This roundtable focuses on new, interdisciplinary scholarship on the history of Jewish anarchism in the United States and features contributors to the forthcoming anthology With Freedom In Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press), along with its editors. The participants' areas of specialization span from labor and immigration history to art history and comparative literature, and their research is similarly diverse in its use of Yiddish, Russian, and English sources. Together, their work illustrates the heterogeneity of Jewish anarchism at the turn of the twentieth century and the multiple ways in which its adherents negotiated identity, language, culture, and activism.

The roundtable will be moderated by Kenyon Zimmer, one of the editors of With Freedom in Our Ears, and features his coeditor, Anna Elena Torres, presenting "Anarchist Elegy and Social Memory," and examination of Jewish anarchist cultural memorialization through Yiddish and English in poetry, with a particular focus on elegies to the Haymarket Martyrs and Sacco and Vanzetti. Allan Antliff will present "Divine Fire: Alfred Stieglitz’s Anarchism," which explores modernist photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz's anarchism and its impact on both his cosmopolitan identity and his artistic endeavors, while challenging prevailing interpretations of Stieglitz's racial and national identifications. Mark Grueter's presentation, "Russian-Speaking Anarchists in North America," examines the Jewish leadership of the Russian-speaking Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (URW), an anarchist federation that, although almost entirely forgotten today, counted more than 10,000 members at its peak in 1919. Each of these presentations, like the book as a whole, challenges prevailing interpretations of their subjects, unearths new sources, and reveals neglected areas of American Jewish anarchism's diverse history.