One hundred years of the Bund
Brumberg, Abraham
Of the two Jewish movements that celebrate their centenaries this year—Zionism and the Bund—the first, founded at a glittering ceremony in Basle, Switzerland, in August 1897, can surely boast of...
...Wittingly or not, the Zionist movement has adopted the Bund's principle of doyikayt (roughly "hereness"), that is, preserving Jewish life wherever Jews live throughout the once disdained Diaspora, as a natural corollary to its commitment to the Jewish state...
...But whereas Zionism could supplant its original dream with an even greater commitment to nation building, the Holocaust marked the end of the Bund's political aspirations...
...The revival of Hebrew, hitherto exclusively the language of the Book, and the rise of a modern Hebrew literature, are minor attendant miracles, too...
...Throughout the years, the Bund remained admirably united and democratic—in stark contrast to the communist parties with their worship of "democratic centralism" (no democracy, lots of centralism...
...So was the fortitude displayed by the Bund in carrying on after the war, until it was crushed by the Polish communist regime in 1948...
...Its pragmatism eventually made the Bund the single most powerful Jewish political party in interwar Poland, allied with the Polish socialists in a common struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism in their country...
...In addition, the Bund worked diligently to strengthen the domain of Yiddish by publishing journals and papers in that language, founding educational institutions, and supporting the growing ranks of Yiddish writers...
...Zionism's extraordinary achievements include, first and foremost, the creation of a Jewish state and of a haven for millions of homeless and persecuted Jews...
...The Bund left an indelible imprint on the secular American Jewish community as a whole...
...The Bund was a socialist party committed to its "revolutionary" ideals yet prepared to overlook doctrinal niceties when its major goals were at stake...
...The Bund's accomplishments have been striking in the United States, too...
...Their history and their achievements are close to the hearts of democratic socialists, and that is why we at Dissent are pleased and honored to salute the members of the Bund, on its one-hundredth anniversary, as comrades in the unending struggle for a more decent world...
...The ultimate blow to the Bund, and also to Zionism's hope of a mass exodus from Europe, was the destruction of East European Jewry...
...Its program of cultural autonomy for the Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe and—later on—America also foundered...
...It was instrumental in creating organizations such as the Workmen's Circle and the Jewish Labor Committee, in contributing to the vigor of the Jewish trade union movement, and in sustaining the position of Yiddish (the Daily Forward, in the first decades of this century, was largely a creature of the Bund, and its Yiddish weekly is edited now by Joseph Mlotek, a devoted Bundist since his childhood in Poland before the war...
...1:1 FALL • 1997 • 105...
...And yet the Bund fills a magnificent page in modern Jewish history...
...During the war, its activities in the ghettos and in the antiNazi resistance movement were nothing short of amazing...
...Israel's democracy— despite some grievous shortcomings—is the most vibrant in the Middle East, and so is its growing economy...
...The Bund cannot boast of similar achievements...
...At present, only a small minority of Bundists remain, yet their idealism and energy are undiminished as they maintain their activities in a number of countries, and continue to publish Unser Tsayt (Our Time) in New York...
...Of the two Jewish movements that celebrate their centenaries this year—Zionism and the Bund—the first, founded at a glittering ceremony in Basle, Switzerland, in August 1897, can surely boast of greater historical achievements than its coeval, formed by thirteen representatives of Jewish socialist groups meeting conspiratorially in a small, nondescript house in Vilna two months later...
...Its dream of a socialist revolution that would free both Jew and non-Jew economically, politically, and nationally, proved a mirage...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
