Molly Crabapple’s book on the Jewish Labor Bund has captured the imagination of the anti-Israel left, and won herself kudos from much of the liberal press.  She is an artist and writer whose birth name is Jennifer Caban.  Her politics are apparently influenced by her Puerto Rican father, a professor of Latino studies and a Marxist.  Her interest in art may emanate from her Jewish mother’s work as an illustrator.

The Bund was a major force on the revolutionary left in Czarist Russia, organizing workers’ councils and fighting units during the massive but ultimately suppressed revolution of 1905, and attempting to provide armed protection for Jewish communities facing bloody pogroms.  As a political party in interwar Poland, it grew to become the largest vote-getter of any Jewish party on the eve of the Nazi onslaught.  It cultivated the Yiddish language and culture, sponsoring schools, health facilities, sports clubs, youth groups and other institutions.

This is a fascinating story that deserves to be told.  Crabapple focuses heavily on this Jewish movement’s opposition to Zionism.  She forthrightly addresses some of its flaws, but in her telling, its rigidly doctrinaire anti-Zionism is not one of them.

The author’s interweaving of her personal and family history adds some warmth, but also seems forced in places.  Where this works best is the story of her great-grandfather, the artist Samuel Rothbort, who was a young Bund activist apparently involved in a shootout that killed two policemen, before escaping Czarist Russia for New York.  

Despite her enthusiasm for the Bund, Crabapple reveals how dogmatic Bundists were, and politically naive.  They rejected entreaties from Alexander Kerensky to join the provisional revolutionary government in 1917, because (correctly according to Marxist theory) Russia was not economically advanced enough to be “socialist.”  The Bolsheviks had no such compunctions about taking power; as Crabapple relates, they relentlessly organized their coup against Kerensky’s hapless government, and eventually crushed all other parties, including the Bund.  

In fact, Lenin’s Bolsheviks owe their name as “the majority” to a principled walkout of Bundists, a tactical blunder, during an internal socialist dispute in 1903.  Crabapple recognizes that the Bund’s rigid devotion to principle and doctrine undermined it politically, but she also seems to know that they were never a match for Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

Almost to the end, forever true to doctrine, the Polish Bund refused to cooperate with Zionists in the Warsaw Ghetto.   We also learn that the Bund turned down a proposal from a leftwing Zionist group (Dror) to join forces in Lithuania, even scoffing at early reports of the genocide.   The Bund preferred its traditional alliance with the Polish Socialist Party; while generally sympathetic and helpful, the Socialists were limited in what they were able and willing to do.

As Crabapple notes without comment, the Bund refused Emanuel Ringelblum’s invitation to participate in the Oyneg Shabbos Archive project, solely because he was a........

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