarchism to the nineteenth century is therefore an error. In fact, Ashkenazi Jews continued to constitute a disproportionately large number of self-identified anarchists into the twenty-first century, includ ing popular writers like Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, Uri Gordon, David Graeber (whose mother was a Yiddish theater actor), Cindy BarukhMilstein, Maya Schenwar, and Howard Zinn in the English-speaking world alone.

Anarchist Literature, Multilingualism, and the Politics of Translation

This volume emphasizes the multilingualism of “Jewish anarchism” and fore grounds language politics as a site for working through questions of cultural and ethnic identity. Anarchist translation practices demonstrated their hungry engagement with non-Jewish radical cultures, and their press filled its pages with translations from philosophy, political theory, and literature. Jewish anarchists might speak Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, German, English, French, Spanish, or Ladino, or a diglossic combination. Anarchist art and literature represented a vital arena of prefiguration, as anarchists looked toward culture—rather than the political party system—as an engine of change. Strong anarchist currents ran through Jewish literature across multiple movements, including Sweatshop, Romantic, and modernist literature.

Proletarian poetry was incredibly popular in its time and exerted a long influence on the unfolding of Yiddish verse, offering an archive of revolution ary images for later poets to reinvent. Edelshtat and Bovshover were hailed by prominent anarchist writers, journalists, and historians, as in Emma Goldman’s reflections on the importance of literary sociality: “Among the frequenters were some very able young men whose names were well known in the New York ghetto; among others, Dovid Edelshtat, a fine idealistic nature, a spiritual petrel whose songs of revolt were beloved by every Yiddish-speaking radical. Then there was Bovshover… a high-strung and impulsive man of exceptional poetic gifts.”45 Joseph Cohen, the historian and onetime editor of Fraye arbeter shtime, also attests to the wide reach of the Sweatshop poets and translations into Yid dish from European anarchists: “Our movement played a preeminent role in the development of the Jewish labor movement and the cultural, educational and social life of the Jewish immigrant communities, not only in this country

but also in the wide world wherever circumstances had cast our Jewish wander ers… We have sent our newspapers, our journals, our books, our pamphlets, the inspired songs of struggle by Edelshtat and Bovshover everywhere. Where have the crystal-clear words of Peter Kropotkin translated into our own mother tongue not reached!”46 Yet because of its remarkable social and participatory function, many literary historiographers cast proletarian poetry as primarily of sociological interest, framing its songs as an archive of immigrant life. Position ing the Sweatshop poets as part of labor history, rather than literary history, elides their contributions to the collective consciousness of later Yiddish writers. Proletarian poetry, then, was written out of the literary canon as the province of labor history, while its anarchist writers were simultaneously erased from labor histories written by Communists and socialists. Likewise, few studies of modernist art have taken anarchism seriously. In this volume, Allan Antliff addresses the anarchist underpinnings of the photographer Alfred Steiglitz’s work and approach to gallery curation.

S everal contributors also ask: How did historical anarchists use translation to articulate a “Jewish” anti-statism? What makes a translation “anarchist”— aesthetically, methodologically, theoretically? Ayelet Brinn’s chapter exam ines to what extent the Jewish anarchist press’s emphasis on translation was politically unique, versus a function of Jewish diglossic culture. Translation and anarchism hold many resonances: translating is an inherently collective process, destabilizing notions of singularity, mastery, and the “original.” Anar chists have long committed to supporting translation: the historical anarchist press was an engine of translation, from Japan to Argentina, and contemporary groups such as the Institute for Anarchist Studies continue to devote limited funds to the project of translation.

