The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History 9780813552255

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The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945

The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945 Toward a Global History

D AV I D S L U C K I

RUTGER S UNI V ER SIT Y PR ESS NE W BRUNSW ICK, NE W JER SE Y, A ND LONDON

LIBR A RY OF CONGR ESS C ATA LOGING-IN-PUBLIC AT ION DATA

Slucki, David S. (David Simon), 1984– The international Jewish Labor Bund after 1945 : toward a global history / David Slucki. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–5168–5 (hardcover : alk. paper)  1. Allgemeyner Idisher arbayterbund in Lita, Poylen un Rusland—Influence. 2. Working class Jews—History—21st century.3. Jews—Politics and government— 20th century.4. Jewish socialists—History—20th century.5. Working class Jews— History—20th century.6. Labor movement—History—20th century. 7. Jews—Politics and government—21st century.8. Jewish socialists—History—21st century.9. Labor movement—History—21st century.I. Title. HD6305.J3S58 2012 331.88089'924—dc22

2011010855

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2012 by David Slucki All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

For my darling wife, Helen

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

xiii

Introduction 1

1

A New World Order: The Bund’s Postwar Transformation

2

13

On the Ruins of the Old World: The Bund in Central and Eastern Europe

3

46

Between the Old World and the New: The Bund in France

75

4

The Goldene Medineh? The Bund in the United States

105

5

New Frontiers: The Bund in Melbourne

139

6

Here-ness, There-ness, and Everywhere-ness: The Bund and Israel

173

Conclusion

211

Notes

221

Index

261

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am often asked about the isolation that accompanies academic life. In fact,

my experience has been quite the opposite. This book would not have come to fruition without extensive collaboration with friends and colleagues, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to acknowledge all those who contributed to this work.

First, I would like to acknowledge my mentors at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization (ACJC) at Monash University. My thanks go to Leah Garrett, who has encouraged me to be a more critical thinker and a more careful writer. Andrew Markus has always challenged me to take this project to a new level and to be a more thorough historian. At the University of Melbourne, where this book began, Gideon Reuveni helped me to conceive of the project and to develop its early stages. My regular discussions with him were crucial in deepening my understanding of Jewish history and getting the book off the ground. I would like to thank Mark Baker of the ACJC not only for encouraging me to move to Monash in the middle of the project, but also for encouraging me to be more involved in the life of the Centre. I have also benefited intellectually from the regular seminars, lectures, and hallway chats with colleagues and friends at the ACJC. I am grateful to Nathan Wolski, Deborah Staines, Melanie Landau, Michael Fagenblat, Ari Ofengenden, and Keren Rubinstein for their encouragement and support throughout. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, particularly those with whom I was lucky enough to organize the conference, in late 2008, Identity and Its Discontents. I would especially like to thank my friend Jordy Silverstein, whose passion and dedication always inspired and challenged me. I wish, too, to acknowledge all my Yiddish teachers at Sholem Aleichem College in Melbourne, which I attended from the age of three. The skills, sensitivity, and appreciation of Yiddish culture that I learned from a young age have served me well throughout my academic career. My research was facilitated by librarians and archivists around the world. I thank the librarians at the Matheson Library at Monash University, ix

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the YIVO Institute in New York, the Bibliothèque Medem in Paris, the Kadimah Library in Melbourne, and the State Library of Victoria. My thanks go in particular to Leo Greenbaum at YIVO, whose generosity and knowledge of the Bund Archives helped me sort through a lot of material in a short space of time; to Erez Levy at the Centre-Medem in Paris, who was eager to make me feel welcome and to help me find whatever materials he could, as well as to his colleague Constance Paris-Bolladiere, who assisted in finding photographs; and to Rachel Kalman at the Kadimah Library in Melbourne, who was always accommodating my requests to come in when the library was closed and to borrow almost anything I needed. I would like, too, to thank Rose Blustein, who helped me sort through boxes of disorganized materials that became the Melbourne Bund Archives. Special mention must go to Rosalind Olsen in the Matheson Library at Monash University, who went to great lengths to find all manner of obscure Yiddish periodical that I requested; this book would have been impossible without her assistance. Several people read drafts of the chapters that appear here. I would like to thank Jack Jacobs, Tony Michels, Hasia Diner, Zvi Gitelman, Rebecca Kobrin, and Alan Astro particularly for their comments on earlier versions and for conversations at various points in which their valuable suggestions that helped clarify my thinking. I would like, as well, to thank the anonymous readers and the editors at Jewish Social Studies and the Journal of Modern Jewish History, whose comments on article drafts were invaluable. During the (Australian) summer of 2007–2008, I was lucky enough to undertake a guest fellowship at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. My colleagues there helped me to understand Jewish history from new perspectives. I also received a grant from the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Tel Aviv University and Beth Shalom Aleichem to attend an International Seminar in Yiddish studies, from which I benefited greatly. This book was made possible by the generosity of a number of institutions. I am grateful for the fellowship that I received from the Zyga and Diana Elton Research Fund and the Benjamin Slome Research Fund at the ACJC. I also thank the Jacob Waks Cultural Fund for its ongoing support. I received travel grants from the Association for Jewish Studies and from Monash University. I am also grateful to Monash University’s Faculty of Arts for a Publication Award that allowed me the space and time to work on this book, and to its School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies for a further subvention to assist with the book’s publication. Finally, I am grateful to all those, too many to name, who gave me a couch, sofa bed, blow-up mattress, or floor to sleep on in the various cities in which I found myself during my research trips.

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xi

Chapter 1 appeared in an earlier form as “The Bund Abroad in the Postwar Jewish World,” Jewish Social Studies 16:1 (Fall 2009): 111–144. Chapter 6 appeared in an earlier form as “Here-ness, There-ness, Everywhere-ness: The Jewish Labour Bund and the Question of Israel 1944–1955,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9:3 (2010): 349–368. I thank Indiana University Press and Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandfonline.com) respectively for permission to reprint those articles. I wish to thank the following from Rutgers University Press: Marlie Wasserman, for encouraging the publication of this book; Marilyn Campbell, for managing the process with patience; and Paula Friedman, for her extraordinary attention to detail in the copyediting phase. Friends and family have played a crucial role in helping me maintain my sanity and by giving me less formal opportunities to test ideas. I would especially like to thank Raph Ajzensztat, whose weekly breakfasts were an opportunity to recharge my intellectual batteries. These meetings provided the chance to discuss my project or just to talk Australian politics, football, cricket, or music. My friends have often wondered what I have been doing all this time, and I thank them all for their patience, understanding, and interest in my work. My family has been a constant source of encouragement throughout the process of researching and writing this book. Thanks go to my parents-inlaw, Fay and Sam, who encouraged me and celebrated even the most minor successes along the way. My grandparents have played a crucial role in this work. Although my Bubba Mania is my sole surviving grandparent, they have all been ever-present over the past few years. They are present, too, in this book in a more fundamental way. My paternal grandfather, Jacob Slucki, and my maternal great-grandfather, Moshe Diner, were Bundists from the party’s early years in the Russian Empire, and they both remained faithful to the movement, across four continents and six decades. The events in this story mirror very closely their lives after World War II. Both men have served as a constant source of inspiration and information throughout my life. Thanks especially go to my parents, Charles (Sluggo) and Mich Slucki, who imbued me with a sense of yiddishkayt and, most crucial, taught me the importance of always being a mentsh and of treating everyone with humanity. Their contribution to this work cannot be underplayed. My wife, Helen, deserves much of the credit for the completion of this work. Over the last three years, she has endured much, including a few lengthy separations during research trips. This book is a product of her patience, proofreading, and counsel. When things were tough, she was always encouraging, and she never complained when I jetted off across the world for three months at a time. I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude and dedicate this work to her.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

In transliterating from the Yiddish, I have followed the YIVO system as set out in Uriel Weinreich’s dictionary. Proper names were challenging, because

many Polish Jews anglicized the spelling of their names, and others did not. For example, Szerer became Scherer, or Szwarc became Schwartz. In such cases, I have tried, where possible, to stick to the Anglicized versions that have appeared in the Bund’s English-language materials. In other cases, people’s names only appeared in Yiddish. In those instances, I have tried to follow the YIVO system. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Yiddish and French are my own.

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The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945

Introduction

In 1966, Noyekh Cukerman, Bund leader in Montevideo, penned a letter

to his counterparts in Melbourne. Expressing his regard for his comrades

across the Pacific, Cukerman noted he was impressed with reports of the Melbourne Bund’s youth movements. “It goes without saying,” he wrote, “that we are very jealous of our dear comrades in Melbourne. It is also not superfluous to say that we have a lot to learn from you.” The Melbourne Bund, he wrote, was “the only one that [was] reminiscent of the pre-war Polish Bund.”1 This correspondence raises some interesting issues surrounding the development of the Bund in the postwar period. For one, the letter was sent to Australia from Uruguay. It bypassed the major centers of Jewish life in North America, Europe, and Israel. It was an exchange between two communities in the global South. Most important, perhaps, it was penned more than two decades after the Jews’ liberation from the Nazi death camps of Europe, attesting to the Bund’s survival in some form after the Holocaust despite losing a majority of its members in the death camps and ghettos. Whereas previously it had been bound to the soil of Eastern Europe, from 1945 onward what remained of the Bund stretched across five continents. Many questions arise as to what the goals of the Bund were after the Holocaust. Was its aim to resemble the Polish Bund, as Cukerman claimed the Melbourne chapter did? Or was it simply to cope as best its members could with the radical upheaval that followed the war? Given that a Jewish state had been established and Zionism had seemingly prevailed in the Jewish world, rebuilding the Bund may seem to the contemporary reader to have been a strange task. Readers may also wonder why, in 1966, the Bund in Melbourne, a city with only thirty thousand Jews, was more reminiscent of the Polish Bund than were its sibling organizations in the much larger Jewish 1

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communities of New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, or Buenos Aires. The development of the Bund in these locations can tell us much about the communities in which it operated and, indeed, about the surrounding societies. Author Abraham Brumberg may or may not have been right when he wrote in 1999 that the Bund groups in these locations “remained, fundamentally, émigré organizations,” unable to come to terms with their new circumstances. Even so, their attempts to reorganize still teach something about postwar Jewish life. Much more scholarly work needs to be undertaken to begin answering these questions; this study is only a beginning. These are some of the issues that this book addresses. It examines the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish Labor Bund and brings into focus the Bund’s reorganization as a transnational movement. It argues that by examining the history of the Bund during this period, contemporary scholars can gain deeper insight into the development of Jewish communities and into the national settings in which Bundists settled. The postwar Bund, comprising local organizations in over a dozen countries, was tiny, with only a few thousand members, yet in many places its output was measurably significant. The six decades after Europe’s liberation saw the publication of long-lasting Bundist journals and newspapers in Melbourne, New York, Paris, Mexico City, Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires. These organizations were represented on local Jewish communal umbrella bodies, and Bundists were active in cultural institutions, welfare bodies, and mutual aid societies. Bundists also collaborated closely with the local socialist movement, in most locations. Bundist calendars were crowded with lectures, meetings, discussions, cultural undertakings, fundraisers, commemorations, and anniversary celebrations. Bund organizations in a few locations tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to foster youth movements. In terms of numbers, the postwar Bund never rose to great heights: at most, it numbered several thousand members, compared to its predecessor in Poland, which claimed around nine thousand members as well as thousands more involved in the party’s auxiliary organizations. Exploring the layers that made up the Bund after 1945, this study looks at the organization’s ideological development; taking place largely in the upper echelons of the movement, this development can be viewed in the context of membership, size, and influence, and in the sphere of Jewish political thought. The work also examines the Bund’s ability—or rather, its inability—to attract members and supporters. Finally, it considers some personalities whose energy and passion drove the direction of the movement, and how these persons reconstructed their lives. The layers are separate stories that interact and sometimes clash. They all fit into different contexts—the ideological debate developed out of the need to reexamine Jewish

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life in the postwar world; the lack of members was perhaps a consequence of the Bund’s ideological development, but could also be considered a part of an increasing trend where organizations like the Bund, Yiddish-oriented and socialist, were invested in forms of Jewish cultural and political identification that were becoming out of step with wider society. Finally, the personalities that made up the Bund—the men and women who survived the Holocaust and sought to build new homes—provided the drive and direction for reestablishing the movement. By examining the Bund as a whole, and by comparing Bund organizations in different locations, we can gain new insights into both postwar Jewish life and the contemporary world. Although the Bund was small in every city in which it appeared, the trajectories of its local organizations can reveal some of the complexities of Jewish life and Jewish communal relationships in select cities. For example, investigating the Bund’s development can tell us more about the nature of the Melbourne Jewish community, which, although tiny, accommodated perhaps the most long-lasting Bund. Melbourne was also the city in which Bundists were most influential in a broader sense, with Bund members occupying senior roles in many leading communal organizations. By contrast, Paris, which was home to a much larger Jewish community—180,000 in 1946, even before an influx of more than 200,000 North African Jews from the mid-1950s onward—saw the Bund experience a much more rapid decline. I examine what about each of these two Jewish communities led to such different trajectories. The Bund’s history also highlights the difficulty faced by many nonZionist organizations in attracting support after Israel’s establishment. It also underlines the course of anti-Zionist thought, which, through the second half of the twentieth century, came to be considered by many throughout the Jewish world as inseparable from antisemitism. The Bund’s postwar legacy can broaden our understanding of each of the organizations’ host societies, as we look at the political and economic climates that affected the divergent paths of various Bund groups. The Bund’s history can further clarify issues surrounding the decline of socialism in the second half of the twentieth century, and questions regarding how socialist organizations sought to tread the fine line between communism and capitalism in a bipolar world. Further, the Bundists’ relationship with their host societies—relations that, because of ideological considerations, differed from those of other Jewish groups—can provide a deeper understanding of the mechanics of antisemitism, of minority relations, and of the politics of migration. Finally, the Bund’s demise highlights the decline of Yiddish life in the twentieth century, as well as the role that Yiddish speakers and Holocaust survivors played in that decline. Such study is thus not only important in telling the story of the decline of a

