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Mazel List

Tracking the tribe and celebrating the accomplishments and global impact of the Jewish people.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman

People · 1869–1940

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman

Anarchist partners who made free speech and prison into American literature.

Facts

Years
1869–1940
Category
People

Story

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman shared a life of speeches, papers, and exile. She became the more famous voice — a defender of birth control, labor, and the right to dissent. He paid with fourteen years after shooting Henry Clay Frick.

Deported together in 1919, they remained writers of a radical tradition that America never fully absorbed. The pair is remembered for nerve, not for comfort.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
Takuma Kajiwara, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Hero photograph: Takuma Kajiwara, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Sources

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