Collections : [University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center]

This collection contains material related to the anarchist Esther Dolgoff's English translation, completed around 1980, 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). In addition to a photocopy of Dolgoff's handwritten translation of the four-part work, the collection contains a small number of letters written by Dolgoff concerning the manuscript.

The bulk of this collection is a photocopy of the handwritten, unpublished manuscript of Esther Dolgoff's translation of Joseph Cohen's 1945 Yiddish book Di yidish anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike: historike iberblik un perzenlekhe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 manuscrpt.

This collection contains the papers of Jon Bekken, who holds a PhD in Communications and has been a faculty member at Albright College. Bekken has served in the past as general secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and as editor of the Industrial Worker. He is on the editorial team of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, a magazine founded in 1986 as the Libertarian Labor Review. The bulk of the papers consists of records from the Libertarian Labor Review. The collection also includes scholarly articles by Bekken and others, documentation of his contested termination from the University of Central Arkansas in the early 1990s, and papers related to the general topic of anarchism and state of the movement.

The bulk of the papers consists of records from the Libertarian Labor Review, a journal in which Bekken contributed to and helped establish. The collection also includes scholarly articles by Bekken and others, documentation of his contested termination from the University of Central Arkansas in the early 1990s, and papers related to the general topic of anarchism and state of the movement. Dates of the collection's materials range from 1972-2016, with a bulk of the material dated between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.