Freie Arbeter Shtimme

FREIE ARBETER SHTIMME. The outstanding anarchist publication in the Yiddish language, and the most popular anarchist publication of any kind in America, the Freie Arbeter Shtimme (FAS; Free Voice of Labor) long served as central mechanism for anarchist ethics and aesthetics within the Jewish immigrant world. It also epitomized the adaptation of many anarchists to the reality of shrinking influence, a strategy that matched accommodation to middle-of-the-road unionism with undaunted philosophical discourse.

The FAS was founded in 1890 as an American version of the highly successful London Arbeter Fraint (Workers Friend), intended, like the Fraint, to bring together anarchists and socialists under one editorial roof. But in America, the socialists had the upper hand in resources and editorial talent. The outstanding early contributor to the FAS, poet David Edelstadt, died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six after composing verses that became classics in the Yiddish choral repertoire. His comrade Joseph Bovshover, the earliest bohemian Jewish radical and the other outstanding anarchist poet, was soon confined to a mental institution. The FAS disappeared for five years, due to financial constraints, only to return in 1899 under the hand of experienced London editor Sh. Yanofsky, who dominated the paper until his departure in 1920.

In the meantime, the FAS and its constituency had adjusted themselves to a narrower political gauge. Active within the Jewish socialist fraternal movement and unions, they adamantly opposed the extreme Left embodied in the Socialist Labor Party and the revolutionary garment unions formed by the Industrial Workers of the World. They aligned themselves, informally and almost unconsciously, with the Poale Tsion (Labor Zionist) movement, many of whose members shared a vague utopianism and a desire to make practical changes in daily life.

The FAS, its pages studded with di yunge, young rebellious poets of the ghetto, reached a circulation of thirty thousand amid the last major Jewish diaspora. But Yanofsky’s support of American entry into World War I (following anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s similar endorsement) disheartened many readers. Others felt drawn, although sometimes only temporarily, to the Russian Revolution and the new Yiddish Communist Freiheit.

The FAS struck early and hard at the new Russian regime, and its followers could be counted upon to support the garment union mainstream against Communist challenges. Its own anarchism became steadily more philosophical and reactive. It retained perhaps ten thousand readers as a “free thought” forum for the older reader and the shrinking but still significant numbers of young Yiddish writers; and for the last outstanding “Yiddish” anarchist luminary, the gentile German intellectual Rudolf Rocker. But it remained a beacon of traditional anarchism as well, albeit mixed increasingly with a liberal anticommunism and a crypto-Zionism. Its activist readers, comfortable with the fraternal Yiddishist atmosphere of the Workmen’s Circle, convoked anarchistic study groups within the Circle, raised funds for the Spanish anarchists, and accommodated themselves to an amiable libertarianism.

By the 1940s–1950s, the FAS became increasingly a newspaper of anniversaries and reprinted poems or essays. Several of the distinguished old-time Yiddish writers, such as Abraham Raysen, continued to write for the paper until their deaths. A handful of younger writers, such as the melancholy eccentric A. Almi, contributed fresh essays on a variety of subjects, from music to literature. For the most part, the FAS celebrated its own, the great individuals and causes past or passing. As the present dimmed, in a world diminished by the Holocaust and by the passing of Jewish labor into the middle classes, the past grew brighter. In the paper’s last years, anarchist historian Paul Avrich became a major interpreter of tradition, his essays translated from the English for the faithful. In 1976 the final editor, Arne Thorne—syndicalist by inclination and typesetter at the Jewish Daily Forward by occupation—closed the paper for lack of finances and readership.

Biolostotski, B. I., ed. Dovid Edelshtot Gedenk Bukh. Los Angeles: Edelstadt Memorial Committee, 1952.

Cohen, Josef. Di Anarchistishe Bevegung in Amerika. Philadelphia: Radical Library Branch No. 243, 1945.

Yanofsky, Sh. Ershte Yorn fun Yiddishe Freiheitlekhe Sotsialism. New York: Freie Arbeter Shtimme, 1948.

Film: The Free Voice of Labor (1980) Directed by Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher. With Irving Abrams, Paul Avrich, Abe Bluestein, Fanny Breslow