What was the old Jewish left and what does the memory of it mean at our own critical inflection point in contemporary Jewish history both in Israel and across the Diaspora? On the anti-Zionist left today, all kinds of claims and counterclaims revolve specifically around the Bund, but with almost no historical context. For theoretical clarity, I am organizing in this post my reading notes on social historians. I want to map conceptually the Bund as a distinctly intra-collective social phenomenon. My own area of interest is modern and contemporary Jewish thought and culture, a subset of which includes politics and the political imagination. Posted below are very long passages that I have selected from social historians who specialize(d) in this area of study; their work is iconic in its own right for the light they shed on this phenomenon.
Regarding the old Jewish left, I am constellating tentative takeaways from Jonathan Frankel, Ezra Mendelsohn, and others around a few elemental nodes: [1] the critical tension between universalism and particularism, socialism and Jewishness, internationalism and nationalism, [2] collective-group formation and autonomous self-organization, [3] the place and time of modern Jews on the left in the world in the Diaspora caught between “here” and “there” and the past and the future.
In retrospect, the least interesting thing about the Bund is the opposition between anti-Zionism and Zionism. As per Frankel, “The truth is that the socialists were actively hostile to the Palestine movement, argued against it, regarded it as a threat, and in attacking it were influenced by its mode of thought” (Prophecy and Politics, p.195). The reason is simple enough. First, Bundists and Socialist Zionists were part of the same social fabric and social class; their politics represent the same acute suffering of a Jewish proletariat, the personal and collective experience of which the New Jewish Left emerging in the 1960s had little in common. Secondly, from early on the Bund embraced a national program of social transformation and cultural autonomy. This rich fabric recognized in the eclectic mix of socialist expression collected by Tony Michels in Jewish Radicals: A Documentary Reader. Bundist, Zionist, Territorialist, Socialist Party, and Communist were separate but interwoven threads in a far-flung universe representing a nexus of working-class Jewish labor and Jewish mass politics.
Jewish Socialism
Jonathan Frankel understood the term “Jewish socialism” as referring to “those socialist individuals, groups, and emergent movements that sought to establish a political role for themselves or their ideas specifically within the Russian-Jewish world (which in the late nineteenth century, of course, was still overwhelmingly Yiddish-speaking)” (“The Roots of ‘Jewish Socialism’ (1 8 8 1 – 1 8 9 2 ): From ‘Populism’ to ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ p.58, emphasis added). It’s an intra-communal model that by definition excludes Jewish communists or other “Jews on the left” who organize outside the Jewish social body.
Late Emergence
Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund (The General Union of Jewish Workers) as a prominent movement on the Jewish left in eastern Europe emerged at a moment of unfolding crises in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Frankel suggests that Jewish socialism came second. A latecomer in “the modernization of Jewish life,” it only developed after “socialist internationalism and Jewish nationalism were already firmly established as possible options for the post-traditional Jew” (Prophecy and Politics, p.552). Daniel Blatman gives an excellent historical overview of the emergence of the Bund starting at its founding in 1897, the transition to a Jewish national program, its elimination in Russia after the Revolution in 1917, and its reemergence in Poland during the interwar years. The Bund did not take off in the United States where Jews active on the left did so primarily outside a Jewish communal or collective umbrella. Instead of seeing Jewish socialism as an import from eastern Europe the United States, Tony Michels demonstrates how Jewish socialism emerged as a force in New York City in the 1890s and was then transplanted back to eastern Europe).
Influence
What were the scope and limits of the Bund’s actual influence as a movement of Jewish socialism? Joshua Myers traces how the Bund buckled under weight of anti-Semitic violence after its first heyday in 1905. “A majority of Bundists, including many of the party leaders, aligned with the Communist regime, while many of their opponents split off to form a Social-Democratic Bund. The Communist Bund would be absorbed into the Russian Communist Party in 1920, their opponents liquidated in 1921…Still, it was not until 1936 that the Bund began to play a major role in Polish politics, and even then, it was restricted to local politics, primarily in Warsaw and Łodz. Two years later, the party would finally break through on the national level, claiming an estimated 38% of the votes cast for Jewish parties in the municipal elections of December 1938-January 1939. The Zionists, their rivals, claimed 39%, but this was split between two parties—a general list that won 36% and the Left-Poalei Zion, a small faction that hoped to build a Yiddish-speaking society in Palestine ruled by workers’ councils, which won 3%.”
