The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America

Joseph Cohen
Translation by Emil Kerenji

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Members of the Philadelphia branch of The Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring) in 1938. Cohen was a founding member.

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INTRODUCTION

“My First Years in Philadelphia” is one of the first chapters in the second part of Joseph Cohen’s memoir, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike: Historisher iberblik un perzenlakhe iberlebungen [The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America: A Historical Overview and Personal Reminiscences], published in Philadelphia by the Radical Library (Workmen’s Circle Branch 273) in 1945.

Cohen (1878-1953) was one of the leading Yiddish-speaking anarchist activists in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Along with Chaim Weinberg’s memoir, which was published in English in 2008 (Forty Years in the Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jewish Anarchist, Litwin Books), Cohen’s memoir is one of the most important documents speaking to the history of American anarchism in Yiddish. While there is a significant treatment of the Jewish labor movement and the history of Jewish socialism in the United States in the academic field of American Jewish history, fewer scholars have looked specifically at the history of the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement.

Apart from being invaluable as a primary source in that respect, Cohen’s memoir is a lively personal narrative that spans the remarkably dynamic historical period between the assassination of the Russian tsar in 1881 and the early aftermath of the Holocaust. Cohen’s prose documents the fundamental social, cultural, and political transformations that Jews faced in this period, and speaks to all major themes of Jewish modernity: migration, assimilation, antisemitism, as well as many others. “My First Years in Philadelphia” is an especially rich chapter, as it provides a colorful introduction to the world of Yiddish-speaking radical activism in a major North American city at the turn of the twentieth century.

This piece and the views expressed in it do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In memory of Motl Rosenbush (1937-2014)

My First Years in Philadelphia

In the spring of 1903, I found myself in Philadelphia. I stumbled into a conservative circle, one nourished by Kasriel Sarasohn’s Tageblat, which I found repugnant from the very first day.1
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Some twelve or thirteen years earlier, I had belonged to a revolutionary circle in Minsk for a couple of years. I had become acquainted with the idea of socialism as it was understood in Russia in those years. I had then followed, from the backwater of Polesia, the rise and development of the Bund, and the growth of the revolutionary movement among the Jewish masses.2
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Three works, quite different in character, strongly influenced my development in those early years. Kalman Schulman’s account of the Paris Commune in his ten-volume world history (Divre yeme ‘olam) elicited in me, still a youngster in the great Mir yeshiva, the highest sympathy for the Communards.3
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The more the author sought to portray them in a bad light, the more appealing they became to me. I felt a close kinship with their yearnings and personal compassion for their martyrdom.

I then stumbled upon, in the woods of Polesia, a bound volume of Ha-Melits from 1881, which provided all the details of the historic trial against Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, and their comrades, for assassinating Tsar Alexander II.4
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The newspaper, as one can imagine, portrayed the accused in the worst possible light—“tsare ubytsi,” a mere trifle!5
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People who dared raise their hand against the God-anointed ruler of all Russians! My sympathies, however, were absolutely on their side. I followed the proceedings with greatest interest, swallowed every word, and lived through all their tribulations.

The third work was, in a way, even more interesting: a bound old supplement to the Novoe vremya, which serialized Edward Bellamy’s great utopian work, Looking Backward.6
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This had happened before Novoe vremya became a dogged reactionary and antisemitic newspaper. I came across the supplement in the mid-1890s; Bellamy’s critique of the current order in the foreword, and his example of people harnessed into a carriage, had a violent effect on me.

Read more: The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America

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