For Jewish anarchists, language was not synonymous with religion or eth nicity, but a volatile site for interrogating the borders and openings of identity. Jewish movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imbued language with ideology: Zionists advocated for the “revival” of Hebrew, inspired by Litvak lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and organized by formal language coun cils.47 Chaim Zhitlovsky and like-minded socialists debated whether Yiddish ought to be designated “a language of the Jewish nation” or “the language of the Jewish nation.”48 Soviet Yiddishists altered their orthography to diminish its Hebrew (loshn-koydesh) component, among other ideological changes.49 Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund (the General Jewish Workers’ Union, known simply as the Bund) claimed Yiddish as the workers’ international lan guage in Russia, Lithuania, and Poland.50 The politicization of language was in no way unique to Jewish movements of that era, but affected Jews across empires.51 Ataturk’s new state demanded that Turkish be spoken, pressuring

Ladino-speaking families to assimilate and identify as “Turks of Jewish faith,” rather than Jews.52

In contrast to these movements’ anxious discourse about national language, Jewish anarchists largely brought either a utopian or a pragmatic approach to language politics. The utopians were primarily European, particularly emerging in relation to broader trends in Russian cosmism, science fiction, and astronomi cal speculation. Vol’f Lvovich Gordin pioneered a brand of linguistic theory at once fantastical and mathematical. Gordin, brother of the more widely known anarchist writer Abba Gordin, invented the language AO, for which he pro vided “sophisticated” grammar books and extensive bilingual dictionaries. AO “eventually became the world’s first language for interplanetary travel among Moscow’s anarcho-cosmists of the later 1920s. […] AO offered a compact circle of logical meanings that its adepts believed would make perfect sense in outer space.”53 Michael G. Smith notes, “True to the anarchist ethic, V. L.’s new lan guage altogether dispensed with gender (signifying male oppression), as well as possessive cases and possessive pronouns and the genitive case (signifying property relations).”54 This was a prefigurative strategy, attempting to hasten through language a future egalitarian world.

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More famous than Gordin’s utopian language is Esperanto, created by Białystok-born Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof (1859–1917), who termed his proj ect Hilelismo and envisioned it uniting humankind.55 Before inventing Espe ranto, Zamenhof first attempted to “modernize” Yiddish with Latin characters to develop a “new Jewish language.”56 Brigid O’Keefe has argued that Zamenhof launched Esperanto as “a means of solving the Jewish Question”57 and “offered Esperanto as a program for uniting all the world’s peoples into a moral com munity of global citizens bound together by a shared international auxiliary language and universalist ethics.” The USSR invested in the Soviet Esperanto Union, which “promoted Russian proletarian internationalism by way of labor unions and pen pals.” In France, a faction of the Anarcho-Esperantists called the Non-Nationalist Association (Sennacieco Asocio Tutmondo) dedicated them selves to a borderless world. Another French anarcho-syndicalist, Victor Coissac, proposed “an interplanetary language of mathematics and geometry for future space travel” and organized a commune from 1911–1935. Widespread repression of Esperanto across Western Europe began in 1922, when France banned its be ing taught in schools; in 1936, fascist Germany and Portugal banned Esperanto itself. The rise of Stalinism led to the arrests and executions of many Esperantists in 1937, and it was forbidden as the “product of bourgeois internationalism and cosmopolitanism”—a familiar aspersion against Jews and anarchists.58

Not all Jewish anarchists celebrated Esperanto, however. One such opponent was the influential German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer, who denounced

