On January 3, 1911, two Latvian anarchists wanted for a police murder were tracked down to a room on Sidney Street in London’s overwhelmingly Jewish East End, where they held off the police and army sharpshooters for six hours. The two gunmen died, but the shootout—unparalleled in London’s history—entered folklore as the siege of Sidney Street. In this illustrated talk, historian Andrew Whitehead—author of the recently published A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street—will explore what the shootout revealed about London’s Jewish East End and the remarkable strength of its Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement at the time. This event is free to attend and presented live on Zoom.