Fraye Arbeter Shtime

The paper's initial years of publication were dogged with financial issues. Foremost, the core audience—impoverished workers—had little money. The paper suspended printing during a typesetter wage dispute beginning in May 1892. Later that year, Alexander Berkman's prominent assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick divided the movement, as some anarchists left the movement to denounce all forms of terrorism. As the wage dispute came to a close nearly a year later, the United States entered an economic depression, the Panic of 1893. By April 1894, the Fraye Arbeter Shtime group again stopped production, ending an era of Jewish anarchism as the Pioneers of Liberty and other groups waned or went defunct.[10] In these dormant years, Fraye Arbeter Shtime editors assisted in the launch of the monthly Di Fraye Gezelshaft.[11]

Five years later, Fraye Arbeter Shtime revived publication in October 1899 and Jewish interest in anarchism rekindled with it.[12] Its new editor, Saul Yanovsky, would serve through 1919, a heyday for both the newspaper and the Jewish anarchist movement.[11] It was also a period of stability for the paper, with readership above 20,000 prior to World War I. Yanovsky's own column was popular for its wit, and he selected numerous talented writers with fresh views. Alongside Kropotkin, Most, and Solotaroff, the editor added Rudolf Rocker, Max Nettlau, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Abraham Frumkin. The paper ran translations of cultural works (e.g., Henrik Ibsen, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde) and pieces by major Yiddish writers (e.g., Avrom Reyzen, H. Leivick). This selection made the paper both readable and alluring among Yiddish readers.[13] The movement had also drifted from the zealous 1880s and 1890s in which social revolution felt imminent and propaganda of the deed justified. Yanovsky turned against terrorism and regarded anarchism as a philosophy of brotherhood, cooperation, and dignity, and the paper took a piecemeal approach to reform, in favor of libertarian schools and cooperative unions. While the 1901 assassination of William McKinley by an anarchist roiled Yanovsky, Fraye Arbeter Shtime bore part of the fallout, as an angry mob trashed the paper's offices and physically attacked its editor. Additionally, anarchist Jews also tempered their antireligious confrontation to be less pronounced, and some took up Zionism after the Kishinev pogrom.[14]