Joseph Cohen’s monumental work, subtitled “A Historical Review and Personal Reminiscences,” was published in Yiddish in Philadelphia in 1945. It has long been regarded as a seminal, if not definitive, source of detailed information and impressions on the topic of Jewish anarchism in America. Cohen was a participant, activist and observer, familiar with virtually every leading anarchist figure of his day, and many socialists and communists as well, who emerged out of the anarchist movement or were his contemporaries. This neglected history, available until now only to those who could read Yiddish, is now available to a much wider English readership.
Joseph Cohen (1878–1953) was a central figure of 20th-century American anarchism. He was born in Belarus and emigrated to the United States in 1903 with his wife, Sophie. They settled first in Philadelphia, where they raised two children. For 12 years, he edited the famed Yiddish paper, the Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Voice of Labor). Throughout his life he took part in various anarchist institutions such as the Radical Library, New York’s Francisco Ferrer Center, and the Stelton and Sunrise colonies. Cohen also wrote two other posthumously published books, The House Stood Forlorn (1954), a memoir of his childhood, and In Quest of Heaven: The Story of the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community (1957), about the rise and fall of an anarchist commune.
