15. The Legacy of Yiddish Bundism

So this is a conversation that I’ve been meaning to have for a long time and it just so happens that that one of the best people to speak to about this is none another than Molly Crabapple. We’ve been chatting about this topic for a long time as it was roughly my MA thesis at SOAS in 2016.

Molly however has a much more personal connection to Bundism as her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, was a Bundist. She wrote a moving piece about this for the New York Review of Books which you can read here. She’s now writing a book about the Jewish Labor Bund.

So who are these Bundists? How does Molly view the legacy of Bundism? What can we learn from the concept of ‘Doikayt’ (here-ness) that they believed in?

This is what this conversation is about. I also tried to – and, hopefully, succesfully – to convey why I, as someone of Palestinian and Lebanese origins with no direct ties to Judaism or the Yiddish language, was so interested in this movement. Long story short: I ended up spending half of my MA year (2015-2016) at SOAS studying the Jewish Labour Bund and, more specifically, how Yiddish and Hebrew were thought of within Bundism and Zionism.

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

As an oppressed group that’s endured so much, you can only keep saying “The world is good, your worker brothers will help you” for so long before people stop believing you, and before other more racist and exclusionary groups start taking advantage of that despair.

Molly Crabapple: Hey, I’m Molly Crabapple. I’m an artist and writer in New York City; I’m the author of two books, and I’m working on a third one about the Jewish Labor Bund.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thanks Molly for having this conversation with me. This is a topic you and I have been talking about for a long time; we’re talking about the Jewish Labor Bund, which is a topic I know is close to your heart. Tell us about who the Bundists were, and explain a bit about why they matter to you personally.

MC: The Jewish Labor Bund was a Jewish revolutionary party that existed between 1897 and—well, there are still some descendants hanging around now, but it basically ended in 1945. It was a political party that was secular, socialist, proudly and defiantly Jewish in an eastern Europe that was incredibly racist against Jews, and also was anti-Zionist, and was armed.

It started as an underground movement against the tsar in Russia; took part in the 1905 revolution, then the 1917 revolution; fell out horribly with the Bolsheviks; re-formed themselves in interwar Poland; became the most popular Jewish political movement in the country; and finally were wiped out in a defiant last stand in the Warsaw ghetto, a revolt that they helped lead.

My great-grandfather was a member of the Bund back in Belarus. It might sound strange to be so into one’s great-grandfather—it’s kind of a long way off. But my mom’s whole family are artists, and my great-grandfather was almost like a father to her. I grew up entirely surrounded by his paintings and his self-published philosophy books, and by stories about him. I felt really close to Sam when I was growing up.

One of my favorite bodies of work that Sam painted was: during World War Two he painted a series of hundreds and hundreds of watercolors that were documentary drawings from memory of Volkovysk, his hometown back in Belarus. They were of all sorts of things: naughty little boys at religious school who were drawing mean pictures of the rabbi and then getting their asses kicked; him climbing a tree to spy on girls taking baths in the river; holidays, fights, a fire that wrecked the town, pogroms. 

But there was one that I was obsessed with: a picture of a girl who had a little corset and a pretty, long skirt; her hair was all done up like a Gibson girl. It was at night, and she was on the street throwing a rock through a window. Next to her was her boyfriend, who was holding a sack with more rocks (because a lady should not have to carry her own rocks when she wants to go smashing windows). The title was “Itka the Bundist.”

I was like nineteen, and I thought, Bundist? What the hell is that? This was so different than anything I thought I knew about what life was like in these small Jewish communities in eastern Europe, especially what life was like for women. That sent me on this quest to learn about the Bund, figure out what it was, and, as I realized more about its prominence (and indeed its eminence) in this part of the world, to wonder why it had been so erased from history.

EA: It has indeed been erased from history. I’ve talked a bit about my relationship to this topic. It’s not personal; I don’t have a great-grandfather with this cool story, unfortunately for me, but I discovered the Bund while doing a master’s at SOAS, and I found a book—I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a random book written by a Yiddish poet with the pen name Yehoash.

MC: You were reading Yehoash? I didn’t know that. You know he translated Khalil Gibran into Yiddish?

EA: He did indeed! That’s why he was such a random find for me. It was in the Jewish Studies section at the library. He went to Palestine in 1914 and wrote this book a decade later, a big book, translated into English as The Feet of the Messenger, which I still have. In this book he talks about things that are very interesting, like how in Palestine 1914 he would see people conversing in half Yiddish, half Arabic, because some of the early Jewish migrants from previous generations would have known Arabic by then.

He mentions all of this and then says, “Yiddish in Tel Aviv is taboo. To speak Yiddish in public requires the utmost courage.” This was in 1923. Long story short, I ended up dedicating half a year just to studying this phenomenon, this period, and then writing my master’s thesis about it.

