Doikayt and the Jewish Labour Bund

The Jewish Labour Bund, hereby referred to as the Bund, was a socialist party and movement in Eastern Europe “whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish.”¹

Founded in Vilna (modern Vilnus, Lithuania)², then part of the Russian empire, as the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Yiddish: Yiddish: אַלגעמײנער ייִדישער אַרבעטער־בונד אין ליטע, פּױלן און רוסלאַנד, romanized: Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter-bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland), the Bund was rooted in “working-class solidarity and subaltern pride.”3 Bundists stood out for their desire to fight authoritarianism and antisemitism without compromising their Jewish identity in an empire which had institutional anti-Semitism and had confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement. From battling the Tzar to resisting pogroms, the Bund would even help lead the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis. 

They promoted Doikayt⁴, or here-ness, in direct contrast to the there-ness of Zionisn which promoted a foreign land, Palestine, as the Jewish homeland-to-be. They held that being part of a millenium-old history – that of Eastern European Jews – “gave them as legitimate a claim to those lands as that of any antisemitic gentile.”⁵

The Bund viewed Zionism as a “reactionary, bourgeois nationalist movement and insisted, as one translation of a 1931 song put it, that “we’d rather stay in the diaspora, and fight for our liberation.””⁶ Indeed, the Bund believed that the diaspora was home, and that Eastern European Jews were to be celebrated as a people with their own rich, Yiddish-speaking culture. For example, the Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem advocated for a “state of nationalities”⁷ in independent Poland instead of the nation state, meaning one “of all peoples living on its territory, not a state of and for ethnic Poles with secondary rights for other nationalities.” ⁸

Legacy of the Bund Today

Despite being as old as the World Zionist Congress – which was founded by Theodor Herzl in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 – and being “one of the largest socialist organisations in the Russian empire” with 30,000 active members in 1905⁹, the legacy of Bundism is today largely obscured. The decline of the Bund follows the same trend as the decline of the Yiddish language it embraced: Up to 85% of Jews killed in the Holocaust, or Khurbn¹⁰ Eyrope (“the European cataclysm” in Yiddish) were Yiddish speakers¹¹ and many of them were Bundists, such as Abraham Blum¹² and Maurycy Orzech¹³, both killed shortly after taking part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.¹⁴

In recent years, the hegemony of Zionism has been challenged by Jewish activists. The 2014 Israeli war on Gaza catalysed the rise of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) providing alternatives for Jews who reject the argument that safety from antisemitism requires an ethnostate defending Jewish supremacy over Palestinians in Israel-Palestine. Instead, the philosophy of “safety through solidarity,”¹⁵ namely the idea that fighting antisemitism is best practiced through solidarity with marginalised groups in the West, is being promoted by many more Jewish activists and groups. 

The erasure of Bundism was a victory for authoritarianism but “history,” Molly Crabapple writes, “is never settled” and today “the Bund’s anti-Zionism, which had so marginalized them during the long decades of Israeli communal dominance, would lead a new generation to embrace them.”¹⁶ This generation is seeking to “live out the values of Doikayt” by “building an anti-fascist movement alongside the people being persecuted just as our ancestors were — immigrants, trans people, student protestors.”¹⁷ Through Doikayt, they seek to push “the boundaries of imagining Jewish self-determination, championing a world where we could exist diasporically alongside a plurality of other peoples.”¹⁸