Esperanto on the grounds that this “artificial product” would homogenize the human variety of world literatures. In a pamphlet titled “Do Not Learn Espe ranto!,” he diagnoses Zamenhof’s strategy of unifying language as a misrecog nition of the problem: “Anarchists need to understand that the basis of both individual life and human coexistence is something that cannot be invented. It is something that has to grow. Society as a voluntary union of humanity, for example, has grown. Nowadays, this union has been overgrown by a dreadful artificial product, the state. The people’s languages and dialects have also grown. It is sad that different languages are often cited as excuses for hostilities between nation states. It would be even sadder, however, if humans really believed that the diversity of languages was the reason for disunity. […] If they were all the same, they would hate one another. Total equality is not only impossible; it would also be dreadful.”59 Landauer’s emphasis on the vital importance of difference marks a vision of utopia built on heterogeneity. He argues, “The diversity of languages is nothing to be lamented. Even less so it is something we can abolish. What we need to abolish are the conditions that keep humans from learning foreign languages.”60 The French Communard Louise Michel likewise critiqued the “artificiality” of Esperanto.61 The debates among Jewish anarchists regarding language politics illustrate their broader concerns with preserving identity, dif ference, and culture. Even their broader rejection of “utopian” cultural projects such as Esperanto constituted a strategy for critiquing hegemony. Translation also represented an important site of cultural and theoretical debate. The extraordinary task of producing the first—and only—Yiddish translation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, for example, fell to the anarchist Dr. Jacob Abraham Maryson (or Merison), with the aid of his wife, the doctor Katherina Yevzerov. Contemporaries hailed the 1,270-page opus as a master piece, and it remained the definitive treatment of Marx’s work in the Yiddish language, admired by American and European Jewish radicals alike. Maryson was known for his dedication to workers’ education: as a founding member of the Yidisher Literatn Klob (Yiddish Writers’ Club) in 1911, he published several popular Yiddish introductions to medical topics, and translated dozens major of political and scientific works into Yiddish. He was, according to an obitu ary that appeared in Argentina, a man “to whom the sociological literature in Yiddish owes much of its flowering.”62 Between 1899 and 1910, Maryson pub lished translations of books by Kropotkin, Paul Eltzbacher, Errico Malatesta, Henry David Thoreau, and Oscar Wilde, in addition to others serialized in the Yiddish press. By 1917, Jewish socialist Moishe Terman noted that Maryson was “already long known as one of the best, trusted, and scientific transla tors.” Zhitlovsky wrote glowingly of his reputation as both “theoretician and translator of theoretical works”: “He is absolutely faithful to the original and at the same time his Yiddish is so rich, so punctual and faithful to the spirit

of our language, that many times it would be said that the authors had written their works originally in Yiddish and that Dr. Maryson had only discovered the forgotten text.”63 The anarchist concern with popular scientific education demanded expert translations, and Maryson rose to the occasion, working to establish a publishing cooperative and social hub called the Kropotkin Litera tur Gezelshaft (Kropotkin Literary Society, or KLG) in 1913. Of the eighteen book-length translations the organization published during its eleven-year existence, Maryson translated nearly half himself, and the KLG’s subscrip tion-paying members peaked at 3,000–4,000 by 1919; “nearly all members,” reported the socialist Tsukunft, “are in fact workers.”64 Terman observed that the anarchists’ “culture-work” had resulted in an environment “where all of the intelligent workers seem to wish to discuss Kropotkin’s, Stirner’s, or Lassalle’s work.” Four thousand copies of Maryson’s translation of Das Kapital, which “took two years to complete and was regarded by colleagues as a masterpiece,” rolled off the presses in 1917–1918 (printed with union labor, of course!).65 Maryson’s biographical sketch of Karl Marx refrained from recounting Marx’s contentious maneuverings against Bakunin within the First International; he merely stated, “This is not the place to describe the very interesting history of the great ‘International,’ which was at every step connected with Marx’s activity.”66 In fact, Maryson declared that Marx’s work “is a revelation of a greater freedom,” and lauded Marx as “the prophet of a better future. He is the scientific founder of socialism; the law-giver of social development; the proletariat’s guide and mentor for their struggle.”67 His praise for Marx, like his dedication to the project of translating Das Kapital, demonstrated what historian Furio Biagini describes as Maryson’s “singular openness of spirit.”68 Translation thus constituted a vital avenue for educating the masses, as well as an encounter between anarchism and other aspects of leftist thought.

Chapters

This volume approaches Jewish anarchist history through three themes: “Roots,” “Strategies,” and “Culture.” In the first section, Tom Goyens examines the forma tive influence of German anarchist Johann Most on the early Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement in the United States, which became home to the world’s largest Jewish anarchist movement. Binyamin Hunyadi’s chapter focuses on the literary heritage of this same movement, tracing the transatlantic evolution of Yiddish socialist and anarchist satire between London and New York through the works of Morris Winchewsky, Dovid Edelshtat, and Dovid Apotheker. Samuel Hayim Brody’s contribution then looks to conceptions of religious and secular “Jewish temporalities” and their manifestations in the writings of German Jewish anarchists Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer, and Martin Buber.

