With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism

Anna Elena Torres, a professor of comparative literature, and Kenyon Zimmer, a historian, have assembled a group of ten scholars based in Canada, the United States, and Israel to survey the history of Jewish anarchism, primarily in the United States but also in Russia. The essays cover the entirety of the twentieth century. Based on research conducted in sources covering a number of languages, including Yiddish, English, Hebrew, and Russian, the authors have taken as their subjects the Jewish female and male anarchists who produced a prodigious number of articles and speeches, poems and creative works that passionately espoused the cause of human freedom. The book's geographic span demonstrates the anarchists’ transnational connections and concerns.The voices recorded and analyzed in this volume subscribed to no single definition of Jewishness. Some explicitly posited a linkage between their Jewish roots and the dictates of Judaism as a religious system, broadly defined, to their anarchist politics. Others studied here happened to have been of Jewish background but left few or no words that showed how their Jewishness and their embrace of anarchism was connected. Some of the heroes of the book, and it does tend to run toward the hagiographic, addressed audiences from a variety of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, well beyond the Jewish world, and some directed their rhetoric exclusively to other Jews, particularly those who wrote exclusively in Yiddish. Likewise, the editors in their introductory essay noted that no single definition of anarchism held these thinkers together and that when invoking the word or label anarchism, the women and men under consideration here referred to an expansive category of political thinking rather than to a single, unified idea.With Freedom in Our Ears can be read as a rebuke to the vast literature in the field of American Jewish history, which the editors declare has given this notable strand of Jewish thought short shrift, particularly in the context of the American Jewish immigrant generation. Few scholars of the history of the Jews of the United States, they claim, have bothered much with the anarchists, offering them only an occasional nod. The anarchists have, for the most part, been excised from the historic record, and this absence has provided the editors with a rationale for the volume's publication.That nearly universal slighting of anarchism as a historic force in the Jewish world does not reflect a desire to paint immigrant Jews as supporters of the standard American, capitalist-driven two-party system. Rather, the failure to credit anarchists demonstrates the triumph of socialists, who espoused a kind of pragmatic utopianism, with the emphasis on the pragmatism. The socialists won out in the historiography, at the expense of the anarchists, because of what they did. They launched the most sustained Yiddish periodical in the United States, Forverts (Forward), which in 1916 had the largest circulation of any foreign-language newspaper in the United States and which deftly combined political ideology with information for immigrants on how to get on with life in America. The socialists ran candidates for office, some of whom won and played an important role in shaping municipal policies in New York. The socialists organized mutual aid and benefit societies like the still-functioning Arbeter Ring—the Workmen's Circle (now the Workers Circle), with its national network of cemeteries, insurance plans, language schools, family programs, and the like—and it was the socialists who importantly stimulated and shepherded into prominence the Jewish garment workers unions, most notably the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.To most analysts of the American Jewish past, what mattered were the institutions and practices during the immigration period that led to the emergence of durable communal bodies that impacted newly arrived Jews and their progeny and helped pave the way for the Jews’ integration into American life.With Freedom in Our Ears, which ironically devotes no focused article to the most important and best-known Jewish anarchist in America, Emma Goldman, justifies, but not by design, the contours of the broad historical narrative responsible for the marginalization of the anarchists. That is, its essays, through their very content and focus, help explain the lack of scholarly interest in the anarchists. Nearly all the essays included here, all of them finely detailed and based on careful readings of primary sources, stray little from the printed page or the speaker's stand. What the subjects in this book did, and presumably what the Jewish anarchists did, was write and talk, mostly to themselves. They left few, if any, traces on the communal landscape, creating nothing that endured or made a difference. They had a press, which limited itself to those already converted to the cause. They spoke at their own rallies and published poetry and essays that seem to have circulated almost exclusively among themselves. Few beyond the anarchist world would have read these sources and acted on them.The anarchists, as the book shows, created no institutions that drew people in, provided for their needs, and, in the process, left their mark on Jewish or American community life. Indeed, the very title of the volume, With Freedom in Our Ears, points to a kind of self-referential, in-group discourse that did little to reach out to others and impact their lives. Outreach and institution formation clearly did not have a place on the anarchists’ agenda, and the operative pronoun our, whether intentionally or not, presents a portrait, however compelling, of adherents to an ideology who spoke primarily to themselves and did little more. No wonder, then, that historians have pushed them to the side.

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