In addition to this oddity, what really attracted me to the Bundists is their focus on language. You mentioned it yourself in a talk recently: they found a homeland in Yiddish, in the language. I can talk about my own thing with languages, but you yourself are learning languages; from what I know there are at least five, to different extents.

MC: Not as good as you speak any of your bajillion. I feel very dilettantish. I think I’m good for an American, which is a pretty low bar.

I studied Arabic, and I continue to study Arabic very seriously, just because I love it. I love contemporary Arabic literature; I love reading Ibtisam Azem or Sinan Antoon, or Kanafani, Darwish, Rashid Hussein. I love it. And I study Spanish because it’s my father’s language, and right now I’m studying Yiddish so I can read all of the original source materials for the Bund.

The Bund had a really interesting relationship with Yiddish. When they started, the people who founded the Bund—not only did they not really give a shit about Yiddish, most of them didn’t speak it. For some back story: in tsarist Russia, there was a place called the Pale of Settlement, which were the westernmost provinces of the empire; those were the only places that Jews were allowed to live (unless they were rich, or a student, or got special permission). In general you were stuck living there, and there were all these restrictions around whether you could go to university, own land, where you could live—basically a whole racist legal structure that was meant to quarantine and confine Jews.

If you were someone like my great-grandfather, who was poor and an apprentice leather worker, you lived in an all-Jewish world. You worked at a crappy little leather tannery, and your boss was Jewish and you’re Jewish, and you lived on the Jewish side of town, so you spoke Yiddish; that was your language. But if you were someone who was a bit more middle class with aspirations, you would want to learn Russian—not only that, you would idolize Russian: the language of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Dostoevsky, a Great Imperial Language.

It would also be the language of social mobility, because it would let you go to university in Saint Petersburg. So as is common in many social movements, the people who founded the Bund were largely rebellious students who spoke Russian as their main language, and maybe knew a little bit of Yiddish but not really. They embraced and learned Yiddish because they had been exiled back to the Pale of Settlement for their political activities; they had been instructed by Marx to organize the workers, because the proletariat is the agent of history; and the Jewish proletariat in Vilna did not fucking speak Russian, they spoke Yiddish.

So these students that founded the Bund needed to speak the language that the people spoke. What was interesting was that this purely utilitarian decision started to slowly morph into something else, where Bundists—the more intellectual folks but also the Jewish workers—started being like, Wait a second, why do we have to fucking learn Russian? Why do we have to speak the language of empire? Why isn’t our minority language good enough? They started nourishing and glorifying Yiddish literature—Sholem Aleichem, [Isaac Leib] Peretz, people like that—trying to focus on their own culture.

This was something they did to lesser or greater extent in Russia, but it went into overdrive as soon as they were kicked over the border into Poland. The Bund was responsible for an entire network of secular Yiddish schools, of poetry readings, of choruses. They had some of the best fucking music—just gorgeous, angry, romantic, stamp-your-feet style protest anthems. They excelled at that in Yiddish. And a lot of it was a reaction: No, our culture is good enough! We’re good enough!

It was happening at a time when, all over Europe, different groups (Polish people, Greeks, Serbians) were trying to define an ethnically-based nationalism—which went in horrifically fucked up directions as we all know, but the Bund was trying to do that without the borders and without the blood and without the ethnic cleansing that so many other groups seemed to pursue. They were just trying to do it as a matter of pride.

EA: As fate would have it, the Bund was officially founded the same year as the World Zionist Congress. This is a tale of two worlds, in a sense—obviously interlinked, and there were some people in between—but it is absolutely fascinating that people don’t know. Another story caught my mind so much that it ended up in the introduction to my thesis. I’ll just tell the story, because people should know.

In January of 1945, a well-known heroine of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Vilna ghetto, Ruzka Korczak, was invited to a conference in Palestine, in what would become Israel, to speak about her experience fighting the Nazis. Obviously, being a Jew from Lithuania, she spoke the language of the eastern European Jews, Yiddish. Most of the audience also spoke Yiddish, everything was in Yiddish, and her speech was well-received; everyone applauded. And then this guy stands up and thanks her for her speech “even though it was done in a foreign, grating language.” He said this in Hebrew.

The audience was so shocked that they actually prevented him from finishing, booed him down. But what’s weird about this story is that this guy who was obsessed with the fact that this speaker was speaking in Yiddish was none other than David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister and founder of the state of Israel. What’s even weirder is that David Ben Gurion himself was a native Yiddish speaker; he was born David Grün in Poland.

This whole phenomenon ended up being called a “Kulturkampf,” a culture war, essentially. One historian [Hillel Halkin] called it “one of the great nonviolent civil wars of Jewish history.” It’s not just about language; a lot of it is about the whole concept of Doikayt, “hereness,” versus a “thereness” which ended up being Zionism.

