At a time when many Jewish people of the Diaspora are organizing against the Israeli state and its settler colonial mass murders against Palestinians committed in a claimed unalienable relationship between Zionism and Jewishness, we ought to remember the Jewish Bund and its history of struggle against European antisemitism, Zionism, and capitalism. We asked Molly Crabapple to revive this memory for us, and the lessons we can take from it for today’s fights.
By the time this issue of The Funambulist is published, Israel will have committed a year of genocide in Gaza. It is a genocide so thorough that it has spurred new words: Scholasticide, or the murder of institutions and agents of knowledge. Urbanicide. The murder of a city. Not content with murdering living Palestinians, the Israeli military has dug up cemeteries, seizing corpses and running their tanks over the graves so that the tracks form a Star of David, an act of blasphemy above all against Palestinians, but also against Jewish history. My history.
“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious,” wrote Walter Benjamin, the great German-Jewish intellectual who committed suicide rather than be deported back to Nazi-occupied France in On the Concept of History (1945). I have thought about this quote often since October 7, 2023. For this reason, I want to look back to Russia-Poland, the blood-soaked crescent of land that was the birthplace of most of Zionism’s major leaders, as well that of their great rivals, the Jewish Labor Bund, the secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist revolutionary party that has been the subject of the last five years of my work.
The Bund was born in 1897, the same year as political Zionism, in Tsarist Russia, of history’s most virulently antisemitic empires, where Jews lived as a racialized, surveilled, and oppressed minority.