The Jewish Labor Bund

The Jewish Labor Bund is one of the most important examples of anti-Zionist Jewish political organizing from before World War II. Founded in Vilnius in Autumn 1897, the Bund was the most popular socialist party among Jews in the Russian Empire prior to the 1917 Revolution, and it led the largest Jewish unions.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian Empire was sprawling, economically backward and diverse, with the vast majority of its multiethnic, multilingual population living outside urban centers. Thanks to historical restrictions on where Jews could live and work, Russia’s Jewish community was one of the empire’s most urbanized. Moreover, Jewish workers were concentrated in crafts that were just beginning to industrialize, such as tanning, textiles, and shoemaking.

Turn of the century Russia also faced a series of increasingly severe political crises as the ossified Romanov monarchy struggled to keep pace with a modernizing economy, a militant labor movement, and emerging national liberation movements. These tensions made Russia a tinderbox for antisemitism as Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II attempted to displace popular frustration onto Jews. Tsarist propaganda drew on Christian anti-Jewish prejudice to portray Jews as either wealthy capitalists responsible for the world’s economic misery or, alternately, as socialists who threatened to tear apart civilization itself.

Combined with poverty and legal discrimination, the experience of often brutal day-to-day antisemitism pushed Russia’s Jewish population toward three broad alternatives. A minority founded organizations promising a better life in an exclusively Jewish homeland. Far more, however, emigrated to developed capitalist countries.

And to those who rejected the first two answers, the Bund offered a radical leftist political project that sought to end antisemitism by transforming society entirely.

Doikayt Contra Zionism

The Bund’s politics can be summed up by the term doikayt (hereness), derived from the Yiddish word do (here). Coined after World War II, doikayt highlighted the need to fight “here” — wherever Jews live — against economic exploitation and racism. And for Bundists, doikayt was opposed to strategies for ending antisemitism and exploitation that promised liberation “there,” namely, in Palestine, as most Zionists proposed.

Zionists, by contrast, claimed that antisemitism would never be defeated, and argued that to live freely and in safety, Jews needed an exclusive homeland. Bundists rejected this as pessimistic and separatist and argued that it was necessary to fight racism and capitalism at the same time, by uniting working-class and oppressed peoples across national, religious, and ethnic lines. Contrary to Zionists, Bundists understood that the fate of Jewish people in Russia and Poland was bound up with that of the entire regional working class and all the ethnic minorities therein.

Reflecting legal, economic, and linguistic realities, the Bund was a Jewish organization. However, thanks to its commitment to solidarity and working-class unity, it played an outsize role in the wider Russian labor movement. Indeed, before the 1905 Revolution, the Bund was by far the largest socialist organization in the Russian Empire, claiming more members than all the small circles then-comprising the socialist movement combined.

This is why, in March 1898 — just a few months after its founding — the Bund hosted the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which went on to split into the better-known Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

Bund members played an outsize role in the RSDLP’s original leadership and were also responsible for significant theoretical breakthroughs. Ob Agitatsii (On Agitation), published in 1893, is a good example. Written by Arkady Kremer, a Bundist, and Julius Martov, who would later come to lead the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP, Ob Agitatsii theorized the interplay between propaganda and agitation. As Kremer and Martov argued, propaganda disseminates broadly socialist perspectives to a smaller audience while agitation attempts to gain a mass audience by focusing on concrete and immediate problems.

Importantly for its time, Ob Agitatsii argued that it was necessary for socialists in the Russian Empire to move away from building small circles of clandestine intellectuals and toward a mass movement of workers — and this meant a shift toward agitation.

National Liberation and Class Solidarity

Debates among Bundists also informed Marxist conceptions of anti-racist solidarity and national liberation.

From the outset, the Bund faced a built-in contradiction between its leadership and its audience. At the time, 97 percent of Jews in the Russian Empire were native Yiddish speakers while only 25 percent knew Russian. Russian was, however, the intellectual and political lingua franca for leftists across Russia, and the Bund’s leadership was primarily drawn from assimilated Russian-speaking Jewish intellectuals.

Instead of insisting on speaking to their audience in a language they did not know, early Bundists established a Yiddish-language revolutionary press. And indeed, this initiative was emblematic of the Bund’s overall approach to cross-cultural organizing.

For example, in the tanning industry, bosses deliberately split Jews and non-Jews into different parts of the production process to undermine solidarity and encourage different cultural groups to scab on one another. In response, the Bund published multilingual manifestos that helped to unite workers of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds while still honoring their cultural differences.

Similarly, as part of the push to simultaneously agitate among Jewish workers and build solidarity between Jews and non-Jews, the Bund developed their own form of non-Zionist Jewish identity, which they called “national cultural autonomy.” Bundists saw this cultural program — which included Yiddish-language arts, sports, education, and recreation — as a proletarian counterweight to both religious traditionalism and emerging secular Zionist cultural movements.

This broad approach raised much debate — both among Jews and between Bundists and their non-Jewish comrades — over the dividing line between Zionist nationalism, which they rejected, and the Bund’s conception of a progressive Jewish national cultural autonomy. Some of these issues came to a head at the famous 1903 congress of the RSDLP.

Drawing inspiration from a perspective known as “Austro-Marxism,” developed by Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer, the Bund envisaged a socialist movement with federal structure, granting autonomy to socialist parties among Russia’s various linguistic and national minorities. As part of this vision, Bundist delegates argued that the Bund should be the sole representative of Russian Jewish workers.

Other sections of the RSDLP argued for a single, united party encompassing multiple nationalities and languages. Many supported Yiddish-language education, agitation, organizing, and cultural activities. But at the same time, they did insist on a party organized across national lines. The Bund lost the vote, after which it quit the RSDLP. Three years later, however, it rejoined.

