Jewish socialist intellectuals founded the Bund in the Russian Empire in 1897, and it soon became a mass organization of the Jewish working class — a working class confined by law to the Pale of Settlement. From its inception, the Bund and the socialist politics it represented struggled against capitalists and autocrats alongside non-Jewish socialist comrades. It also competed bitterly with its Jewish rivals: Orthodox traditionalists, Zionists, and Bolsheviks.

Amid repression and revolution, the story of the Jews of the western Russian Empire diverges. Huge numbers emigrated to the Americas, and more than anywhere to New York City, where they built a Yiddish-speaking socialist world whose inheritors are in many ways today’s anti-Zionist socialist Jews.

Most of the many Bundists who remained in Europe were annihilated in the Holocaust, murdered on an industrial scale while the United States and other Western countries shut the door to refugees. Bundists remained steadfastly opposed to Zionism to the end. But many Jewish Holocaust survivors, their lives and life worlds shattered, emigrated to Palestine under the auspices of British colonialism to become settlers, and then perpetrators of the Nakba.