The Yale series of inter­pre­tive biogra­phies of Jew­ish lives includes some fig­ures known for their Jew­ish iden­ti­ty — Rashi, Solomon— but oth­ers not pri­mar­i­ly iden­ti­fied as Jew­ish — Bob Dylan, Bernard Beren­son, and now, Emma Gold­man. These are not designed as tra­di­tion­al, in-depth biogra­phies, but as med­i­ta­tions on the impor­tance of the sub­ject in the eyes of an author with a sig­nif­i­cant point of view. Many read­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly left­ist-fem­i­nists who were active in the Six­ties, will be eager, now that some of the dust of that era has set­tled, to know Gornick’s ​‘take’ on Gold­man. In Gornick’s eyes, Gold­man was the quin­tes­sen­tial Amer­i­can anar­chist; unfet­tered per­son­al free­dom was her life­long ide­al. Two big chal­lenges for Gold­man came from her sense that Marx­ism seemed to ele­vate ​‘ends’ above ​‘means,’ when the two, for Gold­man, were com­plete­ly inter­re­lat­ed, much like the con­flict between Goldman’s the­o­ries of sex­u­al rad­i­cal­ism and the real­i­ties of her own heart. By sketch­ing out the often-neglect­ed tra­jec­to­ry of Gold­man after her depor­ta­tion to the Sovi­et Union — her dis­il­lu­sioned wan­der­ings through Europe with life­long friend Sasha Berk­man, her sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Span­ish anar­chists, and then her final phase with Cana­di­an anar­chists — Gor­nick offers a sur­pris­ing­ly nuanced account of Goldman’s polit­i­cal dilem­mas. While some read­ers may find the details of Goldman’s sex life — her pen­chant for younger men, her fla­grant eroti­cism, her rag­ing jeal­ousies — mem­o­rable, what’s tru­ly haunt­ing is the way Gor­nick shows us a woman ahead of her times — maybe even ahead of our times. Bib­li­og­ra­phy, index.