Milly Witkop

Milly Witkop(-Rocker) (March 3, 1877 – November 23, 1955) was a Ukrainian-born Jewish anarcho-syndicalist, feminist writer and activist.

Witkop was born Vitkopski in the Ukrainian shtetl of Zlatopol to a Jewish Ukrainian-Russian family as the oldest of four sisters.

In the decades following the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II, many Jews left Russia, as a result of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the Empire.

[1] In London, she worked in a tailoring sweatshop and saved enough money to finance her parents' and sisters' passage to England.

The matter received some newspaper coverage in the United States at the time, attacking the couple's love without marriage.

Rocker and Witkop were opposed to World War I after it broke out in 1914, unlike many other anarchists such as Kropotkin, who supported the Allied cause.

To ease the poverty and deprivation caused by the joblessness that accompanied the war, Witkop and her husband opened a soup kitchen.

[1] At first, the couple welcomed the February and October Revolutions in Russia, but after the Bolshevik coup they started criticizing the statism and totalitarianism of what would become the Soviet Union.

After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Witkop and Rocker fled Germany for the United States via Switzerland, France, and the UK.

During the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, they started an awareness campaign to educate Americans about the events in Spain.

After World War II broke out, Witkop, like her husband and other anarchists such as Max Nettlau and Diego Abad de Santillán, supported the Allies because she felt Nazism could not be defeated with pacifist means.

[1] After World War II, Witkop had some sympathy for the Zionist movement, but was skeptical as to whether a nation state could solve the "Jewish question".

December 1906 edition of Germinal