Alexander Berkman was a Russian-American anarchist and author. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, famous for both his political activism and his writing.
Voltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist known for being a prolific writer and speaker who opposed capitalism, marriage, and the state, as well as the domination of religion over sexuality and over women's lives, all of which she saw as all interconnected. She is often characterized as a major early feminist because of her views.
Paul Avrich was a historian of the 19th and early 20th century anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. He taught at Queens College, City University of New York, for his entire career, from 1961 to his retirement as distinguished professor of history in 1999. He wrote ten books, mostly about anarchism, including topics such as the 1886 Haymarket Riot, 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti case, 1921 Kronstadt naval base rebellion, and an oral history of the movement.
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, commonly known by his pseudonym Volin, was a Russian anarchist intellectual. He became involved in revolutionary socialist politics during the 1905 Russian Revolution, for which he was forced into exile, where he gravitated towards anarcho-syndicalism.
In the United States, anarchism began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
Anarchism in Russia developed out of the populist and nihilist movements' dissatisfaction with the government reforms of the time.
The Cause of Labor was a libertarian communist magazine published by exiled Russian and Ukrainian anarchists. Initially under the editorship of Peter Arshinov, after it published the Organizational Platform, the subsequent controversy resulted in his exit from the anarchist movement. The magazine was then picked up by Grigorii Maksimov, who moved it to the United States and edited it until his death in 1950.
Dyer Daniel Lum was an American anarchist, labor activist and poet. A leading syndicalist and a prominent left-wing intellectual of the 1880s, Lum is best remembered as the lover and mentor of early anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre.
Louise Berger was a Russian Latvian anarchist, a member of the Anarchist Red Cross, and editor of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Bulletin in New York. Berger became well known outside anarchist circles in 1914 after a premature bomb explosion at her New York City apartment, which killed four persons and destroyed part of the building.
Harry May Kelly (1871–1953) was an American anarchist and lifelong activist in the Modern School movement.
Saul Yanovsky (1864–1939) was an American anarchist and activist. He is best remembered as the editor of the periodicals Freie Arbeiter Stimme (1890–1977), Arbeter Fraynd (1885-1914), Di Abend Tsaytung (1906) and the monthly literary publication Die Fraye Gezelshaft (1910–11). He was a member of the jewish-anarchist group Pioneers of Liberty.
Alexander "Sanya" Moiseyevich Schapiro or Shapiro was a Russian anarcho-syndicalist activist. Born in southern Russia, Schapiro left Russia at an early age and spent most of his early activist years in London.
Rebecca Edelsohn, in contemporary sources often given as Becky Edelson, (1892–1973) was a Latvian-American anarchist and hunger striker who was jailed in 1914 for disorderly conduct during an Industrial Workers of the World speech. According to The New York Times, she was the first woman to attempt a hunger strike in the United States.
Platformism is an anarcho-communist organizational theory that aims to create a tightly-coordinated anarchist federation. Its main features include a common tactical line, a unified political policy and a committment to collective responsibility.
Abba Lvovich Gordin (1887–1964) was an Israeli anarchist and Yiddish writer and poet.
Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman is a 2012 history book about Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. The book was co-authored by the father-daughter pair Paul and Karen Avrich, and posthumously published after Paul's death. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice for 2012.
Freie Arbeiter Stimme was a Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper published from New York City's Lower East Side between 1890 and 1977. It was among the world's longest running anarchist journals, and the primary organ of the Jewish anarchist movement in the United States; at the time that it ceased publication it was the world's oldest Yiddish newspaper. Historian of anarchism Paul Avrich described the paper as playing a vital role in Jewish–American labor history and upholding a high literary standard, having published the most lauded writers and poets in Yiddish radicalism. The paper's editors were major figures in the Jewish–American anarchist movement: David Edelstadt, Saul Yanovsky, Joseph Cohen, Hillel Solotaroff, Roman Lewis, and Moshe Katz.
Roman Lewis (1864–1918) was a prominent Jewish anarchist in New York. Fluent in Russian and Yiddish, he was the first editor of the Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime. For a time, Lewis was the Pioneers of Liberty's best speaker. Lewis attended gymnasium in Russia. In New York, when he wasn't working at making shirts, he spent his leisure time with the anarchist movement and spoke at Jewish union rallies. He later became a Social-Democrat, attended law school in Chicago, where he remained. He was elected an assistant district attorney in Chicago as a Democrat. Lewis committed suicide in Cincinnati in 1918.
