About Freie Arbeiter Stimme

Freie Arbeiter Stimme

Freie Arbeiter Stimme, better known in Yiddish transliteration as Fraye Arbeter Shtime and in English as the Free Voice of Labor, was a Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper that was published from New York City's Lower East Side from 1890 to 1977. It ran for eighty-seven years, longer than any other anarchist periodical in Yiddish, and at its closing it was the world's oldest Yiddish newspaper and the last foreign-language anarchist paper in the United States. It was the primary organ of the Jewish anarchist movement in America.

The historian Paul Avrich, its principal chronicler, described its functions as manifold: it was a labor paper, a journal of radical opinion, a literary magazine, and a people's university at once. Its editors were major figures of Jewish American anarchism, its contributors included Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and the leading Yiddish poets of two generations, and its history, from sweatshop New York to its quiet end in the 1970s, traced the whole arc of Yiddish radicalism in America.

The Pioneers of Liberty and the Haymarket Inheritance

The paper grew out of outrage at a trial. The 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago and the prosecution of anarchists that followed it produced a resurgence of interest in anarchism, particularly among Jewish radicals in New York. In response, Jewish anarchists formed the Pioneers of Liberty, generally regarded as the first Jewish anarchist group in the United States, to campaign in support of the Haymarket defendants and to produce Yiddish literature about the case.

From early to mid-1889 the Pioneers published a weekly called Varhayt, or Truth, the first Yiddish anarchist periodical in the United States. It survived only five months. At the end of 1889 Jewish radicals from across the country met in a landmark gathering to consider a joint anarchist and socialist newspaper. The proposal narrowly failed, and each tendency built its own press instead. In January 1890 the Pioneers and allied groups resolved to create a new anarchist weekly, and after an interim periodical, Der Morgenshtern, ran from January to June 1890 under a physician-editor, the new paper appeared. It claimed to represent thirty-two Jewish workers' associations.

First Issues and First Editors

Freie Arbeiter Stimme was first published on July 4, 1890, from the Lower East Side, and it appeared weekly. The choice of Independence Day for an anarchist launch was characteristic of a movement that regarded itself as the true heir of American liberty against both bosses and the state. Speakers toured the East Coast and Midwest to raise money for the venture, because its intended readers, impoverished garment and sweatshop workers, had little to give.

Its first editor was Roman Lewis, a fluent speaker in Yiddish and Russian and an effective fundraiser, who took the post after the British socialist Morris Winchevsky declined it. Lewis left after about six months for the cloakmakers' union and the socialists. The essayist and translator J. A. Maryson followed him. The third editor was David Edelstadt, a buttonhole maker from Cincinnati and one of the first Yiddish labor poets, whose verse had already appeared in Varhayt and Der Morgenshtern. Edelstadt left the editorship in late 1891 after contracting tuberculosis and moving west in search of a cure, and he continued to send the paper his poems until his death a year later, at twenty-six. Hillel Solotaroff and Moshe Katz, who later translated anarchist classics into Yiddish, edited the paper after him.

Collapse in the 1890s

The paper's first era ended in exhaustion. Its audience was poor, its finances were precarious, and in May 1892 it suspended printing during a typesetters' wage dispute. That same year Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick divided the movement, as some anarchists broke ranks to denounce terrorism altogether. As the wage dispute closed after nearly a year, the United States entered the depression of the Panic of 1893.

By April 1894 the paper stopped production entirely, and it remained dormant for five years. The Pioneers of Liberty and the groups around them waned or dissolved in the same years, ending the first era of Jewish anarchism in America. The paper's editors did not disappear. In the dormant years they helped launch Di Fraye Gezelshaft, a cultural monthly that kept a Yiddish anarchist literary circle alive until a weekly could be afforded again.

Yanovsky and the Heyday

The paper revived in October 1899 under Saul Yanovsky, and his twenty-year editorship, until 1919, was the heyday of both the newspaper and the movement. Yanovsky had campaigned for four years to restore the paper, overcoming opposition even within the anarchist cultural circle, and he rebuilt it with a deliberate strategy of constructive anarchism: engagement with trade unions, libertarian education, and cooperatives, rather than propaganda by deed. He renounced terrorism and presented anarchism as a philosophy of brotherhood, cooperation, and dignity.

Under Yanovsky the paper reached a circulation above twenty thousand before the First World War, and its literary standard was its glory. Alongside Kropotkin, Johann Most, and Solotaroff, Yanovsky published Rudolf Rocker, Max Nettlau, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Abraham Frumkin, translations of Ibsen, Olive Schreiner, and Oscar Wilde, and work by major Yiddish writers such as Avrom Reyzen and H. Leivick. His own column, written with caustic wit, was a reader favorite. The paper also served as a movement hub: its circle held an annual December conference of anarchists and socialists and staged the famous Yom Kippur balls, evenings of singing, dancing, and antireligious speeches that scandalized the Orthodox and delighted the movement. In 1906 Yanovsky briefly launched a daily evening paper to compete with the socialist Forverts; it folded after two months. His revival of Di Fraye Gezelshaft as a monthly literary supplement in 1910 and 1911 was more successful and spawned fifty literary clubs across North America.