A Subworld
The old Jewish socialism was a microcosmos in the big-little world of Jewish society in the grim world of the Pale of Settlement at a moment of decay. Frankel calls it as a “subworld” (Prophecy and Politics, p.552, 556). As Ezra Mendelsohn contends, “Any consideration of the achievements or the lack of achievements of interwar Jewish politics must…take into account the success of Jewish politics in creating satisfying subcultures, little worlds that supplied a wide range of services to their adherents” (On Jews and Modern Politics, p.122). As a subworld, it combines elements of fantasy and quotidian culture. (That Mendelsohn’s book is so richly illustrated with art is by design.) Old Jewish socialism mingles politics and the critical imagination into an alternate reality. It mapped out a different world, a realized utopia set apart and set inside the larger social world of Jews set apart and set inside the larger surrounding national cultures of eastern Europe in which it sought a place for the reorganization of Jewish labor, politics, society, and culture free from the scourge of anti-Jewish violence at a moment of historical upheaval.
Once upon a time, socialism was a way of life. There is nothing like this today. About old Jewish socialism in the United States, Tony Michels writes, “Countless young American Jews absorbed socialism at their kitchen tables, in the streets, in summer camps, on school playgrounds, and in working-class housing cooperatives where the atmosphere was thick with socialist ideologies. ‘Socialism was a way of life, since everyone else I knew in New York was a Socialist, more or less,’ the writer Alfred Kazin recalls. ‘I was a Socialist as so many Americans were ‘Christians.’ I had always lived in a Socialist atmosphere.’ Family and neighborhood, in other words, predisposed many Jewish children to the Left, even as socialism’s universalistic vision offered a path—an “exit visa,” in the words of one sociologist—away from the Jewish people” (“Introduction: The Jewish-Socialist Nexus,” p.13).
The “exit visa” from Jewish parochialism did not come with a simple one-way ticket. “With the important exception of socialist-Zionists,” Michels contends, “American-born radicals usually viewed Jewish affairs as a parochial distraction from the class struggle and other matters of seemingly larger significance. This desire to escape Jewish particularity had antecedents in the immigrant experience…. In any case, such negations of Jewish identity diminished over time, often in direct correlation to persecutions of Jews in Europe. After all, railing against Jewish ethnocentrism hardly seemed the most appropriate way to respond to a pogrom” (“Introduction: The Jewish-Socialist Nexus,” p.12). About dining room table Jewish culture once upon a time in the United States, I would point to Kazin’s evocation in his memoir Walker In the City. Written at midcentury looking back to his youth in the 1920s in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, Kazin paints a deeply moving picture of the Sabbath table as a site of adolescent sexual awakening and a paean to socialism. Something of this memory carried forward well into the 1960s and 1970s of the American melting pot. The picture continues to linger as an active, nostalgic after-impression in the imagination of young middleclass Jews on the U.S. left in the post-suburban social milieu evoked most recently in Joshua Leifer’s recent Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life.
The mass mobilization of Jewish youth in political movements during the interwar years stands out as cornerstone of the structural microcosmos that was Jewish society in eastern Europe. Ezra Mendelsohn notes the vast majority of Jewish youth participated in political movements. Placing the youth movements in their time and place as counterculture, he explains,“[F]or hundreds and thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe the youth movement, and then the political party, was particularly attractive because it seemed to offer a happy alternative to grim Jewish reality. The rapid growth of the youth movements was a result of the Jewish crisis in interwar Eastern Europe—increasing economic misery, increasing antisemitism, the feeling that there was no future, and the belief that one’s parents were at a loss to map out the path to a satisfying life. This crisis, much greater than the one that affected American Jews during the Great Depression, produced a vacuum into which stepped Betar, Hashomer ha-tsair, Skif, and all the other groups, promising not only friendship, not only relationships on an equal basis with people of the opposite sex, not only gaiety, but also something more profound. In the memoir literature one encounters descriptions of Jewish life in Poland that emphasize its “emptiness” (pustkeyt), its ‘grayness,’ its ‘disorder’ (umordnung). To escape from this one joined an organizatsye—the word itself is of great significance—a world that stood for a life that was “rational” and “planned,” a world that emphasized the virtues of carrying out orders and bearing responsibility, a world of ‘strictness and punctuality.’ Great emphasis was placed on outings to the countryside, where the young Jews were introduced to the harmony of nature, so different from the ugliness of the town” (On Modern Jewish Politics, pp.120-2).
