arnt bek | ARNDT BECK | אַרנט בעק
mili | Milly | מילי

COLLECTIVE ARTISTIC RESEARCH
With this collective artistic research project initiated by Arndt Beck, YIDDISH.BERLIN is honoring an extraordinary figure: the feminist and anarchist activist Milly Witkop (1877–1955).
In the spring, Beck began tracing Milly’s footsteps in Yiddish archives and reading what they found with a small reading group. The result is a collective exhibition that investigates, honors, and makes visible Milly’s life through audio, drawings, text, mail art, collage, and more – accompanied by a series of events.
Milly was born into a poor, frum family in the town of Zlatopil, in what is now Ukraine, the eldest of a tailor’s four daughters. At seventeen, she migrated on her own to London, where she soon became part of the circle around the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Arbeter Fraynd and one of the leading activists in the Jewish workers’ movement in early-twentieth-century London.
Milly lived through turbulant and combative times in England – including her own imprisonment and eventual deportation. She then spent the Weimar years in Berlin, where she helped shape the Syndicalist Women’s Union (Syndikalistischer Frauenbund), and fled Germany immediately after the Reichstag fire, making her way to the United States via Switzerland. She lived outside New York for the rest of her life.
On the seventieth anniversary of her passing, we commemorate a life of political struggle for a just and humane world.
More information to come.
24 November – 2 December 2025, daily from 11 am
Opening: 23 November 2025, 4 pm
Galerie Zeitzone
Adalbertstr. 79
10997 Berlin