The book’s second section, “Strategies,” covers debates on language politics, translation, praxis, and organizing. Inna Stakser explores internal discussions of the tactic of “expropriations” (the armed theft of money used to fund revo lutionary activities) among anarchists in Russia during the upheavals around the 1905 revolution—members of the elder, “ninety-two-year-old” generation of Grace Paley’s poem. Ayelet Brinn’s chapter returns to New York to analyze the politics and practice of translation from English to Yiddish within the an archist newspaper Fraye arbeter shtime, including how it shaped debates on the vexing question of political violence. In the final chapter of this section, Mark Grueter highlights the leading role of Jewish anarchists within the Russophone Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada, a largely forgotten organization that was once the largest anarchist federation in American history and a significant force in the US labor movement.

The third and final section, “Culture,” offers new research and approaches to the themes of race, ethnicity, and individual self-expression. Reynolds Hahamo vitch’s contribution examines the dual impact of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 and the 1905 Russian Revolution on the Fraye arbeter shtime’s discussions of Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism, marking an important transition in the anarchist movement’s approach to “Jewish” issues. Art historian Allan Antliff’s chapter revisits the politics and praxis of Jewish American photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, demonstrating that his experiments in artistic collabo ration and curation were carried out in accordance with the “divine fire” of his anarchism. Ania Aizman returns us to Russia in her chapter, which provides a groundbreaking analysis of the Soviet-era writings of the Jewish anarchist nov elist and memoirist Semyon Sibiriakov (Srul-Moishe Gershevich Braverman), and his participation in the remarkably nonpartisan Society of Former Politi cal Prisoners and Exiles. Finally, Elaine Leeder profiles eight Jewish anarchist women whom she first interviewed in the 1980s, all of whom first joined the US anarchist movement between 1920 and 1950, as well as Rose Pesotta, about whom Leeder published a groundbreaking biography in 1993.69 She provides an irreplaceable collective portrait of how these women translated radical ideals into their everyday lives, including their most personal relationships.

The conclusion surveys the past, present, and possible future of historical schol arship on Jewish anarchism. To illustrate the breadth and depth of the multilingual primary sources that exist on the subject, the book also has an online Supplement and Teaching Guide that includes selections from historical Jewish anarchist writ ings.70 Many of these documents are translated into English here for the first time, and they provide insights into many of the figures and events discussed in the preceding chapters and offer starting points for future research. This anthology is intended to be a beginning, not an end. It is our hope that scholars and activists will continue to recover the obscured Jewish anarchist past and that their work, as in Grace Paley’s poem, will flower and save it.

Notes

1. Grace Paley, A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry, ed. Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 335.

2. David Edelstadt, “A Crumb of Bread,” trans. Zachary Groz, In geveb (April 2019), https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/a-crumb-of-bread.

3. Aaron Kramer, A Century of Yiddish Poetry (New Jersey: Cornwall Books, 1989), 61.

4. Paul Buhle, “Anarchism and American Labor,” International Labor and WorkingClass History, no. 23 (1983): 21–34 (quote on 21).

5. Useful recent guides to anarchist ideology include Ruth Kinna, The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism (London: Penguin, 2019); Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun, and Leonard Williams, eds., Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard, “Anarchism and Non-Domination,” Journal of Political Ideologies 24, no. 3 (2019), 221–240.

6. Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910), 56.

7. Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, 12.

8. Martha A. Ackelsberg, “Rethinking Anarchism/Rethinking Power: A Contempo rary Feminist Perspective,” in Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays on Politics, Com munity, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2010), 107.

