What a beautiful piece on the Bund, "a sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish." nybooks.com/daily/2018/10/…
"The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists adhered to the doctrine of do’ikayt or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood."
Bundist refugees came to New York and influenced New York's Jewish counterculture. They set up socialist housing cooperatives like Amalgamated Housing in the Bronx. occasionalplanet.org/2011/05/31/the…
"Immigrant Bundists also led the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Jewish Socialist Federation. They dominated the Workmen’s Circle, a secular Jewish mutual aid society that exists to this day, and whose banners still appear at protests against President Trump."
The Workmen's Circle (@workmenscircle), as noted, is still around, fighting the good fight.
"Not content with economic justice alone, the Bund created a parallel culture of progressive newspapers, theaters, libraries, and secular Yiddish schools."
More of this please.
More of this please.
Like, we're already living in a super-polarized culture where we essentially have separate media, so do we have a mutual aid network for progressive theater companies, newspapers, libraries, etc.? And if not, can we get on it?
"There is a myth that, before Israel, Jews did not fight. Even Hannah Arendt...falls into this error. The Bund, the elected leadership of Europe’s largest Jewish community, fought from the first day of the occupation to the last."
"The Bund created youth groups, newspapers, illegal schools, and a courier service that transmitted news across occupied Poland; the latter’s operatives exchanged information at soup kitchens that the Bund set up as cover."
The Bundists fought in and organized resistance to the Nazis, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But Stalinism, antisemitism, and the allure of right-wing Zionism largely killed it off.
"By the 1980s, nothing was left but a dwindling number of old people with faded red banners and a dead language, ghosts in a legion hall for Veterans of Lost Causes."
But not QUITE gone: "In August 2018, when someone pasted a swastika on a billboard in Melbourne, Australia, it was immediately covered by a sticker for the organization my great-grandfather had joined in 1898."
This is a gorgeous epitaph. 
"Immediately after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Bund demanded the right of return for Palestinian refugees that had been expelled by the IDF."
"When the Bund is acknowledged at all today, it is...as naive idealism whose concept of Hereness lost its argument to the Holocaust."
"When the Bund is acknowledged at all today, it is...as naive idealism whose concept of Hereness lost its argument to the Holocaust."
I think, in reading this, how Jews have survived exile by creating a home both in the sense of peoplehood, and in the Torah, which became a sort of portable homeland.
Also of how the term "stiff-necked" has been used derogatorily for Jews. But that refusal to bow one's head also drove the labor movement (my favorite journalistic complaint from the 1910s was that Jews made other workers insubordinate by demanding safe working conditions).
Which makes one of the closing lines of this article deeply resonant: "Did their defiance taste like home?"
Anyway, it's a beautiful article, worth reading. I read a thing a few years back about how millennials' values and worldviews more closely aligned with our grandparents' (mostly Greatest Generation). Maybe their resistance work has models we can use today.