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party once so influential in the Jewish world, but also in the way it broadens our understanding of both local Jewish communities and even global politics. There is another broad historiographical issue at stake. Reappraising the Bund’s postwar history also brings into the focus the narrow geographic perspective that has dominated nearly all the historical writing on the Bund. Historians have heretofore focused almost entirely on the Jewish labor movement in the northern hemisphere, and have not considered how utilizing sources from southern hemisphere locations such as Australia, Argentina, and Uruguay can enrich our understanding of modern Jewish culture and further draw attention to the vibrancy of Jewish history.2 There are many open-ended questions that arise from this wider study, such as: how communities outside the large centers of the United States, Eastern Europe, and Israel managed the tensions between their Jewish identity and their desire to sow their roots where they lived; how these differing experiences contributed to Jewish national discourses; what, for example, the development of the Bund in Australia, a parliamentary democracy with a small Jewish community, says about the Jewish labor movement after World War II; how Peronism in Argentina affected Bundist theory and practice; what can be learned about the Jewish labor movements in New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv by comparing them with their counterparts in Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, or Johannesburg. With the growth of southern hemisphere Jewish communities after 1945, the idea of the Jews as a world people took on novel dimensions, as new Jewish cultures and new Jewish politics developed, interacted with, and influenced more established Jewish ideas. In the end, the Bund groups faced the same fate as just about every other Yiddish-oriented organization—they either perished, or their Yiddish became a symbol. Also, they went the way of other socialist organizations, many of which could not accommodate to the Cold War’s realities. Perhaps the Bundists’ efforts were never going to bear fruit. Nonetheless, examining more deeply the divergent courses that the groups followed offers a more complex picture of Jewish life and post-1945 global politics. Although only a footnote to the Bund’s more acclaimed pre-Holocaust history, this later history offers many historical insights for contemporary scholars. And although concerned primarily with the Bund after 1945, this book raises questions about the ways Jewish political and cultural movements developed and interacted over the course of more than one hundred years. The Bund’s postwar history cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a longer history of Jewish socialism and politics in Eastern Europe. The Bund’s history from its founding until the Holocaust is well documented, although, as is generally the case with Jewish politics, there is rarely a consensus among scholars. The Bund was founded in Vilna in 1897, although

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momentum had been building for the establishment of a Jewish workers’ party for around a decade. 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.3 From then on, the Bund was not only a labor movement catering to the needs of Jews, but also a Jewish labor movement dedicated also to the advancement of Jewish cultural life. The Bund’s road to its national program has been the subject of considerable debate among historians of the movement. The traditional Bundist narrative suggests that this shift was a result of the socioeconomic realities of Jews in Russia.4 This, as Yoav Peled noted, became an accepted narrative among historians of the period.5 In 1981, Jonathan Frankel challenged the accepted position, arguing that the change to a national program was the result of “specific political contingencies.” The central factor in the Bund adopting a national position was, he said, the “often bitter political infighting,” that marked the party’s early years: “Politics,” he wrote, “rather than sociology determined ideology.”6 Another, more recent, addition to the debate was Peled’s thesis, which suggested that the central factor in the Bund’s philosophical shift was the development of an “ethno-class consciousness,” a result of the peculiar socioeconomic circumstances that were typical of the period’s Jewish life, largely due to employment restrictions and religious considerations. Peled eschewed Frankel’s purely political approach to the question of Bundist national thought, in favor of sociological considerations.7 Whatever the case, by the 1905 revolution, in which Bundists were enthusiastic participants, the party had embraced a national program that recognized the Jews as a nation—although at this time the organization’s conception of Jewish nationhood was limited to Eastern European Yiddish-speaking workers. The concept would change to incorporate all Jews, after the war. The czarist repression that followed the failed 1905 revolution deeply wounded the Bund.8 Forced into retreat, thousands of Bundists joined the great migration to the United States, where many tried to realize the Jewish socialist dream on American soil. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 once again energized Bundists and sparked a heated debate over whether to join the Communist International. Unwilling to cede its independence to Moscow, the party decided against joining, and within the space of only a few years the Russian Bund was liquidated by the Soviet government. Then, with

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its center transplanted to Poland, the Bund became a Polish party, operating for the first time as a legal entity. Those initial years following the revolution were filled with internal debate over whether or not to back the new Bolshevik regime and to join the Communist International.9 Partly due to this division, the Bund struggled to garner widespread support in Poland; by the eve of the Second World War, however, it had become the most popular party in the major Jewish centers of Poland. Bundist lists won pluralities and occasional majorities in the kehille [Jewish communal body] and city council elections in the major Jewish centers of Poland. In the Warsaw kehille elections of 1936, for example, the Bund received 10,767 votes, nearly 4,000 more than its nearest rival, the Zionist bloc. In the same city in 1938, the Bundist-dominated list won seventeen of twenty Jewish seats. In Lodz, the figure was eleven seats of seventeen, with at least eight of those eleven going to Bundists.10 The party’s huge electoral success in municipal elections throughout Poland in 1938 and 1939 highlighted what a formidable force the Bund had become in the Jewish world. If the Bund’s adoption of its national program in 1901 continues to be an area of contention, the meaning of these electoral results also remains an area of historiographical debate. Some historians of interwar Poland, such as Ezra Mendelsohn, Joseph Marcus, and Bernard K. Johnpoll, attribute the Bund’s popularity in the late 1930s to external factors, such as an increase in antisemitism, the decline of Zionism, and the disbanding of the Communist Party in Poland. Antony Polonsky argues that these results were merely part of the Jewish political landscape, which was “subject to violent swings of mood” and could change very quickly.11 Others, such as Jack Jacobs and Roni Gechtman, give more credence to the notion that the Bund’s popularity was the result of actions the party had taken in the preceding two decades to shore up support, including the establishment of a “Bundist counterculture” with a network of sociocultural organizations and the strengthening of unions.12 Gertrud Pickhan argues similarly that, at the time, Bundist ideology was visionary. She wrote that Bundists recognized, even in interwar Poland, a hotbed of nationalism and antisemitism, that they belonged in a multicultural society, and that the Bund’s approach, in recognizing this situation, was “far ahead of its time.”13 Another explanation for the Bund’s popularity in late interwar Poland is found in Zvi Gitelman’s assertion that, in its first forty years, the Bund’s major contribution to twentieth-century Jewish life was in helping to democratize the Jewish political process. It achieved this by including more marginalized elements in Jewish society, such as women and workers, by establishing an extensive countercultural network, and by insisting that Jewish organizations must cooperate and negotiate with nonJewish movements.14

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The war years were catastrophic for the Bund. During those six years, most of its members were murdered. Bundists were active participants in underground cultural and resistance movements in the ghettoes and concentration camps of Eastern Europe. Outside Poland, the Bund maintained a foreign bureau in New York comprising leaders who had escaped, and the party sent Shmuel Zygelboym, and later Emanuel Scherer, to London as its representative in the Polish government-in-exile. Although many of its leaders managed to escape, the Bund’s most beloved intellectuals and activists, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, were murdered in 1941 as prisoners of the Soviet Union. On the whole, the Bund’s institutional structure was torn apart. Surprisingly, this is an area of the organization’s history that has received little scholarly attention, with Daniel Blatman’s work the only comprehensive account of the Bund’s fate during the Holocaust.15 There is, of course, a vast body of Bundist literature that chronicles the heroism of Bundists as resistance fighters. Postwar Bundist newspapers and journals have been preoccupied with documenting the activities of the Bund underground for more than six decades. There are also memoirs and histories written by party activists.16 These accounts deal mostly with the Warsaw Ghetto and the Bundist role in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Holocaust is the point at which the historiography of the Bund peters out. The movement, however, continued to evolve. Although it had been shattered, its members set about rebuilding the Bund both in Poland and in the countries in which they had found refuge before, during, and after the war. In 1947, the International Jewish Labor Bund was founded at a world conference in Brussels, and, for the first time in its history, the Bund became a movement not confined to national borders. This was a shift propelled by the Holocaust and the dispersion of Polish Jews to many corners of the world. The decision, undertaken by the movement’s leaders in America and Western Europe, was a landmark in the party’s fifty-year history and set the scene for the Bund’s final chapter. Bund organizations were established in cities across Western Europe, the Americas, Israel, and Australia. The movement continued its opposition to Zionism. Local Bund branches were active in their Jewish communities. Bundists also participated in their local labor movements and socialist parties. They were often prominent activists within these worlds. For many Bundists, the continuation of their movement provided comfort amid the uncertainty of displacement. The organization provided a safe, familial space in which they could ease their way into their new surroundings, and was a meeting place in which they linked past, present, and future. The Bund came to represent a slice of the home from which they had been torn so violently and abruptly. It was something permanent and safe that bridged the old world with the new lives they were forging in different settings.

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Historians have yet to undertake a thorough examination of the history of the Bund after the Holocaust, and have not yet considered what implications such research may have on the study of Jewish communities more broadly. There are several studies that treat aspects of the Bund’s postwar history. Daniel Blatman’s account tells of the Polish Bund’s painful demise; although his work deals only with the party in Poland, he suggests that the world movement had no hope of resurrecting itself as it failed to make the ideological adjustments necessary to ensure ongoing relevance in the Jewish world.17 In his work comparing the Bund’s and the Zionist Labor Movement’s approaches to Jewish peoplehood, Yosef Gorny analyses the Bund’s postwar ideological evolution; he focuses narrowly on the ideological debates that took place in the world Bund setting, but does not give any consideration to the activities or impact of the local organizations that operated in over a dozen countries. Like Blatman, Gorny considers the Bund’s unwillingness to ideologically adjust to the changed circumstances as the source of its downfall.18 Even Abraham Brumberg, renowned writer and editor raised in a Bundist family, wrote on the movement’s one hundredth anniversary in 1997, that “without Yiddish, the Bund could not possibly exist.” For him, the Bund groups in Australia, the United States, and France remained “fundamentally, émigré organizations, never able to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers in order to become legitimate components of the new social realities.”19 Perhaps these authors are right. Perhaps the Bund’s refusal to accommodate to the new political and linguistic conditions that ruled Jewish life was the most critical factor in its downfall. Yet my goal here is not simply to pore over the tactical mistakes of the Bund leaders: although I do consider the role that Bundists played in their own downfall, I am more interested in exploring what else can be learned from examining this history, and how this historical approach opens up new comparative approaches to Jewish history. By regarding the course of the Bund’s postwar history, we can uncover much about the wider Jewish world: how less popular organizations fare in different settings; what are the factors that allow a Jewish political and cultural organization to flourish; in what ways the broader society impacts on how Jewish communities develop; how the experience of the Holocaust affected Jews’ ability to rebuild in varying kinds of settings. Considering the Bund’s final decades also helps us to broaden our appreciation of the decline of socialism—for example: why the Bund in Melbourne was more successful on a local level than that in the United States; why the Bund faced such a swift and tragic downfall in Poland; the state of the Left in those and other countries. The comparative, multicity approach of this book suggests new ways to understand how the modern Jewish experience played out in

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the wake of the Holocaust; it does so by highlighting that the contexts into which Jewish refugees were thrust were perhaps as important in determining the trajectory of post-Holocaust Jewish life as were the formative experiences of prewar Eastern Europe. Because Bundist organizations developed in over a dozen countries, and because each organization followed its own trajectory according to its local circumstances, this book is arranged geographically rather than chronologically. I examine a selection of these organizatons—those in Poland, in the Displaced Persons camps of Central Europe, in New York, in Paris, in Melbourne, and in Tel Aviv. At various points, there were also Bund groups in Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, England, South Africa, and Shanghai. The organizations that I examine cover the full lifespan of the postwar Bund, from the years immediately following the liberation, when Bundist survivors in Poland and in the DP camps struggled to comprehend what they had just experienced, to the twenty-first century, when the last of the Bund’s regular publications were printing their final words. These organizations were, that is, the longest lasting: all maintained some kind of local presence, albeit small, through to the end of the twentieth century, whether through publications, through meetings, or through youth movements. There are also ideological considerations that account for the locations examined here: Poland, the United States, France, and Australia were deeply implicated, in very different ways, in the Cold War politics of the time. These were societies profoundly affected by the struggle between East and West, by the decline of socialism, and by the eventual emergence of the New Left. The Bund in Israel, perhaps the most complex of all Bund groups, provides a counterpoint to the relative freedom that other Bund organizations experienced, with their ability to build coalitions. The Israeli Bund faced the challenge of being an anti-Zionist organization trying to carve its niche in a Zionist country: its whole existence was predicated on its hostility to the state. Further, the Israeli Bund was important for its impact, which was considerable, on the International Bund’s debate over Zionism. In the first two chapters of this study, I examine the way that Bundists responded to the new reality that Jewish life in Poland had been wiped out by the Nazi onslaught; these chapters concern the major challenges that confronted the Bundists in the wake of the Holocaust. First was the ideological question of how to deal with the fact that there was no longer a Bund center but that, rather, Bundists were now scattered around the world, and chapter 1 explores the decision to reorganize as a world movement in light of this question and the debate surrounding it. The other major challenges that Bundists had to confront were in many ways more urgent: what would