9. Goldman, “Anarchism,” 67.

10. The title of this introduction is taken from the image of “freedom’s fullest glory” or “freedom’s full gleam” [frayheytsfulen glants] in Bovshover’s poem “To the Memory of David Edelshtat—Written the day of his death” (October 17, 1892). Bovshover mourns his loss and consoles himself with the “holiness” and urgency of Edelshtat’s call for libera tion. The final stanza foretells a time of freedom, which will necessitate recognition of his comrade-poet: “And in freedom’s fullest glory/The time will come for which I crave/ When the world will pause to place/A wreath of flowers upon your grave.” Translation by Rose Freeman-Ishill in To the Toilers (published under Bovshover’s alias Basil Dahl, with an introduction by Benjamin Tucker; Oriole Press, New Jersey: 1928), 38–43. The Yiddish version can be found in “Tsum ondenkung fun dovid edelshtat,” Gezamlte shriften: poezye un proza (New York: Fraye arbeter shtime, 1911), 52–56.

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11. See Ruth Kinna, “Utopianism and Prefiguration,” in Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives, ed. S. D. Chrostowska and James D. Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 198–218.

12. On prefiguration, see Uri Gordon, “Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise,” Political Studies 66, no. 2: 521–537.

13. Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925), 260.

14. Daniel Grinberg, “Il radicalismo ebraico in Polonia,” in L’Anarchico e l’ebreo: storia di un incontro, ed. Amedeo Bertolo (Milan: Elèuthera, 2001), 172.

15. On Bakunin, see Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion (New York: Seven Sto ries Press, 2011), esp. 274–77. On Jewish anarchists’ engagement with Bakunin, see Anna Elena Torres, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming). On Rocker, see Mina Graur, An Anarchist

“Rabbi”: The Life and Teachings of Rudolf Rocker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Voltairine de Cleyre was another non-Jewish figure who learned Yiddish and occupied a prominent place in America’s Jewish anarchist milieu; see Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

16. See, for example, Annie Polland, “‘May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?’: The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ and the ‘Secular’ Among Eastern European Jewish Im migrants to America,” American Jewish History 93, no. 4 (December 2007): 375–407.

17. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 26.

18. Bernard Lazare, Job’s Dungheap: Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolu tion, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 75.

19. Quoted in Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe; a Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 196–97.

20. Here the words of Martha Ackelsberg, herself a religiously observant Jewish an archist, are instructive: “No one should be forced to choose among aspects of her or his identity as the price for political or communal belonging. We are each whole beings, capable of multiple commitments to a variety of collectivities.” Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, rev. ed. (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 219–20. On religious Jewish anarchists more broadly, see Hayyim Rothman, No Masters but God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism (Manches ter: Manchester University Press, 2021); Anna Elena Torres, “The Anarchist Sage/Der Go’en Anarkhist: Rabbi Yankev-Meir Zalkind and Religious Genealogies of Anarchism,” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, February 2019, https://ingeveb.org/articles/the -anarchist-sage-der-goen-anarkhist

21. J. Rogue and Abbey Volcano, “Insurrection at the Intersections: Feminism, In tersectionality, and Anarchism,” in Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, ed. Dark Star Collective, 3rd ed. (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 43–46; Hillary Lazar, “Inter sectionality,” in Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, ed. Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun, and Leonard Williams (New York: Routledge, 2018), 157–74; Andrew Cornell, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 293.

22. Deborah Dash Moore, ed., City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

23. Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso Books, 2016). See also CrimethInc. ExWorkers Collective, “The Vanishing Jewish Anarchists: A Review of Revolutionary Yiddish land: A History of Jewish Radicalism,” CrimethInc., https://crimethinc.com/2017/05/26/ anarchism-without-anarchists-a-book-review-of-an-incomplete-history.

24. Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1903), 252. On the Haymarket Affair, see Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy.

25. Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 294; N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual (1902), 1440.

26. N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual (1906), 1115; N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual (1917), 1292.

27. Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 4–5.

