Francis Shor

Jewish Anarchism and Communitarianism from Stelton to Sunrise

The massive influx of Eastern European Jews to the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century also witnessed a significant increase in the number of Jewish anarchists in urban centers across the country. While there had been a Jewish presence within anarchist circles at the end of the nineteenth century, what emerged in the early twentieth century marked a transition towards more extensive communitarian and cooperative networks among Jewish anarchists. Although many Jewish anarchists, especially immigrants from Russia, had been radicalized by waves of anti-Semitic pogroms and alienated from their religious heritage, their desire to establish counter-cultural practices led some of these Jewish anarchists to develop intentional communities. The most prominent intentional communities founded by Jewish anarchists in the early twentieth century were at Stelton, New Jersey and Sunrise, Michigan.
Stelton grew out of the Ferrer Center and Modern School that had been established in New York City in 1910 and 1911. Both places were cultural magnets that attracted the leading anarchists and free thinkers of the day from Emma Goldman to Margaret Sanger, from Hutchins Hapgood to Alexander Berkman, from Robert Henri to Many Ray. As one historian of the Ferrer Center noted: "it provided a foretaste of the libertarian future, of what life could be like once the restraints imposed by authority had been removed". The Ferrer School moved to Stelton, New Jersey in 1915 in order to escape the growing anti-radical hysteria and to develop a more extensive communal experiment. Most of the colony members were anarchists from Philadelphia and New York with immigrant backgrounds, Eastern European Jews predominating. In fact, as recalled by one youngster, Stelton "was essentially a Jewish community with a traditional feeling about education, but with a libertarian slant". While receiving support from a number of Jewish related labor and fraternal organizations, the Stelton Colony did not become the spark for cultural revolution in America as some had hoped. Although Stelton survived the Red Scare of the post WWI period, its vital moment had passed by the beginning of the 1920's.
On of the key organizers at Stelton was Joseph J. Cohen, a Jewish anarchist who had emigrated from Russia in 1903 and had been schooled in anarchist thought during his early residence in Philadelphia by Voltarine de Cleyre, called by her biographer "the apostle of anarchism to the Jewish immigrants of the Philadelphia ghetto". Cohen's disappointment that Stelton had not really developed into his Kropotkin-like ideal of an anarcho-communist commune became a motivating factor for the experiment at the Sunrise Community in Michigan during the Great Depression. Cohen used his position as editor of the Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor), a Yiddish anarchist newspaper that traced its beginnings back to 1890 and had a circulation of over 20.000 around the time of WWI, to recruit members for a communal experiment at a 10,000 acre farm located near Saginaw, Michigan. In its short existence from 1933-36, Sunrise never realized the "heaven on earth" envisioned by Cohen and his supporters. Instead, the colony was rent by divisions sparked by different factions of Jewish anarchists who demanded that Yiddish be the primary language (even though there were numerous Italian anarchists from Chicago and Detroit at Sunrise) and individual choice take precedence over collective and communal arrangements. Moreover, Sunrise became embroiled in federal bureaucratic snares as a result of accepting funds from the New Deal Farm and Resettlement agencies.
In assessing these two intentional communities, this paper will attempt to identify what factors contributed to the growth of communitarianism among Jewish anarchists and how that communitarianism changed over time. In addition, the capacity of Jewish anarchists to realize their counter-cultural and counter-hegemonic ideals will be measured against the transformations within the American Jewish community and within the larger socio-economic and socio-cultural contexts. Thus, Stelton and Sunrise will be investigated for defining the socio-historical boundaries of Jewish anarchism and communitarianism in early twentieth century America.