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become of Jewish life in Eastern Europe; whether to try to reorganize the Polish Bund; what to do about the hundreds of thousands of Jews languishing in DP camps. Chapter 2 focuses on Central and Eastern Europe and concerns how those remaining in Poland and in the German, Austrian, and Italian DP camps understood their predicament. In the next three chapters, I examine three contrasting case studies of Bundist communities farther westward. Using these examples, I show not only the way Bund organizations were shaped by their local surroundings, but also how, more generally, those communities operated in a Cold War climate. The three locations examined span different political, geographic, and linguistic landscapes; an examination of the Bund in these locations underscores the varying trajectories of Jewish communities in three communities with high concentrations of Holocaust survivors. My focus in chapter 3 is the French Bund and the anxieties with which it struggled throughout the stormy period of the Fourth Republic and French decolonization. In chapter 4, I focus on the Bund’s attempts to transplant itself across the Atlantic to the United States, site of what was by then the most populous and active Jewish community in the world. This chapter considers the paradoxes of the Bund’s struggles in light of the fact that it was operating within an already established Jewish Left. In chapter 5, I engage with the Bundist attempts to create new frontiers in the fledgling Melbourne Jewish community, home of what was certainly the longest-lasting postwar Bund organizations and perhaps the most influential within its local Jewish context. In the final chapter, I examine how the Bund confronted its own mortality in light of the establishment of Israel. Here, I explore the complex question of Zionism and the Bund’s evolving approach to Jewish statehood. The chapter also considers how the establishment of a Bund organization in Israel affected the heated debates within the movement. Of course this last consideration adds another layer of complexity to this volume’s comparisons among Bundist organizations and the contexts in which they developed. Any researcher confronts challenges, and I have faced some in my journey through the postwar history of the Bund. The most difficult has been the search for sources. Most local Bund organizations did not maintain records. Through great persistence, I was able to uncover two boxes of correspondence, pamphlets, and protocols in Melbourne, but these boxes provided only a sample of the local organization’s sixty-year history. In other cities, I had even less luck. In Paris, Tel Aviv, and Mexico City, there appears to be little to no archival material. Even the Bund Archives at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in New York do not provide systematic collection of materials. There is a plethora of materials collected from the New York Bund organization and the World Coordinating Committee, as well as many

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folders with materials from other local organizations. On the whole, however, there is a lack of data on membership, financial records are sparse, and protocols from meetings and conferences are intermittent. Because of this, the extensive Bundist press, including journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and books, plays a particularly important role in this, and any, study of the postwar Bund. There is another reason for the prominence of the press throughout much of this narrative. Because ideology was the major factor that continued to bind Bundists worldwide, the press and the debates among the movement’s leading writers and intellectuals are the best place to fully come to terms with the Bund’s ideological development, and with how the divergent paths of local organizations were affected by local political contexts. The newspapers can also reveal the many layers of anxiety, hope, and frustration that Bundists felt throughout this period. These periodicals help to clarify how the Bundists publicly constructed their relationships with other Jewish groups and how they related to the surrounding societies. Of course, one must be wary when working with the party press, as writers generally present ideologically skewed understandings of issues. This is true of all sources, but, as an historian, I have had to be especially skeptical of the way parties chronicle their own history and create their own narratives. The Bundist sources especially seemed to try desperately to paint a much rosier picture than the reality of the movement. For example, in a 1955 press release, the party claimed a membership of 50,000 worldwide, and, two years later, an anniversary publication cited 20,000, but the real figure was no more than 5,000.20 However, although ideological considerations meant that journalists and Bund spokespeople often misrepresented or misunderstood their reality, the party press is an excellent source in exploring the Bundists leaders’ own ideological soul-searching and their understanding of the world around them. Another fundamental challenge in writing this book was to determine what were the limits of the postwar Bund’s period. This time span is not easily defined, because each organization experienced its own successes and failures, its own high points, low points, and eventual decline. In France and Israel, for example, this book covers mainly the 1950s and early 1960s, in which it became clear that the organization was already entering its crisis period. In Melbourne, however, the success of the Bund’s youth movement ensured that the organization continued to run an active program through the 1990s. So, although there are points where this narrative seems temporally uneven, such points only reflect the variations that come with such a transnational movement. It would be impossible to write a history of the Bund that was monolithic and neatly bookended.

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After the war, the Bund was a small, weakened movement; still, it played a central role in the lives of its members, and was an actor in the political and cultural life of over a dozen Jewish communities in the Western world. From a theoretical perspective, the Bund is also important in showing the varieties of Jewish political ideology in the wake of the Holocaust. My aim is to illuminate the way Bundists themselves understood their place in a radically altered Jewish and universal reality, where Jewish politics and society were no longer drawn along the same lines as in prewar Poland or prerevolutionary Russia. Such an overview will clarify the efforts of European Jewish refugees more generally to return to their lives after the upheaval of World War II. It is true that the Holocaust irreparably weakened the Bund, as it weakened so many currents of Jewish life. The Bund’s demise, however, took place over a much longer period than the war years, and was affected by the circumstances both of the delicate global political balance and of the local communities into which Bundists sought to integrate. As historians attempt to understand better the impact of the Holocaust on the postwar Jewish and non-Jewish world, a study of the demise of the Bund can help broaden and shape our understanding.

1 A New World Order The Bund’s Postwar Transformation

The first world conference of the International Jewish Labor Bund in Brussels in May 1947 and the subsequent establishment of the World Coordi-

nating Committee of Bund Organizations marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Bund. The conference—the first of eight over the ensuing forty-five years—oversaw the formal establishment of Bund organizations in more than a dozen countries around the world, including the United States, Australia, Israel, France, Belgium, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and South Africa. By this stage, Bundists had become all too aware that not only had their prewar Jewish society been devastated, but also their social, political, and cultural milieu had been forever altered. It was not solely that Jewish Poland no longer existed as they had known it, but also that the ideals around which they had built their lives and the movement that for so many was like a family, now lay in tatters. Scattered around all parts of the globe, Bundists tried to comprehend the magnitude of their loss and to find a new way forward. They could not rely on formulae from the past. The postwar reality was too different. With the tiny remaining Jewish population in Poland rapidly dwindling due to mass emigration and ongoing antisemitism, Bundists needed to adapt to new homes, which, in most cases, required a radical social, cultural, and political readjustment. After the Holocaust, the Bund’s leadership, primarily based in New York, established new structures in an attempt to stave off the organization’s demise. Debates surrounding the decision to reorganize, debates that unfolded among the party’s leading intellectuals between 1945 and 1947, culminated in the first world conference, in 1947; these debates highlight the panic and anxiety that plagued the Bundists in the postwar period as they sought to justify their ongoing existence and appeal to a broader base of 13

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Jews around the world. The Bund’s leaders implemented structures to try to maximize the scarce resources at the Bund’s disposal, and the Bund’s newly formed World Coordinating Committee worked closely with local Bundist communities around the world; most significant was the committee’s role in producing and distributing journals and newspapers, and in sending emissaries to raise money and bolster local organizations. A crucial issue, examined in this chapter, is how the movement’s leadership dealt with the new circumstances as it sought a synthesis between its prewar ideology and postwar reality. These discussions within the movement were a somewhat tragic aside to the broader, parallel debates in the Jewish world over the prospect of Jewish statehood. While the Zionist movement was gaining traction in the wake of the Holocaust, the Bund was deciding how best to simply survive as a movement. The debates within the Bund in these immediate postwar years reveal a great deal of uncertainty and torment about prospects for continuity; this concern would become a theme in the subsequent five decades in Bund communities everywhere as Bundists tried to navigate their way.

Toward a World Bund? Although the Bund had largely been a one-country party through the first half of the twentieth century, Bundists had lived outside of that nation’s major centers (the Russian Empire and then, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, independent Poland) virtually from the establishment of the organization, in Vilna in 1897.1 The spread of Bundists around the world was a reality in Jewish life before the Holocaust. During the Russian period of the Bund’s existence (1897–1917), there were two major tendencies in Bundist proliferation outside the Russian empire. The first was as a network of Bundist support groups scattered around such Western European cities as Bern, Berlin, Paris and London, support groups dedicated to assisting the Bund in Russia proper; these groups included both students and workers. Although there were proposals to turn such groups into formal party organizations, it was broadly understood that real party activity could only take place within Russia, among the Jewish masses, and that those Bundists outside Russia were to be considered outside the party structure.2 With the closing of the American borders, and the subsequent acceleration of Eastern European Jewish migration to France, Paris became a more important center of Bundist activity.3 From 1933 until 1940, the Bund’s extensive archives were housed in Paris.4 In 1932, French Bundists established the Jewish Socialist Union of France. With the establishment of the World Coordinating Committee in 1947, this union became the French chapter of the Bund. In the interwar period, this chapter

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was not only concerned with fundraising activities and support for the Polish Bund, but, significantly, with local issues and concerns.5 The other major tendency in the spread of the Bund was migration to the United States. The major immigration that took place between 1880 and 1924 included tens of thousands of Bundists who sought to continue propagating the ideas for which they had fought in the old home; they arrived in their greatest numbers after the failed 1905 revolution in Russia and the subsequent czarist repression. Although there was no formal Bundist group established in these early years, Bundist activists such as Ben-Tsiyon Hoffman (Tsivion), Baruch Charney Vladeck, A. S. Zaks, David Dubinsky, and Yankev Salutsky became active and influential in American Jewish life, promoting a Bundist vision for the American Jewish labor movement.6 A Bundist club was established, a counter-initiative to this established Jewish labor movement that was highly influenced by Bundism but was not formally linked to the Bund in Poland. The club’s activists sought stronger links with the organization in their old home, but never constituted a Bund organization as such. This group was very much separate from the formal Jewish Socialist Federation, led by the above activists, with both groups even holding separate anniversary celebrations to mark the Bund’s founding, and separate memorial ceremonies to honor former Bund leaders.7 As well as in Western Europe and the United States, informal Bundist groups proliferated in Latin America, Australia, and South Africa, where they carried out a range of activities, from financially supporting the Polish Bund to working within the local Jewish community and the local labor movement. Given their size and geographic isolation, such groups were never considered part of the party machine, and were indeed subordinated by the Polish Bund. The Bund’s rhetorical insistence that their struggle could only be carried out where there were high concentrations of Jewish workers precluded such small communities from being considered part of the movement. Historian Claudie Weill highlighted a major tension within Bundist ideology that arose from the spread of Bundism as an idea, but not from the Bund as an organization. She identified a basic paradox inherent in the Bund’s mode of organization: “A party which set extra-territorial autonomy on its agenda was actually putting emphasis on its anchorage to a territory, that of the Russian Empire.”8 This tension was never resolved until after the Second World War, when the Bund’s hand was forced by multiple factors: the physical destruction of the Bund’s major base, mass emigration from Eastern Europe, and the final liquidation of the Polish Bund by Poland’s Communist government in 1949. Much soul-searching took place in exiled Bundist circles after the realization that the mass murder of European Jewry would permanently change Jewish life. Traditional modes of Bundist thought

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began to be seriously challenged within the party. Debate inside the party was not new, but with Nazi occupation of Poland it took on new urgency. By 1941, New York became the seat of the exiled Polish Bund leadership in the form of the American Representation of the Polish Bund, and it was there that the future of the Bund, Jewish life, and socialism were most vigorously discussed, primarily in the pages of the committee’s newly established journal, Unzer Tsayt (Our Times).9 The Bund was also represented in the Polish government-in-exile in London, first by Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Lodz party activist who committed suicide in 1943 in an attempt to bring the Nazi genocide of the Jews to the world’s attention, and then by Emanuel Scherer, a young lawyer who would become the postwar Bund’s leading intellectual. However, these leaders were rightly primarily concerned with the urgency of the crisis on the European mainland, and had little time to engage with theoretical questions. The philosophical issues therefore were discussed in the safety and comfort of New York.10 The first to recognize what a profound and lasting impact the events in Europe would have on world Jewry and particularly on the Polish Bund was essayist Yechiel Yeshayahu Trunk. Trunk had been ordered by the Bund’s leadership to flee Poland after the German invasion in September 1939, and eventually arrived in New York, via Vilne, Siberia, Japan, and San Francisco, in March 1941. He had been a highly regarded literary critic and author in interwar Lodz and then in Warsaw, where he led a more aristocratic lifestyle than most of his comrades. Because of his dedication to Yiddish and his sympathy toward socialism, however, he had joined the Bund in 1923. After the war he would become one of the Bund’s leading intellectuals, and would become most famous for his seven-volume memoir, Poyln, which chronicled Jewish life in Poland from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the war.11 Trunk argued as early as 1942 that the Bund needed to rethink its dogmatic commitment to Marxist socialism and shift its energies to questions of Jewish nationhood; in an Unzer Tsayt article, “Bundist Problems,” he recognized already that the Jewish landscape would forever be different, and saw the necessity for the Bund to react to these changes and prepare itself for whatever postwar reality it would confront. More than anyone in the party at the time, Trunk understood how potentially devastating the situation in Europe was to become. With the “onset of emigration,” he argued, Bundists who had made it to the United States would be engaged in “ideological soulsearching.” With the events in Europe, “an era has tragically come to an end. We now stand at the dawn of a new world, with new answers for humanity to the problems of its existence.”12 Trunk emphasized the national and psychological elements that connected all Jews. The Bund’s Marxist analysis of what bound people