What’s really fascinating to me is that a whole movement and ideology ended up being symbolized by two supposedly opposing languages: Yiddish for the Bundists, and Hebrew for the Zionists. There were Bundists who spoke Hebrew, there were Zionists who spoke Yiddish; it’s always more complicated than just one or the other. But essentially that became the story, and because of that, people like David Ben Gurion, in the forties, fifties, and sixties, were aggressively clamping down on Yiddish: people were being spat on; there were flyers all over Palestine and Israel, including posters in Yiddish, which is ironic, telling people to only speak Hebrew.

They had to do it in Yiddish because most people spoke Yiddish! For me, it’s one of those stories. I feel like I’ve been carrying it for years; this is the first time I’ve talked about it.

This is an awkward segue into the concept of Doikayt: Wherever you are, that’s home.

MC: Here where I stand is my country.

To talk about Doikayt, I need to give a little context into why it was so important that Bundists said “Here where I stand is my homeland.” Since the early 1880s, there had been a mass migration out of the Russian empire—some of it spurred by pogroms, some of it spurred by changes in laws that made it really hard for you to live in the capital, some of it spurred by the crap economic conditions and real poverty. The vast majority of this mass migration was to America and to countries in South America like Argentina. Some if was also to western Europe, and a trickle of it was to Palestine.

But it was hard to stay in the Russian empire if you were a Jew, because of the poverty and the racism, and because in general it was an extremely oppressive autocracy. And furthermore, Jews were not viewed as Russians. They were viewed as aliens and foreigners, and they were viewed as racially different. This is really important. People can argue whether or not Ashkenazi Jews are European or not—but they weren’t viewed as European, and they weren’t treated as that. They were treated as a treacherous, alien Other.

One of the things that Bundists saw really early about Zionism was that Zionism and European antisemitism share a lot of things in common, one of which is the belief that Jews don’t belong in Europe and should get the hell out. When the Bundists were saying Here where I stand is my country, they were saying, No, I’m not going to Palestine. But it was something more than that. It was saying, Here where I stand is my country, and if you have a problem with that then I have a gun and I will fight you.

So much of the popularity of the Bund in Jewish communities in eastern Europe was because they were a proud armed group that defended the entire community against pogroms; they did it in 1905, they did it in 1917, they did it in interwar Poland—some of the earliest fights against the Nazis, fights that happened even before the Warsaw ghetto was built, were launched by Bundists—and they did it as resistance fighters.

So saying This is my home wasn’t just a squishy Hug refugees “tolerance,” like I love Thai food shit. It was actually a very defiant act.

EA: You wrote an essay, “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” and you mention that it’s been translated into Arabic and shared by some Palestinian networks. This brings me to the other reason I got into studying and researching the Bund. This relationship with the language is something that Palestinians, most of whom are in exile, know quite well. Arabic literature became a big focus of identity, with Mahmoud Darwish becoming a symbol of the nation or the people.

So there were these parallel stories—the story of Bundism and the story of Zionism—and Zionism “won” the Kulturkampf in the end. But it’s important to note: you mention Russia, but the Holocaust is the big culprit here, the vast majority of Yiddish speakers who were killed during that period were killed in the Holocaust; the policies under Stalin were anti-Yiddish; on the cultural level there was the assimilation of many Yiddish speakers into American culture and losing it (Yiddish became synonymous with a style of comedy and an accent in parts of America, especially in New York); and the fourth component in why Yiddish ended up being weakened is the policies of the Israeli government.

In past years—there’s no way of dating when this has been happening. Just before we started talking I found an article from ’87 saying that there’s a revival of Yiddish in Israel, for example. If you look for these headlines, you’ll find one every two or three years—which says that the revival isn’t really there. There are some pockets here and there, but it’s obviously not supported by the state. But what really fascinates me about the Jewish Bund is the aggressive (in a good way) affirmation of their Jewishness. It’s not like this was a movement of people who were encouraging only assimilation (which many early Zionists accused Bundists of wanting to do—I have records from 1905 and 1906; there were debates and letters being sent, some of them are pretty funny).

But there was this notion: We know who we are, we want to strengthen it, and we will defend it. And the concept of Doikayt for me is very personal, because I have a grandfather who is Palestinian; when I think of “the homeland,” it’s very vague, it’s very ill-defined, it’s something that changes a lot depending on when I’m thinking about it. The reason I ended up finding shelter in languages is the same reason you’re learning Yiddish: because it opens you up to a world, especially through literature.

We’re finally seeing this come back—not in Israel but in America (though there are small pockets in Israel). I interviewed a native Hebrew speaker in London, and he was teaching Hebrew to people in London from an explicitly anti-Zionist and diasporist perspective. For him, since there are birthright trips to Israel to learn Hebrew, he wanted to teach people Hebrew but decoupled from the ideological baggage that usually comes with it.