28. Hertz Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung in Amerike, Rusland un England (New York: Fareynigte Idishe Geverkshaften, 1915); Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher un zeyere yunyons: erinerungen (New York: Klok Opereytors Yunyon Lokal 1, 1920); Abe Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 5 vols. (New York: “Forverts” Asosieyshon, 1926–31); Bernard Weinstein, Di idishe yunyons in Amerike: bleter geshikhte un erinerun gen (New York: Feraynigte Idishe Geverkshaften, 1929); Elias Tcherikower, ed., Geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter-bavengung in di Faraynikte Shtatn, 2 vols. (New York: YIVO, 1943–45); J. S. Hertz, Di yidishe sotsialistihe bavegung in Amerike (New York: Der Veker, 1954). Important exceptions, which appeared in English, are Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924); and Melech Epstein Jewish Labor in U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement, 2 vols. (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1950–3).

29. Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike: historisher iberblik un perzenlekhe iberlebungen (Philadelphia: Radical Library, Branch 273 Arbeter Ring, 1945), x, as translated in Esther Dolgoff’s unpublished translation, in the Esther Dolgoff “Jewish Anarchist Movement in America” Collection, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.

30. For overviews see Will Herberg, “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States,” American Jewish Year Book 53 (1952): 1–74; Hyman Berman, “A Cursory View of the Jewish Labor Movement: An Historiographical Survey,” Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1962): 79–97; Isaiah Trunk, “The Cultural Dimension of the American Jewish Labor Movement,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 16 (1976): 342–93; Irwin Yel lowitz, “American Jewish Labor: Historiographical Problems and Prospects,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1976): 203–14.

31. See Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Ronald Sanders, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken Books, 1977); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

32. For critiques of this narrative see Jonathan Frankel, “The Roots of ‘Jewish Socialism’ (1881–1892): From ‘Populism’ to ‘Cosmopolitanism’?,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 58–77; Hadassa Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

33. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Tony Michels, “Socialism and the Writing of American Jewish History: World of Our Fathers Revisited,” American Jewish History 88, no. 4 (2000): 521–46.

34. See, for example, Philip S. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers Union: A Story of Dramatic Struggles and Achievements (Newark: Nordan Press, 1950), 122, 165, 199; Philip S. Foner, “Comment,” in Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism,

ed. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 237; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 9 (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 274; Stanley Nadel, “Reds versus Pinks: A Civil War in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union,” New York History 66, no. 1 (1985): 49–72; John Holmes, “American Jewish Communism and Garment Unionism in the 1920s,” American Communist History 6, no. 2 (2007): 171–95; Paul Le Blanc, “Garment Worker Strikes,” in The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, ed. Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness (Routledge, 2015), 344; Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919–1929 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 21.

35. The classic statement of this view is Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965).

36. Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2.

37 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 191; Max Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues: Reminiscences (New York: Waldon Press, 1964), 153.

38. Kenyon Zimmer, “Saul Yanovsky and Yiddish Anarchism on the Lower East Side,” in Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, ed. Tom Goyens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 33–53; Herman Frank, “Anarchism and the Jews,” in Struggle for Tomorrow: Modern Political Ideologies of the Jewish People, ed. Basil J. Vlavianos and Feliks Gross (New York: Arts, 1953), 283.

39. Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 20215), 168–72; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 180; Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 190.

40. Peter Glassgold, ed., Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 2001), xxvi.

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41. William J. Fishman, Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Shtetl to London Ghetto (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), chaps. 10–11 (quote on 301). See also Benjamin Gidley, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Account of Jewish Socialism: Class, Identity and Immigration in Edwardian London,” Socialist History, no. 45 (2014): 61–79.

42. Nancy L. Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986); Karin Hofmeester, Jewish Workers in the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London and Paris, 1870–1914, trans. Lee Mitzman (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 229–55.

43. Inna Shtakser, The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement: Community and Identity during the Russian Revolution and Its Immediate Aftermath, 1905–07 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Avrich, The Russian Anarchists.

