Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

The Working Class in American History

by Kenyon Zimmer

From the 1880s through the 1940s, tens of thousands of first- and second-generation immigrants embraced the anarchist cause after arriving on American shores. Kenyon Zimmer explores why these migrants turned to anarchism, and how their adoption of its ideology shaped their identities, experiences, and actions.
 
Zimmer focuses on Italians and Eastern European Jews in San Francisco, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey. Tracing the movement's changing fortunes from the pre–World War I era through the Spanish Civil War, Zimmer argues that anarchists, opposed to both American and Old World nationalism, severed all attachments to their nations of origin but also resisted assimilation into their host society. Their radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity instead embraced diversity and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. Though ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of Americanism and other nationalisms, the anarchist movement nonetheless provided a shining example of a transnational collective identity delinked from the nation-state and racial hierarchies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Judaism, Jewish, American History, Politics, Italy

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2015

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zimmer argued that the two largest contigent of American Anarchists, Yiddish speaking anarchists and Italian anarchists, represented two strong and interrelated rebelliously cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-state, anti-racist, pro-labor, and internationalist traditions. He makes two central arguments that challenges much of conventional historical discourse: 1) Both Yiddish and Italian Anarchists mainly became radicalized because of their experience in the United States as immigrants, with relatively few carrying their ideas from Europe; 2) Both traditions were firmly steeped in the immigrant culture, and had a hard time reaching outside it, even to their children, which hurt the Anarchist movement when immigration was cut off in the 1920s, and eventually it collapsed by WW2 because of the extreme polarization of the world in the war against fascism as well as the following Cold War (though did not entirely go away.)
Zimmer focuses on three locales: The mainly Yiddish speaking Lower East Side anarchist movement in New York City, the Italian anarchists of Paterson NJ, and finally the Italian-led but hodgepodge of internationals in San Francisco (Italian, Jewish, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian.) In all three cases, Anarchists were central to labor movements and radical organizing against exploitation. Zimmer also illustrates that Anarchists moved with relative ease, with American based anarchists appearing in the Mexican Revolution, Russian Revolutions (1905 & 1917), Italian movements, Spanish Civil War, and more. Anarchists were mostly consistently against the war, largely resisting German attempts to bribe them to sabotage Allied shipping (though many of the Yiddish anarchists silently hoped for German victory over Czarist Russia.) Anarchist communities and organizing faced a series of crises and upheavals as both Western Capitalist governments cracked down on them, as well as Soviet governments as they destroyed their leftist rivals. Still, Italian anarchists had a revival in the 1920s as anti-fascist resistance began to grow. Within Jewish Anarchists, the rise of Zionism also challenged anti-nationalist sentiment, and Israel’s birth after the Holocaust openly sidelined the Anarchist argument against the state (though many of their critics proved to be prophetic.)
Key Themes and Concept
-International Anarchism was a movement of movements, consisting of overlapping groups and networks. Somewhat difficult to estimate, since many of its members did not belong to formal groups and existed outside formal politics in general.
-Anarchist language periodicals key to Zimmer’s research. Language brought both cohesion and barriers to reaching outside those communities.
-Jewish Anarchists tended to fall into the German Anarchist circles initially in the United States, while Italian Anarchists tended to fall into the Spanish and French traditions and circles.
-The rise of fascism, soviet communism, and Zionism led Anarchism into a series of crises.
-Anarchists argued for anti-authoritarian, nonformal, all shades of immigrants to be included.
-Anarchists opposed lynching and racial systems against African-Americans, but the vast majority of Black Americans were in the American South, where there was little presence of Anarchists. They tended to not analyze race as systems of oppression but as simply prejudice.
-While they fiercely critiqued patriarchal systems, especially marriage, and advocated for free love, Anarchists often ended up replicating those systems in who was involved in organizing in Yiddish and Italian spaces. Amongst the most well known of women Anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, did most of their organizing and speaking in English.

[Jeff Buddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this remarkable history, Kenyon Zimmer chronicles the rise of American Anarchism and how it was fueled largely by immigrants who were radicalized after coming the to the United States. Pilloried by the state as bands of violent, bomb-throwing monsters, Zimmer shows how these Anarchists were largely idealists, whose ideas of inclusiveness in race, gender, and even sexuality far predated any modern social activism in these areas.

Yes, there was violence. Strategic assassinations and bombings were thought to be "propaganda by the deed," that by acting decisively against what the anarchists viewed as tyranny, the world would rise up with them and the revolution would start. It didn't. The state just labeled them as terrorists, and the crackdown started. Arrests. Deportations. Executions. It was a pretty efficient machine.

What is striking about Zimmer's account is that he portrays Anarchists as an extremely literate bunch. They published newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets and broadsides. The founded schools and started libraries. They made the most of the American freedom of speech, only to find their offices raided, their printing presses smashed, their literature confiscated.

Because they were immigrants, mainstream American culture painted all similar immigrants with the same brush. And until the state started to restrict the influx of these immigrants, that treatment merely won new converts. When the state passed laws against immigration, the strangled the communities that could sustain such groups.

Zimmer's account displays a glimmer of hope. The Anarchism that these groups nurtured in America still lingers in us. The hope that human beings can be better, that we can treat each other as true equals -regardless of the color of our skin, our gender, or our sexual identity- is still possible. It's just that it's not going to come from the state.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exemplary: clearly argued (both on macro- and micro-levels), well-sourced (with great linguistic variety therein, extending beyond what the book title suggests), and managing to tell human stories alongside with stories of collectivities.

[Inna · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book. The author concentrated on two communities prominent within US anarchism - the East European Jewish and the Italian. The main point of the book is to show how in US the anarchist movement combined mutual support within particular immigrant groups and an anti-racist, internationalist stance. The author did a great job describing the anarchists' standing against the authoritarian tendencies prominent in the 20th century and positioning a belief in human beings as an alternative to closure of borders, whether of states or of communities.
The author describes the demise of these particular anarchist communities as a result of curtailing of immigration to US, which meant that the particular combination of ethnicity and radical politics on which these were based disappeared with the first generation of immigrants. He also points out that the WWII created a polarized reality in which resistance to both Nazi and Communist authoritarian regimes seemed irrelevant. This reality was sustained during the Cold War, when a struggle for freedom for everyone and everywhere was replaced in the public mind by struggle between political regimes.
The book is highly internationalist in approach. The author managed to describe the experience of anarchists, as people living in a world where the events in Russia, Mexico, or Spain are directly relevant to their lives. He also describes them as highly mobile and highly committed to their ideas. The book includes stories on US anarchists in Mexico, Soviet Russia, and Spain, and the author seems to care about them as much as their comrades did.
Perhaps the most convincing story addressing the demise of anarchism as not permanent is the one about a prominent US anarchist traveling to Lodz after the war and encountering several Jewish anarchist survivors, who asked for nothing for themselves, but wished to renew their international contacts and asked for technical assistance in publishing their ideas locally. It is hard not to think that such ideas have power.

[Acep Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more things change....

Loved how it looked at the Yiddish speaking Jewish anarchists of NYC, the Italian-American anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey, and the multi-ethnic anarchist community of San Fransisco.

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Edward Shapiro for the Jewish Book Council.