Newsletter #106: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Bund w/ Molly Crabapple
This month, The Dig published two long interviews with Molly Crabapple, the New York-based artist and writer, to discuss her excellent book on the Jewish Bund, Here Where We Live is Our Country. The interview covers the arc of the Bund’s long political life, which takes listeners through the classical period of Second International socialism and the mass strike wave of the early 20th century through to World War 1, the October Revolution, Russian counterrevolution, the rise of the Nazi’s, World War 2, and up through the Nakba in Palestine. These are stories often told in isolation from one another, but, from the vantage point of Eastern Europe’s Jewish working-class, are part of the same calamitous political sequence.
For listeners interested in taking this inquiry further, we asked Crabapple to assemble a reading list–her favorite books, besides her own, which is well worth reading even if you’ve listened to our episodes. Here’s what she recommended:
- We, Traitors: Bundist Writing on Zionism, Palestine, and Socialism, edited by Eyshe Beirich and Nathan Tankus and translated by Eyshe Beirich. Introduced by Kaleem Hawa.
From Crabapple: “I am awed by the work of archival reclamation [Tankus and Beirich] did. I can’t wait till you all get to read this book.”
From the publisher: “In this collection of never-before-translated Bundist writing, the largest Jewish socialist party in history explains its opposition to Zionism in its own words.
As the threat of violence loomed in the early twentieth century, Bundists doubled down on their politics of solidarity with all oppressed peoples, not just Jews. In return, Zionists called them “traitors.” And as Zionism became hegemonic in the wake of the Holocaust, the Bund’s vast corpus of anti-Zionist writings languished untranslated in Yiddish—until now.
This volume presents texts from the most prominent leaders, orators, and thinkers of the Bund: critical travelogues from Palestine and furious takedowns of Zionist propaganda, eyewitness accounts of Zionist violence and groundbreaking visions of a future where Jews, Palestinians, and oppressed peoples everywhere could find liberation through socialism.
At a time when people are more hungry than ever to learn about the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism, Bundists’ revolutionary fervor and sense of social justice can tempt us to lionize them as heroes. Here, read in their own words for the first time, we can understand Bundists in all their cultural and historical specificity: good and bad, noble and petty, inclusive and exoticizing. One thing, however, becomes absolutely clear: we are not the first ones to fight this fight.”
- Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund: A Memoir of Interwar Poland by Bernard Goldstein, edited and translated by Marvin S. Zuckerman
From Crabapple: “From the very start, the Bund needs to physically defend itself, and to this they turn to a scar-faced bruiser named Bernard Goldstein, my major crush of the book, by the way, which should be obvious to everyone.”
From the publisher: “Bernard Goldstein’s memoir describes a hard world of taverns, toughs, thieves, and prostitutes; of slaughterhouse workers, handcart porters, and wagon drivers; and of fist-and gunfights with everyone from anti-Semites and Communists to hostile police, which is to say that it depicts a totally different view of life in prewar Poland than the one usually portrayed. As such, the book offers a corrective view in the form of social history, one that commands attention and demands respect for the vitality and activism of the generation of Polish Jews so brutally annihilated by the barbarism of the Nazis. In Warsaw, a city with over 300,000 Jews (one third of the population), Bernstein was the Jewish Labor Bund’s “enforcer,” organizer, and head of their militia—the one who carried out daily, on-the-street organization of unions; the fighting off of Communists, Polish anti-Semitic hooligans, and antagonistic police; marshaling and protecting demonstrations; and even settling family disputes, some of them arising from the new secular, socialist culture being fostered by the Bund. Goldstein’s is a portrait of tough Jews willing to do battle—worldly, modern individuals dedicated to their folk culture and the survival of their people. It delivers an unparalleled street-level view of vibrant Jewish life in Poland between the wars: of Jewish masses entering modern life, of Jewish workers fighting for their rights, of optimism, of greater assertiveness and self-confidence, of armed combat, and even of scenes depicting the seamy, semi-criminal elements. It provides a representation of life in Poland before the great catastrophe of World War II, a life of flowering literary activity, secular political journalism, successful political struggle, immersion in modern politics, fights for worker rights and benefits, a strong social-democratic labor movement, creation of a secular school system in Yiddish, and a youth movement that later provided the heroic fighters for the courageous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”
From the publisher: “In the years between the two world wars, the Jewish community of Poland—the largest in Europe—was the cultural heart of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Workers’ Bund, which had a socialist, secularist, Yiddishist, and anti-Zionist orientation, won a series of important electoral battles in Poland on the eve of the Second World War and became a major political party. Many earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements revolving around the party. The Bundist movements for children, youth, and women, and for physical education offered highly innovative programs and promoted countercultural values.
Drawing on meticulously researched archival materials, Jacobs shows how the development of these programs—such as a program to provide sex education to working-class Jewish youth—translated into a stronger, more robust party. At the same time, he suggests the Bund’s limitations, highlighting its failed women’s movement. Jacobs provides a fascinating account of Bundist movements and a thoughtful revision to the accepted view.”
From Crabapple: “For the vibe, pt. 1.”
From the publisher: “One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel’s reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.
Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel’s 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories―the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.”
From Crabapple: “For the vibe, pt. 2.”
From the publisher: “Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century —and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary—and exemplary—career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world.”