Two rituals of protest have largely defined the national Occupy Wall Street movements: on the one hand, tetchy and often violent confrontations with the police; on the other, a democratic commitment to true consensus. These also happen to be the hallmarks of anarchism, a political philosophy with roots dating to the 18th century, which is currently experiencing its widest florescence in the United States in nearly 100 years.

Jews were deeply involved in the movements previous heyday. In the 1880s and 90s, immigrants from Russia or Eastern Europe carried their anarchist beliefs with them to New York City. Among Jewish radicals, Vivian Gornick writes in a recent biography of Emma Goldman, none were more dynamic than the anarchists, who in their unaccommodating view of capitalist reality often struck the note most emotionally satisfying. In 1890, the anarchist periodical Freie Arbeiter Stimme — the Free Voice of Labor — began publishing in Yiddish. And by the turn of the 20th century, New York Citys Lower East Side was an international center of the movement, boasting such world-renowned Jewish anarchist leaders as Goldman, Alexander Berkman and a host of others. They were revolted by the entire ethic of capitalism that they found here in the United States, historian Paul Avrich has said. So what they did was to replace this world with a counter world — American culture with a counter culture — and they began to establish their whole anarchist culture.

Open gallery view Occupy Wall Street activists marching to Zuccotti Park, Dec. 1, 2011. Credit: AP

Historically, anarchism has been most appealing to those who, like Jewish radicals in Russia, found themselves without any representation. Unskilled laborers shunned by the organized trade union movement, the homeless and unemployed — these were the constituency for the ideas of its orators. If todays participants in the Occupation movement feel themselves to be politically unrepresented, if they find that their concerns and ideas do not get voiced within the two-party system, then it is little surprise that they are participating in that same tradition.

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