Jewish Socialism and Socialist Internationalism
The contemporary turn to the Bund by Jews on the anti-Zionist left in no way resolves the deep contradictions at work in the lifeworld of modern Jewish politics. Despite current questions today about the contradiction or non-contradiction between Zionism and democracy, the tension was not, in fact, unique to Zionism. Yiddish culture and the Bund, “here” at home in the Diaspora did not escape the coil between particularism and universalism. On a most basic level, there is no Jewish modernity outside the many varieties of this constituent problematic.
Writing about the Jewish left in the United States, Tony Michels points out what I would call the irony of Jews on the left. “The early Jewish socialists,” he writes, “viewed themselves not as building a new Jewish culture in Yiddish (they denied such a thing was possible) but as preparing the masses to transcend their own allegedly parochial culture. Their goal, in Abraham Cahan’s words, was ‘to erase all boundaries between Jew and non-Jew in the labor world.’ ‘We are no patriots of a special `Jewish labor movement,’ Cahan’s colleague Louis Miller explained in 1892. ‘We would like the Jews to be members of the American unions.’ And yet, in their efforts to organize and educate (‘enlighten’) immigrant Jews, socialists built –in spite of themselves– a distinct Jewish labor movement”(Fire in Their Hearts, p.31).
In eastern Europe, Jonathan Frankel refers to the “double alienation” with which members of the Bund grappled. Jews on the left were “at once estranged from, and drawn to, the ways and problems of their own nationality, on the one hand, and a Russian or universalist political philosophy, on the other (Prophecy and Politics, p.3). Frankel’s analysis continues, “Bound together in conspiratorial brotherhood, the leadership could never cut the Gordian knot, could never finally decide whether its first duty lay with the international proletariat or with national liberation. In this respect, perhaps, it reflected more faithfully than any other movement the divided soul of the modern Jewish intelligentsia (Ibid., p.185).
Autonomy
Not merely communal, the formation of Jewish socialism as part of a distinctly “national” project was a relatively late phenomenon, a byproduct of anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe, and in competition with Zionism. Tony Michels recalls how, “In 1899 the Bund’s program advocated only for civil and political rights for Russian Jews. Two years later the Bund made the important step of identifying Jews as a nation and, in 1903, adopted the demand of ‘national cultural autonomy’ for Russian Jews” (A Fire in Their Hearts, p.142?). As explained further by David Slucki, “Bundists were central to the establishment, a year later, of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party; in 1903, however, the Bund withdrew from the Russian party after being denied federative status as an autonomous Jewish party. Although it began with an interest primarily in combating the special barriers that Jewish workers faced, in 1901 the Bund adopted, at its fourth conference, a national program calling for a federated Russia that would provide constituent nations with national-cultural autonomy, a concept borrowed from the Austro-Marxists” (The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, p.3).
