if you think that the bund advocated for assimilation you have reached molly crabapple levels of bund-induced delusion
jumblr for some reason
I think the reason for this is that people still see the bund as the opposite of zionism but don’t know anything about how the bund actually operated.
A lot of it is a reaction to Neo-Bundists that takes their revisionist lens at face value, some of it is the bund’s clashes with religious Jews, but I think the main confusion is that they did eventually align and merge into the Yevsektsiya, which undeniably facilitated assimilation before it was also dissolved.
One could argue this wasn’t “the Bund”, it was the Yevsektsiya, and that’s true, but in some cases they were the exact same people.
SO!
(not a bundist and tagging @penrosesun, an actual bundist, for this reason)
As I understand it, the Bund's central ideological argument related to Zionism was that it didn't make sense to fuck over the safety of a vast majority of Jews (as they believed Zionism did; at the very least, they thought it wasn't the best approach) for a small minority.
For instance, here:
To be clear, I think this is wrong. Israel provides an assurance of safety. You don't want to use the fire extinguisher often, but it's important to have when you need it.
But more importantly for this, that's not true anymore. almost half of all jews live in Medinat Yisrael. Any position on the wellbeing of overall world Jewry must take into account the wellbeing of Jews in Medinat Yisrael as a somewhat primary factor.
indeed, in 1958, the bund said this (#3 was essentially a call for peace and resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict)
Indeed, as David S Slucki writes in The International Jewish Labor Bund After 1945: Toward a Global History,
and in fact that
This did not, of course, mean that it was Zionist per se, however it does indicate a lessening antipathy towards Israel.
And there are fascinating questions to be asked, about how Bundism, with its concern for global Jewish well being, should operate today, given that almost half of Jews live in Israel, and how that should function. About the role of labor organizing, another key tenet of the Bund, now that many Jews are no longer working-class, and how that reflects things.
In fact, the Melbourne Bund -- the only uninterrupted Bundist organization in the world -- is much more nuanced than Crabapple et al would have you believe.
A minor note in that the first statement is more ambiguous about Israel's right to defend itself. It's certainly the most likely reading of a statement like "We call on Israel to make maximal efforts to avoid civilian casualties whilst acknowledging the absolute imperative of freeing the captives and defending from acts of terror." (emphasis mine), but "affirmed Israel's right to defend itself" is a lot stronger terms than the Bund used.
Again, this is going based off of documents. I'm not Bundist. I think it makes interesting and very valid points and raises fascinating challenges to mainstream Zionist positions, but, at the end of the day, I'm Zionist or territorialist ("if you're given a choice between a stable state in Tasmania and the present situation, I'm sorry, but go to Tasmania, the Kotel is not worth Jewish lives"; the distinction is much more theoretical today, of course).
This is a good summation, and I especially appreciate bringing up the Melbourne Bund – in my opinion, no conversation about either Bundism or so-called neo-Bundism is complete without an acknowledgment of what extant Bundist communities with actual continuity are actually saying about their views and positions.
The only thing I want to add is a bit of additional nuance to the concept that historical Zionism was “fucking over the safety of a vast majority of Jews for a small minority”, and that’s that this is a little bit conflating two distinct concerns, and coming out with a third concern, which was certainly present, but not at all the focus:
Concern #1 is that Israel could not be the ultimate solution to the problem of eg. Polish pogroms. This is entirely true and born out by history. People tend to point to Israel’s role in accepting refugees as evidence that Israel is a solution to global antisemitism, and indeed, specific incidents such as Operation Moses make a compelling case… But note that not everyone made it out of Ethiopia… or Yemen, or Egypt, or the USSR, for that matter… and it’s rank historical revisionism to claim that if Israel had existed before the Holocaust, everyone would have made it out of Germany or Poland or Lithuania. Even if Israel has a guaranteed open door for Jewish refugees, Jewish safety will always be to some degree reliant on the counties where Jews actually live, because in order to even be able to leave, you need either some rights (such as freedom of movement), or enough resources to get out anyway. A maximalist policeman-of-the-world Israel that was willing to militarily occupy any country that made noises towards disenfranchisement until every last Jew had been safely evacuated could maybe guarantee Jewish safety – but if, chas v’shalom, the United States were to turn aggressively fascist and start revoking Jewish passports and sending Jews to camps, would Israel really be able to hold off the US armed forces for long enough to Operation Moses the entire Jewish population of New York? Let’s imagine the most militarily mighty Israel possible – the Israel of the wet dreams of the hawkiest of hawks – is even that Israel really a solution to global antisemitism, or is it merely one of many harm reduction strategies? And for Zionists gearing up to say “well no one is saying that Israel can save everyone”, 1) many Zionists are, and 2) you’re moving the goalposts; if “Bundism can’t save us all” is a coherent argument against Bundism, then “Zionism can’t save us all” is an equally coherent argument against Zionism.
