What Organizers Today Can Learn From the Socialist Jewish Labor Bund Movement

When I was maybe eighteen or twenty, there was this one watercolor that I really loved. It was called Itka the Bundist, and it showed this young woman dressed up like a Gibson Girl. She’s in a little corset waist, wearing a long skirt, her hair up, and she is throwing rocks through windows. Her boyfriend is standing next to her with more rocks for her to throw.

I was obsessed with this image, and I began asking the question ​“what is a Bundist?” And I learned that it was this secular, socialist, anti-Zionist, but very Jewish revolutionary party.

As I poked more into the extensive written archives my great grandfather left my mother, I realized he had been a member of it. He wrote about that. Then, after I went to Palestine for the first time in 2015 with the Palestine Festival of Literature, and after I went to Gaza on that same trip to report, I became very interested in the fact that the Bund was also an anti-Zionist movement. So I started doing a lot more research.

I decided to write a piece about it for the New York Review of Books. The more I researched for the piece, the more obsessed I became. Then all these older people, whose parents or grandparents were leaders in the Bund, got in touch with me. I just realized this was too big a subject for one article. So I decided to write this book.

The big thing I found out about my great grandfather is that I was reading this book chapter by Inna Shtakser, Self-Defense as Emotional Experience. I’m reading all the footnotes, and then I see Volkovysk in one of them.

The footnote included testimony from a member of one of the self-defense groups in Volkovysk, and he talked about how the self-defense group had shot two cops during a pogrom at the end of 1903. After that, the authorities were rounding up all of the Jewish revolutionaries in the town.

My great grandfather arrived in America at the beginning of 1904. The timing was almost exact. Then my mother found a note where he said, ​“I was involved in strikes, sabotage, and a shooting.” I found out the specific incident that almost certainly led to my great grandfather coming to America.

SB: Can you explain a bit of the significance of the Jewish Bund and why it stands out from the rest of the socialist movement and even from the Jews who joined the larger communist party?

MC: Jewish workers were persecuted both as workers and as Jews, on top of the general persecution that every single person in the Czarist Empire faced. Jews in the Czarist Empire were subject to specific, racialized persecution. They were confined to certain places. There were quotas on education. They couldn’t own certain types of land.

The combination of these things is what led young Marxists like Arkady Kremer to found an organization that was for Jews and for workers, and for democratic revolutionary socialists who also wanted liberation as Jews.

The Bund was a major part of the founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. One of the things that set Bundists apart from the Bolsheviks is that they were much more democratic. The second reason is that they were very concerned that if they completely subsumed themselves into an all-Russian organization, no one would care about the specific persecution they faced as Jews.

And the thing that sets them apart from people like Leon Trotsky, Julius Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg is that they weren’t assimilationists. They believed Yiddish was a language worth preserving, and Jewish culture was something worth preserving. They believed in a much more multicultural ideal.

SB: Something that is interesting about early Jewish communist writing is that they didn’t hold a ton of value in Jewishness, even expecting it to dissipate. But the Bund saw it differently. Why?

MC: Because it was theirs.

I relate to that a lot as someone who’s half Puerto Rican. Among Puerto Ricans in New York, there’s this desire to hold onto a Puerto Rican identity. You put flags up everywhere. You have your music. You have your special traditions, like making coquito during the holidays, and real pride in those traditions and in that specific culture.

It’s not some supremacist thing. You’re not saying, ​“It’s so important to be Puerto Rican because Puerto Ricans are better than everyone else.” It’s that you love it because it’s yours.

And that connects to this concept of Hereness — of Doikayt — which is obviously referenced in the title of the book. It’s the sense of championing your culture while also rooting yourself in the countries and the lands where you actually live. Their politics were about fighting for dignity and rights where they were, rather than imagining liberation somewhere else, at someone else’s expense.

SB: Why was that concept of Doikayt so important?

MC: Because the lands in which Jews lived were places that wanted to expel them, restrict them, impoverish them, humiliate them, and degrade them.

Even though huge numbers of Jews immigrated to America, and much smaller numbers immigrated to Palestine, the majority of people were going to stay. And they believed that if you’re going to stay, you have the right to freedom and dignity — and not to have a boot on your face.

SB: The Bund formed the same year as Theodore Herzl led the first Zionist Congress. How did the Bundists understand Zionism?

MC: They thought of Zionism as an effort to go to Palestine to create a Jewish-majority state, which is what it is.

In 1902 their opposition to that idea was based on the fact that they thought it was ridiculous. They saw it as basically a tool of Jewish bosses to whitewash their image so they wouldn’t have to pay their Jewish workers living wages.

After the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which gave Zionism the backing of the British Empire, they had different reasons for opposing it. One reason was that they were opposed to collaborating with the British Empire to deny Palestinians their political rights and expel them from their homes.

They saw Zionism as racist and chauvinist. They also saw it as a huge shift of resources away from the Jewish population of Poland — which had millions of people — to this little community in Palestine. They thought that if Zionists did succeed in creating a Jewish-majority state, it would live in a constant state of war — with its neighbors and with whatever Palestinian Arabs remained in the new ethnostate’s borders.

SB: Towards the end of the book you make a distinction. Many Zionists point to the Bund’s decline in the Holocaust and suggest they failed. You counter: they didn’t fail, they lost. How do you conceive of that distinction?

MC: They lost because the Jews of Eastern Europe were not able, on their own, to defeat the Nazi war machine — the most powerful war machine in the world.

If the country of Poland couldn’t keep out the Nazis, how were the Jews of Poland supposed to do it? Why are we asking why three million Jews in Poland couldn’t defeat the Nazis on their own? It’s a ridiculous question. 

Failure is when you’re defeated by your own bullshit. Losing is different. Losing is when, no matter what you did, you were still going to be defeated because the people you were up against were so much stronger than you.

SB: The Bund emerged from the conditions of the time, but where do you see a kind of Bundist spirit today?

MC: First of all, it’s the absolute importance of solidarity across difference — of not trying to force everyone to be the exact same way. Second, their strength was that they were great practical organizers. 

A lot of young people became Bundists not because of an ideological love of socialism, but because they wanted to hang out with hotties and join a soccer league. For a political project to win, it has to be attractive.

They were valiant people who refused to dispense with their morals. We’re facing American fascism right now. We need examples from the past.