“We have weapons, and we will kill you all like dogs,” remarked Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion during an intense debate against a Bundist in Poland.
Ben-Gurion’s threatening outburst against a member of the socialist Jewish group reflected a mutual antagonism between Zionists and Bundists, who were competing to win over Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Bund was internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, irreligious, and, at one point, the largest socialist party in the Russian Empire.
They played a pivotal role in the development of Yiddish culture, education and literature, led rebellions, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, and were key players in the 1917 Russian Revolution and attempted to break down barriers between Jews and non-Jews to foster working-class solidarity.
Today, the Bund is scarcely remembered, with both the Nazis and Soviets killing a lot of its members, but also many anti-socialists, Zionists and others having little interest in people remembering them.
Molly Crabapple’s new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story Of The Jewish Bund is a beautifully written, beautifully illustrated, urgent and sorely needed story of the men and women who fought for a different world.
Crabapple weaves together personal stories of activists, artists, leaders, writers, workers, and fighters with a broader historical analysis.
Crabapple’s own family is connected with the Bund, and she grew up with their struggles as part of her own identity. She is able to connect this to her own experiences working alongside and standing in solidarity with Syrians, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and others.
While most would treat the story of the Bund as purely history, Crabapple is mindful of the present moment that includes Israel’s genocide in Gaza, populist politics and the need for an alternative future.
In 1897, the Bund came into existence within Vilna, present-day Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Their birth came on the back of over a century of intense persecution by Russia following the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, where Jews enjoyed relative freedom.
The Russian Empire passed highly discriminatory laws, forced Jews to live in ghettos known as the Pale Settlements, and, as an adviser to Tsar Alexander III put it, the purpose of Russia’s Jewish policy was to force one-third to convert to Christianity, one-third to migrate, and one-third to die.
The rise of socialism in late 19th-century Russia led to the growth of radical political movements across the empire.
The highly sectarian and racist classifications of society are the environment in which the Bund emerged, and their radical political vision aimed to dismantle them.
A central doctrine of the Bund is do’ikayt, or ‘hereness’: ‘Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood’; in other words, wherever Jews live, they belong.
Related to this concept is the idea of fighting for Egyptians’ rights. In Jewish discourse, the land of Egypt is associated with Jewish oppression that Moses freed them from. Many lands where Jews lived and were oppressed became the new Egypt.
The Bund wanted to fight this oppression, but they also wanted to fight all oppression, including the oppression of those who come from groups that have historically oppressed them.
These ideas are crucial for understanding their opposition to Zionism — the Bund described the Zionists as ‘the most evil enemy of the organised Jewish proletariat.’
The Bund rejected the notion that Jews couldn’t live anywhere but Palestine, that this was their homeland, that they needed to supplant and expel Palestinian Arabs, that Jewish supremacy should exist and that it should serve the imperial agendas of the West.
Meanwhile, the Zionist press would demonise Palestinians, especially after events like the 1929 riots, which saw deadly violence between Palestinians and Jews.
The Zionist press railed against the number of Jews killed, while ignoring Jewish violence against Palestinians as well as the broader context of the riots.
However, the Bundist press put forward the Palestinian point of view and pointed out the hypocrisy of both the British and Zionist groups.
They noted the oppression of Palestinian political figures by the British, including those calling for self-determination, as Zionist leaders like Zeev Jabotinsky were allowed to hold huge rallies in Palestine calling for war and to expel Palestinians.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country offers a tragic, intimate, personal and fascinating account of a radical political movement that fought for equality for all people. But their existence also offers an alternative vision of how to think about oppression, solidarity and what is possible, especially in a time of genocide.
The book reanimates the lives of those who rejected the past as destiny, who believed in the laws of history to free themselves from oppressive practices, and who chose to believe in a humanity that transcends religious and cultural identity, even as the world descended into war.
While the story is tragic, it also offers a way to think about the past as having urgent lessons for the present.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country could easily be driven by pessimism, but the book has a hidden optimism about the radical possibilities these stories can unlock in us.
Usman Butt is a multimedia television researcher, filmmaker and writer based in London who read International Relations and Arabic Language at the University of Westminster and completed a Master of Arts in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter
