A bold recovery of Yiddish anarchist history and literature Spanning the last two centuries, this fascinating work combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement. The narrative unfolds through a cast of historical characters, from the well known--such as Emma Goldman--to the more obscure, including an anarchist rabbi who translated the Talmud and a feminist doctor who organized for women's suffrage and against national borders. Its literary scope includes the Soviet epic poemas of Peretz Markish, the journalism and modernist poetry of Anna Margolin, and the early radical prose of Malka Heifetz Tussman. Anna Elena Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women's bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.

Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer edit a collection of essays which recovers many aspects of this erased tradition. Contributors bring to light the presence and persistence of Jewish anarchism throughout histories of radical labor, women’s studies, political theory, multilingual literature, and ethnic studies. These essays reveal an ongoing engagement with non-Jewish radical cultures, including the translation practices of the Jewish anarchist press. Jewish anarchists drew from a matrix of secular, cultural, and religious influences, inventing new anarchist forms that ranged from mystical individualism to militantly atheist revolutionary cells. With Freedom in Our Ears brings together more than a dozen scholars and translators to write the first collaborative history of international, multilingual, and transdisciplinary Jewish anarchism.

Through stories at once poetic and poignant, There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart offers a powerful elixir for all who rebel against systemic violence and injustice. The contemporary renewal of Jewish anarchism draws on a history of suffering, ranging from enslavement and displacement to white nationalism and genocide. Yet it also pulls from ancestral resistance, strength, imagination, and humor—all qualities, and wisdom, sorely needed today. These essays, many written from feminist and queer perspectives, journey into ancestral and contemporary trauma in ways that are humanizing and healing. They build bridges from bittersweet grief to rebellion and joy. Through concrete illustrations of how Jewish anarchists imaginatively create their own ritual, cultural, and political practices, they clearly illuminate the path toward mending ourselves and the world.

Jewish Ethics: The Basics demonstrates how ancient and contemporary ideas have shaped and reshaped Jewish traditions about how to act toward others. Readers are introduced to foundational questions, controversies, and diverse ethical conclusions developed by Jewish thinkers throughout the ages. Topics addressed include: • Assumptions about Authority • Love, Compassion, Justice and Humility • Human Rights, War, Land and Power • Gender and Sexuality • Personal and Social Ethics • Environmental and Animal Ethics • Bioethical Issues Concise, readable and engaging, this is the ideal introduction for anyone interested in religious ethics, secular traditions, Judaism, and the field of Jewish ethics.

A revolutionary guide to Jewish practice rooted in social justice, feminism, and queer liberation. This contemporary companion to the Jewish year cycle is not only a bellwether for radical Jews who want their lives and practice to be rooted in their political commitments but also an educational resource in Jewish tradition, holidays, and ritual. With a chapter for each month of the Hebrew calendar, For Times Such as These offers spiritual practices and holiday rituals rooted in movements for racial justice, decolonization, feminism, and queer and trans liberation. Each chapter opens with an invocation by liturgist and healer Dori Midnight and illuminated by artist Sol Weiss. Highlighting each month's spiritual and cultural qualities, Rabbi Ariana Katz and Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg summarize and provide commentary on Torah readings; examine the texts, histories, and contemporary customs of Jewish holidays; and offer questions to reflect on and engage spiritually with the month. This work provides a guide for creative action and ritual making throughout the seasons, an exploration of anti-Zionist Judaism, and spiritual-cultural invitation to embody and expand decolonial, anti-racist, queer, and feminist Jewish practice.

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

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.