I don’t necessarily believe that everyone should have to learn Yiddish and there’s no other way of being Jewish; that’s none of my business, I’m not Jewish myself. But from the distance and privilege that I have, the distance between me and this Kulturkampf which is sort of happening now in this resurgence of a very vocal Jewish left in America, which you are obviously part of—we saw the phenomenon in Bernie Sanders to a certain extent; we saw the If Not Now groups, Jewish Voice for Peace, and a bunch of others. Those are legacies that, had this spatial and temporal erasure (the Holocaust, Stalin, and everything else) not happened, it would have been more obvious to say, Well, these people have inherited the legacy of the Bund.

MC: I have two notes I always give on Yiddish. The first is that while the vast majority of Jews in America are Ashkenazi, the majority of Jews in Israel are not. Israel didn’t just wage a war on Yiddish, it waged a war on all diaspora Jewish languages: Ladino of the Ottoman empire; the Arabic that Jews spoke; many other languages that Jews spoke—they lived all over the world. Sometimes I think the war against Yiddish was more bitter because the founders of Zionism spoke Yiddish, and you can never hate as much as when you’re hating people who are like you.

The other thing I always want to say with Yiddish, and it’s one of the ironies, is that Yiddish isn’t a dead language. There are millions of native Yiddish speakers—they’re just Hasidic. One of the things about the Bund that was interesting was that they were militantly anti-religious. They were proud Jews in the ethnic sense, but they loathed religion. They served pork at their meetings; they hung up posters on synagogue walls on Friday night, because they knew no one could take them down until Saturday night; they smoked on Yom Kippur. They did everything they possibly could, almost in the manner of many generations of naughty Catholic schoolboys—the Bund definitely came from that perspective.

So the irony is that while their children in America forgot Yiddish and assimilated into the American left in the sixties and rock ‘n’ roll, the children of a group they very much disliked are actually the inheritors of Yiddish as a living language. It’s something I didn’t think about until a formerly Hasidic guy started making fun of me and my YIVO pronunciation of Yiddish.

But the Bund’s embrace of Yiddish, especially in interwar Poland, reminds me of another group that I was familiar with and my dad knew a bunch of members of, which is the Young Lords, the militant Puerto Rican group that came out of Chicago. It has many similarities to the Bund: everything from the working class ethnic pride to being revolutionary socialists to making ersatz paramilitary uniforms to the civil disobedience and law-breaking stuff.

It’s something very natural, when you’re a minority who’s always been told you’re shit—you’ve always been told your culture is shit; you’ve always been told you don’t have a literature, that you don’t have a history worth celebrating, you don’t have a tradition—for you to say, No, we do have a literature, we do have a history, we do have a language. I see this self-assertion and pride with many of my Kurdish friends also, who might not even speak Kurdish but are trying to learn it. It’s something I’m sure many people who struggle to preserve Indigenous languages feel. It’s certainly something the Bund felt in their struggle to elevate Yiddish. 

As for Yiddish coming back: as far as I know, the only dead language that ever came back was Hebrew, and only with a genocide and the most state brutality possible. I think that dying and dead languages don’t come back because languages take a really long time to learn, and people have other things they want to do, like go on dates and watch Netflix. However, there is certainly a small and really dedicated group of people, that I suppose I am part of, who are studying Yiddish—and interestingly, not all of them are Jewish.

When I was taking the crazy YIVO summer intensive program, there was a guy in my class who was Egyptian, who was learning Yiddish because he was trying to do a thesis on nationalist cinema in Egypt and Israel—you know who I’m talking about! I met a Lithuanian cartoonist of Christian background who was learning Yiddish because she was trying to do a project about Yiddish teenage autobiographies that were done in Lithuania, to understand her country’s history.

I think it’s really cool that people who aren’t Jewish are studying it, because it means it’s actually a legit language with a legit history, as opposed to something that people only study to read their grandmother’s cookbook (even though it’s totally cool and valuable to read your grandmother’s cookbook).

EA: There was an institute next to SOAS that was giving summer courses in Yiddish and I took a couple hours of lessons. It sounds like German in my mind, and indeed there are lots of common words—but what’s different about it is the alphabet is not Latin. The poster which will be the featured image for this episode is a poster I’ve had for a long time—it confuses a lot of my Arab friends when they enter the room and I have a random poster in Hebrew [letters] behind me. It’s in Yiddish, but people don’t know the difference.

The reason I put it up is to be a bit provocative, and because the message on it is just amazing. The message is something I can relate to, it’s something that anyone who is interested in anything from democratic socialism to liberalism to mutual aid—anything that has this need to create something better than what is currently the case, creating a new world. 

