The Ideals of the Jewish Labor Bund Have Outlived Nazi Genocide
In tsarist Russia and interwar Poland, the Jewish Bund developed a socialist alternative to Zionism while fighting against antisemitic oppression. The neglected international history of their movement is a vital resource for our own time.
Members of the Jewish labor bund participate in a May Day march in Poland, 1930. (ullstein bild / Getty Images)
I was in my late teens, reading about the Russian revolutionary movement, when I first stumbled across the Bund, a left-wing Jewish movement that emerged in Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth century. “Bund” means “union” in Yiddish.
My first encounters were not promising: these were footnotes about the Bund arguing with Lenin at the 1903 London Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) for the right to agitate autonomously in Yiddish among Jewish workers. This preceded the momentous Congress wrangle that split the Russian revolutionary party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
In these footnotes, leading figures denounced the Bund as “separatists,” “nationalists,” and worse. Elsewhere, standard Jewish histories dismissed them as irrelevant “dreamers” who opposed Zionism in the 1930s, when millions of Europe’s Jews were about to be mass murdered in the Holocaust.
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