Historian Kenyon Zimmer is joined by authors Anna Elena Torres and Shane Burley for a discussion of Joseph Cohen’s 1945 Yiddish-language history of the Jewish anarchist movement in America.

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, The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America, covering the period from the 1880s through the Second World War. The book's recent publication in English by AK Press allows a wider audience 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).

Anna Elena Torres is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Torres is the author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (2024) and co-editor of With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (2023). Torres’ publications include work in Prooftexts, Jewish Quarterly Review, Nashim, make/shift: a journal of feminisms in motion, In geveb, and ArtsEverywhere.  Torres' creative practice has included work as a poet and translator, community arts organizer, muralist, and conceptual artist exhibited at the Venice Biennale’s Yiddishland Pavilion (2022) and the POLIN Museum, Warsaw.

Shane Burley has contributed to places such as NBC News, Jewish Currents, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, Tikkun, and The Oregon Historical Quarter. With Ben Lorber, they co-authored Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (2024). Their previous books on the far-right and social movements include No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis (2022) and Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (2021).