{"id":6215,"date":"2026-06-04T16:21:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T23:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/?p=6215"},"modified":"2026-06-05T11:38:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T18:38:23","slug":"a-history-of-the-jewish-bund-from-1772-to-1948","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/2026\/06\/04\/a-history-of-the-jewish-bund-from-1772-to-1948\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of the Jewish Bund from 1772 to 1948"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here Where We Live Is Our Country; The Story of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The Jewish Labor Bund was <\/span>a secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist movement founded in 1897 in the Tsarist Empire<\/mark>. Dedicated to doikayt<\/em> (hereness), Bundists fought for multi-racial democratic socialism and cultural autonomy where they lived, rather than emigrating to establish an ethnostate in Palestine.<\/p>\n

Large numbers of Jews migrated from Spain and other western European areas to escape the pogroms around the time of The First Crusade<\/em> (1096\u20131099). Most settled in an area around present day Poland. There, they developed their own language, Yiddish, an amalgam of medieval high German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic written in the Hebrew alphabet.<\/p>\n

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In 1791, Empress Catherine the Great formalized the Pale (of Settlement) after Russia acquired vast territories with large Jewish populations during the partitions of Poland. Jews were only allowed to settle in this Pale. At its peak, the territory spanned about 500,000 square miles (1.2 million square km), covering parts of modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Moldova. It comprised roughly 20% of European Russia. The Pale was officially abolished following the February and October Revolutions (1917), which dismantled the Russian Empire and eliminated state-sanctioned restrictions on Jewish residency.<\/p>\n

Now free of the Russian Empire, Poland immediately embarked on its own imperial wars of conquest, starting with the exquisite, formerly Hapsburg city of Lviv…The Lviv massacre was among the first of over a thousand pogroms that took place between November 1918 and March 1923, within the former Pale of Settlement. They were of a ferocity and sadism never before experience in eastern Europe. Almost everyone took part, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, Cossacks, criminals, warlords, aristocrats, soldiers, deserters, Whites, Greens, monarchists, reactionaries, nationalists, people with no ideology whatsoever, and even units that were ostensibly communist…Everyone agreed they had it coming.<\/p>\n

Over the next two decades, the Bund would show Jewish workers that they were a people as worthy as any other. Their methods remind me of those of the America’s Black Panther Party, another group of young radicals who carried guns and started free breakfast programs and asserted their people’s beauty in a country that wanted them dead. Like the Panthers, the Bund was a Marxist party built by and for oppressed and racialized others, who created a network of communal care and cultural uplift, of schools, clinics, mutual aid centers, and youth groups, backed with weapons and branded with militant chic…The Bund created a youth movement. Tsukunft (the Future), for teenagers who worked ten hours a day and lived five to a tenement room but still dreamed of a better and more beautiful world. Bundist teachers dominated the new, secular Yiddish school system, TSYSHO (Central Yiddish School System). These schools directly challenged the traditional cheders that my great-grandfather endured — that Bundists described as filthy holes where subliterate old men “filled [a child’s] small brain with nonsense,” using\u00a0 a cat-o’-nine-tails to reinforce their points.<\/p>\n

The Bund helped transform Yiddish, the language of the Jewish street, into a vehicle for transnational literary culture. When they fled disaster, Yiddish became a portable homeland that Bundists carried on their tongues. Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions. Bundists devoted themselves to the perpetuation of Yiddish long after they had been forced to abandon everything else.<\/p>\n

In April 1920, at the Bund’s Krakow convention, a majority of delegates voted to join the Comintern (Communist International).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From a 1928 Bund Warsaw resolution:<\/p>\n