The transition from internationalism to a national Jewish program lies at the core of Frankel’s scholarship as it relates particularly to the Bund. About this he writes, “In May 1895, [Martov’s lecture], delivered to some forty worker-agitators, was published in 1900 and was entitled A Turning Point in the History of the Jewish Labor Movement (in Russian) and A New Epoch in the History of the Jewish Labor Movement (in Yiddish). ‘Our movement,’ he said there, ‘has become first more democratic and, second, more materialist… The object of our activity…is not the worker-intelligent who is divorced from his environment by his mental abilities, his need for education, but the average worker of the masses with his average needs, average morality, and average level of development. The materialist character of our movement today…consists of the fact that all our hopes and expectations depend not on a faith in the omnipotence of our ideas… but…on the needs of the masses.’ But in becoming more democratic and more mass-oriented, Martov continued, the movement had inevitably become more national in character. ‘[Previously], relegating the Jewish working-class movement to second place, we tended to scorn the realities of its existence, and this attitude found expression in the fact that we conducted our work in the Russian language’…[But] life has forced us to change our tactics…While we tied all our hopes to the general Russian movement we —without even noticing it ourselves-raised the Jewish movement to a height not yet attained by the Russian one . . . Having placed the mass movement in the center of our program we had to adapt our propaganda and education to the mass, that is make it more Jewish. What was now required was to recognize the logic dictated by experience, to translate the unconscious gains made hitherto into a conscious organizational program for the future: The goal of the Social Democrats working in the Jewish sphere [should be] to create a separate Jewish labor organization which would lead and teach the Jewish proletariat in the struggle for economic, civil and political liberation” (Prophecy and Politics, p.174).
Do’ikayt
Appearing late at the historical twilight of the Bund, the slogan Do’ikayt, Yiddish for “Hereness,” conveyed the notion that the fight for socialism was here at home, here where Jews are. It was a principle that flew in the face of social history at a dis-locative moment of anti-Jewish violence and genocide, and mass emigration when European Jews left had little choice but to leave here for there.
About the appearance of the actual term (as opposed to the idea and ideology it instantiated), there is some confusion. Ezra Mendelsohn writing about Poland in the 1930s introduces the theme in its relatively late Polish context. “The Bund was the great apostle of doikeyt on the ‘Jewish street’—its slogan, ‘We remain here.’ In a novel of Polish Jewish life in the 1930s, the Polish mayor of a little town asks Hersh when he will be leaving for Palestine with all the other Jews. Hersh may not have been a Bundist, but his reply was in keeping with that party’s most fervently held position: ‘It’s no use, Wojtusz. We Jews must live here together with you in Smolin. This is the way it has always been.’ Such stubborn optimism may have been admirable, but why should it have appealed to the Jewish masses at a time of growing economic misery and rising antisemitism. The Bund was also the great advocate of cooperation with the Polish left despite its disapproval of what it regarded as the too-nationalistic line of the main Polish socialist party” (On Modern Jewish Politics, p.76).
“Do’ikayt” has its own strange place and time in the history of Jewish socialism. Long since forgotten and only recently remembered, it seems that the term was articulated only after World War II and the destruction of European Jewry. Flying in the face of reality, the principle speaks to the ghostly hereness of a Jewish collective that was no longer there, in Poland. Do’ikayt is a retroactive concept from when the Jewish left in eastern Europe had just lost its actual place in time. About this, David Slucki observes, “To the best of my abilities I have established that the term “do’ikayt” seems most likely to have gained in usefulness only after World War Two to describe a set of beliefs originating in the interwar period” (The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, p.207).
Madeleine Adkins Cohen confirms this late dating of what turns out to be a postwar theoretical object. She explains, “The term ‘do’ikayt’ appears only to have gained popularity and usage in the immediate post-World War II period when the ideological debate between Bundists (members of der algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund, the General Jewish Workers Bund), scattered around the world and Zionists on the cusp of Israeli statehood became especially—and perhaps surprisingly—heated. While recent scholarship on Jewish national politics in the first half of the twentieth century often uses the term to describe Bundist ideology, especially in the interwar period, nothing that I have come across traces the term back to actual use in the interwar period. It remains something of a mystery how the term has become so accepted in historical and cultural scholarship of the last few decades with such sparse ties to the period and ideologies it is used to describe. The best answer I have at this point is a sudden rise in usage by Bundists and perhaps especially by Zionists critiquing Bundist ideology in the immediate postwar period. The debate about Jewish territory and belonging took on new intensity and immediacy as displaced Jews decided where to live after the end of the war and as Israeli statehood became a reality. These debates become the basis for political and historical reassessments of territorialism, antiterritorialism, the Bund’s legacy, and Zionism’s ‘victory’” (Here and Now: The Modernist Poetics of Do’ikayt, pp.3-4).
