Do the Neo-Bundists Know What Country They Live In?

An idea whose time has definitively passed tries for a new lease on life

For many years, I’ve found it irritating when American Jews call themselves fierce Zionists, because the fiercest version of Zionism asserts that there is something defective about Jewish existence outside of Israel. If you claim to be a fierce Zionist, then, why haven’t you moved there? I am fully aware that there are versions of Zionism that don’t make such unequivocal claims or demands, like Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionism, but by the same token these strains are less fierce, more self-critical. In any event, I’ve often felt that there’s an element of cosplay involved in such displays, an element of armchair warriorhood, and that kind of thing doesn’t sit well with me.

Well, the American Jewish left may be about to lap the American Jewish right in that regard. Molly Crabapple has a new book out, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which aims to resurrect the Jewish Bund of the pre-war Russian Empire and, after that country’s collapse and transformation into the Soviet Union, of Eastern Europe. Why resurrect the Bund? Because the Bund was left-wing and Socialist but not Communist, was anti-Zionist but also anti-assimilationist, and so seems ideally suited to the contemporary identitarian left. As Crabapple herself says, she wanted to give contemporary Jewish leftists a set of ancestors they could look back to, a potential identity that would reinforce their existing political commitments while deepening them Jewishly.

There’s only one problem: Bundism has essentially nothing to do with Jewish life as it actually exists in America, or really anywhere else in the world. It’s pure nostalgic cosplay.

Before saying anything further, I should stress that I haven’t read Crabapple’s book, and it’s possible that she deals with all of my possible objections. Those objections, therefore, shouldn’t be taken as a response to her book so much as a response to the fact of her book in the context of conversations—and I’ve had a number of them—with young Jews who are already treading the path that it seems to me from descriptions of the book—including her own—that she is laying out for them.

The original Jewish Bund was a response to the actual conditions of Jewish life in late Tsarist Russia. Jews were a minority that was discriminated against both socially and legally, that spoke a distinct language (Yiddish) that had evolved over hundreds of years in response to conditions of social isolation, and that were predominantly laborers, artisans and tradespeople. None of that is true of American Jews today. American Jews are well integrated into American social and political life and face no legal or social obstacles to their advancement; indeed, so assimilated are American Jews that for decades now Jewish organizations have been wringing their hands about intermarriage as being the great threat to Jewish continuity in America. Yiddish remains a living language, but only in the context of insular ultra-Orthodox religious communities; outside of that world, it’s a subject of academic study and a pursuit for hobbyists, not a living organism. Most important, American Jews are significantly wealthier on average than the overall American population, and are overrepresented in the professions. There absolutely still is Jewish poverty in America, but it is concentrated in the ultra-Orthodox community and in immigrant communities, particularly elderly immigrants. The chasm between this social base and the social base of the original Bund is unbridgeably vast.

Another disjunction may be less obvious, but I suspect it is equally important: though America is home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world, Jews are a much smaller minority in America than they were in Tsarist Russia—and yet they are far more diverse internally than were the Jews of the Russian Empire. According to the 1897 census of the Russian Empire, 4% of the empire’s population spoke Yiddish as a first language, roughly congruent with the percentage counted as “religiously” Jewish (the census had no category for religiously alienated or unaffiliated; if you came from a Jewish background, you were Jewish even if you threw your tefillin in the Dniester and ate pork). That’s a little less than double the percentage of the American population—but the potential potency of the original Jewish Bund was greater than this comparison suggests because of how the Jewish population was distributed. Specifically, Yiddish speakers were nearly 15% of the urban population in Russia in 1897, whereas in America their percentage of the urban population is only slightly larger than their percentage of the population at large, because 80% of Americans live in urban areas (which include suburbs) whereas Russia in 1897 was far more rural. In Odessa—the most Jewish city in Russia and the fourth largest city in the empire, with half the population of the capital, St. Petersburg—Jews comprised more than 35% of the population. (I note in passing that Ukrainian-speakers comprised less than 6% of the population at that time.) By contrast, in the most Jewish city in America—New York—roughly 12-13% of the population is Jewish.

It’s also worth noting that nearly 30% of New York’s Jewish population is over 65, and nearly 20% is religiously Orthodox, and that the latter population skews significantly younger than other Jewish groups. Moreover, there are other significant Jewish sub-populations in New York who are vanishingly unlikely to be attracted to an ideology of socialism with Yiddish characteristics. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are roughly 10% of the eight-county New York area Jewish population; Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are roughly 6%, which I don’t think includes their English-speaking children and grandchildren. Both groups skew right-wing and are passionately pro-Israel. So in the most Jewish city in America, Jewish youth who might be attracted to Neo-Bundism are a small fraction of what they were in the most Jewish city in the Russian Empire, and might only be a plurality of the area’s Jewish population itself.

Bottom line: the original Jewish Bund could legitimate contest with liberals, Zionists and other left-wing secularist movements (like the Communists) for Jewish support, and know that they were contesting for something significant and burgeoningly powerful. By contrast, in America Jewish power has surely already peaked and is in decline, that power is based on having scaled the heights of America’s meritocracy and fully integrated into its political and social mainstream, and Bundism could only appeal to a fraction of that community on the basis of commitments that have little or nothing to do with their economic, political or social situation.

