The Strange Lives of Two American Jewish Anarchists

In the first decades of the 20th century, anarchism—the belief that the overthrow of the government would lead to an era of spontaneous, communal human cooperation—vied with Communism as the most appealing radical movement in both Europe and America. Anarchists played a key role in Russian politics after the February 1917 revolution, and briefly held territory in both Ukraine and Spain during those countries’ respective civil wars—until the Bolsheviks brutally suppressed them. Two recent books, The J. Abrams Book and Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff, provide the life stories of two prominent American Jewish anarchists, both of whom realized quite early that nothing but tyranny could come out of the Soviet Union. In their review, Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh write:

[In 1927, Jack] Abrams [and his wife] Mary arrived in Mexico, where the National Revolutionary Party had come to power. There weren’t many anarchists in Mexico, but they were welcomed by the small but growing Jewish community. “In Jewish Mexico,” one of [Jack’s] friends wrote in tribute, “it was the community activists of the younger generation who were his audiences and his adherents.” Eventually Abrams became a director of the Jewish Cultural Center. He found work as a printing shop where he printed Yiddish books and newspapers. . . .

Jack Abrams and Sam Dolgoff shared more than their identities as anarcho-syndicalists. They were both idealistic, courageous, single-minded, and passionate in fighting for their cause and for freedom not only in America but internationally. Like many of their fellow Jewish immigrants they were self-taught and eager to learn; they were working-class intellectuals and charismatic orators—a lost Jewish type. . . .

What . . . did these Jewish anarchists accomplish? After all, they not only failed to achieve their lifelong dream of a free cooperative society without a state to rule over it; they even failed to attract enough believers in that dream to keep the movement alive. Perhaps their biggest mistake was the belief that humankind was basically good despite all they had experienced to the contrary. [Nevertheless], they were clear-eyed, even prophetic, in their early disillusionment with Communism. They were dreamers, but their dream was a novel one and worthy of being remembered.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: American Jewish History, Communism, History & Ideas, Mexico, Socialism, Soviet Union

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society