One thing I find fascinating about Zionism and the revival of the Hebrew language is the fact that it succeeded. Obviously it succeeded with violence; that goes without saying. But it also succeeded because there was this dedication, and this dedication was top-down (again going back to the violence), but it’s something that people should know. I’m not kidding when I say that many people I speak to, including folks from the region, from Lebanon especially (in Palestine I assume more people know this), don’t even know that Hebrew went through an actual active revival, of people forcing themselves to speak it, because they themselves didn’t speak it.

There’s an Israeli scholar, Avi Lang, who mentions how her father or grandfather spoke Yiddish as a native language, but growing up in Israel he was spat on and attacked, to the point where he would only speak it within the confines of his home, and as soon as he leaves the house he would speak in Hebrew. This is something that many immigrants can relate to. The stories of Arab immigrants to America who only speak English or who don’t teach Arabic to their kids—it’s such a common story at this point.

This is why for me it feels like a missed opportunity, and it’s why I wanted to have this episode with you: to encourage people to learn more about a movement that actually tried to do it. The fact that they “failed” doesn’t say anything about the movement itself or the value of the ideals of the movement. People need to understand that for the early Zionists like David Ben Gurion, to quote Avi Lang: “For Israel, Yiddish stank of the ghetto. It was the demotic of the persecuted, the victim, the murdered.”

The contrast to this, the myth of the “weak Jew,” is the strong Jew: the Hebrew speaking Sabra (Sabra being the name of Jews who were born in what ended up becoming the state of Israel—it’s the name of a cactus in the desert; resilience is the idea). This contrast between the supposedly weak and the supposedly strong—we need to think about this. We need to think about what it means for an entire state to be formed and created on this idea of something that is strong. 

This is obviously gendered; indeed many early Zionists would describe Yiddish as an effeminate language—they would explicitly use these terms. They felt the need to erase it. If there is a need to erase something, especially something that is their own mother language in a lot of cases (like David Ben Gurion himself), it’s worth asking the question Why. What did the language represent, for it to be such a threat?

Doikayt, hereness, the idea that Wherever we are, that is our homeland—recent weeks have been particularly tough in New York; can you reflect on how a concept like Doikayt can be translated into some of the mutual aid networks that we’ve been seeing, that have been one of the few lights in this horror show that we’re seeing in the US? Have you revisited, in the past few weeks, some of these writings?

MC: I wanted to segue into something else you were talking about, which is strength and the myth of the weak ghetto Jew versus the strong Israeli Sabra. One of the reasons the Bund’s legacy has been so deliberately erased in Israel is because the Bund represents that that dichotomy was always bullshit. 

The founding literary document of the “week Jew/strong Jew” thing is a poem that was written after the Kishinev pogrom by the Hebrew poet Hayim Bialik, called “In the City of Slaughter.” In the Kishinev pogrom, over a hundred Jews were killed, and there was a lot of rape of Jewish women. It was a hideous pogrom; it was something that echoed all around the world; images of the dead were distributed on mass media. Hayim Bialik had been sent by the Yiddish historian Shimon Dubnow to collect survivor testimonies in the aftermath, and he collected these testimonies—and then he chucked them, and wrote this poem about the disgusting, bowing, scraping, weak ghetto Jew that allows his wife to be raped in front of him because he’s hiding in the toilet. 

It says things like, They died like dogs. It is a howl of self hatred, and it was a massively influential poem for Zionism, and something that established his name as a Hebrew poet—a major document. But it was all fucking bullshit, and he knew it was bullshit. In the Kishinev pogrom, it was not that men passively allowed their wives to be raped while they hid. Men fought back, and so did women, but they were overwhelmed with superior numbers. They were tough working class people who fought, and not just one-on-one but organized armed militias, and were put down by force of superior numbers plus the police.

So even the founding literary document, written in 1903, was built on bullshit. The truth is that Jews always fought back. Whatever one thinks of the Bolsheviks and Leon Trotsky (and I am not a fan), Leon Trotsky ran the Red Army. The idea that Jews didn’t fight back until David Ben Gurion and [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky and the Haganah and the Irgun and the Palmach came along is such fucking ahistorical bullshit that I don’t even understand how it passes in common parlance.

The thing about the Bund was—yes, first they were an armed group that ran some of the most heroic and legendary self-defense militias in Russia and later in Poland, and then helped lead the Warsaw ghetto revolt. But they did it as Jews; they didn’t do it as Bolsheviks, as Communists, the way that Trotsky did. And that’s very upsetting to a narrative that always posits Jews back in the Old Country as weak and simpering and cowardly. I think that specifically is why Israel had such a problem with their story.

EA: I took Hebrew while I was doing my master’s at SOAS—it ended up feeding into this thesis, but it was just a coincidence because it was being offered and I like learning stuff. They showed us in class some of those awkward ads by the Israeli government. I’m saying “awkward” because they are horrible and make no sense. But essentially one of those ads is something along the lines of, This Israeli woman goes to America and ends up coming back to Israel, and instead of saying “Shalom” she says “Hello!” The story is that assimilation is the main threat to Jewish identity.

