The heretic throws out the dirty water,

the renegade throws out the baby.

Both of them have fuses that are shorter

than skeptics who don’t throw out “maybe,”

like the members of the Bund who fought a

fierce battle against Zionism till extincted,

sans Judaism – disparaged just like dirty water

which they’d not drink, but kitchen sinked it. 

In “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” NYT, 4/6/26, Max Strasser, reviewing  Here Where We Live Is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple,  writes:

Has the entanglement of Jewishness and Zionism ever felt more fraught? As Israel, fresh off the wholesale destruction of Gaza, drops more bombs across the Middle East, a Michigan synagogue is attacked by a Lebanese American man whose brother was killed in an Israeli strike half a world away. Noxious conspiracy theories about Jewish power and Zionism bubble up from far-right YouTube shows and even, according to some readings, in the resignation letter of a national security official.

This conflation of Jews and Israel is dangerous antisemitism. And yet it’s harder to fight back as the mainstream Jewish establishment insists that Zionism is nearly as integral to Jewish identity as circumcision. Increasingly, though, many Jews are searching for another point of view: Feelings about Israel are wobbling within the community — and disapproval is rising among the young; pro-Palestinian Jewish groups are growing, and more and more Jews view “Zionist” as a toxic label.

In this muddled moment Molly Crabapple’s terrific “Here Where We Live Is Our Country” unearths the story of a Jewish political movement that opposed ethnic nationalism of all stripes and that fought antisemites head-on — sometimes literally beating them on the head. It’s an authoritative history of the Jewish Labor Bund, better known simply as the Bund, the early-20th-century socialist movement that broke with the Bolsheviks, fought the Zionists and tried to resist the fascists.

 Today, the Bund is largely forgotten. A century ago, though, a reader of this newspaper likely would have heard of it. It was, as Crabapple proves, the kind of movement leftists today dream about — political party, social movement, mutual aid group — with tens of thousands of members. The Bund published newspapers and ran soup kitchens and summer camps; its athletes competed in a socialist version of the Olympics. Bund activists organized across Eastern Europe and beyond — they helped elect a congressman on the Lower East Side.

From the group’s founding on the outskirts of the Russian Empire in 1897 through its painful disintegration, first in the Nazis’ ghettos and gas chambers and then with Israel’s rise, the Bund stood not just for socialism, but for do’ikayt — Yiddish for “hereness.” It meant, Crabapple writes, that “Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies.” Working-class solidarity and a pride in cultural particularity. She calls it a kind of identity politics avant la lettre.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)