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The Politics of Doikayt

The Bund and the history of Jewish anti-Zionism.

The Bund and the Radical History of Jewish Anti-Zionism

Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country revisits the past of the Jewish Labor Bund and considers what it might mean for our future.

A parade of Jewish Bundists on May Day.

Looking back on a debate with Edward Said in 1978, Irving Howe recalled, among other sharp-elbowed moments, one in particular: When it came time for questions, an old Bundist with a thick Yiddish accent let loose a thundering attack on Israel. Howe said he was “ashamed that a fellow Jew, and a socialist at that, would talk this way.” By the time you get this far into Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a history of the Jewish Labor Bund (and you probably will, because the book is absolutely spellbinding), you will have become accustomed to such denunciations.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

Born in the same year, 1897, Zionism and Bundism were bitter and intimate rivals from the beginning, struggling for the souls of poor Eastern European Jews. The Zionist program—to resolve the Jewish question once and for all by establishing a homeland in Palestine—is well-known, the Bund’s much less so. In Here Where We Live, Crabapple seeks to revive what she can of the Bund’s project. As her title reminds us, the Bund wanted to stay and fight—for Jewish and working-class emancipation through socialism—where its members lived. In the Bund’s eyes, the Zionists wanted exactly what the antisemites around them wanted: for the Jews to self-deport. Staunch opponents of self-deportation, the Bundists were well placed to predict, early and accurately, what the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine would mean for the Palestinians. Crabapple makes it a matter of pride that the Bund was so prescient.

Crabapple routes her history through her great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbort, a Bundist born in czarist Russia who came to the United States in 1904 and became an artist of a vanishing Yiddish-speaking world. Rothbort taught his granddaughter, Crabapple’s mother, to paint. She then taught Crabapple, who has made a name for herself as a visual artist and a writer for left-wing magazines, publishing the words-and-pictures memoir Drawing Blood as well as illustrated accounts of Guantánamo, the Syrian rebels, and the Greek financial crisis. If the evidence had permitted, one would have wanted more of Samuel, who makes only walk-on appearances. While her great-grandfather’s example intrigues and inspires her, Crabapple’s retrieval of her family history is really there only to help her tell the story of the Bund, especially its anti-Zionism.

There are many ways of telling this story. The Bundists were Jews, but they were also secularists who rejected their parents’ religion. They were labor organizers who sought to defend poor Jewish workers, who were the victims of antisemitism as well as exploitation. And, first and foremost, they were revolutionary socialists. They led strikes by Jewish workers against Jewish factory owners; in New York City, they led the fight of Jewish tenants against Jewish landlords. David Dubinsky, the leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, was a former Bundist. In those years, organizing involved the near-certainty of street fighting. The memoirs of tough-guy enforcer Bernard Goldstein have enough material to fill a Hollywood action flick. If that movie gets made, it will give a well-merited boost to the moral status of antifa.

Crabapple enjoys telling these stories, and they are good ones. A mass movement of working-class Jews is a thing of the past, but Zionism is very much an antagonist of the present, and she wards off nostalgia by putting the Bund’s anti-Zionism front and center. Her own political commitments aside, she has good historical reasons to do so. Crabapple quotes Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who became the first president of Israel, in 1903: “Our hardest struggle everywhere is conducted against [the Bund].” At the same time, the Bund was describing Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.”

For the Bund, Zionism was not just a distraction; it gave local antisemites a convenient means of eliminating the Jewish population. Instead of building power for working-class Jews, Zionists encouraged the Jews of Eastern Europe to give up the fight (to the Zionists, a losing fight) and move elsewhere. The Bundists, on the other hand, advocated doikayt, or “hereness”: Here where we live is our country. Here where we live is the place where freedom has to be won, freedom for everyone. During the 1905 uprisings against the czar, the American socialist Meyer London, who in later years would come to voice his own criticisms of the Zionist project in Palestine, gave this motto an allegorical spin straight out of the Passover Seder. He told his New York audience that in Poland, the young people “pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”

This program........

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