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together—class—could no longer be the movement’s starting point. “A person is driven by much more than economic circumstances,” he argued: people were also the “product of deep historical developments, even ancient historical developments, that remained lively in their psychic and spiritual emotions and are always present.”13 The Bund needed to abandon the cold, scientific rationality of an analysis that saw people tied together primarily by their economic situation, which was fluid and unstable, and adopt an approach that recognized the irrational and subconscious roots of community. “I would call the national community the community of collective subconscious,” he wrote. “The roots of our psyche are nourished from the subconscious, from our temperament.” For him, the nation was the deepest and most profound community. “All human light and all human darkness lie in it [the national community].” He called for the party to strengthen its national program, highlighting the need for the party to adapt its thinking beyond ties to one country.14 Trunk’s article was significant and, at that time, still early in the war, both its tone and message were radical. The extent of the destruction in Europe was not yet obvious; mass emigration did not yet seem inevitable to most Bund leaders. The party responded swiftly to Trunk, publishing a rebuttal emphasizing that the party did “not support his metaphysical-idealistic objections against Marxism and other critical remarks about the ideology of scientific socialism.”15 The editors defended Marxism, arguing that it always saw class as “an historical circumstance and not a cosmic fact”; class was simply privileged in its historical narrative. “With whom does khaver Trunk himself feel closer?” asked the writer: With the Irgun HaLeumi, who applauded Franco when he destroyed the ‘red’ plague of Spain, or with the Spanish, French, German, Russian, English and other ideological comrades of many other nationalities who gave and still give their lives in the fight against fascism? And how does this heavenly daughter, the “cosmic idea” of the nation look? With whom, for example, does khaver Trunk feel more spiritually connected? With Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Goethe, Byron, and Rolland, or with a Yemenite or Abyssinian Jewish tribe, with whom he is supposedly united in an eternal “community of collective subconscious”?16

The Bund clearly did not yet agree with Trunk that it was time for soulsearching. Only one month earlier, Shloyme Mendelson had argued forcefully that the future of Jewish culture would remain in Europe. “The majority of the Jewish people [der rov minyen un binyen] will remain in the old places of residence,” Mendelsohn claimed, “but the general tendency of Jewish life will probably remain the same as it always was,” with the Jews’ “rootedness”

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being an important feature, and economic and political factors continuing to play a major role in the lives of Jews.17 For Mendelsohn, emigration was no solution to the challenges Jews and other European peoples would face when the war finished. He was also not optimistic about the possibility of building or resurrecting Jewish culture in America, where he saw Jewish society in a crisis of assimilation. Officially, throughout this period, the Bund maintained the position outlined by historian Abraham Menes in the inaugural February 1941 edition of Unzer Tsayt: “the solution to the Jewish question can only be found in a righteous and just world. And our first task in such a freed world will have to be the rebuilding of the destroyed Jewish communities in Europe.”18 The idea, he wrote, that “millions of European Jews can take their bags on their backs and can simply go on their way and find a new home” was merely utopian and dangerous. “The destruction of the diaspora,” Menes concluded, “is the destruction of the Jewish people.”19 Although the party organ maintained the party line, Trunk continued his call for the broadening of the Bund’s national program in a 1944 article, “Bund and Bundism.” He argued that Bundism existed beyond the organization and that the Bund was only the active organization of the historic idea. The spirit of Bundism, on the other hand, existed within Jewish socialist organizations in other places, such as Latvia and Romania: “The Polish Bund is organized Bundism in Poland, but Bundism as such is a path, an historical essence and an historical ideal for Jewish masses everywhere.”20 His overarching conclusion was that the Bund needed to root itself more in the United States, and to find an appropriate organizational approach through which to lay the foundations of more widespread Bundist activities in what was surely to replace Poland as the major center of world Jewry. The party once again distanced itself from Trunk’s comments, inserting a disclaimer that the article represented only the author’s personal beliefs.21 With the end of the war shortly thereafter, the movement would heed Trunk’s call to expand the Bund beyond Poland. The leading figures within the American Representation of the Polish Bund in New York realized that the situation for world Jewry had now irreversibly changed. No longer would there be the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, the people who had fostered a rich thousand-year-old web of Jewish life and culture. The Holocaust would forever haunt those who had survived, those who had by chance or luck escaped; they would have to rebuild their lives carrying a burden of trauma. This new situation brought recognition of the Bundists’ imperative to review their own direction, to decide whether to try to revitalize the movement that had been so important to so many, or whether to abandon what had been so important in their lives before 1939. What existed was no more, and what was to come remained uncertain.

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The impetus toward an international organization came from Emanuel Scherer at the beginning of 1945, when he cabled the American Representation from London, where he was the Bund member of the Polish government-in-exile. Raised in Cracow, Scherer was a doctor of law when he joined the Bund in 1920. After moving to Warsaw, where he spearheaded a number of Polish-language Bundist publications, Scherer was elected to the Warsaw Committee. After escaping Warsaw at the outbreak of the war, Scherer became the Bund’s representative in the Polish government-in-exile in 1943 after Shmuel Zygielbojm’s suicide. He became one of the Bund’s leading intellectuals in the postwar period, and his earnest glare, bow-tie, and bushy eyebrows overshadowed all the world conferences and the activities of the World Coordinating Committee until his death, in 1977. With the war in Europe’s impending conclusion, he recognized that, with Soviet domination over Poland the likely outcome of the upcoming Yalta Conference, there was little hope that the Polish Bund could secure its future. He suggested that the representation in New York dissolve itself—but that the members must not simply return to their private lives. “The Bundists of Poland,” Scherer demanded, “must organize an extra-territorial Bundist body to initiate and lead a Bundist mass movement in the remaining countries of Jewish mass life, including the United States.”22 By May of that year, the Jewish Socialist Union in France and the Bund council in Switzerland undertook to organize a conference in New York in late 1945 for all Bund groups around the world.23 The American leadership was slow to respond, and, in telegrams through May and June, Scherer pushed his New York comrades for an answer.24 Plagued by uncertainty, the Presidium of the Representation continued to defer the question of its liquidation and of a world conference.25 Finally, in late July, the Presidium narrowly passed (by six votes to four) a resolution in favor of establishing world Bundist cooperation.26 In the middle of October, a blueprint was in place for a New York conference. Organizations would be invited from thirteen groups across Europe and the Americas.27 There were hurdles. First, the decision was hardly unanimous, and in fact barely passed. The minority, which included such heavyweights as Frantz Kurski, Leyvik Hodes, Sara Schweber, Leon Oler, and Chaim Wasser, penned a declaration opposing the motion. They argued that a world organization ran contrary to Bundist philosophy and would only serve to undermine the Bund in Poland. The declaration stated that the Bund had always rejected an international solution to the Jewish question because Jews’ problems were specific to the countries in which they lived. Its authors insisted any decision needed to be endorsed by the Polish Bund.28 The motion to publicize the declaration was ultimately rejected, although the committee did agree to

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open up the debate in the pages of Unzer Tsayt.29 Another obstacle was the venue. The conference (originally planned for late 1945) was set for October 1946, to take place in Paris, a location central for attendees on either side of the Atlantic.30 By September 1946, though, it became clear that Paris was no longer an option, with the French Socialists only allowing the congress on the condition that it would be a general conference on racism and its victims; otherwise, visas would not be granted to delegates.31 London and Brussels were proposed as the other two options, and, with the Belgian prime minister accepting the Bundists’ request to host the conference in his capital city, a date finally was set for February of the following year.32 With the decision taken and the plans for the conference in motion, the debate over Bundist world cooperation moved into the public arena. Emmanuel Nowogrodski, leading figure in the American Representation of the Polish Bund, got the ball rolling with an article in favor of establishing a world Bund organization. Nowogrodski, who had been secretary of the Bund’s Central Committee in Poland before the war, had escaped Warsaw with most of the Bund’s leadership for Vilna when Germany invaded Poland. After a year in Vilna, he escaped to New York, where he maintained contact with his comrades in Europe and worked tirelessly to raise funds to aid those left behind and to draw attention to their plight. He also took up the role of secretary of the American Representation, and was a major contributor to Unzer Tsayt. He was a key figure in the movement’s postwar restructure and became general secretary of its World Coordinating Committee, and he was active in the local New York organization (where he started the weekly Bundist radio program) before suffering a stroke in 1961.33 “What is left?” he asked in 1946, as he argued in favor of the establishment of an international Bundist body. The largest Jewish population was now in the United States: “The Jewish community in Poland was slaughtered,” he lamented; “Polish Jewry is today too small in numbers for the Bund to play an independent political role.”34 Some of the party’s most senior figures clearly recognized then that an organizational restructure was the only way for Bundism to survive. Emmanuel Scherer, previously the Bund’s representative in the Polish government-in-exile in London after Shmuel Zygielboym’s suicide in 1943, returned in early 1946 to the United States, where he became a key figure in the American Representation.35 He took a leading role in the debate, arguing that, at such a time, “each Bundist needs to ask the question about our future direction in this new era in which we find ourselves,” when only a minority of the ten million Jews of Europe remained.36 He reaffirmed the need for Bundists to continue their socialist work, and emphasized that the Bund’s greatest strength was its recognition of the idea “that the Jews’ fate

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is tightly bound up with that of non-Jews.” In an order with a “general lack of freedom, exploitation, injustice, and inhumanity,” the Jews suffer much more than non-Jews. Stemming from this belief was “the Bund’s root-ideas about the unbreakable community of fate between the Jews and non-Jews”: that the solution to Jewish problems lay “on the ground, in the countries where Jews find themselves rooted.”37 With the new circumstances of world Jewry, and the strong desire to continue to fight for Bundist ideas, the Bund’s leadership was ready to expand its borders. Professor Liebman Hersch, a demographer at the University of Geneva and a Bundist intellectual, joined Nowogrodski in recognizing the new challenges facing Bundists. Hersch, whose major works as a demographer had dealt first with Jewish emigration from Europe and later with comparing Jewish and non-Jewish crime in Poland, was a key advocate for the Bund continuing its work in a postwar world. Hersch would later become a dissenter within the party on the question of Israel.38 On this issue though, he was in the majority. Hersch recognized that, after the war, Jews everywhere, except those in the United States and Palestine, were an insignificant part of national populations and were more scattered than they had ever been. And, in those places where there were noteworthy Jewish populations— places such as Romania, Hungary, France, or Argentina—circumstances had changed immeasurably. He could see, he noted, that it was now difficult to establish a transnational political party (interetatistishe politishe partey) even though “the Jewish question” had become much more a “transnational question” than it had been before the war.39 “In this new era, how it is possible to run a political party that looks to solve the Jewish national question in each country where the far-reaching Jewish folks-masn [folk masses] live?” How could a Bund exist into the future? According to Hersch, the Bund was still necessary, even vital, for Jewish continuity. “As far as the human eye can look into the future,” he argued, “Jews will continue to live in more or less compact masses in different countries as national minorities.” The Bund’s ideological foundation—that the solutions to Jewish problems were tied to socialism and democracy—was “politically and logically still vindicated” as long as this was the case.40 He outlined how he believed the new Bundist structure would be organized: “Through their general political activity they [Jewish working masses] must create local organizations within the borders of the country and within the general program of the local Socialist and Syndicalist movement, a program that will be able to meaningfully differentiate itself from one country to the next; but in Jewish national affairs, their activities must be internationally coordinated through appropriate measures.”41 To this end, Hersch recognized the world conference in Brussels

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as an important first step toward ensuring Jewish stability and permanence on local and global levels. Although there was broad support for the idea, world Bundist cooperation became the subject of heated and public debate in the party press and among the leadership, debate that highlighted the lack of any clear and consistent Bundist response to the new Jewish world order. This debate underlined the fact that Jewish politics more broadly was now being drawn on different lines, and new realities were not necessarily compatible with old ideological considerations. Some within the Bund remained firm that the establishment of a global Bund organization would undermine the very fabric of Bundism, with its emphasis that the solutions to Jewish problems were rooted in local contexts: Jews in Belgium, for example, faced very different challenges from Jews in Australia. A monolithic world organization was therefore not viable. Nowogrodski attempted to allay these fears by stressing that a world coordinating committee would simply act as a resource for local organizations, and would broadly represent Bundist ideas in an international context—for example, within the Socialist International.42 In what became almost a catch-cry from this side of the debate, Trunk also emphasized the differing circumstances under which each Bundist organization would operate, and the necessary independence each would have: “With regard to contemporary Socialist politics, we will give each separate Bundist community its own autonomy to operate under the conditions in which its country enters the fight for socialism.” This was essential because socialism would come to each country at a different time and in a different way.43 Polish Bundists also remained wary, feeling that their position in Poland would be compromised if they were members of a worldwide, Westernoriented, social democratic movement.44 Polish Bund leaders however, gave their tentative support to the initiative. In a letter to the American Representation in December 1945, the Polish Bund welcomed Bundist cooperation as “desirable” and “useful.”45 They were determined to maintain contact with their comrades abroad; still, they wanted the cooperation to be very loosely based and for the local organizations to retain full independence. Grisha Jaszunski emphasized, after the first conference, in 1947, that the only way the world Bund could be successful was if it allowed each separate Bund group its full measure of autonomy, with the world Bund serving mainly to connect those groups rather than acting as any kind of Bundist center.46 The most notable and outspoken opponent of the world Bund idea was prewar Bund leader Yankev Pat, who, with his loyalties transferred to the Jewish Labor Committee, did not have the same desire to see the Bund transplanted to his new home of New York.47 “I am against the world convention of the Bund,” he wrote late in 1946 in Unzer Tsayt. He felt that

