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.
Tsarist law banned Jews from the Russian heartland, confining them to towns in the empire’s westernmost provinces called the Pale of Settlement, and put strict limits on their rights to education, land ownership and residence. Seeking to deflect popular frustration, courts staged blood libel trials, and the secret police forged the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which blamed Jews for the revolution. When pogroms broke out, cops and soldiers often joined in.
From its inception, the Bund rejected the idea that Jews should leave their homes to create an ethnostate in Palestine. “We are not strangers here and not guests, even though the Russian government considers us as such,” one local Bund committee wrote in 1903. “The richness of the land is soaked through with our blood […] we demand and fight for that which belongs to us, for human, civil and political rights.” To the Bund, Zionism was submission to the same bigots who wanted to kick Jews out of their homes. The Bund believed that Eastern European Jews had the right to stay in Eastern Europe. To leave meant letting their tormentors win. The Bund coined a word for this stubborn insistence on staying: Doikayt (Hereness), as opposed to the “There” of Palestine. Bundists would fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead. One can see in this Yiddish term a precursor echo to the Palestinian concept of Sumoud, the steadfast determination to stay on their land despite the predations of the Zionist state.
I discovered the Bund through the paintings of my great-grandfather Samuel Rothbort. As an exploited young leather worker in a podunk town not far from Bialystok, Sam had joined the Bund to fight for better labor conditions. He quickly plunged into a life of strikes, industrial sabotage, and prison breaks that took him out of the conservative, religious community of his birth. When the “revolution wave came,” he later wrote, “I became a world brother.” There was “no Jew, no Goy, and no God.” Eventually, political persecution would send him fleeing across the ocean. He arrived in New York in 1904, where he became an artist, like my mother, like me.
Sam’s trajectory was typical. With 30,000 members, the Bund was the most popular political party in the Tsarist Empire in 1904, dwarfing both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. These armed idealists organized unions, battled pogroms, then fought on the barricades of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Banned by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, they regrouped in the newly independent Poland.
In interwar Poland, the Bund created a vibrant counterculture that encompassed every stage and aspect of life.
For children of Jewish socialist parents, there was SKIF (Sotsyalistishe Kinder Farband), with its anthem “We are young, and the world is open.” Teenagers joined the youth movement Tsukunft, and the Bundist women’s movement fought for birth control and free childcare. Through their network of schools, choirs, summer camps, and newspapers, the Bund introduced Poland’s impoverished Jewish working class to high art and internationalist socialism. They elevated Yiddish, the much-derided language of the Jewish Street, into a vehicle of transnational literary culture – a portable homeland that could be carried on the tongue. Believing that the oppressed should write their own history, working-class intellectuals excluded from the academy created YIVO, an institute for the study of Eastern European Jews, in much the same spirit as young Black and Puerto Rican radicals like my father created ethnic studies departments in 1970s New York. They unionized sweatshops and fought evictions. Every May Day, tens of thousands of Jewish socialists marched through Warsaw beneath the Bund’s banner. “Mama Bund,” activists called the party. Their slogan was “Here where we live is our country,” and by their actions, they sought to prove it.
Such hereness was hard won in interwar Poland. Large swathes of Polish society were virulently racist, considering Jews as a tumor that needed to be excised from the body politic. The National Democrats, one of the country’s most popular political parties, demanded that all Jews be deported to either colonized Madagascar or Palestine. Things grew worse when Poland’s founding father, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, died in 1935. The men who replaced him were military blowhards lacking even a smidgen of daddy’s charisma. Seeking to use antisemitism as a rallying principle, they tolerated pogroms, funded terroristic youth paramilitaries, organized national boycotts of Jewish businesses, and introduced racial segregation at Polish universities. Under the leadership of a scar-faced bruiser named Bernard Goldstein, the Bund organized armed defense of their communities, sometimes with the support of comrades in the Polish Socialist Party. This collaboration was sometimes fraught – Polish workers were as susceptible to racism as anyone else, and the Bund could be maddeningly sectarian – but as the 1930s wore on, the two groups fought side by side. The Zionist movement took a different tack.
At the same time as the Polish government funded wannabe Brownshirts to terrorize Jewish neighborhoods, it lavished funds on Zionist militias wreaking havoc in Palestine.
The Haganah, the Irgun, and the deranged Stern Gang all received machine guns and military training from the poisonously antisemitic Polish government, which they then used to murder hundreds of Palestinians during the Great Arab Revolt (1936-1939). Trainees had to sign pledges to leave Poland immediately after training, so as not to use their skills to defend their own communities. While the Polish government brayed for the mass deportation of Jewish citizens, Zionist leaders like David Ben Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky pranced about on Polish stages to agree. Zionists and European racists could agree on one thing: “Jews to Palestine.”
All of this filled Bundists with disgust. While the Bund had banned Zionists from membership in 1901, their opposition to their ideology reached its height in interwar Poland. The Bund loathed Zionism’s nationalism, its racism, its contempt for the Jewish diaspora, and its slavish dependence on British imperialism. When riots broke out in Palestine in 1929, killing dozens of Jewish residents, Jewish communities around the world plunged into mourning that quickly morphed into calls for bloody revenge. Only the Bund refused to participate, blaming the riots on Zionism, which collaborated with the British occupation to deny Palestinians their political rights. Instead, they held a three-thousand-person mass rally at Warsaw’s Splendid Theatre under the banner “Liquidate Zionism.” Their resolution read:
“The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable upset of the Jewish community […]. This meeting calls on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish Street. The answer to tragically but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in more national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clashes, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement.”
