His family immigrated first to Cochabamba, Bolivia[1] to escape the Holocaust[2] and later to the United States.
[3] His best-known work,[4] Against His-Story, Against Leviathan (1983) rewrites the history of humanity as a struggle of free people resisting being turned into "zeks" (a Soviet term for forced labour that Perlman borrowed from The Gulag Archipelago) by Leviathans (a term used by Thomas Hobbes for the sovereign nation-state).
describes Perlman's critique of what he saw as "the millennia-long history of the assault of the technological megamachine on humanity and the Earth."
Clark also notes the book discusses "anarchistic spiritual movements" such as the Yellow Turban movement in ancient China and the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe.
[7] Perlman died on July 26, 1985, while undergoing heart surgery in Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital.