Fraye Arbeter Shtime

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freie Arbeiter Stimme, vol 1 no 4, Friday, July 25, 1890

The Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Freie Arbeiter Stimme, The Free Voice of Labor) was the longest-running anarchist periodical in the Yiddish language, founded initially as an American counterpart to Rudolf Rocker's London-based Arbeter Fraynd (Workers' Friend). ^[1]

Publication began in 1890 and continued under the editorial of Saul Yanovsky until 1923. For a period the paper was under the editorial of Mark Mratchny, an exiled Ukrainian anarchist and former editor of Nabat (The Alarm), the organ of the anarchist Nabat Federation during the Makhnovist-Bolshevik peace agreement. The paper ran for 87 years until it finally was forced to stop publication in 1977 under the editorial of Ahrne Thorne due to the declining and aging population of both yiddish speakers and anarchists in the United States.

Contributors have included David Edelstadt, Abba Gordin, Rudolf Rocker, Moishe Shtarkman, and Saul Yanovsky. The paper was also known for publishing poetry by di Yunge, Yiddish poets of the 1910s and 1920s.

The newspaper's story has been memorialized in a documentary by Steve Fischler and Joel Sucher of the Pacific Street Film Project: Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists (1980). The movie contained a short interview with a very young Joe Conason. Paul Avrich was a consultant on the film.

[edit] Notes

^ The original Yiddish spelling, Fraye Arbayter Shtime, reflects the early 20th century fashion to germanize certain Yiddish words. The native Yiddish speakers pronunced this word as arbeter or, in some dialects, arbeyter