“Anarchism by Our Grandmothers”: Feminist Genealogies of Yiddish Anarchism

In the first of four talks in the Zhargon Speaker Series, Dr. Anna Elena Torres discusses the fascinating feminist genealogies of Yiddish anarchism. Torres will be discussing a chapter of her new book Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism in Yiddish Literature, which examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers.

The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women’s bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature.

Dr. Anna Elena Torres is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Torres is the author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press, 2023).

Currently, Torres is writing a book titled The Dancing Bear: Animality in Yiddish Arts and Literature, which explores representations of the bear as a liminal figure – wild, half-tamed, or dancing – in folklore, painting, and modernist literature. Torres’ other publications include work in Prooftexts, Jewish Quarterly Review, Nashim, make/shift: a journal of feminisms in motion, In geveb, and ArtsEverywhere.  Torres’ creative practice has included work as a community muralist, contributor in the Venice Biennale’s Yiddishland Pavilion (2022), and commissioned artist by the POLIN Museum, Warsaw.

Image: Book cover for Peretz Markish's Shveln (Kiev: Idisher folk verlag, 1919) by Joseph Chaikov; pictured in Torres, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish (2024).