The Double Tragedy of the Jewish Bund

The ecstatic review in the New York Times of a new history of Bundism, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country,” by Molly Crabapple, is an occasion to mark the use and abuse to which that chapter of leftist Jewish history is put by those with an ax to grind against Israel. The reviewer, Max Strasser, asks, “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” The answer to that counterfactual is easy enough to find at Auschwitz and Babyn Yar.Mr. Strasser answers that question with another question, asking “Has the entanglement of Jewishness and Zionism ever felt more fraught?” He shudders as “Israel, fresh off the wholesale destruction of Gaza, drops more bombs across the Middle East.” Casting about for an alternative, he finds in Ms. Crabapple’s “authoritative” history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the inspiration of a movement that “fought the Zionists and tried to resist the fascists.”There were three big Jewish experiments at the beginning of the last century — Zionism, America, and socialism. The extraordinary year of 1897 saw the publication of the first issue of the Jewish Daily Forward at New York, the First Zionist Congress at Basel, and the founding at Vilna of the General Association of Jewish Workers, which became the Bund. Rarely in Jewish history has there been a debate with such stakes. Those who went to Palestine and the New World by and large survived and thrived. The socialists who stayed put — their philosophy of “Doykait” means “hereness” — were murdered in their thousands — as Jews were in their millions — by Hitler, Stalin, and a host of other tyrants. Heroes of the Bund included Marek Edelman, who succeeded Mordechai Anielewicz, a Zionist, as commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Bundists imagined the Jewish future not in Jerusalem or New York but instead in the towns and cities of Eastern Europe. Ms. Crabapple contacts the Bund’s Doikayt to the “Zionist ‘there’ of Palestine.” Mr. Strasser calls Bundism “the kind of movement leftists today dream about.” While he allows that “Scarsdale and the Upper West Side in 2026 are not Bialystok and Minsk in 1906,” both he and Ms. Crabapple clearly yearn for a lost leftist era.As Seth Mandel notes in Commentary, the movement’s secularism sat alongside an uncompromising commitment to a kind of Jewish nationalism that could be pursued in the Diaspora. Mr. Strasser calls Bundism “identity politics avant la lettre,” but the best of the Bundists — Edelman, say, or Szmul Zygielbojm, who tried to warn the world about the Jewish extermination — make today’s practitioners of those politics look miniscule in comparison.The Bundists can hardly be faulted for lacking prophecy. A Bundist at Bialystock in 1906 knew the horrors of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 but could not have known that 110,000 Jews from that city’s ghetto would be gassed at Treblinka in three decades. Astonishingly, Mr. Strasser commends Ms. Crabapple for admiring not only the creativity and idealism of the Bund but also “these losers’ foresight.” That’s like commending the Titanic on its navigation.Mr. Strasser attributes the “disintegration” of Bundism to the “Nazis’ ghettos and gas chambers” and “Israel’s rise” in equal measure, as if the latter were just another misfortune rather than one of the most astounding Jewish achievements in 2,000 years. The best thing about Bundism, for him and Ms. Crabapple, is its implacable opposition to Zionism and, mutatis mutandis, “Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.” Ms. Crabapple ends her book by asking “So why did I write this book about the Bund — who lost? Because I am sick of monsters.” She asserts that “for leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult, the Bund is a model.” Ms. Crabapple tells the Guardian that “What the Zionist model has shown us is that it ends in genocide, too. That’s not acceptable.” Meaning, Zionism is Nazism. This wishcasting says less about the Bundists of yore than about the today’s critics of Israel. The Bund ended in blood, but the tale of Zionism is hardly concluded, especially as the Jewish state faces foes whose intentions hardly differ from those of the Nazis. The achievements of Israel are majestic, but hardly so secure as to be taken for granted — or condemned. Perhaps that is why ever more Israelis are finding paths to the God of Israel. Bundism has suffered two tragedies — it was murdered, and then remembered with such mendacity, as a cudgel to assail the only solution to antisemitism that ever truly succeeded. The Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse tells the Sun that the “impulse to return to a world without Israel, whether sentimentally or as a political platform, is like the impulse to return to America before the Emancipation of the slaves. Beware such longing for a better time.”

The Double Tragedy of the Jewish Bund

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