The New Yorker, “An Intimate History of Antifa”

According to Bray, antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism. The movement’s profile has surged since antifa activists engaged in a wave of property […]

CNN, “Unmasking the leftist Antifa movement”

“There are people who were energized by Bernie (Sanders) that now are anarchists,” said an organizer of the website It’s Going Down, a newsblog for Antifa. “People are freaked out by a Trump regime, freaked out by the far-right. A lot of people saw neo-Nazi symbols. There’s a reason why people are becoming polarized. It’s […]

Slate, “The Public Face of Antifa”

Antifa is sometimes used as a synonym for black bloc anarchists—the scruffy kids in black bandanas or balaclavas known for smashing Starbucks windows—but while the movements overlap, they’re not identical. Jenkins doesn’t wear a mask, and Laura is an upper-middle-class suburban woman with grown children. The movement appears to be growing rapidly under Trump, though […]

Tablet Magazine, “Dear Antifas: A Note About Your Ancestor”

Tresca was the Cold War anarcho-syndicalist. He was a super-radical who, even so, did not remove himself from the larger American system. My old friend Daniel Bell had the misfortune of seeing Tresca’s body on the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and 15th Street, after the assassination, in January 1943. That was a terrible event. Tresca’s […]