{"id":130993,"date":"2026-06-03T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=130993"},"modified":"2026-05-31T06:34:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T04:34:29","slug":"03-05-122","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=130993","title":{"rendered":"Why Worshipping the Bund Is Bullshit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leadership of the National Conference of Bundist Councillors in Jewish communal organizations and city councils, 1928 piemags \/ Alamy<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Why Worshipping the Bund Is Bullshit<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

by Debbie Lechtman<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

What do anti-Zionist actress Hannah Einbinder, illustrator Molly Crabapple and The Economist magazine have in common? The newly fashionable idea that Jews would be better off if they traded in Zionism for Bundism, a niche brand of pre-1945 European socialism that died with the Holocaust.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

In some ways, the Jewish Labor Bund appears to be tailor-made for this exact political moment\u2014a label that allows self-styled socialists to identify as Jews while also sharing the opposition of their wider cohort to Zionism. Similarly, the attachment of the Bund to Yiddish offers an authentically Jewish-flavored alternative to Hebrew, the tongue of Zionist oppression. It is no wonder, then, that a range of voices from the anti-Zionist Jewish actor Hannah Einbinder, to the illustrator Molly Crabapple, to the august British magazine\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

There is a small problem with Bundism, though: It ceased to exist as a meaningful political movement among Jews by 1945. To understand why is to understand just how historically empty the current gestures at a Bundist revival are, and the fate to which they are likely to lead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the bitter cold of February 1943, a group of 17 young Jewish partisans slipped out of the Ostrowiec \u015awi\u0119tokrzyski Ghetto in south-central Poland, armed with just 12 overpriced revolvers, purchased clandestinely in the black market. At great risk to their lives, they marched their way to a forest bunker in the outskirts of Kun\u00f3w, where they united with other partisans. Shortly after, members of the Armia Krajowa (AK), or the Polish Home Army, the Polish resistance under Nazi occupation, caught wind of their presence, incinerating the young men with the toss of a single grenade.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The partisans of the Ostrowiec \u015awi\u0119tokrzyski Ghetto would eventually regroup, cutting through the barbed wire that imprisoned them in the summer of 1944 and making their way back into the forest. But their first tragic brush with the Home Army wouldn\u2019t be their last. For the next year, the group battled the Germans while dodging, as survivor Wolf Fajnsztadt later\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0in one of the earliest Holocaust written testimonies, persecution \u201cby AK groups and the Germans wherever we moved.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Originally 47 partisans, by the war\u2019s end, only seven had survived. Among the murdered were one of my grandfather\u2019s brothers and two of his cousins.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Whatever the Bund had thought\u2014about working class solidarity, about doykeit\u2014was proven false, on the largest and most consequential scale imaginable.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

My grandfather, himself a Holocaust survivor, never told me this story. I\u2019m not sure that he even knows it. I stumbled upon it randomly it while sifting through Holocaust testimony a few years back. But this account matches everything that he has ever told me about the Shoah.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As a teenager, I signed up for a Jewish youth group trip to Auschwitz, Madjanek, Treblinka, and the other slaughterhouses of Eastern Europe. My grandfather was dismayed. \u201cI spent years trying to get out of that godforsaken place,\u201d he said with a defeated sigh. \u201cAnd now you\u2019re just going back.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This idea\u2014that the Jewish people were abandoned to burn during the Shoah, even by those who should\u2019ve been our natural allies in the face of Nazi aggression\u2014is a, if not\u00a0the<\/em>, running theme of early Jewish Holocaust testimony and historiography. In the great decadeslong argument between the Bundists, who told Jews that the solidarity of the working class would protect them from persecution by their neighbors, and the Zionists, who urged mass emigration from Europe to Palestine, the Zionists were proven right, and the Bundists were proven to be tragically, and comprehensively, wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Founded at the tail end of the Russian Empire, the Bund advocated for socialism, Jewish integration in the Diaspora, working-class solidarity, and internationalism. Though ardently\u00a0anti<\/em>-assimilationist, a position that later threatened their Soviet rulers, the Bund presented itself as a Jewish alternative to Zionism, embodied in their concept of doykeit, or \u201chereness.\u201d \u201cWhere we live is our country!\u201d was their rallying cry.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the 1920s, the newly-formed Soviet Union crushed the Bund, but its Polish counterpart survived. In fact, it\u00a0thrived<\/em>, skyrocketing to popularity in pre-war Poland, enjoying 80% of the Jewish vote in some cities, most notably, Warsaw, though a significant portion of its base was drawn to the group not so much for their anti-Zionism but for their commitment to workers\u2019 rights. Then the Nazi tanks rolled in.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Everybody knows about the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but few are familiar with the intra-Jewish politicking that preluded it. After all, the enduring\u2014and infinitely inspiring\u2014story is that Jewish youth from across all political persuasions cast aside their differences, from Zionist to anti, and united to form the Jewish Combat Organization, to stick it to the Nazis one final time. As Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the Organization\u2019s leaders, said, \u201cNo one doubted how it was likely to turn out \u2026 the important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But as is often the case with these things, the real story is not so simple.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the years preceding the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Bund hesitated, even as Zionist youth groups were itching for a revolt. Underground Bundist newspapers in the ghetto promoted instead the idea of working-class solidarity among the Jews and the general Polish population, themselves suffering from the Nazi occupation but spared the indignities of life inside the ghetto walls. When, week after week, month after month, the solidarity failed to materialize, the Bund downplayed or ignored the abandonment, gaslighting its own constituents. Finally, the older Bundists relented to their younger members\u2019 demands and reluctantly agreed to join the Jewish Combat Organization, along with Labor Zionist youth movements Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, and Poale Zion. You know how the rest of the story goes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the decades preceding World War II, the Bund had been ideologically driven by two principles: doykeit and working-class solidarity. But by 1945, Zionism had become the near-unanimous position among Holocaust survivors, ex-Bundists included, with Jews in Displaced Persons camps advocating fervently for the British to open up the gates to Palestine. Both the U.S. government-sanctioned Harrison Report and a myriad of later surveys found that an overwhelming majority of stateless, destitute survivors\u2014as many as 97%\u2014demanded to go to Palestine and only Palestine, and when asked to list a second choice, thousands wrote, \u201ccrematoria.\u201d Jewish DPs demonstrated against the British often, and they minced no words: \u201cEretz Israel for the People of Israel!\u201d their signs read. \u201cWe demand to open the gates to Palestine!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThey want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes,\u201d Earl G. Harrison noted in his\u00a0report<\/a>. \u201cWith respect to possible places of resettlement for those who may be stateless or who do not wish to return to their homes, Palestine is definitely and pre-eminently the first choice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

So much for working-class solidarity, and so much for doykeit.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The resurrection of the Jewish Labor Bund, doykeit and all, at a time when antisemitic violence in the Diaspora parallels 1930s numbers, may suit the needs of elites who find Jewish national existence inconvenient. Never mind that the Bund\u2019s anti-Zionism and today\u2019s anti-Zionism have little in common. The Bund opposed the establishment of a not-yet-existing sovereign Jewish state, whereas today\u2019s anti-Zionists demand the dissolution or outright destruction of an already-existing Jewish state, with 10 million citizens who are expected to somehow simply vanish\u2014to avoid being murdered en masse by their neighbors.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As with all things social media, the fetishization of the Bund has not remained confined to social media. This April, an imprint of Penguin Random House published\u00a0Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund<\/em>, by anti-Zionist Jewish author and illustrator Molly Crabapple, which details a grade-school level history of the Bund, intertwined with her own family\u2019s story, to a glowing review from\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. That would be all well and good\u2014fascinating, even!\u2014except that in numerous interviews and in her own social media posts, Crabapple presents the Bund as the righteous path not taken. \u201cWe will win,\u201d she wrote, alongside a screenshot of\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We will win? How noble-sounding. It\u2019s as if the tragedies of the 20th century never happened for these people.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The early 20th century relationship between Zionism and Bundism can be characterized as a vigorous debate over the Jewish future, as Jews grappled with the disheartening realities of their newfound emancipation and empires splintered off into independent nation-states. It was the Holocaust that finally settled this debate\u2014and not in the Bund\u2019s favor.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the DP camps, surviving Bundists, who\u2019d long condemned Jewish emigration, particularly to Palestine, asked the British to reverse their anti-Jewish immigration policies to the Holy Land. In the words of longtime anti-Zionist Jewish writer and journalist Isaac Deutscher, \u201cI have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism,\u201d he said in 1954, \u201cwhich was based on a confidence in the European labor movement, or, more broadly, a confidence in European society and civilization \u2026 If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were to be extinguished in Hitler\u2019s gas chambers. For the remnants of European Jewry, the Jewish state has become a historic necessity. It is also a living reality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

