This event is taking place as part of the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, three days of workshops and tabling with music performances at night.

Historian Kenyon Zimmer will discuss the story behind Joseph Cohen’s 1945 Yiddish-language history of the Jewish anarchist movement in America, and the multigenerational effort to finally have it published in English translation in 2024. Cohen spent more than four decades as a prominent figure in the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement, and wrote the only full-length historical study of it from his position as an insider, covering the period from the 1880s through the Second World War. Lifelong anarcho-syndicalist activist Esther Dolgoff translated the book into English in the late 1970s, but was unable to get it published. The project passed through other hands until ending up with Zimmer, who spent several years editing and fully annotating Dolgoff’s translation for contemporary readers. The book’s publication at last allows English-speaking readers to access the story of thousands of radical Jewish immigrants who fought to create a new world without borders, militaries, or bosses.

Kenyon Zimmer is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (2015) and co-editor of Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (2017), Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance (2018), and With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (2023).