The underlying message here is a very clear anti-diasporism. The term “diaspora” is contentious; I’m using it as a shorthand here. It’s not my place to say who is diaspora, it is up to people themselves to figure that out. But the underlying message is: Even if you are an Israeli who goes to New York and only hangs out with American Jews, you’re still losing something, because the real representative of Judaism (as Netanyahu himself loves to proclaim) is the Israeli state. There are whole studies on this. 

Another thing on this topic of erasure: my interest in Yiddish (and specifically the politics of Yiddish—the thesis is called “Language Politics”) is the fact that something could be so important and powerful, and we have documentation that the Bund was important and powerful, and in the timespan of a fraction of its history (because the Yiddish language is at least a thousand years old), within two or three decades, it can be wiped out, a significant percentage of its speakers killed in the Holocaust and in Stalinist purges—that is the reason I got so attached to and interested in learning about the Yiddish language. 

There are parallels to the Palestinian story, and there are parallels to stories of exile and migration and ethnic cleansing and all of these things. I saw parallels with the Armenian story; I saw parallels with the Kurdish story. This is why it baffles me, really. As someone from Lebanon, where there is a narrative that Lebanon is supposedly anti-Zionist (at least it’s performed as state ideology)—despite all of this, there has been zero effort to actually learn the context of where all of this came from. And if people don’t really understand the story of Yiddish in the “success” or “victory” of Zionism, then they’re only looking at a part of the story.

The Nakba and the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict—those are part of the story. They are a big part especially of the post-’48 state of Israel. But the World Zionist Conference and the first Labor Bund meeting were in 1897. We’re talking about half a century in between! And people should really know what happened in that half-century. I don’t know if there are any other parallels—maybe the Armenian story is one—of so much destruction in such a small amount of time, and the legacy of that being translated into these weird historical trajectories (here I’m referring to the state of Israel).

Bundism is not necessarily something people should study because it was perfect and idealistic and everyone was fantastic—I’m sure there were problems, as with everything. But it’s important! At least half a century, at some point the biggest movement from that community in the Pale of Settlement.

MC: One of the tragedies of Bundism—because they were secular socialist internationalists, even though they were a proud Jewish movement, they profoundly wanted to work with other groups. They were a member of one of the major international socialist groupings, and they had this faith in the international working class that, when you read it in retrospect and you know what happens, sounds incredibly naive. To the point where they’re in the Warsaw ghetto risking their lives, and forgoing food when they’re starving to death, to put out these newspapers in Yiddish (and Polish as well, so they could smuggle them out to their Polish comrades), and in these newspapers they’re writing about how they’re not the main victims of Nazism, because the German working class is also crushed under the boot of Nazism!

That’s not true—not that the German working class wasn’t crushed, but [the Bundists] were indeed the main victims of Nazism. But they were always trying to see themselves in this very internationalist framework. 

And after the war was over, there were constant lynchings of Jews in Poland—people trying to return to their homes found someone was in their home, and then the person who squatted their home would kill them. There was also a major pogrom in Kielce [in 1946] based on a blood libel. So people had just survived the Holocaust; the Polish Jewish community suffered more than any other Jewish community in the Holocaust (of the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, three million were Polish Jews), and then their neighbors are lynching them! 

It’s just not a country you can be in. And the Bundists who survived are still trying to tell people Doikayt. And Jews then were like, No, I don’t fucking want to stay here. I was reading a memoir [Ashes and Fire: The Story of Poland’s Jewry Under and After German Occupation] by a Bundist, Jacob Pat, who had fled Poland in ’39 and then returned in ’46 to distribute aid to the survivors—and every single person wants to get out of Poland. They’re all sneaking over the border into Germany to go into the American occupied zone, to get into displaced persons camps. And once they get into these camps, they’re applying for visas to every fucking country in the world: Australia, Brazil, Canada, America, anywhere they can. They want to get out of Europe.

And they’re getting rejected. The surviving members of the Bund who were able to escape and reconstitute in America built a pretty close relationship with the American labor movement, and they were petitioning the government to give 400,000 visas to Jewish survivors—and the American government refused, because they thought they were Communists (and also because they were racist).

So there were these people rotting in DP camps for one year, two years, often guarded by Germans. And suddenly there’s a group like the Haganah coming in, that’s like, We can get you out of this DP camp. We can put you on a smuggling ship and you can get your manhood and your dignity back and join a militia and go kill some other people. It’s one of the clearest examples I’ve ever seen of how a group of desperate refugees gets radicalized. People who, if they had been given a visa to New York, for instance, would never have been Zionists, necessarily.