Due to their intractable opposition to nationalism, the Bund were more ambivalent towards the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, but they still placed the ultimate blame for the revolt on the Zionist movement, which as their newspaper Naye Folktsaytung wrote in 1937, “has taken it upon itself to settle people in a home that is for the most part occupied by others, in order to take control of all of it with the assistance of the house superintendent.”
In 1938, Polish Zionists attempted to make a coordinating committee of Jewish groups to fight against the worsening situation in the country. The Bund refused to join. To explain the decision, their leader Henryk Erlich described how Zionism collaborated with the racist Polish government that sought to expel Jews from the country.
“Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism,” Erlich wrote. “Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history, and on this law has based its perspectives on Jewish life. In the forty years of its existence, it has always appeared lost and helpless in the presence of any victorious freedom movement […]. The Zionists regard themselves as second class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second class citizens.”
The establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbors and the people it had dispossessed, Erlich wrote. “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine; its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle fit every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine […]. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?” Erlich asked. “Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”
By 1939, the Bund’s communal self-defense had made them the most popular Jewish political party in Poland. The Nazis invaded on September 1. The Bund continued their resistance, both physical and spiritual, under the occupation, educating kids in underground schools, circulating illegal newspapers, singing their rebel songs. I see the same spirit in the videos that Palestinian artists, poets, journalists, and teachers post from bombed, besieged Gaza.
In 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, young Bundists, Zionists, and Communists finally united to launch the legendary uprising. It was the first urban revolt in occupied Europe, but courage did nothing to change the realities of power. Nazis murdered 90 percent of Poland’s Jews, and the Soviet Union murdered the Bund’s leaders, who had fled there seeking safety. After the war, pogroms continued in decimated Poland, where nationalists murdered at least a thousand Jews. The majority of survivors fled into squalid displaced persons camps in the part of West Germany occupied by the United States. They rotted there for years, applying for visas to Western democracies who refused to accept them. The Zionist movement quickly seized control of the displaced persons camps’ administration, using their power to convince and sometimes coerce thousands of Jewish survivors to board smuggling ships to Palestine.
Despite everything, the Bund maintained its opposition to a Jewish state. “Deeply grieved and shaken by the murder of six million of their brethren, the masses of the Jewish people became enveloped by strong nationalist tendencies, which […] fanned by skillful Zionist propaganda, caused among the Jews a psychosis of Zionist and Messianic illusions,” the Bund’s coordinating committee wrote in 1948.
That year, after Zionist paramilitaries ethnically cleansed seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians from their homes while Bundists demanded the right of return for these refugees.
“It appears that 2,000 years of suffering and of untold hardships caused by the misery of numerous deportations were entirely forgotten as soon as circumstances caused a fraction of the Jewish population to be placed in a position of self-government,” wrote the Bund’s Bulletin. “True to its Zionist self, the Jewish Government of the State of Israel appears ready to forfeit the moral rights of the Jewish DPs in Europe and elsewhere by refusing to permit the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Palestine.”
Israel of course had no such intention. For Israel to exist, Palestine could not. The Israeli army tortured Palestinians who tried to return or shot them as “infiltrators.” Their property became booty for the new Israeli state.
The Bund, meanwhile, seemed to dwindle into irrelevance. Its scattered groups were largely support communities for Holocaust survivors, and its international coordinating committee finally shuttered in 2003, though a branch still remains in Melbourne. This all changed after Israel began the genocide in Gaza. On social media, Palestinians exposed the violence that has continued since the Nakba, with every house that settlers steal, every gang rape in an Israeli prison camp, every crater carved by Israeli bombs. The Bund’s anti-Zionism, which had so marginalized them during the long decades of Israeli communal dominance, struck a chord on social media, leading a new generation to embrace them. In Berlin, in New York, and even in their home country, Poland, young people have raised the Bund’s banner in support of Hereness, of democratic socialism, and of Palestinian rights.
Zionism takes its inspiration from the vicious nationalisms of Eastern Europe. Like all of these nationalisms, it is at war with memory. This has been laid bare in Gaza. The Israeli occupying forces’ murder of the poet Refaat Alareer, the 170 slain journalists, the mosques, churches, bazaars, museums and archives bombed to ash, etc., all of these are an attempt to erase and destroy all possibility of the future comprehending the past. But I saw the same hatred in Lyd, where I had the honor of joining a tour led by Zochrot, a joint Palestinian and Jewish group that commemorates the Nakba. As the erudite speaker described a massacre that the Zionist Palmach militia carried out against Palestinians sheltering in a mosque, a scowling, pink man hovered by the margins. Eventually, he stormed up to the speaker to try to disrupt the talk. The man was bald, with mirror shades and the roll of neck fat I associate with New York City cops, and he spoke with a fury that I recognize well from Eastern Europe, from the wounded amour-propre of nationalists who take their dogs to piss on the mass graves of Jews in Ponar forest outside Vilna, and refuse to admit their grandfathers had anything to do with how the bodies got there. Erase the past, the fascists scream. Memory must die.
When I post about the Bund on social media, Zionists often remind me that many of their members were gassed in Auschwitz. They sometimes wish me the same fate. This makes me think of fascism’s first form of forgetting. Before fascism erases the other, it must purify the self. It must cut off the dissident, cosmopolitan, and solidaristic parts of its own people’s history, to foreclose other futures that might be. This accounts for the Bund’s erasure, and the anger its mere mention provokes.
The rebel dead are not so easy to silence. Not in the forests of Eastern Europe, and not in mutilated Gaza. Their words bleed into the present, where they can be used by the living to create another world. ■