Most Bund-sympathetic accounts criticize the vote as antisemitic or read it as a harbinger of Joseph Stalin’s repression of Jews. This is misguided. Rather, the debate was over the best way to organize a socialist party in a large multinational empire. The outcome did not entail a rejection of the Bund’s call for Jewish self-determination.

Opponents of the Bund’s proposal argued that it would limit Jews — and other nationalities, Russians included — to single, nationally defined parties. Far from uniting workers, this would, they suggested, encourage separatism and undermine cross-cultural solidarity. Instead of separating Jewish and non-Jewish socialists, the Bund’s 1903 opponents argued that there needed to be a Jewish presence in every part of the RSDLP, as part of an ongoing fight against antisemitism.

This position also reflected reality. Although the Bund represented the vast majority of Jewish socialists, the RSDLP also had Jewish members in most of its regional divisions.  Under the Bund’s proposal, these RSDLP members would be faced with a choice: either leave their organizations within the RSDLP and join the Bund, or effectively renounce their Judaism in order to remain in their chosen political or regional groupings.

The RSDLP members who voted against the Bund’s proposal were far from dismissing Bund members’ concerns, and less still were they motivated by racism. The “no” voters staunchly opposed antisemitism, both legal and popular, and saw it as a tsarist strategy to divide and poison to the wider movement. Ultimately, they believed a united party had a better chance at combating antisemitism than a federated one.

Labor Zionism

In addition to Bundism, The Radical Jewish Tradition looks at another Jewish political current, labor Zionism. Labor Zionism, as the name suggests, was broadly congruent with socialist Zionism or left Zionism, and tried to combine socialist and working-class politics with the project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

The original labor Zionist organization, Hashomer Hatzair, was formed in 1913 in Austria-Hungary. On the eve of World War II, it claimed 26,000 members across 300 branches, while its international sections enjoyed some support. However, with an overwhelmingly middle-class membership and few inroads in the Jewish working class, labor Zionism paled in comparison with the Bund.

On its face, labor Zionism was a left-wing current. Many labor Zionists escaped racism and poverty in Europe, in order to establish kibbutzim — agricultural collectives — in Palestine. Labor Zionists also created the Histadrut, the Jewish union in British Mandate Palestine, which was, at the time, one of the strongest labor federations in the world. Among the labor Zionists who remained in Europe, many joined ghetto movements and partisan units to fight against the Nazis, often taking leading roles.

In the lead up to World War II, however, labor Zionists set their sights exclusively on Palestine, dedicating organizational resources to camping trips and learning how to farm, in preparation for their occupation of Palestinian land. This strategy was often in direct counterposition to active resistance. For example, when Nazis famously rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939, Hashomer Hatzair declined to counterprotest, stating that “Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine.”

Today the labor Zionist tradition holds continuing appeal for progressive Jews who oppose the occupation and the far-right Zionism that dominates contemporary Israeli politics. As Zionists, they believe a nation-state is the only model for Jewish self-determination. As progressives, they hope for a more liberal-democratic or even social democratic Israel.

As Stone and Gluckstein argue, the historical record proves that these aspirations are mutually incompatible. To understand why, we need to understand how Israel has evolved over time. When we think of Israeli settlements today, we think of the fanatical, Jewish fundamentalist settlers in the West Bank. Although the labor Zionists were never a majority, the kibbutzim they founded were the first settlements to be established on Palestinian land. Although far more secular and socially progressive than Jewish settlers today, labor Zionists led the way by expropriating tracts of Palestinian land.

Labor Zionists also laid the foundation for the military occupation of Palestine. They established the Haganah — a paramilitary organization that eventually became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — to protect the kibbutzim. In 1948, the Haganah led the expulsions of Palestinians before going on to dominate Israeli politics for its first three decades. Since then, labor Zionism has played an outsize role in Israel’s military establishment. Of the last ten chiefs of staff of the IDF, eight have a background in labor Zionist parties or the kibbutzim.

Similarly, when labor Zionists founded the Histadrut, their intention was to segregate Jews and Palestinians by excluding Arab labor. Members paid two types of dues; the first funded pickets against businesses that employed Arab workers, and the other funded boycotts of Arab produce.

To their credit, a few labor Zionists opposed these racist policies and argued for unity across national lines. Nevertheless, from the beginning, the movement as a whole was crucial to seizing land and establishing apartheid. There is, unfortunately, more continuity between today’s Zionist far right and their labor Zionist forbears.

The Zionist Consensus Is Breaking

Although Zionism is hegemonic among Israeli Jews, among Jewish people elsewhere, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has led to the greatest break with the Zionist consensus in a generation. A 2024 Pew study found that 53 percent of American Jews under thirty-five have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government.

And as the number of Jewish people opposed to Zionism grows, it’s crucial that the Left revisits histories like those presented by Stone and Gluckstein in The Radical Jewish Tradition, both to undermine the Zionist conflation between Israel and Jews, and to outline a Leftist Jewish tradition.

After all, during the interwar period, although Jewish people in Poland made up only 10 percent of the population, they made up 25 percent of all union members. They were overwhelmingly Bundists, and while Zionist unions claimed 12,000 members across Poland, the Bund claimed 20,000 in Warsaw alone.

Most important was their commitment to solidarity. As Stone and Gluckstein recount, with the solidarity of Polish socialists, just ten days after the Przytyk pogrom,

three and a half million Jews went out on strike. At noon all Jewish stores shut down, Jewish people walked out of school. The streets of Poland were filled with fiery people, proud and battle ready.