In Jacob Pat’s book, he has a part where he’s talking about how horrible it is in Poland, and he ends it by saying, In Poland you can hear the ships. Whether they are going to America or to Palestine, I don’t know. It was written in 1946. And I’ve always thought that there are many reasons, obviously, that Bundism collapsed—the Nazi genocide, Stalin, American assimilation—but one of the reasons that’s not appreciated is that after the war, when the remaining Bundists in America were asking for international solidarity and help for refugees, there was none on offer.

As an oppressed group that’s endured so much, you can only keep saying The world is good, your worker brothers will help you for so long before people stop believing you, and before other more racist and exclusionary groups start taking advantage of that despair.

I wanted to return to the smart thing you said about Doikayt and New York. I’ve often thought one of the clarifying things about this horrific plague we’re going through (and this is not a cut-and-dried rule; there are a million exceptions) is that in general, if people have a choice about where they’re going to be, where you choose to be says a lot about where you think your home really is. I’m in New York right now; the New York Times says they think the death toll is around 20,000 in New York City, though that’s not official—and there’s no place in the world I’d rather be. 

This is my home. It’s where my mother was born; it’s where my father came when he was a little kid; it’s where my family has been for a really long time. And I can’t imagine leaving New York at a moment like this, when it’s suffering so much. I can’t imagine not doing everything I can for my city right now. I love other places in the world; I would love to live in some other city at some point—but not now. New York City is my country, and perhaps that sounds exclusionary, but it’s a city of nine million. There are many countries smaller than that. If you can say Lebanon is my country, you can say New York City is my country. I don’t think one is any more petty than the other.

This is a city that’s become increasingly hard to live in if you’re not rich, because the rents are just too damn high and you get chucked out of your apartment at the end of the year and gentrification is off the hook. It’s really hard. And now those same people who have been so instrumental in making the city completely unaffordable for the working class have fled to their summer mansions in Montauk. I don’t know what they’re afraid of—maybe they think the Corona will come through the walls—but they’ve fled, and the working class of the city is dying, because it’s keeping the world running at risk of getting infected with the virus.

And sometimes when I walk the city streets late at night, and they’re completely empty, I almost feel like the city is—this sounds strange perhaps, but all the people who would use the city, who would come here to make some cash, to have fun, but who didn’t really love it, have left, and for a moment, even in this horrific moment where it’s dying and where the Trump administration is helping it die, it feels like the city belongs to its people again. I love it here so much, and I’m doing everything I possibly can to help it, and so are all my friends. 

There’s a huge amount of mutual aid that’s been set up. There’s a lot of poverty, because people’s rents are so high, and people are quite precarious here; even middle class people have lost everything overnight because they can’t work now. So there are all sorts of initiatives to get food to people, to support people who are rent striking—the largest rent strike in American history is going to kick off on May first in New York. There is a lot of stuff to help older people get their food and get their meds. And there are lots of people just giving each other money because everyone is broke and trying to pool their resources.

This isn’t an official mutual aid thing, but in my building I have badass neighbors, I love them, and we’re cooking for each other, we do shopping for each other, we mail things for each other. We just help each other in a way that, even though we always liked each other before and we were always friends, we just never thought to do because New York is so busy.

I have so many fears for what’s going to happen with this city—I’m afraid that so many people are going to die and then these Jared Kushner-style developer vampires are going to sweep in and buy everything up and turn this into Dubai with much worse infrastructure. But maybe something that could happen that is good would be that the hedge fund bastards and the developer bastards and the rich kids left, and the city could return to being for its people again. That may seem like a naive hope, but we must look for hope at this moment.

EA: We’ve been talking about a movement that had to think that way. I don’t know what they went through, I can’t really picture it obviously, but they definitely needed to have a vision or at least some kind of hope that things can get better, to get through the day.

On this note, I was interviewing that guy in London who was doing the non-Zionist Hebrew class, and he told me what he was trying to do was facilitate “learning Hebrew outside of the realm of its participation in erasure and dispossession in Palestine, while at the same time deeply engaging with those processes from an oppositional standpoint.” They’re called Babel’s Blessing, by the way.

When he met Palestinians, including some of his students being Palestinians, when they called Hebrew the “language of occupation,” he could “only nod in agreement, for this is the lived experience of a language which was forced on them.”

At the same time, when Jews say that they want to learn Hebrew in a different way, “they are expressing their critique of Zionism and interest in diasporic Hebrew culture.” This is very interesting to me. It’s both worlds—diasporism on the one hand, and Hebrew replacing Yiddish but in the context of diasporism. I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve read about a similar revival in Berlin among a lot of Israelis who left Israel and settled in Berlin—there’s a countercultural thing going on.