Kropotkin, War, and Revolution

The paper gave special devotion to Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist theorist who was especially beloved among American Jewish anarchists. It prepared a photographic supplement for his second American lecture tour in 1901, which Kropotkin himself asked to have cancelled rather than be made into an icon. With Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, it planned a seventieth-birthday celebration for him at Carnegie Hall in 1912 and published a special issue on his life and thought. Following Kropotkin, it became the only major American anarchist publication to endorse the Allies in the First World War.

The paper also bore the backlash of anarchism's violent reputation. After the assassination of President William McKinley by a self-described anarchist in 1901, an angry mob wrecked its offices and physically attacked Yanovsky. Yanovsky stepped down in 1919 after siding against Lenin in the movement's debate over the Bolshevik Revolution, as circulation fell by half. Postwar deportations, the pull of Communism and of Russia itself, new immigration restrictions, and the assimilation of the older generation's children all shrank the movement at once, and this time the decline did not reverse. A new Jewish anarchist federation, formed in 1921, raised money across the continent and restabilized the paper by the mid-1920s.

Joseph Cohen and the Interwar Paper

Joseph Cohen became editor in 1923 and served for nine years. Under Cohen the paper retained its quality, remained a major source on American and international anarchist movements, and reached toward a second generation: it ran an English-language section for readers unaccustomed to Yiddish, issued special supplements and jubilee numbers, and published English-language books and pamphlets by Nettlau and Berkman. Extracts of what became Berkman's classic primer of anarchism were first published in its pages. Manuscripts submitted during the editorships of Cohen and his successor were preserved and later formed an archival collection at the University of Michigan.

Cohen resigned in 1932 to found the Sunrise Colony, an anarchist agricultural community in Michigan, leaving the paper to a committee. From 1934 to 1940 it was edited by Mark Mratchny, a Ukrainian anarchist exile and psychoanalyst who had edited the Makhnovist movement's paper in Ukraine. He covered the Spanish Civil War with exceptional intensity, and the Republican defeat crushed him; he left both the paper and the movement. By the 1930s the Jewish anarchist world had grown more conciliatory and less revolutionary, and the paper kept good relations with socialist Jewish unions, which subscribed, fundraised, and advertised in it on labor holidays. A documentary history of the paper's circle appeared in the period under the name Mark Mrachnyi in the Michigan finding aid, a variant spelling of the same editor's name.

The Long Decline

After the Second World War the paper's world contracted steadily. The Jewish neighborhoods that had sustained it emptied, the hope of imminent revolution that had animated its founders faded, and Yiddish itself receded as the children and grandchildren of its readers lived their lives in English. Readership fell year by year, and the paper slowed its cadence from weekly to fortnightly and then to monthly.

Editors passed in succession, among them Herman Frank, Solo Linder, and Isidore Wisotsky. In 1975 the paper's printer, Ahrne Thorne, became its editor and briefly restored its standing in the Yiddish world with serious articles on economics, international affairs, labor, and literature. The revival could not outrun demography. By the 1970s circulation had dropped below two thousand, and Jewish anarchist organizations across the country were dissolving as their members aged and died.

The Last Issue in 1977

Freie Arbeiter Stimme held its last annual banquet in mid-1977 and published its last issue on December 4, 1977. The Los Angeles Times marked the event with an obituary for the paper itself, reporting the death of the oldest Yiddish paper in the United States. With it, Avrich concluded, went the Jewish anarchist movement in America, whose central institution the paper had been for eighty-seven years.

Its last year was filmed. Pacific Street Films' 1980 documentary Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists followed the elderly editors, printers, and readers of the paper's final period, preserving their testimony about the movement the paper had created. Thorne, its last editor, died in 1985, his New York Times obituary identifying him simply as the editor of an anarchist journal, the paper by then already a subject for historians.

Legacy

The paper's legacy was literary as much as political. Avrich judged that it had upheld a high literary standard for nearly nine decades and had published the most lauded writers and poets in Yiddish radicalism, including the young poets of the Di Yunge movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Contributors across its life included Edelstadt, Goldman, Abba Gordin, Rocker, and Moishe Shtarkman, and its pages carried translations that ranged from Marx's Capital to Turgenev's fiction, set before sweatshop readers as a matter of right.

It was also, in Avrich's formulation, a people's university for readers whom every other university excluded. No other Yiddish anarchist paper in the United States lasted more than five years; this one lasted eighty-seven, outliving the sweatshops, the movement, and nearly the language community that made it. Among defunct American newspapers, Freie Arbeiter Stimme stood as the clearest proof that a weekly with almost no money could, by seriousness alone, hold a world together for as long as that world itself survived.