Concern #2 is that, setting physical safety aside for a moment, Zionism was (and I’d argue, still is) fucking over the cultural preservation of the vast majority of Jews for a minority. Ironically, this is specifically an anti-assimilationist point: the Ben-Yehuda vision of a modern Hebrew revival is a powerful one, and its success is a triumph of cultural preservation and restoration… and at the same time, it’s a vision that has no room at all for Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and that’s a problem. The Ethiopian kahen line is being forcibly broken by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as we speak – while it’s true that Israel has preserved Beta Israel lives, that culture will be just as lost in a generation as it would have been had Israel not existed to “save” it. You can’t make a Jewish unity omelet without breaking a few galut community eggs… but who gets to decide what that final omelet looks like? And which eggs are we comfortable breaking to make it happen? Should we really be trying to unify such diverse Jewish communities at all? Why not instead form a common front on political lines, and accept that the continued existence of individual Jewish communities with their own distinct cultural features is a good thing? Maybe self-determination means not just self-determination for “Jews”, but also self determination for Litvaks, and for Galitzianers, and for Italkim, and Gruzim, and Parsim, and Temanim.
These two concerns are often synthesized into the quite distinct Concern #3 which is “Zionist agitation is making things more politically dangerous for those of us with no desire to pick up our entire lives and make aliyah, stop rocking the boat.” And… I mean, to be clear, that’s also a thread of concern, and some Bundists raised it pre-WWII, and some are raising it now. But overall, this is not the primary thing that Bundists were on about. I think it’s worth remembering that the Bundist position was never “let’s sit on our ass in galut and hope the goyim come to accept us” – the Bundist position was “socialism should be achieved through an Austro-Marxist program of national-cultural autonomism”. The idea that we should work to dismantle the modern nation state completely and instead form nations which were “not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons” is hardly a “don’t rock the boat” position! Some Bundists were concerned that early Zionists weren’t getting on very well with other groups in the region, sure – but the ultimate hardcore Zionist vision was one in which a modern State of Israel was Germany’s equal, and the ultimate hardcore Bundist vision was one in which Germany did not meaningfully exist.
Tl;dr: Handwringing about how Zionism has caused or exacerbated antisemitism is silly and disingenuous – antisemitism is caused by antisemites, full stop. And while I certainly can’t claim that Bundists have never partaken in that sort of vacuous argument, that was clearly never the main thrust of their criticism, either historically or now.
Thank you both for the perspectives. Personally, I would like to see strong Jewish strongholds in the diaspora as well as in Israel. Zionist, Bundist, or otherwise, the ideology is secondary to the result and Jewish cooperation in bolstering each other.
An issue that does stick out to me on concern #2 is that Bundism has historically had similar issues. Because it has tended to be staunchly, not necessarily fully “anti-religious”, but certainly strongly secularist, it has struggled to find place for religious Judaism that doesn’t require Judaism to be reshaped to fit into a Marxist worldview that tends to look down on religion as religious Jews (especially Orthodox) practice it. Just as examples off the top of my head, a few key points of conflict might be the perception that by spending their time in poverty studying yeshiva students weren’t showing solidarity to laborers, or the cultural and religious importance of the Jewish homeland to many Jews. So my first question would be, how would Bundism address that today? What shifts in ideology, practical steps, or change in structure have occurred or been implemented to make it more amenable to aspects of Jewish religiosity that don’t necessarily fit into a secularist Marxist way of life?
And I get the argument about not necessarily being “anti-Jewish autonomy in Israel”, just that there would be no nation-states anywhere in the world, and in theory, as an eventual goal for the world, I’m not necessarily against that. It’s just a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, like gun control or nuclear disarmament; it’s objectively more dangerous for everyone to have guns & WMD so disarmament is an objectively good goal. But at the same time, it’s dependent entirely on everyone doing it at once & the assurance that it wouldn’t be taken advantage of: the other prisoner isn’t going to turn on you; you’re not going to be left with a knife in a gunfight; you’re not going to be left without nuclear deterrence when a nuclear-armed Russia invades.
In a world with ~200 officially recognized states, where the diplomatic mechanisms are built to interface with states, and trading in a national military for a series of autonomous militias seems significantly more precarious with how many people want to completely erase Jewish civilization from the Levant, the concern I see from Zionists and a lot of non-Zionists alike is less “Bundism can’t save everyone” and more “Bundism working is dependent on the Bund not being vulnerable to dissolution and leaving Jews dependent on the good will of an exterior state, regardless of ideals/intentions”. And given that the Bund folding into the Yevsektsiya and not just leaving Jews vulnerable but merging into a group that assisted anti-Jewish purges is the historical track record, you can understand why most Jews would be not just hesitant but actively resistant to putting any of our eggs in that basket.
My intent is not to imply that would necessarily be the outcome of any Bund, or that Bundism was responsible for exterior antisemites’ actions (antisemitism is the fault of the antisemites, not Jews), but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to draw the conclusion that the shape of historical Bundist ideology & praxis played a role in its dissolution. So my second would be, how does modern Bundism differ from the historical Bund there; what ideological shifts, change in praxis, or structural differences have developed or been implemented to address that historical vulnerability?
And third/second-and-halfth, how would the Bund actually navigate the current world order into one where a stateless Jewish people aren’t left vulnerable to dissolution in a State-filled world?