44. Jose C. Moya, “The Positive Side of Stereotypes: Jewish Anarchists in Early-Twen tieth-Century Buenos Aires,” Jewish History 18, no. 1 (January 2004): 19–48; Javier Díaz, “El anarquismo en el movimiento obrero judío de Buenos Aires (1905–1909),” Archivos 9, no. 8 (2016): 119–40; Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),

chap. 6; Gregorio Rawin and Antonio Lopez, “La Asociación Racionalista Judía: an archismo ed ebraismo in Argentina,” in L’Anarchico e l’ebreo: storia di un incontro, ed. Amedeo Bertolo (Milan: Elèuthera, 2001), 179–86.

45. Goldman, Living My Life, 55.

46. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, ix, translated by Esther Dolgoff.

47. For documentation of the Language Council, Literature Council, Pure Language Society, and other institutions, see Scott B. Saulson, Institutionalized Language Planning: Documents and Analysis of Revival of Hebrew (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979).

48. Joshua A. Fogel and Keith Weiser, eds., Czernovitz at 100: The First Yiddish Lan guage Conference in Historical Perspective (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010).

49. For a detailed survey of the waves of Yiddish language reform, see Gennady Es traikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

50. Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001).

51. Soviet language reformers, avowedly motivated by a desire for pedagogical sim plicity, changed Arabic, Latin, Georgian, and other alphabets to Cyrillic. Ivan G. Iliev, “Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet,” International Journal of Russian Studies, no. 2 (2013/14), http://www.ijors.net/issue2_2_2013/articles/iliev.html. During the same period, Turkish reformers abandoned the Arabic alphabet and purged words derived from Persian and Arabic. Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

52. Nesi Altaras, “Sephardic Jews in Turkey Were Told to Assimilate. Today’s Genera tion is Reclaiming Its Identity Through the Ladino Language,” Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, July 21, 2020, https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/sephardic-studies/ladino -and-jewish-identity-in-turkey-then-and-now/?fbclid=IwAR3QZrXBGITXCpmnn41 VqPDmMNJuGFY_tUtjQGL40-TSOeWtfqBVQCYhgM8.

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53. Michael G. Smith, Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 131.

54. Ibid.

55. Esther Schor, “Esperanto—A Jewish Story,” Pakn-treger, Winter 2009, https://www .yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/pakn-treger/esperanto-jewish-story.

56. Ibid.

5 7. Brigid O’Keeffe, “An International Language for an Empire of Humanity: L. L. Zamenhof and the Imperial Russian Origins of Esperanto,” East European Jewish Affairs 49, no. 1 (2019): 1–19.

58. Will Firth, “Esperanto and Anarchism,” The Anarchist Library, 1998, https://the anarchistlibrary.org/library/will-firth-esperanto-and-anarchism.

59. Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 277.

60. Ibid.

61. Carolyn J. Eichner, “Language of Imperialism, Language of Liberation: Louise Michel and the Kanak-French Colonial Encounter,” Feminist Studies 45, no. 2–3 (2019): 377–408.

62. Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 148; “I. A. Merison: Su fallecimiento,” Judaica (1941), 201–202.

63. M. Terman, “Di ‘Kropotkin literature gezelshaft’ un ihre letste oysgaben,” Di Tsu kunft, June 1917, 371; Zhitlovsky quoted in “I. A. Merison,” 202.

64. Terman, “Di ‘Kropotkin literature gezelshaft,’” 369; Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 284; Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 294 n.69.

65. Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 149; Karl Marx, Dos Kapital: kritik fun der polit isher ekonomie, 3 vols., trans. J. A. Maryson (New York: Kropotkin Literatur Gezelshaft, 1917–1918).

66. J.A.M., “Karl Marx: a biografishe skitse,” in Marx, Dos Kapital, 1:22–32 (quote on 31–32).

67. J. A. Maryson, “Forvort fun’m iberzetser,” in Marx, Dos Kapital, 1:7–21 (quotes on 7, 8).

68. Furio Biagini, Nati altrove: il movimento anarchico ebraico tra Mosca e New York (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 1998), 15.

69. Elaine J. Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

70. Information can be found at www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087141.

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