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because the fact that the Zionists, the Orthodox, the Mizrachim, and the Poale Tsiyon all had world conventions did not mean that the Bund needed to. This was because, as Pat argued, the Bund was different from these other movements. That difference was the very reason that the Bund was the most badly destroyed organization after the war: it was a movement of the Jewish folks-masn (masses) and of the Jewish folks-neshome (people’s soul). The Bund was not for the people; it was the people.48 The Bund was a party guided by reality, Pat argued, not by the desire to build or cultivate something that did not exist; the Bund was yidishe folks-realizm (Jewish people’s realism). But the reality had changed; the likelihood of Polish Jewry surviving was slim, and the role of the Bund in Poland would now be all about survival, not about cultural and political programs rooted in prewar Polish Jewish life.49 In Pat’s view, a world Bund convention would seal the fate of those Bundists seeking to reestablish a Jewish community in Poland. Further, he did not believe in setting up Bund groups in countries like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, or Australia, seeing the hundreds of Bundists in such places simply as romantics, although he did commend their local welfare and communal work. Ultimately though, Pat thought that a world Bund convention smacked of desperation at a time when the Bund, in his eyes, had been burnt in the fire that consumed millions of Polish Jews: “When Poland was flourishing with three million Jews, with a powerful Bund, with a resilient and creative Jewish working class, when there were lively Jewish communities in Romania and France, we did not call for a world convention of the Bund. But now, when a small Jewish community in Poland is struggling for its life, and desperately, nostalgic Bundists who have been thrown around the seven seas think that this is the right time for a world Bund and a world convention of the Bund!”50 This period would mark the end of Pat’s decades-long involvement in the Bund, which included his role as a leader in the education and children’s movement. As Emmanuel Patt wrote in his 1971 biography of his father, Pat’s loyalties shifted entirely to the Jewish Labor Committee. As Patt wrote in his father’s biography, “The politics of the Bundist leaders, their growing sectarianism, their ideational hardening, their refusal to come to terms with reality, according to [Jacob] Pat, isolated them from their surrounding environment.”51 Pat was also at odds with the New York Bundists over the question of a Jewish state; he wholeheartedly supported the establishment of such a state, whereas the Bund wrestled over the question and, in the end, was much more ambivalent toward Israel. This led to very public confrontations between the Pat and the Bund coordinating committee.52 In 1949, Pat penned a letter to Bund leader Binyomin Tabachinski, pledging a donation of fifty dollars. He lamented that the pledge was not be taken as

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an expression of his agreement with new Bundist policies and ideas, which he felt did nothing but weaken the movement spiritually and materially. “I send you my cheque,” he concluded, “as a fallen optimist, believing that if it is only a vessel, an instrument, not all hope is lost that it can be changed and it can be better.”53 In the end, Pat’s protest remained, as the title of his 1946 article suggested, just “a little dissent against the world convention of the Bund.” Despite the voices of protestation, the first world conference of the Bund took place in May 1947 in Brussels. Bundists from eighteen countries were represented, including from as far as Shanghai, Australia, and South Africa. A World Coordinating Committee was established and a transnational framework was created to ensure the continuity of the Bund for at least another generation. The manifesto agreed upon at the conference, and published in Unzer Tsayt, emphasized the transnational nature of this new Bundist superstructure, which would coordinate the activities of the various groups and organizations, and aim to “strengthen the thinning ranks of the local masses.”54 The role of the ruling body would be to deal with the broad issues of antisemitism, Yiddish culture, assimilation, and displaced persons. The manifesto resolved to members that, “just as in the previous half-century of its existence,” the Bund would remain the “pre-eminent fighter for your rights, your organizational centre, and your avant-garde.”55 It was clear that the new organizational principles were based on a twotiered system whereby the movement’s international arm would be a largely theoretical body and support structure for the local organizations, which would operate independently and carry out the practical activities having a more discernible impact on the daily lives of Jews. That week in May 1947 marked a transnational overhaul in the governing principles of an internationalist movement that, until then had, ironically enough, been territorially bound. Emmanuel Scherer, who became the secretary of the committee, wrote in his account of the conference that differences of opinion had always been, and would continue to be, part of the fabric of Bundist life, even more was this true now that Bundists lived in such diverse spaces. The conference resolved therefore not to pass any resolutions on local issues but only to decide on general matters relating to socialism and global Jewish issues. The atmosphere that lingered over the conference, though, was idealistically reported to be one of solidarity: “the spirit of internationalism; a humanitarian approach to people—as a whole and as individuals; the strong connection between democracy and freedom,” and an ongoing commitment to socialism, informed the conference proceedings throughout.56 Scherer reflected ten years later on this decisive moment, which saw the Bund shift

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“from a party in one country to a global organization.” He argued: “It marked a turning point, but not an upheaval, not a contradiction in the essence of Bundism. Thanks to this new path, the danger of the Bund’s downfall or of its atomisation has been eliminated. With this new path the Bund remains true to its socialist ideology, true to its goals and principles.”57

The Role of the World Coordinating Committee Although the International Jewish Labor Bund had been officially established in 1947, the question of its role in Jewish life had not yet been settled, nor had the nature of the new organizational structure been fully developed. It would take a year of local Bundist activity and the development of the World Coordinating Committee to clarify the way the new world Bund would function. By the second world conference, in October 1948 in New York, the issue was mostly resolved, with the importance of world Bundist cooperation recognized virtually unanimously, leaving behind the debate of the previous years. The Bundist principle of doykayt, which called for Jews to foster viable and creative communities wherever they lived, had been reinvigorated as local communities set about strengthening their activities, with the support of the World Coordinating Committee. The doykayt notion stated that there was no single Jewish center, and that Jewish life benefited most when local circumstances were a part of its development and Jewish communities around the world were implicated in a relationship of cultural and intellectual exchange and respect. The questions for the 1948 conference delegates was how their new structure could operate most effectively and what role an organizing committee should play.58 In the eighteen months leading up to the world conference, the World Coordinating Committee had consolidated its position as the representative of Bundism in the international socialist arena and had taken an active role in supporting the development of local Bundist organizations. The executive had met three times, in Brussels and in Paris. The committee had sent representatives to three international Socialist conferences; it had published twenty-two bulletins, thirteen in Yiddish and nine in English; it had coordinated a largescale celebration for the Bund’s fiftieth anniversary; and it had formulated a position toward the rapidly changing situation in Israel.59 The Committee’s general secretary, Emanuel Nowogrodski, wrote that by the second world conference, no one could deny that the committee had become the natural center for Bundists all around the world.60 Although Nowogrodski was exaggerating—the center for Bundists was their local communities—his point did reflect the focus of the movement’s most respected thinkers, who poured much energy into the committee.

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FIGUR E 1  Executive of the World Coordinating Committee of the Bund, New

York, 1957. Includes Emanuel Scherer (front row, third from right) and Emanuel Nowogrodski (front row, center). Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

The proceedings of the conference highlighted how the committee members had positioned themselves as the intellectual and organizational vanguard of the world Bundist movement. As reported in the Bund’s Englishlanguage Bulletin, the second world conference picked up where the first world conference left off. The first conference was unable to treat important questions surrounding the new circumstances with the necessary thoroughness, and could only lay the foundation for subsequent effective cooperation. The second world conference undertook to outline in greater depth the framework through which a world Bund would operate.61 Its discussion, on the first day, heaped praise on the World Coordinating Committee for its work in the previous year, particularly in connecting all Bund organizations.62 The conference drafted a new statute that ensured greater cooperation between the World Coordinating Committee and the emerging Bundist organizations; it called for more attention to the growing Bundist communities in Latin America and laid forth the possibility of a Latin American secretariat; and

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it committed to greater support in transforming Bund support groups into legitimate Bundist organizations and in providing them with propaganda materials.63 The movement’s leadership saw the consolidation of this structure as one of the most significant outcomes of the conference. Scherer wrote, in his report of the conference, that these decisions “secured and strengthened the foundations of the all-Bundist community of struggle [der al-Bundisher kamf-gemeynshaft]. With this alone, the second world conference of the Bund would have fulfilled an important assignment in the postwar history of our movement.”64 The first two conferences were landmarks for the Bund. The restructuring that they undertook marked a radical shift from the organizing principles in pre-Holocaust Europe, which did not allow for the spread of the Bund or even for any kind of formal transnational ties. As Scherer would note on the committee’s tenth anniversary, these conferences would ensure the continuity of the Bund beyond the death camps of Europe.65 This was not, however, the end of the discussion around how a global structure would operate, as Bundist communities grew rapidly in the ensuing years. This issue was further elaborated a year later at the October 1949 executive session of the World Coordinating Committee, in Brussels. A resolution, passed unanimously at this session, called for local Bundist organizations to strengthen their local work. The resolution reiterated earlier appeals to Bundists to continue special emphasis on local work. In particular, it called for greater focus on education and youth work, and especially for the establishment of “secular, progressive Yiddish elementary schools or, at least, weekend schools, permeated with the Socialist spirit.” It called for members to “play an active part in the work of Jewish civic bodies dedicated to the task of raising the cultural, economic or material status of the Jewish popular masses,” and endeavor to make such bodies “democratic and broadly Jewish.” Finally, the resolution reaffirmed the need for Bund organizations to participate in the local Jewish community councils, and to strive for the democratization of such bodies. If such umbrella bodies did not exist, Bundists should work toward establishing them in the interests of securing local Jewish life.66 Much of this was in line with the resolutions of the first and second world conference; however, by late 1949, as Jews began to settle into new locations, the Bund felt it necessary to reiterate this call for Bundists to throw themselves into the community activism that most had left behind at the beginning of the war. By this stage, the World Coordinating Committee was in full swing, and the superstructure established only a couple of years earlier had been consolidated. On its tenth anniversary, Scherer wrote that “the World Coordinating Committee of the Bund stood at the center of current Bundist

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activity.”67 This was no doubt an overstatement. The committee did guide the movement through what was a radical organizational shift; however, local movements functioned with great independence, and their directions were dictated more by local circumstances than by the directives of the World Coordinating Committee.68 There was a tension between the stated aims of the world Bund—to act as a representative of local Bund organizations on the world stage, and to provide those organizations with moral and material leadership—and the rhetoric that gave the World Coordinating Committee prominence as a “center” in Bundist life. This rhetoric was also at odds with the mandate of doykayt, which stressed that the center of Jewish life was necessarily in the communities where Jews lived and worked. The reality was that committee and local Bund organizations were codependent. If anything, the World Coordinating Committee relied much more on its local organizations than the reverse. Without well-oiled Bund machines on the ground, there was no hope of disseminating the movement’s message. The only way to reach Jews and to have any impact on Jewish life was through the development of local organizations. There is no doubt that the World Coordinating Committee played a significant role in the continuing development of local Bund movements, be it with financial aid or community-building expertise. However, the claims of such leaders as Scherer and Nowogrodski that the committee occupied a “center” in world Bundist life ran contrary to the earlier debates in which they had argued that Jewish problems could only be solved locally. As Scherer had written in 1946, the answers to Jewish questions were “on the ground, in the countries where Jews find themselves rooted.”69 Clearly there was a gap between how the leading figures in the World Coordinating Committee pictured their role, and the realities of the “all-Bundist community of struggle,” which demanded a network of centers. Still, the committee continued to meet regularly, to represent the Bundist line with regard to international institutions such as the Committee of the International Socialist Conference (COMISCO) and the United Nations, and in other matters of international interest. It provided intellectual guidance and organizational support to local Bund organizations around the world, and it hosted a further six world conferences—in 1955, 1964, 1972, 1985, 1987, and 1992—in which the leaders of Bund organizations gathered to garner greater cohesion on ideological matters. The committee continued to assemble until the turn of the twenty-first century.70 In this period, its most important function was not its creation of resolutions, or even the leadership it offered to Bundists around the world; rather, its most significant task was to connect Bundists around the world and to act as an intermediary between geographically dispersed communities existing under all kinds of conditions. It was the World Coordinating Committee that was

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ultimately responsible for creating a sense of an international Bund and, by extension, for the survival of the Bund. The committee provided local Bund organizations—at the forefront in the struggle for hearts and minds in the Jewish world—with intellectual leadership and administrative support. The committee could not, however, be much more than an ideological reference point and bureaucratic center for Bundists worldwide. Still, the world Bund apparatus played an important role in guiding and fostering local Bundist activity, and providing a framework for transnational Jewish cooperation and exchange that would serve as a model for Jewish communities. The World Coordinating Committee carried out its role through a number of functions. The most important, apart from the world conferences that once each decade brought together the leaders of most local organizations, were its regular press (represented primarily by the monthly Unzer Tsayt) and the emissaries it sent to support and energize Bundist communities all over the world. The committee also tried to represent Jewish interests in the Socialist International, although in reality this had minor effect on the day-to-day function of the Bund. Realizing that the Bund’s unlikely survival required greater numbers, the committee tried to acted as a link between all Bundist organizations, and to create the mythology of mishpokhedikayt [ “family-ness,” from the Yiddish mishpokhe, “family”], around which members could find common cause.71 In the decades after the war, this notion was elevated to the highest realms of the Bundist narrative. In 1957, for example, Argentine Bundist Yitzkhak Lipski described how this feeling remained strong in Bundists’ hearts everywhere. Bundists around the world, he claimed, were connected by correspondence and by the journals and Bulletins that were sent across continents. Their institutions and events were familiar, from Yiddish libraries, to schools, to Holocaust commemorations and anniversary celebrations. When a visitor arrived in Argentina, he wrote, “he is familiar, and already feels as though he has stepped out of an event in Warsaw or Łódź, in Lublin or Kraków. Comrades come from Brazil and Uruguay, but who feels like a stranger in Buenos Aires?”72 For Lipski, bundishe mishpokhedikayt was not simply “an empty question, but a matter of flesh and blood.”73 Even as late as 2004, Motl Zelmanowicz, a leading Bund writer of the last quarter of the twentieth century, tried to emphasize the centrality of mishpokhedikayt as one of the key features in the party’s history: “When other parties were being torn apart by internal conflict and splits, the Bund remained united thanks to its internal democracy and the atmosphere of comradeship.”74 The reality was that ideology connected Bundists as much as did this atmosphere of kinship. Bundists still shared a commitment to Yiddish culture as the cornerstone of their Jewishness; they still saw socialism as the

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only means through which to create a more just society and to ensure Jewish continuity. Their friendships and shared experience were certainly a factor in their ongoing involvement with the movement, but as an explanation, mishpokhedikayt remains insufficient to explain why Bundists continued their fight in new settings and why their organizations and members seemed to maintain a healthy appetite for political conflict and struggle even when they lacked the physical numbers to exert major influence. Still, the mishpokhe narrative was a useful rhetorical tool in trying to establish unbreakable bonds between party members in radically different settings around the world. It was a way of convincing Bund members, leaders, and the world that the Bund’s interwar ability to attract support and shine a guiding light in the Jewish world was not yet extinguished, even if the opposite was fast becoming reality.

