The Relevance of the Bund Today

JVL Introduction

David Rosenberg led a JVL members’ seminar on how we should understand the history of the Bund and how we should interpret its relevance to today’s struggles. Richard Kuper responded with a underlining how different our situation is to that  facing Jewish workers in pre-WWII central Europe.

The seminar was introduced by Nira Yuval-Davis and Glyn Secker lso talked about how the Israeli Jewish Trade Unions have abandoned any link with the Bundist tradition and have instead become part of the machinery oppressing Palestinian workers.

More information, links and videos of the presentations below.

Nira Yuval-Davis: introduction – placing Bundism in its context

Nira Yuval-Davis introduced the seminar and the speakers by recounting how her first encounters with the Bundist tradition transformed her understanding of the different ways of being a Jew.

She emphasised how her studies of the Bund showed that it must be understood in its context and suggested that currently it may have greater relevance for Jews in Israel/Palestine than for Jews of the Diaspora. Nira outlined that Jewish identity has varied not just over time but also regionally, nationally and globally. Nira drew out how the Bund was finding solutions for the Jews of Eastern Europe in the here and now of their lives and in socialist directions for their struggles.

David Rosenberg: The Vibrant Legacy of the Jewish Workers’ Bund

The Bund was a secular Jewish socialist movement created in Vilna (Vilnius) in 1897. Its name means “union” in Yiddish. It grew out of working class struggles against  exploitation and oppression in Imperial Russia’s “Pale of Settlement”, where Jews were forced to live. The Bund fought in the wider uprisings against the Tsarist regime in 1905 and 1917.

It was born in the same year as the Zionist movement, which argued that Jews could only be free in their own nation state. The Bund rejected Zionism. It fought instead for a secure Jewish future by struggling for social justice, and for equality for all minorities, where they lived. it warned that a Jewish state would bring permanent bloody conflict in Palestine and would not solve antisemitism.

The Bund’s most creative phase was in inter-war Poland. In many Polish cities, including Warsaw, Jews comprised a third of the population. The Bund, supported by Polish socialists, led the struggle against antisemitism and the far right it. It created an incredible array of progressive institutions that helped it become the dominant Jewish political force in Poland by the end of the decade.

Under Nazi occupation it worked with communists and left wing-Zionists in the ghetto resistance. The Nazis murdered 90% of Poland’s Jews. The Bund and its historical achievements were decimated. But its ideas of progressive multiculturalism where Jews work with other minorities against oppression and for full equality and cultural freedom,  and its critique of Zionism live on. To be a Bundist in 2023 means to be proud of that radical history and fight for a radical future.

David’s slides

Richard Kuper: Diasporism – the Bund and beyond

To restore the Bund to its rightful place in the Jewish radical tradition is important. But, at the same time, I’m wary of saying that Jewish Voice for Labour is, in any serious sense, Bundist. I try to explain why by looking at two things:

1) the context in which the Bund emerged – the very specific reality of “Yiddishland” – that dense, wretched, over-exploited populace several million strong, concentrated in central and eastern Europe in the late C19th onwards, and very homogeneous in terms of its conditions of existence, its traditions and cultural references and its Yiddish language. I argue that the conditions that gave rise to its radicalism no longer exist. Not just because they was destroyed by the Nazis but because the kind of Jewish world in which this radicalism thrived has also been transformed beyond recognition.

2) I look at the larger Jewish, diasporic, radical tradition which expressed itself in many forms, times and places: with Jews heavily involved in the struggles in Russia and central Europe, but also in involvement in the Spanish civil war, the resistance to Nazism, against apartheid in South Africa, in the US civil rights and radical movements of the sixties more generally, against the Argentinian Junta – and elsewhere. I argue that much of its inspiration lay in the wider responses of those in, and dispersed from,Yiddishland, encompassing socialists (and liberal-democrats) of a wide variety of persuasions seeking modernity and social transformation.

The text of Richard’s presentation

Glyn Secker presented on how the Israeli Jewish Trade Unions have abandoned any link with the Bundist tradition and have instead become part of the machinery oppressing Palestinian workers.