The bulk of this collection is a photocopy of the handwritten, unpublished manuscript of Esther Dolgoff's translation of Joseph Cohen's 1945 Yiddish book Di yidish anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike: historike iberblik un perzenlekhe iberlebungen (The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America: Historical Overview and Personal Experiences). A notable addition is two original, handwritten chapters of the translation and a typed foreword and table of contents. Handwritten annotations, likely written by Philadelphia anarchist Robert Helms and another unknown comrade, appear throughout the photocopied manuscript. These materials together comprise the second and largest series, "Manuscript."
The first series consists of a small amount of correspondence, mainly letters from Esther Dolgoff to Frank Gerould written in 1980, and emails from Gerould and Helms to Labadie curator Julie Herrada in the 2010s providing some context for the manuscript.
Joseph Cohen was a Russian-born American anarchist. Based primarily in Philadelphia, he was for a time the editor of the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Di Freie Arbeiter Stimme (The Free Voice of Labor). During the Great Depression, he helped found a collective farm in Alicia, Michigan, called The Sunrise Colony. He wrote a Yiddish volume that combined a historical overview of Jewish anarchist activity in the U.S. (beginning in the late 19th century) with autobiographical reflections on his own experience in the movement. This book was published as Di yidish anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike: historike iberblik un perzenlekhe iberlebungen (The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America: Historical Overview and Personal Experiences) by the Radical Library of Philadelphia.
Esther Dolgoff, born in 1905 in Russia, was an American anarchist. Committed to connecting a younger generation of anarchists to their ideological predecessors, Esther completed a translation of Cohen's manuscript around 1980. Although she and several comrades were working to prepare the manuscript for publication, it was never published and the original copies are believed to be in private hands.