Allies+ Class war
Questions regarding non-Jewish allies and alliances and intra-Jewish antagonism have always been a key component of all modern Jewish political movements –liberal, rightwing and leftwing, Zionist, ultra-orthodox, nationalists, socialists.
Regarding Jews on the left, Ezra Mendelsohn explains with characteristic wit, “The alliance with the gentiles signified not only comradeship but also power. It is said that the leaders of the tiny Montenegran people were fond of boasting that they, together with their allies the Russians, numbered over one hundred million people. For Jews on the left the longed-for alliance with the international working class signified their transformation from a despised and powerless minority into an integral part of a mighty force, potentially the majority of mankind. This must have been, from a psychological point of view, an extremely satisfying compensation for the loss of old certainties, of God and Torah” (On Modern Jewish Politics, p.100, see pp.99-103).
But who were the actual allies of the Jews or of the Bund on the left in Russia before the Russian Revolution or in Poland between the wars? On the one hand, according to Frankel, “For the Bund, the challenge from the Russian Social Democrats [the RSDRP led by the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks –zjb] presented incomparably more difficult problems than did the conflict with the PPS or the Zionists. After all, the entire ideology of the Bund was based on the idea that the Jewish movement (albeit self-governing) formed an integral unit in the international but Russian-centered party. To have to decide between loyalty to the Russian party and to Bundism, as it had developed by 1901, was a cruel choice indeed” (Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 227). Frankel’s detailed analysis of the full-bore attack against the Bund orchestrated by Lenin and others at the Second Congress of the RSDRP in 1903 assigning primary importance to the confrontation with the Bund makes for painful reading (ibid., 227-46)
On the other hand, did the slogan of the Bund even make sense? “Workers, organize yourselves within one party but with national subdivisions” (Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, p.248)? In the end, the Bund was menaced politically, not by Zionists, but by the allies in RSDRP. “As long as its principal rivals were on the right,” writes Frankel, “the leadership [of the Bund] slowly moved toward the idea of a fully autonomous Jewish socialist party, combining class war with the defense of national interests…It saw the opportunity to preempt the cause of Diaspora nationalism, revolutionary and socialist, and by 1901 it had moved far and effectively to do so. But when…the challenge came from the ‘internationalist Left,’ the Bund was thrown into a deep inner crisis from which there could be no satisfactory escape” (Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, p.257).
Of a piece with alliance politics, intra-Jewish class war was a mainstay of the Jewish left. I don’t have a lot on this in my reading notes, except for Dubnov’s criticism of the Bund taken from Jonathan Frankel.“The basic assumption of Bundist ideology, that the accentuation of class divisions and class warfare within the Jewish people was in the best interests of the nation, became the cause of bitter attacks from the ‘bourgeois’ leaders of the Union for Equal Rights. The Bund, Dubnov wrote in December 1905, ‘declares its pretensions to be the representative of our national interests . . . but the alienation of these Marxist fanatics was revealed in tragic form during the recent events. Together with their comrades from the Russian socialist organizations, they are profoundly convinced that the Russian people are called upon to carry through a revolution of the highest order which will enable it in one fell swoop to leap all historical barriers, even a democratic constitution, directly to a ‘people’s government’ or to a democratic republic or even a little further-to social revolution . . . How has this mystical Russian [russkii] nationalism seized hold of you, gentlemen, the Jewish Social Democrats, you, brothers and sisters, who have just experienced on your broken skulls one of the historic “missions” of the Russian people, making 1905 analogous to 1648 (read 1648 not 1848)?’” (Prophets and Politics, p.253).
