The Unknown and Heroic Anarchist Struggle Against Communism

Jacob Kronhill Visiting Professor Lecture Admission: Free

Paul Berman, YIVO’s 2018 Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History, will deliver a lecture on a little-discussed and altogether remarkable episode in the modern history of human rights. This was the struggle, beginning exactly 100 years ago, of the anarchist labor movement against the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and subsequently against the larger Communist movement around the world.

The story of the anarchist struggle is dramatic in itself. It is a Russian story, which became a German and Western European story, then became a Spanish story, and ultimately became a story of the American labor movement, some of the Jewish unions especially. But the lecture will also present the story as something of a fable for our own era. It is a fable of a seemingly marginal political movement in a dark time, and the movement's ability, even so, to mobilize a good many people around the world to achieve something large and noble in the field of human rights.

About the Speaker

Paul Berman is the critic-at-large of Tablet magazine. He has contributed essays on politics and literature to many magazines and newspapers and has taught at various universities. He is the author of two histories of the modern political left, A Tale of Two Utopias and Power and the Idealists, and two books about liberalism and its struggle with the Islamists, Terror and Liberalism and The Flight of the Intellectuals. And he is the editor of various anthologies, the earliest of which, in 1972, was called Quotations from the Anarchists.