A living reality. Indeed, after the Shoah, some of the fledgling remnants of the Bund reestablished themselves in the State of Israel, though, of course, their popularity had long plummeted.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

What is it, then, that today\u2019s neo-Bundists, devoid of any contextual historical understanding, are trying to accomplish? A\u00a0reversal<\/em>\u00a0of this reality? And what, in practice, would that look like? Do seven million Israelis pack their bags and ship off to Poland, Germany, Iraq, Russia, Yemen, and the like? What would happen to them there? Does Israel turn into Palestine, and its Jewish citizens forsake their aboriginal rights, and the thriving society they have built, and cross their fingers and hope for the best, amid a population that openly sees their very presence in what they deem Islamic land as an affront to God? What form of justice would any of these insane gestures achieve?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I suppose that for people who live in a world of ideological abstraction, protected by their own wealth and privilege, the logistics of someone else\u2019s life don\u2019t really matter, as long as the inconvenience is removed. And listen, I get it. When your political understanding of your Jewish identity is rooted on such flimsy historical ground, you\u2019ll hang onto whatever straws you can grasp.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cOne of the many things that [Zionists] have done is they\u2019ve tried to colonize all of Jewish history,\u201d Crabapple stated in an interview with the\u00a0New Internationalist<\/em>, which just about sums it up the illustrator\u2019s own childish and blinkered understanding of history. As the neo-Bundist argument goes, the Jewish community turned to Zionism, not out of lived experience, but out of trauma. In other words, the Holocaust so traumatized worldwide Jewry that it clouded our collective moral judgment, and turned us into oppressors, Nazis, settler-colonizers,\u00a0g\u00e9nocidaires<\/em>, and whatever other libel is in vogue at any given moment. This is, of course, an example of Holocaust inversion, which is itself a form of soft Holocaust denial.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

What the neo-Bundists fail to grasp is that the post-World War II universal Jewish embrace of Zionism did not come from a Holocaust-induced moral lapse\u2014if anyone is to contemplate moral lapses, it\u2019s the Shoah\u2019s perpetrators, rather than its victims\u2014but from bitter conclusions drawn from lived realities. That is not to suggest, in any form, that the Bund bears responsibility for the Holocaust. That lies with the Nazis and their accomplices alone. But whatever the Bund had thought\u2014about political organizing, about working-class solidarity, about doykeit\u2014was proven false, on the largest and most consequential scale imaginable. Working-class solidarity only works when it is reciprocal, and it wasn\u2019t. Hereness only holds real weight when Jews can find a place among neighbors, and they didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As for my great uncles, all six of them became partisans, most belonging to Zionist youth movements, though rumor has it one had been a Bundist. By the war\u2019s end, five of them had been murdered all the same, their remains having long rotted into the earth in the forests of Poland, Zionist and Bundist alike. Only my great-uncle Szulim lived to tell the tale. By the time he reunited with my grandfather, who was only a child at the time, he was an ardent Zionist, braving Red Army checkpoints, the Austrian alps, and a DP camp in Italy for the slim shot that he might make a home in the Promised Land. He never did, but he remained a Zionist to his dying day.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Who are we to challenge his wisdom? Even today, anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are an outlier, tokenized by Jew-haters to the high heavens. I hold no animosity toward the Bund, which did what it could, what it thought best, with the information that it had. Anybody could be forgiven for thinking that the Bund\u2019s ideology would succeed in the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the early 1940s. But to continue to argue in its favor 80 years later, with the enormous privilege of hindsight, which the original Bundists didn\u2019t have, and with the living achievement of a Jewish state in which the majority of the world\u2019s Jews now live, is beyond historically ignorant and practically absurd. It\u2019s indefensible.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Debbie Lechtman<\/strong> is a Jewish author, activist and content creator, best known for running the educational Jewish Instagram account @rootsmetals. Her debut Jewish nonfiction book will be out in 2027.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leadership of the National Conference of Bundist Councillors in Jewish communal organizations and city councils, 1928 piemags \/ Alamy Why Worshipping the Bund Is Bullshit by Debbie Lechtman What do anti-Zionist actress Hannah Einbinder, illustrator Molly Crabapple and The Economist magazine have in common? The newly fashionable idea that Jews would be better off if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130993"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131014,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130993\/revisions\/131014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}