With his eye on the old Soviet Union in particular, Mendelsohn’s own conclusions were judicious in their mordant wit regarding the general promise and failure of Jewish-gentile alliance politics on the left. “The most charitable interpretation that can be put on this sad alliance between Jewish radicals who would not harm a fly and a wicked regime that murdered millions of innocent people is that it derived at least in part from the existential situation of a persecuted minority that, especially in the 1930s, found itself under an attack of unprecedented dimensions led by nazism, the “native” fascist movements of East Central Europe, and by less powerful but nonetheless frightening forces in America” (On Modern Jewish Politics, p.102). “Nonetheless, a chapter dealing with the sources of appeal to Jews of various political movements must emphasize the tremendous power of the vision of an alliance between Jews and all progressive mankind—Polish and Russian workers, American blacks, all the dispossessed and powerless, struggling together for a better world, for a just society, against the forces of evil embodied by nazism. It was, I believe, one of the great heroic visions of modern Jewish politics, and if it had, to put it mildly, its unpleasant side, so did the others” (On Modern Jewish Politics, p.103).
Israel
Critical doubts regarding the coherence of doi’kait as a slogan today on the anti-Zionist left have nothing to do with the epic failure of alliance politics or the destruction of the Jews in Europe. It has everything to do with brute social-demographic facts made manifest by the establishment of the State of Israel as a dominant center of Jewish life in the world today.
At our own historical distance, it is easy to overlook that the most interesting critiques of Zionism from Jews on the left had little to do with imperialism and colonialism and the so-called Arab question in Palestine. Anti-Zionism was an inner-Jewish critique reflecting Jewish political exigencies. Almost to a person, the early critics assembled by Tony Michels in Jewish Radicals: A Documentary Reader argued that Zionism was an impractical solution to actual Jewish political problems. The Zionist idea was nothing more than a “dream,” not “real.” Socialism represented the real solution to the challenge of Jewish liberation. At most, it was argued, the isolated settlement in Palestine might accommodate a mere two or three million Jews. But the Jewish society and culture built there would be a small thing indeed relative to the great powers and more culturally advanced countries in Europe and the United Stats. Against utopian schemes, Zionism harmed socialist internationalism which was imagined as being really real and not an empty scheme. Ironically, the only one in Michel’s reader expressing concern about Arab dignity in Palestine was Hayim Greenberg, an American Labor Zionist who visited Palestine in the 1930s and met with Jews, Arabs, and British administrators. Because their orientation at the time was purely class-based, Jewish socialists on the anti-Zionist left failed to see the national character of the Jewish and Arab-Palestinian politics in British Mandate Palestine.
In retrospect, the establishment of the State of Israel becomes part of the history of the Bund, as made clear by David Slucki. Concerning the major policy reversal at the 1955, third world conference in Montreal, “the world Bund officially endorsed Israel as a positive factor in Jewish life” (The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, p.173). Slucki shows how, after the war, the Bund sought to reconcile “its antipathy toward Zionism and its support for one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, which was growing in Israel at an exponential rate… Bundism very quickly transformed to accommodate Jewish statehood…The Bund’s relationship with Israel was complex. Torn between support for the state’s existence and its critical stance vis-à-vis Zionism, the Bund sought a path that could resolve the tension between its doykayt, which did not privilege any Jewish community above another, and the very real role that Israel could and did play on the world Jewish stage..” Slucki quotes a leader of the postwar Bund in Israel, “We are not Zionists. We don’t have the illusions that the Zionists have with regard to the state. It is also true that we never strived for Jewish statehood, because our ideals were higher and broader than a tiny little state surrounded by enemies.” It was argued that, despite this, “the destiny of the Jewish people is precious” to Bundists, so “if a Jewish state exists, why would we be ‘outsiders’ and ‘enemies’ when we live in the state? When our own success depends on its success? (ibid., p.197). Slucki cites another postwar leader of the Bund that “the continuity of the Jewish people lay not in the rise or fall of the state, but in the ascent of democracy. In the present time, he argued, the Jews’ national destiny was in their own hands, and their self-determination was a consequence of their living in democratic countries” (ibid.,p.206).
These principles of self-determination, democracy, and skepticism of state power represented by the Bund after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel still cohere today as guiding normative politics across the entire Jewish left.
