By Ingrid
I recently encountered a description of Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which chronicles the history of the Jewish Labor Bund.
The Bund has always fascinated me. Before the Holocaust, it stood as one of the most influential Jewish political movements in Eastern Europe. Secular, socialist, Yiddish-speaking, and fiercely anti-Zionist, the Bund offered a radically different vision for Jewish survival. Rather than building a sovereign homeland in the Middle East, Bundists argued that Jews should fight for dignity, equality, and cultural flourishing right where they lived - a concept known as do'ikayt (hereness).
It is crucial to remember that this was not an argument between Jews and the outside world. It was an internal, fierce debate among Jews themselves. Zionists, Bundists, religious traditionalists, assimilationists, and liberals all wrestled with the exact same existential question:
What future is possible for the Jewish people?
That rich history deserves to be remembered. Yet, I find myself approaching the modern revival of interest in the Bund with a distinct degree of caution.
My unease does not stem from a desire to forget the Bund. Quite the opposite - Jewish history is far more diverse than contemporary narratives suggest. The Bund was real, its ideas mattered, and its members organized, dreamed, and suffered. My concern lies elsewhere: too often, historical movements are not resurrected to understand the past, but to fight partisan battles in the present.
Today, a history of the Bund can easily be weaponized, consciously or unconsciously, as an argument that Zionism was a historic mistake. It becomes a convenient way for modern critics to say: "Look, the Jews had another option, and they chose wrongly."
This is where the argument becomes disingenuous, because the very definition of "anti-Zionism" has fundamentally shifted over the last century.
For the Bundists, anti-Zionism was an internal position within the Jewish ecosystem. They opposed a Jewish nation-state, but they were deeply invested in Jewish life, continuity, and the welfare of Jews as a people. Their stance emerged from a vision of Jewish flourishing, not from hostility toward Jewish existence.
Today, anti-Zionism operates in a vastly different geopolitical and cultural landscape. While it can remain a principled critique of nationalism or Israeli policy, it also frequently serves as a vehicle for collective hostility against Jews. This is especially true when Jews are uniquely denied the right to national self-determination afforded to other nations, or when criticism of Israel slides into ancient tropes of suspicion and exclusion.
There is a profound difference between an internal Jewish debate about the diaspora's future and a global movement that treats the existence of the world's only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate.
Furthermore, the world in which the Bund flourished no longer exists. The Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were not defeated in an intellectual debate; they were annihilated. Entire worlds vanished into the ashes of the Holocaust.
When discussing the Bund in the 21st century, we cannot pretend history stopped in 1935. We know things the Bundists could not have foreseen. We know the horrors of the camps. We know about the violent expulsion of nearly a million Jews from Arab lands. We know that Israel became the only life raft for millions of refugees who had nowhere else to go.
Ultimately, there is a sharp dividing line between studying Bundism and using Bundism. One is an act of historical curiosity; the other is an act of political advocacy. The first asks, "What did these people believe?" The second asks, "How can these dead Jews be used to validate my political stance today?"
I am drawn to the Bund because it reveals the breathtaking breadth of Jewish thought, reminding us that Jewish identity was never monolithic. Perhaps the passionate argument itself is the most authentic Jewish trait of all.
However, I lose interest when historical figures are reduced to mere props for modern ideological campaigns. The Bund deserves to be understood on its own terms - not as a convenient footnote in a contemporary argument over whether the Jewish state has a right to exist.
History should illuminate the present. It should not be conscripted into it.
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