Rudolf Rocker, a German Catholic fleeing political persecution, moved to London to become the acknowledged leader of the Yiddish-speaking Jewish anarchists. There, at a time of mass immigration by impoverished Jews—persecuted by a right-wing press and an “anti-alien” movement—he organized demonstrations of up to 25,000 against the contemporary Russian pogroms. Rocker established the Jewish Bakers Union in a community action where housewives would only buy union label bread, and most famously, in 1912, organized a general strike of Jewish tailors, which abolished the sweatshop system. The London Years is the autobiography of a remarkable man and chronicles this vanished world.

Rudolf Rocker, the main theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, edited numerous Yiddish political and cultural journals.