Utopian-Futurism
There never was and there never will be socialism apart from a stake in utopian fantasy and the futuristic imagination. The very aesthetic of old Jewish socialism reflected broader trends in the radical culture of the short-lived Russian avant-garde (Cubo-Futurism of early Chagall, the Constructivism of Lissitzky and Rodchenko, and so on). In Bundist and other Jewish socialist and communist poster art/agit prop from the period, we see imagined the energetic dissolving of old forms conveyed in experimental typography and sharp geometric shapes, a bold but ultimately monotonous palette of red and black, the social drama of militant motion in abstract time and place.
As a modernist movement in Jewish politics, the old Jewish left expressed belief in the future. Per Jonathan Frankel, socialism stood out as “a movement of new men [sic] who were fighting the past and already living in the future, in a new world undivided by outmoded ethnic barriers” (Prophecy and Politics, p.6). Mendelsohn saw as well how, “Finally, the people and organizations belonging to this school of Jewish politics evinced great optimism regarding the future of the Jewish Diaspora. History, they believed, was on their side. Reason would triumph over medieval superstition. The artificial walls separating the Jews from the rest of mankind would, like the walls of ancient Jericho, come tumbling down. When they did, the aims of the Central-Verein, the Alliance, the American Jewish Committee, and their sister organizations would be fulfilled at last. The barriers to advancement would collapse, allowing fully acculturated, patriotic Jews to bring their great talents to bear in the advancement of society for the general good (On Modern Jewish Politics, p.16).
EPILOGUE
What are the real effects of a simulacral presence? With each passing generation, the Jewish left in the United States more and more will have lost that material base in a thick social Jewishness that was the condition of possibility and the vital source of energy for the old Jewish left. But,“[f]or better or worse,” Ezra Mendelson insists, “the old association with the left still has an impact— hard to measure but palpable— on the modern Jewish ‘mentality.’ The struggle for social justice and the campaign against racial and other forms of prejudice can still count on considerable Jewish support. Historians are not prophets, but it is likely that the next round of radical left-wing activity in the Western world, whenever it comes, will once again find willing Jewish recruits (introduction to Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, p.12-13).
In the Diaspora today, Jews no longer represent a large social mass. Jewish politics in the Diaspora is integrationist insofar as looks outwards, assuming institutional place in civil society. Insofar as it looks inward, Jewish politics is communal, not collective. Jewish politics aren’t mass movement politics. Politics on the radical Jewish left is internecine and sectarian vis-à-vis the larger Jewish social body represented by institutions and the “Jewish establishment.” In Israel, Jewish politics is, indeed, national, but the left and especially the radical left in Israel today represent niche politics.
I want to conclude this long post with a nod to the richly illustrated manifesto by “Di Luftmenschen.” It is, in its own right, a product of the political imagination, akin to science fiction by Octavia Butler. Reconstructing the Jewish collective is at its heart. The authors are cognizant of Israel (“the seed of a re-mingled people with no homes to return to”). (As a Zionist, much harsher things could be written about Israel.) But the manifesto is written over here and in spaces between here and there. It is an unapologetic Diasporist manifest for tomorrow. There is the anti-assimilationist call for new communal-social and interpersonal structures and values, commitment to Jewish solidarity, and a critique of techno-capitalism. At our apocalyptic moment, the Jewish temporalties are steeped in futurism and “cultural time travel.”
Bibliography:
Daniel Blatman, Bund, https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/146
Joshua Meyers, “The Bund by the Numbers: The Ebbs and Flows of a Jewish Radical Party” https://ingeveb.org/blog/the-bund-by-the-numbers
Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862—1917
Jonathan Frankel, “The Roots of ‘Jewish Socialism’ (1 8 8 1 – 1 8 9 2 ): From ‘Populism’ to ‘Cosmopolitanism,’” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left https://laliberationschool.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/frankel.pdf
Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics
Ezra Mendelsohn, Essential Papers on Jews and the Left
Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Jewish Socialists in New York
Tony Michels, “Introduction: The Jewish-Socialist Nexus,” in Michels (ed.), Jewish Radicals: A Documentary Reader
David Slucki, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History
Madeleine Atkins Cohen, Here and Now: The Modernist Poetics of Do’ikayt (dissertation)
Di Luftmenschen https://ia800103.us.archive.org/23/items/5784-1/5784-1.pdf
