The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America: A Historical Review and Personal Reminiscences

Essential reading in Jewish labor history, culture, and radicalism.

Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe once comprised the largest segment of the anarchist movement in the United States. Part historical excavation and part memoir, Joseph Cohen chronicles both well-known events and behind-the-scenes conflicts among radicals, as well as profiles of famous personalities like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and of the rank-and-file radicals who sustained the anarchist movement across North America from the 1880s to the 1940s.

The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America brings Joseph Cohen’s irreplaceable 1945 Yiddish-language study of America’s Jewish anarchists to an English-speaking audience for the first time and remains the most detailed examination of this neglected history.

The book also contains Cohen’s own reflections on anarchist theory and tactics, based upon his experiences and observations over four decades. Edited and fully annotated, this edition includes a wealth of supplementary information about the people, places, and events central to American anarchist history.

Joseph Cohen (1878-1953) was a vital figure of twentieth-century American anarchism. He was born in Belarus and emigrated to the United States in 1903 with his wife, Sophie, and settled first in Philadelphia, where they raised two children. For twelve years Cohen edited the famed Yiddish paper, the Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Voice of Labor). Throughout his life he took part in various anarchist institutions such as The Radical Library, New York’s Francisco Ferrer Center, and the Stelton and Sunrise colonies. Cohen is the author of two previously-published books, The House Stood Forlorn (1954) and In Quest of Heaven: The Story of the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community (1957).

Kenyon Zimmer is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (2015) and coeditor of Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (2017), Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance (2018), and With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (2023).

Esther Dolgoff (1905-1989) was a lifelong anarchist that was raised in Ohio and later settled in New York City with her husband, Sam. Dolgoff was at the center of American anarchism her entire adult life.