The Bundist Press Journals were a particularly important tool in the Bundist effort to foster a feeling of kinship and family. As Argentine Bundist Lipski had written in 1957 of the place that journals occupied in Bundist life: “Here a fresh package with Unzer Shtime [France], there a recently-printed Unzer Gedank [Our Belief— Argentina]; here a delight in Lebns-Fragn [Life Questions—Israel], there a Mexican Foroys [Forward]. You forget that you are lonely—no, everywhere you have a big and warm family.”75 These journals served several purposes: they sought to engage with local questions involving both Jewish and nonJewish labor movements; they included writings on international politics, particularly on the Cold War; and they debated the meaning of Jewish socialism in the contemporary world, seeking to ensure the movement’s continuing relevance. Mexican Bundist and leading Jewish communal figure Tuvie Maizel wrote in 1955 that the Jewish socialist press was the movement’s most important tool in carrying out its struggle. It was the “carrier of the great ideas—the idea of world and people; the idea of Jew and man, of equality and brotherhood.”76 No less important for the editors and distributors of the journals in the postwar period was to link Bundists worldwide. The journals were a principal means by which Bundists in different countries were connected. Print media—the World Coordinating Committee’s official monthly organ, the French Bund’s daily newspaper, or the less frequently published journals of other Bundist communities—became a central means of cultural expression that brought together comrades in a transnational Bundist space. This role was as much from necessity as it was idealistic. First, had the Bund not sent the journals worldwide, these papers could not have claimed a broad readership. The circulation was small, but by distributing the journals so widely, the Bund leaders could make more grand claims about

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their influence. Second, there could be no world Bund movement without some form of transnational communication. Finally, there were the leaders’ underlying anxieties. Certainly they intended for their regular publications to act as carriers of the ideological torch, and as the binding agents of the Bundist family; however, the reality was that Bundists were competing in a still-crowded market of Yiddish press and ideas; the only way that Bund organizations could try to stem their decline was to reenter this fray and increase their visibility in the Yiddish-speaking world. The two most important such publications—in terms of circulation, quality of writing, regularity, and longevity—were the New York–based Unzer Tsayt and the Parisian daily newspaper Unzer Shtime. Both drew on leading Yiddish (Bundist and non-Bundist) writers in the Americas, Europe, and Israel. The varying circulation figures of Unzer Tsayt and other Bund journals are difficult to gauge, although it is certain that figures fluctuated with the rises and falls of the postwar Bund. A reasonable estimate for Unzer Tsayt would be that it had thousands of readers worldwide during the Bund’s mini renaissance in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1960, the party reported to the Socialist International that the journal had a circulation of eight thousand, but this was most likely an overstatement.77 At the 1964 world conference in New York, Scherer reported on behalf of the editorial collective that the journal was being sent to 197 cities and 28 countries around the world, including 99 cities in the United States alone, and 31 cities and towns in Israel.78 In the late 1950s, the movement also publicly claimed a membership of around twenty thousand worldwide, although the real figure was more likely somewhere between three and five thousand.79 In any case, given these figures, it is almost certain that there were thousands of readers of the party’s official organ. Another indicator of the publication’s perceived importance to the Bund is how it highlighted the numbers of well-wishers in anniversary editions. The sixtieth-anniversary edition in late 1957 boasted greetings from 250 organizations and institutions and from 3,400 individuals from 99 different cities in 19 countries.80 Such proclamations, however, also can evidence the declining readership of Unzer Tsayt and the decline in the Bund’s fortunes. After the sixtieth-anniversary edition, in which the greetings section ran up to one hundred pages, the seventieth-anniversary edition in 1967 received greetings from “hundreds of organizations; from thousands of individuals, from sixteen countries in all parts of the world,” and was only sixty pages long.81 The seventy-fifth-anniversary edition contained only fifty pages of congratulatory messages; by the eightieth anniversary in 1977, there were only fifteen countries represented, and no reference to how many people had sent well wishes; the introduction to a section containing congratulations

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said only that the paper had received “greetings from organizations and individuals from fifteen countries in all parts of the world.”82 This trend gives an indication that the late 1950s marked a high point in the fortunes of the Bund as a world movement, and, from the mid-1960s onward, the party was in steady decline. Unzer Tsayt began its life in 1941 as the monthly journal of the American Representation of the Polish Bund. Its stated aim was to “sow the seed of Bundist thought” among the thousands of Jewish workers who had “stood in the ranks of the Bund in the old home” and who had been “thrown to various states and countries in both of the Americas.” The editors called on their readers to take responsibility for the broadening of the journal’s readership and for its survival. 83 For its first five years, reflected writer and Bund journalist Leyvik Hodes, the journal sought to bring to light the anguish of the Jewish masses in Europe and particularly in Poland, and to represent their cause to the world. The editors put all their energy into this battle to publicize Nazi atrocities against European Jewry. However, as Hodes noted on the occasion of the journal’s fiftieth issue, after the war it needed to revise its role in Jewish life: “Today is not just a time for counting our losses, but also for frantic searching for a tomorrow.”84 Unzer Tsayt had a positive role to play in building the new Jewish reality, but it would also play a very important role in creating the world Bund. Hodes wrote: “We [Unzer Tsayt] bound together the scattered [tsezeyt un tseshpreyt] Bundist and general Jewish socialist family around the whole world: Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and other countries—through Unzer Tsayt, they all have become closer to one another and more tightly connected in an organic way.”85 By 1948, Unzer Tsayt had become the organ of the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee. There had, until then, been an open question over the ideological position of the journal because of a stand-off between the Bundist leaderships in New York and in Poland. After the Brussels conference and the dissolution of the American Representation of the Polish Bund, Farlag Unzer Tsayt (the New York Bund’s publishing house) took over the responsibility for publishing the journal, and for a short period it represented the newly established New York Bund organization.86 By the movement’s second world conference in 1948, however, the Polish Bund had withdrawn from the World Coordinating Committee, thereby removing the organizational and ideological obstacles that had prevented the journal from representing the committee. Until its closure in 2005, Unzer Tsayt would speak on behalf of the world movement’s central leadership.87 It was an official voice of the Bund, bringing Yiddish-readers worldwide an analysis of Jewish and global events from Bundist perspectives. It published commentary on politics and culture, with

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much focus on issues surrounding the Cold War and the development of the State of Israel. It also brought news and greetings from Bund organizations around the world. Finally, it constantly reflected on the relevance and necessity of Bundism as an idea, and of the Bund as an organization. Of course, underlying this hyperbole were deeper existential concerns. A party whose members had been concentrated and that had been bound by language, geography, and daily experience now lacked much of what had held it together. If the members wanted their movement to survive deeper into the twentieth century, there were not many vehicles that could bind the “scattered Bundist . . . family.” And declarations like those by Hodes showed that, above everything else, it was ideology that connected comrades. A worldview that saw Yiddish as the central marker of Jewish identity, that saw socialism as a guiding light, and that did not include Israel as the Jewish homeland, brought together readers of Unzer Tsayt and Bund members worldwide. Even by the 1990s, when the readership had dwindled, Moshe Lokiec, the journal’s editor during the 1980s and 1990s, insisted that it had “carried out its historic mission of connecting Bundists in all corners of the world where destiny has thrown them. And we continue to further the ideas of brotherhood, of freedom, and of a Yiddish cultural renaissance.”88 This lofty rhetoric continued into the twenty-first century, even as the movement faded into obscurity. Despite many writers’ optimism, the journal’s content still revealed the deep psychological angst that plagued postwar Bundists. The writers’ anxiety was clear in the many attempts to justify the party’s role in contemporary Jewish life, and, in Unzer Tsayt’s last two decades, the panic became palpable. There were regular articles affirming both the important role that the Bund played throughout the twentieth century, and its ongoing potential to influence Jewish politics. These appeared regularly throughout the year, and were more conspicuous in the November issues that celebrated the Bund’s anniversary. World conferences and significant milestones saw an even greater emphasis on the question of relevance and continuity. Of course, hyperbole had long been a tool utilized by Bundist historians and journalists. It was common in the prewar Bundist press to read of the Bund’s pioneering role in the Jewish and socialist worlds. The postwar period also saw such grandiose rhetoric about the Bund’s activities during the Holocaust, and especially in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.It was no surprise that such a tradition would continue, and a leading role would be carved out for the postwar Bund in rebuilding Jewish life. As the decades elapsed, though, these discussions of the Bund’s place in the Jewish world took on a much stronger air of desperation. In the lead-up to the fourth world conference, in New York in 1965, for example, as the Cold War raged and the Vietnam

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War began to escalate, Scherer wrote on the Bund’s fundamental questions—socialism, Jewish survival, Yiddish, secularism, and doykayt—in light of contemporary events. He also looked at the current problems surrounding the Jews’ condition as a world people, the situation in Israel, and the ongoing question of assimilation.89 Scherer concluded that the basic principles of Bundism were “a logical connection between a realistic basis and idealistic goals.” However, a state of world peace and international cooperation were preconditions for a secure Jewish future. On this basis, Bundism would continue to be an important factor in ensuring the future for world Jewry.90 Two years later, on the movement’s seventieth anniversary, Scherer once again affirmed the movement’s importance. He wrote that, although the Bund was no longer so strong as it had once been, “Bundist ideas and truths remained wholly valid and no-one can destroy them.”91 He continued: “Bundism is not simply a branch on the Jewish tree that can be cut off; it is a part of the trunk. And as long as there is a trunk, there will also be part of its life force.”92 Scherer failed to address, however, a fundamental problem that faced the Bund: its numbers were declining in many of its bases, and by this time it exerted virtually no influence on an international level. The question of how to reverse this trend was not something for which the Bund’s leading intellectuals seemed to have an answer. Such articles continued to appear through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the twenty-first century. Motl Zelmanowicz, who was by that stage the chairman of the World Coordinating Committee, was perhaps the most prolific writer in these years. In the lead-up to the 1992 world conference in New York—the Bund’s last world conference—Zelmanowicz wrote of the role the Bund could play in helping Jews in the former Soviet Union, and in supporting the peace movement and the Left in Israel. He emphasized that the Bund must continue to work for Jewish survival and cultural autonomy, and urged that, as in the previous ninety-five years, it retain its optimism.93 On the Bund’s one-hundredth anniversary in 1997, he wrote of the sorrow he felt that the Bund was physically much weaker than half a century earlier, but maintained that Bundism had continued to be a continuing tendency in Jewish life, and emphasized that it existed beyond an organized form.94 Each anniversary brought more of these reflections from Zelmanowicz, who had by the turn of the new century become the mouthpiece for the Bund’s hopes and anxieties as he articulated the Bund’s ongoing importance and centrality in Jewish survival.95 These articles—not only since the beginning of the 1990s, but through the whole second half of the twentieth century—reveal more than simply a group of activists committed to rebuilding their lives and their world around the ideas of “brotherhood, freedom and .  .  . Yiddish cultural renaissance.”

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These writings uncover a deep anxiety that the Bund’s message was falling on deaf ears; that the Bund was in fact losing its relevance as the language of Marxism became old-fashioned and as Yiddish became a marginal factor in Jewish life. As much as the history of the postwar Bund is a story of a small band of committed socialists rising from the ashes to build a better tomorrow, so too is it the tale of a decades-long existential crisis that only worsened as the situation became more precarious. Unzer Tsayt certainly gave voice to the Bundists’ struggle for their ideals, but it also highlighted the constant instability of their situation. The journal represented not only the Bund’s struggle for Jewish socialism, but also its fight to have a voice among world Jewry, to retain some modicum of relevance in the Jewish world. By 2005, the Bundists’ anxieties became reality, and without the readership or the writers to publish a regular Yiddish socialist journal, Unzer Tsayt closed its doors after more than sixty years. Unzer Tsayt was not the World Coordinating Committee’s only regular publication. The committee also published a short-lived English-language bulletin, through which it sought to counteract the Zionist-dominated Jewish American press.96 This bulletin was not the only attempt to make inroads to an English-speaking audience; there were further attempts by the Bundist youth in the 1970s.97 The Bund’s Bulletin first appeared after the movement’s inaugural world conference in 1947. Initially, it was issued monthly, but after less than eighteen months this already proved too great a strain on resources, and it was published less frequently. In fact, between 1950 and its final issue in early 1953, the Bulletin appeared only three or four times a year. The Bulletin was circulated free of charge, relying on the generosity of its readers for voluntary contributions and financial support.98 Although it appears to have published its last issue in 1953, the Bund claimed in 1960 that it still had a circulation of six thousand, which seems unlikely.99 Mainly, the paper reported the Bund’s position on Jewish and Socialist affairs, and regularly translated excerpts from articles that had appeared in Unzer Tsayt. It published resolutions from the world conferences and from the executive sessions of the World Coordinating Committee. Finally, each edition brought news from Bund organizations around the globe, whether anniversary celebrations, or local conflicts in which Bund committees were involved. Being an Englishlanguage publication, the Bulletin was not designed to play the same role as Unzer Tsayt—it could not reach a broad Bundist audience in other countries, some not English-speaking. It could only really appeal to Jews and socialists in English-speaking countries who were sympathetic to the Bund’s goals but could not really access the organization for a lack of Yiddish literacy. Circulating an English-language publication also highlighted a tension between

