Embracing 'hereness': A secular Jewish, anti-Zionist movement is reborn

If you are a Jew disgusted by Israel’s ongoing destruction of the Palestinian people, or a secular Jew who feels connected to your heritage in an ethnic or cultural sense but don’t believe in God, or if you are dating someone who fits both or either of these categories—or simply wish that you were—you need to know The Jewish Labor Bund.

Nearly exterminated by the Nazis, persecuted by Stalin’s communists, scattered around the world in small enclaves, often painfully mistaken for the fascist German American Bund, this atheist, social-democratic, Jewish, anti-Zionist movement is in a current state of revival. 

History

The Bund (Yiddish and German for federation) was founded on October 7, 1897 when thirteen Jewish radicals met in the attic of a dilapidated house on the edge of Vilnius, Lithuania. Their main goals included social democracy, cultural autonomy for Jews and other minorities, empowering workers to gain humane working conditions and fair pay, improving the welfare of the poor and the sick, and advancing Yiddish language, arts, and culture.

The movement was a huge success: the Bund organized trade unions and co-ops, built schools and camps, organized self-defense units, agitated against the ruling regimes, enhanced leftist political collaboration, published newspapers and magazines, and with tens of thousands of members, ultimately constituted the largest socialist group in the Russian Empire in the first half of the 20th century.

Key Bundist ideals

First and foremost of the ideals of the Bund is “hereness” – or in Yiddish, Do-ee-kayt. The Bund has always believed that Jews, as a diasporic people, should make their homes wherever they are, in solidarity with their fellow countrymen and women, fighting against persecution and for equal rights for themselves and others, in the countries in which they reside. 

Second is anti-Zionism. For the Bund, establishing a Jewish nation in what was once the ancient kingdom of Israel is problematic because it displaces and oppresses the Palestinian people, who have lived there for centuries. Furthermore, being fiercely anti-nationalistic, the Bund is repelled by the chauvinism, tribalism, and ethnocentrism that inevitably pulses through the veins of all nationalisms, including the Zionist enterprise. 

Third is social democracy, or democratic socialism, which opposes the dangerous dogma and anti-democracy of communism as well as the inequality and exploitation inherent to capitalism. Social democracy seeks a “middle way,” entailing a strong welfare state, political freedom, economic democracy, and a society that places human, animal, and environmental wellbeing above profits and the short-term gains of the corporate class.  

Fourth is secularism, which emphasizes both the needful separation of church and state, as well as a naturalistic, humanistic worldview that rejects faith in deities who we can pray to for help and, rather, accepts that we must rely on ourselves to solve our problems, alleviate suffering, and ensure justice. 

Fifth is Yiddish. A Germanic language originating in the 12th century, an official language of Sweden, with a long and rich history of literature, poetry, scholarship, lore, theater, music, and film, Yiddish was spoken by nearly 12 million people prior to the Holocaust. Long the mother tongue of most Jews–85% of those killed in the Holocaust were Yiddish-speaking—the language was never quite able to recover from that extermination.

The Bund in the Holocaust 

The Bund played a valiant role during the Holocaust. Much of the heroic armed resistance carried out by the Jews was led by Bundists. The Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Bialystok ghetto uprising, also those in Łódź, Vilna, Lublin, and elsewhere, and the many partisan groups in the forests, as well as the heroic revolts in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz – Bundists were central to all. 

Tragically, the Bund was decimated in the Holocaust, a catastrophe which some could argue exposed the naïvete of the Bund’s optimistic emphasis on hereness/Do-ee-kayt. After all, with the exception of Denmark, every other country where Jews were slated for extinction either actively collaborated with the Nazis or did precious little to help the Jews in their midst. And no country outside of Europe was willing to help the Jews in their darkest hour. Then, after the war, the Soviets proceeded to arrest, torture, kill, and oppress the Jews in their expansive domain, thereby exposing the futility of seeking Jewish survival via active comradeship with other ardent leftists. And, of course, those Jewish Zionists who were able to flee Hitler and Stalin and settle in Palestine, well, they not only survived, but flourished, establishing a new nation. 

Israel today

If the idea of being both Jewish and secular is new to you, it isn't new to Jews. Even the Israeli Jewish population has a very large secular presence, and ever-larger over time. A 2021 survey by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics found that 45% of adult Jews in Israel self-identify as secular. The number is similar in the US and around 20-30% elsewhere around the world.

So the secular Jews in the reborn Bund fit comfortably in the global trend.

Most Jews living outside of Israel today are not Zionists. They prefer to live where they are, be it Argentina, Germany, or the USA, rather than move to Israel. But after the unfathomable destruction of the Holocaust, most Jews around the world have been proud and glad that Israel exists: a nation of and for Jews, with military strength to repel any future attempts at extermination. Israel also became a sort of national insurance policy for the Jews of the diaspora: If things ever get really bad, there’s always Israel to escape to – an option Jews have never had before.

Unfortunately, this Zionist success created its own victims—the Palestinians. Although the Jews accepted a two-state solution many times – a compromise that was rejected by the Palestinians just as many times – that sound solution was abandoned by the Israeli government decades ago, as it began building extensive settlements in what should be a free and independent Palestinian state. Today, these settlements number in the thousands – crushing any chance of a peaceful future for either peoples. The Israeli occupation of these Palestinians lands has created an apartheid reality, characterized by structured inequality, systemic injustice, continual land theft, daily humiliations, state-sanctioned settler violence against Palestinian villagers, and nonstop Israeli violations of human rights and international law.

The current war in Gaza, undertaken in response to Hamas’s kill-as-many-civilians-as-possible assault on Israel, has resulted in more and more diaspora Jews horrified by the death and maiming of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. While Hamas shoulders blame for embedding itself among Gaza’s civilians in explicit violation of international law, it is Israel that is dropping the bombs, day after day after day, thereby rapidly eroding its own claims to any moral superiority. Add to this US-subsidized Gazan bloodbath an Israeli society that is growing increasingly religious and increasingly anti-democratic and, well, it is easy to see why so many younger, progressive, secular, non-Zionist Jews are feeling increasingly alienated from Israel.

Rekindling The Bund for tomorrow

Thus, today, the Bund is experiencing signs of revival because it offers progressive, secular, non-Zionist Jews—and their allies—community, heritage, values, and hope.

The New Yiddish Bund of Binghamton University, to cite one example, was established in 2023, and holds various political and cultural events. IfNotNow, a burgeoning organization that emphasizes Palestinian rights and Jewish values has close ties with Bundism, drawing inspiration from its historical vision. Popular musicians, such as Isabel Frey, have come out as Bundists. Molly Crabapple, the cutting-edge artist and author, has a major new book Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, being published by Random House this coming year. Bund-sympathetic periodicals such as Jewish Currents are seeing an uptick in subscriptions. In Melbourne, Australia, which is home to the most active Bundist branch in the world, there is an active youth group, summer camp, and ongoing cultural events. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York maintains a vast archival collection of Bundist writings and memorabilia. And the Bund’s presence on Instagram is growing, with the chapter in Germany now having over 14,000 followers, and the chapter in Montana boasting over 300.

Last Spring, walking across the campus of Pitzer College, a liberal arts institution in Claremont, California where I have worked for over 25 years, I came upon a student wearing a shirt with Hebrew lettering. As I approached him, I could see that it wasn’t something in the Hebrew language that his shirt was proclaiming. Rather, it was Yiddish: דאָיִקייט – Yup, that’s right: “Do-ee-kayt.” Hereness.

The student knew of the Bund. As did his friends. As, now, do you.