Then there’s the international situation. In 1897, the Russian Empire was the home to a plurality if not a majority of the world’s Jews. The third largest Jewish population outside of its borders—in the United States—was numerically dominated by emigrants from the Russian Empire, and while the second largest Jewish population—in Austria-Hungary—was highly diverse in religious, economic, political and linguistic terms, a large fraction of the population lived in its eastern Polish, Hungarian and Romanian regions, was poor, spoke Yiddish, and was therefore part of the same cultural matrix from which the Bund emerged in the Russian Empire. The Bund, therefore, could at least plausibly present itself as a political program for the Jews as such.

Today, there are small but meaningful Jewish diaspora populations in a variety of other countries: France, Canada, Argentina, Russia, Germany, Australia, Brazil. Around 1.7 million Jewish live in these countries. Their demographic origins are diverse, and apart from recent immigrants from the Arab world or the former Soviet Union they have long since become attached to their countries. Most of these populations are more right-wing than American Jews, and have a strong identification with Israel. Outside of the ultra-Orthodox communities, none speak Yiddish. It’s hard to see how a nostalgic Neo-Bundism would appeal to them.

Of course the largest Jewish population in the world is in Israel. The original Bund opposed Zionism, preferring to fight for Jewish cultural distinctiveness and political liberation in the countries where they lived, along with labor organizing and ultimately some version of socialism. What does Neo-Bundism have to say to the Jews of Israel, other than “wish you hadn’t gone there?” The original Jewish Bund spoke to a the largest Jewish community—their own—and said: we have a program to make your lives better where you are and without changing who you are. I can understand the appeal of that message! The only message I can imagine a Neo-Bund delivering to Israel’s Jews is the opposite: you must change everything, and lose everything, or else we have nothing to say to you. In that sense, they’d be more comparable to the original Zionists, who told Jews that they had to change everything about how and who they were, move to another country, learn a new language that they would revive from the dead, and, at least in the short term, suffer extreme privation, all in the service of an ideal.

But what is the Neo-Bund’s ideal? So far as I understand it, it’s a world that is multi-cultural, anti-national, and in some sense “socialist,” though what that means in economic terms feels exceedingly vague. That’s not some radical combination; it’s the default stance of the contemporary Brahmin left. What a revival of the Bund would offer American Jews is little more than a way to affiliate comfortably with that ideology without surrendering their Jewish identities. But what does that identity consist of? What might it even consist of? Unlike American Zionists, who can at least look to actually-existing Israel as a source of inspiration for their role-play, the Old Country that Neo-Bundists would be looking back to is long since dead. The Zionists were inspired by a national history that had been dead for even longer of course—but they aimed to bring it back to life. What is the life that the Neo-Bundists would revive? What is its texture?

I’ll be blunt. If I were an American Jew looking for a source of Jewish identity that wasn’t necessarily organized around political support for Israel, I’d start going to shul. That was the institution that kept the Jewish people alive for thousands of years, in just about every world culture and every political, economic and social circumstance you could name. The resources for a lived Jewish identity are already there; the texts and practices have a substance of their own that you’ll have to grapple with. A lot of American synagogues are pretty strongly invested in pro-Israel politics, of course, but if you don’t like your shul you can always start a new one. That’s a very Jewish thing to do, and it’s also a mode of organizing exceedingly in tune with American culture specifically. Nothing is more American than walking out of your church in a huff starting your own denomination. If you’re looking to reinvent the wheel, you might as well start with a wheel.

As for the lost, lamented Jewish Bund, I would love to understand what significance the Neo-Bundists attribute to the fact that the original Jewish Bund was a total failure. Within the Russian Empire, they didn’t succeed in transforming that land into a multicultural socialist paradise. Instead, faced with the choice between the antisemitic Whites and the Bolshevik Reds in the Russian Civil War, they did the only thing they could and folded themselves into the Soviet project—from which position they were ultimately obliterated by Stalin. After Poland regained its independence, the Polish Jewish Bund operated independently of its Russian progenitor, but it failed as well. It performed valiantly but ultimately helplessly in fighting the Nazis, but prior to the Nazi invasion the Bund was unable to slow much less stop the rise of right-wing antisemitic forces within Poland. In the United States, finally, some literal or figurative descendants of the Jewish Bund got involved in the CPUSA or its front groups. But most—and the vast majority of its underlying social base—ultimately migrated into mainstream American liberalism and the Democratic Party.

Given young left-wing Jews’ alienation from existing Jewish institutions, particularly given their frequent orientation around pro-Israel activism, and from the similarly sclerotic and gerontocratic institutions of American liberalism, I can understand why left-wing Jews are hunting for Jewish models for left-wing activism. I can even understand the masochistic fantasy of being a disenfranchised minority still living under the Tsar’s boot, though I don’t empathize with it at all and do not recommend it as a basis for politics. But at a time when antisemitism is rising dramatically, and when the specter of fascism, or at least some kind of right-wing authoritarianism, really does feel more and more to be materializing in America, it’s worth remembering that the Bund failed to prevent the worst the last time around. Whereas, in America at least, a good old-fashioned liberalism, revived and retooled for the challenges of the time, did the job, and made the Bund largely obsolete in the process.

That’s a disposition that could use more support these days here in America. It could use a big boost in Israel as well. Those Jews on the left looking for a universalistic politics that is actually relevant to the well-being of the Jewish people worldwide might consider giving it a try.