I’ll end on a quote from someone else: “When you speak Yiddish, you always think about the past. Whereas when you speak Hebrew you think about the present. It’s an ‘everyday language.’ Yiddish is a language that got fixated in the past with the Holocaust, and there is always this longing, thinking about going back in the past, in the shtetl and all of that. Hebrew doesn’t capture this longing for the past.”

Hayim, the guy I was quoting at first, replies: “I find that in many cases when Jews learn Arabic, Yiddish, and Hebrew in a decolonial, diasporist context, as well as with anti-authoritarian techniques,” (he was talking about Paolo Freire’s pedagogy, basically), “it not only correlates with them having views critical of Zionism, but also facilitates exploring their own Jewish identities from different angles and in new, stimulating ways.”

This is what I wanted to end on. As I mentioned before, this is not my business. I’m not saying this is how someone who is Jewish should or shouldn’t be. It can be a tricky thing as someone who is not from the community. I’m simply saying that what I found personally fascinating in this whole story is these tensions and contradictions. There were Bundists who spoke Hebrew and Zionists who spoke Yiddish, as we know. It was never black and white, and there were people who were in between and didn’t know how to identify themselves.

I’ll leave it up to you to reflect and do whatever you want with this.

MC: One of the great ironies of Yiddish and Hebrew is the positions are almost exactly reversed. A hundred years ago, the argument against studying Hebrew was that Hebrew is the language of your perfect, dead prophets and Yiddish is the language of the living Jewish street—why are you always so fixated on the past? Now, Hasidism aside, Yiddish is the language of the idealized dead and Hebrew is the language of the imperfect and deeply fucked up Jewish street in the country where half the Jews in the world live.

There is always this tension to that. I’m not learning Yiddish because I think every Jew needs to learn Yiddish—I’m learning it because you can’t write about the Bund without it. They did every single one of their documents in it until 2003. Any time you learn a language, even this one, which I’m learning to commune with the dead, you’re opening up yourself to another world. That’s why I do it with love.

I wanted to end with a quote, too. It was a quote about Zionism and Bundism that was written by a Bundist in 1947, and he was writing this reflecting on a world where most Bundists had been killed—ninety-seven percent of the Jews who stayed in Poland had been killed. He wrote this trying to defend the movement he had given his life to:

“The great Jewish catastrophe has weakened the position of the Bund. In Poland, in the land of the greatest Jewish creativity, one cannot find those millions of Jews, those workers, artisans, regular people, from the black Earth, of whose lives and struggles the Bund drew the juices of growth and development. The tragedy is not only for the Bund but for the entire Jewish people. One cannot speak of victors and losers on the Jewish street. War has left all parts of the Jewish people defeated. 

“The idea of the Bund is a deep belief in mankind. The tendencies that are hostile to the Bund are based on a lack of this belief. The idea of belief in mankind is not popular today. In these last years, we have seen it become deeply debased, despoiled, and spat upon. But if man is at heart a beast, no amount of running away will help. If there is no redemption for mankind, then there is no redemption for Jews. The beast will hunt those who run, and meet them everywhere. If the belief disappears, then hope disappears. The victory of the Zionist idea is a victory for the failure of belief in mankind. It is a complete victory for hopelessness. 

“The Bund has always put its cards on socialism, which means a better future for all humanity, and for all the people that make it up. If the dream of socialism becomes true, then there is no one to run from. If the dream dissipates, like so many other better dreams of mankind, then there is nowhere to run to. The mirage of a little statelet surrounded by enemies is no amulet against antisemitism and extermination. The Bund has always fought for continuity, for creative national life, for Doikayt, for hereness, for the right to remain rooted in the ground where the Jewish masses live and fight. 

“This idea received from Nazism a most painful blow. The remnants of the Jewish masses lurch through the camps, wander around homeless, or float like splinters on the foaming waves of the stormy postwar world. But with every day it becomes clearer that the pathway to healing those wounds leads not through increasing the number of helpless wanderers, not through increasing the number of uprooted refugees, but through building and rebuilding.”

That’s why I think the Bund is worth listening to. Because the person who wrote that was not a soppy, cosseted liberal with a six-figure academic job, it was someone who had just seen his entire world destroyed—and that’s still what he believed.

EA: That’s amazing. Molly, is there anything you wanted to add?

MC: No, this was great. It was such a pleasure to talk about these things with you.

EA: Same here. This was very refreshing. Thanks a lot for your time.

MC: You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Elia J. Ayoub

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2 responses to “15. The Legacy of Yiddish Bundism”

  1. Our Mirror Worlds w/ Naomi Klein – The Fire These Times

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  2. Doikayt (‘Hereness’) Now! w/ Molly Crabapple – The Fire These Times

    […] Crabapple: I’m so grateful to be back on the podcast again. The conversations we had at the start of my project on the Bund helped shape how I thought about things as I wrote this crazy four-hundred-page […]

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