With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism

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Anna Elena Torres and Ania Aizman celebrate With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism with an in-store event at Pilsen Community Books. Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer edit a collection of essays which recovers many aspects of this erased tradition. Contributors bring to light the presence and persistence of Jewish anarchism throughout histories of radical labor, women’s studies, political theory, multilingual literature, and ethnic studies. These essays reveal an ongoing engagement with non-Jewish radical cultures, including the translation practices of the Jewish anarchist press. Jewish anarchists drew from a matrix of secular, cultural, and religious influences, inventing new anarchist forms that ranged from mystical individualism to militantly atheist revolutionary cells. With Freedom in Our Ears brings together more than a dozen scholars and translators to write the first collaborative history of international, multilingual, and transdisciplinary Jewish anarchism. Anna Elena Torres is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Torres is also the author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press. Ania Aizman is assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She previously taught at the University of Michigan as a postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows. She is working on a study of antiwar sabotage in Russia as well as a book called Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture.