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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3222/free-radicals/