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its mandate to further the cause of Yiddish and continue the traditions so important to generations of Bundists, and its need to expand and adapt to new circumstances. The Bulletin was not the first Bundist publication in a language other than Yiddish; Russian and Polish journals had been a constant fixture throughout the party’s first fifty years. The paper’s ultimate failure—it only lasted around six years—was testament to the difficulty that the Bund would subsequently face in broadening its base, particularly as the market for Yiddish readers and the pool of Yiddish writers went into freefall in the following decades. The Parisian Yiddish daily, Unzer Shtime, also went to great lengths to bolster the Bund globally. Established in 1935 as the successor to the shortlived French Bundist journal Der Veker [The Awakener], Unzer Shtime was one of the first Bundist publications outside Russia and Poland that was dedicated to local Jewish life, rather than concerned primarily with supporting the Bund in the “old home.” In its original prewar form, it operated as a fortnightly newspaper and then a weekly.100 Its editorial board and supporters were proud of the Bund’s work during the Nazi occupation of continuing to publish the journal illegally, albeit less frequently. The paper continued to publish whatever news its editors could gather, usually through underground radio broadcasts, and stayed true to its socialist principles.101 Soon after the defeat of Germany and the reunification of France, Unzer Shtime reappeared (on 4 October 1944) as a twice-weekly newspaper. The first edition congratulated the victorious Allied armies, the French resistance, and all the Jewish fighters. It reaffirmed its commitment to “a free France .  .  . a brotherhood of peoples .  .  . equal rights for Jews .  .  . [and] socialism.”102 The editors outlined in this issue the challenges that faced the Jews in the postwar era, and what role Unzer Shtime would play. Acknowledging that everything had been destroyed “systematically, radically, and with German efficiency,” they declared that everything “must be rebuilt anew. . . . We will not,” stressed the editors, “spare any effort or energy in mobilizing all communal strength, so that we can, as quickly as possible, realize the material, legal-political, and cultural rebirth of the Jewish masses.”103 After more than two years as a twice-weekly newspaper, Unzer Shtime became a daily on 29 December 1946. On this occasion, the editorial committee idealistically reiterated that it would continue to serve the best interests of the Jewish people, to fight for socialism and a free France, to increase its cultural content in order to foster Yiddish high culture, and to bring forth the best reporting and journalism in the French Jewish press. The new format would also include a greater focus on global Jewish issues, with a large number of correspondents from Jewish—mainly Bundist—communities around the world.104 The ability to reorganize as a daily was due largely to the

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arrival of a wave of Polish Jews to Paris, through which Unzer Shtime received a boost in readership and in the ability to produce a quality publication. The influx was, as one writer described it, like a blood transfusion.105 The newspaper later proclaimed that in those years immediately following the defeat of Nazism, it had played a crucial role in acting for the Jewish refugees trapped in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Partly this claim had to do with the distribution of a small number of newspapers within the camps, a distribution that lifted the morale of the refugees. The circulation of Unzer Shtime was made difficult, given the domination of Zionism in the camps. However, the newspaper’s editors felt that they had given Jewish refugees an opportunity to tell their stories of hardship and struggle, in the years following the war. The paper’s pages brought stories of the ongoing Jewish suffering to the world, and put pressure on world leaders to act on behalf of those still downtrodden.106 Of course, it is unlikely that a Yiddish newspaper in Paris played any significant role in bringing to light the poor living conditions in the DP camps, but by exaggerating their role, Bundist writers once again tried to assert their importance in rebuilding postwar Jewish life. One of the most significant functions of the newspaper was, in fact, the way it connected Jews, and particularly Bundists, around the world. Perhaps more than the monthly Unzer Tsayt, the daily newspaper carried a strong focus on reporting news from around the Jewish world, and operated as a means of communication for Bundists in different communities. Unzer Shtime functioned as more than just a newspaper to its readers. The act of reading Yiddish itself became a form of cultural expression, albeit on what was, through the twentieth century, a ship sinking ever deeper into the abyss. It was the editors’ last act of defiance, as they sought to assert that they had survived the earlier brutality that had claimed so many of their friends and family. Bund leaders from various cities emphasized this when Unzer Shtime celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 1955. The special edition that appeared contained messages of congratulations and support from Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel, Belgium, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Brazil. These greetings reveal how newspapers became a valuable space in which Bundists could gather as a community. The messages of congratulations filled Unzer Shtime’s pages. Melbourne Bund secretary Jacob Waks wrote, on behalf of his organization, that “the continuing future of national Jewish culture lives in the Yiddish language. Twenty years of Unzer Shtime is one of the most striking demonstrations for our beliefs and our desires.” Waks’s words indicate not only the shared history and ideology of Bundists everywhere, but the Bundists’ common destiny and cultural identifiers. He continued, “Although we are twelve thousand

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miles apart, we are still close and we celebrate together with you.”107 Bund members saw Unzer Shtime, along with other Bundist journals, as agents that helped overcome the great physical distances that separated the members. M. Rosenberg from Toronto confirmed this sentiment in his congratulatory message: Unzer Shtime’s anniversary was “a yontev for all of us. Therefore, Bundists everywhere will read this anniversary edition wherever they find themselves, and will send an all-Bundist greeting through the pages of our twenty-year-old newspaper.”108 Unzer Shtime was circulated for most of the second half of the twentieth century as a daily. Like most of the postwar Yiddish press, it was forced to close its doors as the market for Yiddish—and Yiddish socialist—newspapers waned. This was the fate of almost all Bundist publications, and indeed of most Yiddish publications. Apart from Unzer Tsayt, which ceased publication in 2005, the only Bundist journals to survive into the twenty-first century were Melbourne’s Unzer Gedank [Our Belief], which by then came out only once every year or two and contained mostly English-language material, and the Israeli monthly Lebns-Fragn, which had become bimonthly. In late 2006, Lebns-Fragn launched a website and became the first (and will most likely remain the only) online Bundist journal.109 For half a century, these journals transmitted the ideals that had sustained Bundists for so many decades, connecting them through their shared history, memory, and ideology, and acting as a community through which Bundists were connected beyond the geography that separated them.

Emissaries The printed word was not the only vehicle through which the World Coordinating Committee connected Bundists. The party also sent representatives to energize and connect local communities; thus, visiting emissaries were constant fixtures in Bundist life from Melbourne to Montevideo and from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. Sponsored by the World Coordinating Committee, Bund leaders from the United States, Israel, Mexico, Australia, and France visited Jewish communities around the world to provide a link between Bundists and the world Bund, to connect communities to one another, and to keep the movement alive. Coordinating Committee Secretary Emanuel Scherer reported to the fourth world conference in New York in 1965 that the emissaries played an important role both in linking and in strengthening Bundist organizations.110 Whether or not this was correct, the party’s leadership clearly saw sending emisssaries as a highly useful tool in working toward the goal of maintaining a global organization. For the movement’s world leadership, the shlikhim (emissaries) were considered critical. As

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well as providing leadership and bringing expertise, the emissaries’ visits reassured local communities of their place in a broader social and cultural movement, and highlighted the support they received from their leaders on the committee and from Bundist organizations abroad. The emissaries were generally members of the committee; they were in the upper echelon of the movement and had been leading activists for decades in Poland and subsequently in the postwar communities. An emissary sent by the World Coordinating Committee was welcomed like a celebrity and treated like royalty. Banquets were held in the emissaries’ honor, and they lectured to crowded halls and received glowing praise in the Bundist press and often within the broader Jewish media. Bund anniversaries were a particularly busy time for the most senior Bundists in their roles as envoys of the central leadership. There was a great deal of transcontinental activity, as these leaders used these opportunities to energize the local bases. The Bund’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations, for example, saw airplanes cross the Atlantic and Pacific carrying figureheads of the movement. Emanuel Nowogrodski, secretary of the World Coordinating Committee, arrived in Melbourne on 6 October 1957, where he was welcomed at the airport by a large gathering of local Bundists. He was the first shaliakh sent to Australia, where he stayed until mid-November. Essayist Yitzkhak Kahn, documenting the visit, noted that the excitement, on Nowogrodski’s arrival, was palpable, as old khaverim waited to greet a friend they had not seen for nearly two decades. In fact, one of the biggest factors in arousing a strong sense of anticipation and enthusiasm from local Bundists was that members of the Bund who had been torn apart in the years following 1939 were reunited, if only briefly, by these visits. It was not only personal friendships that were rekindled, however; news that the envoys carried about their brothers and sisters in other corners of the world brought tears of joy. So it was when Nowogrodski landed in Melbourne. Kahn described the scene, typical of so many accounts of Bundists welcoming comrades: “They were shuffling through names, towns, and ‘Bundist towns’ in Poland; branches of the Bundist family, of Bundist roots [tsvaygn fun der Bundisher mishpokhe, fun Bundishn shtam], who were carried by the storm to the Australian continent. It was a moving reunion: Bundists from a number of generations surrounded their general-secretary, with whom they were connected through years of common struggle, dreams and hopes.”111 Nowogrodski’s visit generated a great deal of enthusiasm in the local Bundist community. He spoke at anniversary celebrations, party gatherings, and committee meetings, and worked with the youth and children’s movements. He laid wreaths and delivered eulogies to recently deceased khaverim. He also raised £2,500 for the World Coordinating Committee

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in New York. Nowogrodski returned to Australia in 1970, in what was considered a highly successful visit. During this stay, he spoke at three public events in front of 1,400 people, took part in nine party meetings with 374 participants, and attended six meetings of the party’s committee and several meetings with the youth and children’s movements. He also attended thirty-three fundraisers and informal gatherings.112 A number of other emissaries were sent from New York to mark the Bund’s sixtieth anniversary, in 1957. Binyomin Tabatchinsky spent October and November on a tour of European Bundist organizations in France, Belgium, and London. He was welcomed in Paris as a distinguished guest at the seventh national conference of the French Bund, and was the keynote speaker at the major European Bund anniversary celebration in the main hall of the Maison de la Chimie and at the major banquet marking the anniversary at the Hôtel Moderne.113 The World Coordinating Committee also sent Hershl Himmelfarb to Los Angeles for three weeks to mark the Bund’s anniversary; in Los Angeles, he was the keynote speaker at the celebration evening, met with seventeen different organizations on behalf of the Bund, and raised money for local Bundist work.114 By then, he was well acquainted with the Los Angeles Bundists, having toured in 1951 and raised over $2,200.115 The Bund’s seventieth anniversary, in 1967, was also an opportunity for the World Coordinating Committee to extend its support to local organizations. Canadian Bundist intellectual and economics professor Arthur Lermer toured South America at this time. His visit began in Rio de Janeiro and San Paolo, Brazil, moved on to Montevideo for a few days, and continued to Buenos Aires, his main stop. In each of these places, he gave speeches reflecting on the history of the Bund, and provided time to discuss organizational questions with the movement’s leadership and with youth representatives.116 That year, Arcadius Kahan, economic historian from the University of Chicago, visited Melbourne to mark the anniversary. Like the other emissaries, he gave lectures and participated in committee meetings.117 One of his most important tasks, however, was to attempt to encourage party members who were no longer active and to entice former members back into the mishpokhe. To this end, he made personal visits to dozens of lapsed members’ homes, seeking to inspire them into serving the needs and interests of the party.118 These are merely a few examples of the emissaries sent by the World Coordinating Committee to Bund communities around the world. International visits were a regular fixture on Bundist calendars. Other early visits included Nowogrodski’s productive fundraising trip to South America in 1951, Emanuel Scherer’s European tour that same year, Liebman Hersch’s visit to South America in 1952, and Israeli Bund leader Yisachar Artuski’s

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visit to Australia in 1961.119 In the years between the Bund’s third world conference in 1955 and its fourth world conference in 1965, Scherer reported, there were frequent visits to American and Canadian Bundist communities, regular visits to (and visitors from) European and Israeli Bund organizations, and twelve tours of South America.120 The Bund Coordinating Committee clearly saw this program as a worthy and powerful tool. By directing human and material resources to the program, it felt, it could go some way to realizing the goals of creating a global organization and of stemming the party’s rapid decline. Less talked about in the Bundist press are these more negative factors that might have led to such a strong emphasis on this course of action, factors that did not feature in the public discourse, or perhaps even in private. After all, sending leaders on European and South American tours, as well as on missions to distant locations like Australia and Israel, was an expensive exercise with results difficult to measure in material terms. It is possible that one major function of the emissaries was to bolster the authority of the World Coordinating Committee, in an attempt to create something broadly comparable to the interwar Polish Bund’s Central Committee. When Scherer continuously described the committee as the heir to the highly centralized Polish Bund, he revealed

FIGUR E 2  Visiting emissary Arcadius Kahan speaks at the seventieth anniversary celebrations of the Bund in Melbourne, 1967.

Courtesy Henry Nusbaum, Melbourne.

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his desire to persist with a formula that had earlier brought success.121 Such a more self-serving motive was clear in the emissaries’ task of collecting funds for the World Coordinating Committee, a task that was a standard part of any international tour, and one with which local Bundists happily complied. In trying to assert its centrality to the world Bund, the world leadership was possibly betraying a certain desperation, as the reality was that the movement was very much decentralized and local organizations functioned with great independence. The envoys could be read as trying to overcome a feeling of powerlessness by the World Coordinating Committee—of despair that they could not be to their membership as Israel was to the Zionist movement worldwide. Perhaps they felt a lack of confidence about their place in the Jewish world, an anxiety that the transnational mode of organization established in 1947 was fragile and needed to be constantly reinforced. To this end, their visits may have been aimed at keeping a close eye on the communities to make sure that they were progressing in the way that the Coordinating Committee imagined. The envoys’ very presence would also have served as a gentle reminder of their authority, as each Bundist community celebrated their visits and welcomed them with great reverence. And what did this special emphasis on sending representatives say about the communities visited? What did it say, that these communities needed to be reinvigorated or energized? It is likely that all this pointed to a leadership vacuum in many places and showed that there were neither the resources nor the ability in these cities to build a sense of Bundist family, community, and responsibility. The need for external leadership could be seen as an indictment of these local Bund organizations, who failed to carry out the task set out at the establishment of the world Bund, and who could not muster support or excitement within their own communities. The emissary program may thus have been a sign that, despite the bold rhetoric and hyperbole of the Bundist presses and leaders, their positions were precarious and faced a steady uphill battle even to attract their natural bases, those persons reared in a leftist-Yiddishist environment. The Bund ultimately considered the emissaries vital cogs in connecting otherwise separate communities the world over. Publicly, the visits proved successful in reinvigorating an older generation of Bundists, who were reunited with old friends; in transmitting the wisdom of some of the movement’s most gifted intellectuals; in seeking answers to some organizational questions that required a fresh approach; in learning from Bund communities in differing circumstances; and in inspiring the youth, who were able to interact with some of the most lucid and energetic representatives of their movement. This element of Bundist activity was seen by Bundist leaders as highly important in creating an international Bundist culture that

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transcended boundaries, yet respected the differences that necessarily came from such varying local circumstances. The emissaries were considered crucial in fostering a sense of kinship seen as the only means of survival in the newly decentralized circumstances. They brought enthusiasm, wisdom, and energy, inspiring the communities they visited and giving them a sense of their movement’s global mission and of their mishpokhe’s transnational dimension. Sadly, the enthusiasm aroused could not stem the tide that was washing over the once-popular party.

Conclusion The world Bund continued to function in some form to the end of the twentieth century. Its eighth and final world conference took place in 1992 in New York, where the group reflected on the ever-growing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, itself in the midst of a transformation at the time, and on the role of the Bund in a post–Cold War world, where communism had been discredited and the Left had entered an era of soul-searching. The conference also passed resolutions on contemporary issues like the rapid expansion of technology, the advent of globalization, and the scourge of terrorism.122 The last major meeting of the Bund as a world movement was for the movement’s one hundredth anniversary, in which celebrations and a plenary session of the World Coordinating Committee took place.123 The World Coordinating Committee continued to meet occasionally thereafter, and Unzer Tsayt continued distribution until 2005. Ultimately though, the Bund failed to pass on the baton to a new generation of activists. In 2003, when leading New York Bund activist Motl Zelmanowicz spoke to a group of khaverim in Miami on the 106th anniversary of the Bund, his despair was evident, and it was clear that the world Bund would not survive much longer. He cited first the desperate situation faced by Yiddish. With regard to Yiddish in America, he said: “Unfortunately, I can bring you no good news, because the question that continues to torment and gnaw at us is: ‘How can we halt the decline of Yiddish?’”124 The Yiddish press in New York, which had incorporated three Yiddish dailies—the Forward alone had a circulation of 300,000—now only counted three weekly newspapers, he noted, with the Forward’s readership down to only 7,000.125 He was also concerned for the future of Jewish secularism. The once thriving schools and cultural institutions had become remnants of what they had been. Due to a policy of “neutralism”—through which the Jewish leadership did not struggle against assimilation but accepted it as an organic part of immigration—Yiddish was in a dire situation. With regard to the Bund, the younger generation had not embraced the goals and spirit of the movement. “How

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long,” Zelmanowicz asked, “will we survive these critical organizational times? When will we be forced to shut down? How does the situation look for the World Coordinating Committee of the Bund? When will the youth in our movement take over the leadership?”126 A year later, Zelmanowicz again conceded that the party’s prospects were dire. “Our path today is thorny with endless temptations,” he wrote. The important thing for him, though, was what Bundists learned from this: “We know that from this history of hardship, we can also channel new energy and new belief, if we have the stamina and the will.”127 No matter how old and tired his generation became, Zelmanowicz vowed, he would continue to “spin the thread of secular yidishkayt and social justice, and to hope for a better tomorrow.” The Bund needed to attract a younger generation. It needed to appeal to those young Jews searching for their Jewish identity and to those who dreamed of peace and social justice; already, many of these young persons were involved in Yiddish courses at YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute), in the leadership of the Workmen’s Circle, or in other connected Yiddish institutions.128 Given that the major Bundist organ shut its doors shortly after Zelmanowicz’s pleas, a revival of the Bund in the future appears unlikely. As the generation that experienced the horrors of Nazism and the barbarism of Stalinism and that was infused with the Bundist spirit in interwar Poland disappeared, so too did the Bund as an active and transnational movement. Bundism may have survived as an idea, but by the early twenty-first century, the world Bund was no more. The ebbs and flows of the world movement provide one of the contexts for understanding the history of the local movements. These movements could not have operated for the decades that they survived without the organizational support and intellectual leadership of the World Coordinating Committee, which, in turn, could not have operated purely as an ideological body but required the cooperation of its member organizations. The development of this now tiny organization contrasted with the success of the Zionist movement in realizing its goal of Jewish statehood. While Israel was consolidating through the 1950s, the Bund’s answer to the question of a Jewish center, the World Coordinating Committee, was an institution desperately seeking new ways to attract a new generation and to shore up its existing membership, even while trying to answer the pressing questions of the postwar era. The Bund’s story highlights the difficulty faced by nonZionist and Yiddish organizations during this period. It also underlines the difficulties for an organization caught in an ideological trap: socialism was faltering in many countries, and, in the decades of a bipolar world, a socialist organization like the Bund faced little chance of upholding its ideals

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and increasing its popularity. Although Yiddishism and socialism had been cornerstones of Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century, in the postwar decades they were relegated to the background. An organization like the Bund, that had invested everything into these two ideas, could only delay the decline that, by the late twentieth century, faced nearly all prewar Jewish socialist and Yiddishist organizations.

2 On the Ruins of the Old World The Bund in Central and Eastern Europe

In 1945, the Jewish community in Poland was tiny, with Bundists only a tiny

minority of those who remained or returned from the east. Many Jews who found themselves liberated from Nazi concentration camps sought permanent relocation far from the site of their devastation, and many of those returning from the Soviet Union used Poland only as a transit point en route to North and South America, Palestine, or Australia. That is not to say that Bundist survivors did not try to revitalize their party in postwar Poland. Many did attempt this, and for around three years after the war, there was a small and vocal, if not hugely popular, Bundist presence in Poland. The Displaced Persons camps in central Europe also became a temporary site of Bundist activism, as former Polish Bundists sought to assist and comfort each other. Bundist groups, as well as Bund executives, were established throughout the camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Polish Bundists attempted to rebuild above the struggling embers of Jewish life in the Old World, their final efforts to organize in Central and Eastern

Europe. They tried to find a new voice under the shadows of annihilation. Meanwhile, those who found themselves trapped in the displaced persons camps of Europe, who yearned for a new life in the new world, could not escape the old world where their lives had been turned upside-down. This is a story of uprooting, and of trying to establish new roots; of the struggle to find meaning in destruction, and of the desire to leave the pain behind. As Bundists tried to cope with their trauma, they remained unsure if they would be able to create new lives in postwar Europe. They hoped that they would once again dream of a better tomorrow, despite the constant reminder of the extermination of their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters, their children, and their comrades. Finally, they wondered whether or not 46

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they would rebuild their houses, schools, meeting halls, and libraries on the ruins once their homes.

Displaced Persons Writing about Bundists in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy presents a major challenge. Outside of the Bundist press and the Bund Archives in New York, there is little material on the subject. Bundist sources tell a very different story from both that related by the mainstream Zionist press in the camps, and that told by contemporary historians. These latter newspapers, journals, and correspondences depict camp life as overwhelmingly governed by a Zionist politics that cared little about the survivors but primarily about establishing a Jewish state, whatever the cost. Correspondents to the Bundist press in Paris and New York leveled accusations of violence, economic intimidation, political repression, electoral tampering, and victimization against the camp leadership in general, and against the Zionist parties in particular. There was even an accusation of murder in one Italian camp. However, there seems no evidence to substantiate these claims. The only Bund sources we have to draw upon, however, are the official Bundist ones. Even correspondences—at least those preserved in the party archives—were more often than not directed through official Bund bodies.1 This paucity of evidence may indicate that the Bundists’ accusations simply were not true, or else that they were grossly overstated. It is likely that the materials that may have confirmed some Bundist charges, such as letters from camp officials, were discarded in the camps by the survivors, who did not see the importance of preserving the official documentation. It is also possible that there was a cover up of the kind of violence of which Bundists claimed to be victims. It was not in the interests of the camps’ Zionist leadership to admit to a sustained campaign of intimidation against its political opponents, and so it is possible that a sympathetic press did not report on it, nor did the camps maintain any official records in this regard. Whatever the reason, the Bundists’ charges against the Zionist movement have been so far unsubstantiated. Historians of the camps have, therefore, generally interpreted the Bundist claims as exaggerated. Yehuda Bauer dismissed these claims as a marginal phenomenon, conceding that, although there may have been instances of violence directed at Bundists, these were perpetrated by fringe radicals. There was not, according to Bauer, “any hint of undemocratic procedure involved in preventing [Bundist] groups to be set up—it was merely unthinkable, in the atmosphere of the camps, that a non-Zionist group could

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make any headway.”2 In his book on the Polish Bund in the 1940s, Daniel Blatman flatly rejected the Bundists’ claims.3 Avinoam Patt referred to the Bund’s accusations in his recent book, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism after the Holocaust, and Hagit Lavsky acknowledged that the Zionists were carrying out an ideological war against the Bundists, who had become marginalized in camp life, although she did not indicate whether or not this marginalization had been achieved through violence and coercion.4 Zeev Mankowitz, too, does not address the Bundists’ claims of violence.5 My purpose here is not to establish what actually happened in the DP camps. As historians have for decades recognized, in most cases there is scant evidence to corroborate Bundists’ claims of intimidation and “Zionist terror.” Still, it is important to examine what actions the Bundists took in the camps, what they hoped to achieve, and what the relationship was between their needs and the goals of the distant Bund functionaries in Poland, New York, and Paris. Several layers comprised Bundist experience in the DP (Displaced Persons) camps: the ideological imperative of the Bund as a world movement, the renewed struggle between the Bund and the Zionists, the immediate survival needs of the camp inmates, and the urgency of finding new homes for those still languishing in camps in Central Europe. Bundists comprised only a very small part of the population within the DP camps of Germany, Italy, and Austria. Of the roughly 230,000 Jewish inmates in the camps at their peak in 1947, there were around 1,200 Bundists. It was estimated that most of these returned to Poland from the Soviet Union after the war, only to leave again after the 1946 Kielce pogroms.6 With the influx that followed Kielce and the consolidation of Bund groups throughout the camps, an Executive of Bundist Groups in Germany was set up to coordinate and support the activities of those groups, to connect comrades across Germany, and to advocate a general party line on emigration.7 The executive conducted several national conferences and acted as an intermediary between its members in the camps and the Bundist leadership and press in Western Europe and the United States.8 One Bundist correspondent estimated that there were Bundist groups, in thirty-six camps within the American Zone, that carried out varied activities with, at most, hundreds of participants.9 There were two reasons that Bundist groups functioned in the camps. Foremost were the practical considerations about the inmates’ prospects for emigration. Many, perhaps most, Bundists did not want to nominate Palestine (or, after May 1948, Israel) as their destination of choice, but instead preferred the United States, Canada, Argentina, or Australia. Others were happy to go wherever they could, including Palestine (later Israel). Generally though, the Bundist press argued that it was not a safe location

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for the remnants of European Jewry, as the local Jewish community—indeed, eventually the Jewish state—was mired in a bloody conflict with its Arab neighbors. Western countries, where many already had family and friends, were seen as best equipped to ensure that the Jews returned to some form of normality. So, although many Bundists did make their way ultimately to Palestine (later Israel), Zionism was not viewed in the Bundist public sphere as a solution to the uncertainty Jews faced.10 Because of their desire to migrate to places like the United States, and their comrades’ support of this goal, a relatively small number of persons previously active in the Polish Bund formed Bundist groups in various camps. These groups, and the central executive body that was formed, helped facilitate their members’ connection to other Bundists throughout the DP camp network. Organizing in formal groups also helped to keep the Bundist inmates at the forefront of the Western European and American Bundist consciousness. Bundist groups appeared, and Western European and American leaders supported them, also because, for many inside and outside Europe, the DP camps represented a battleground in the war against Zionism. The camps were the manifestation of the issues being debated by intellectuals and community leaders in Western Europe and North America. In Central Europe, Jewish homelessness was a real and pressing problem, and the dozens of camps in which Bundists found themselves represented the front line in the battle for ideas and influence. The DP camps were seen as an arena in which the party’s struggle could have a real impact. In New York, Bund leaders carried out the group’s ideological war in the public sphere, but this was a long way from where the real clash was taking place. In the same way that Bundists accused Zionists of exploiting the desperation of the DPs, so too did the New York Bund leadership exploit this desperation as they carried out their ideological battle by proxy. The New Yorkers were, of course, also genuinely concerned for the fate of not only their comrades in Europe but all those languishing in the DP camps; their solution was that all Western countries should open their borders to the now homeless Jews. Statehood would not be a long-term solution to the challenges that the DPs faced; it would only create further uncertainty as migrants to Palestine were thrust into the worsening conflict with the local Arab population and the surrounding states. The international Bund representatives demanded that the refugees “be given the opportunity and the means of settling wherever they choose, in any free country of the world, including Palestine.”11 Although the Polish Bund leaders advocated for a return to Poland, this was not seen as a viable option by Bund leaders in the West.12 For Bundists in the camps, survival rather than ideology was the priority. They were preoccupied with questions of the possibilities for emigration

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and the most suitable destinations. Generally, their preferences were the United States or other Western countries where they had family and friends. Palestine (later Israel) was not seen as a suitable option, because many did not feel that such a move would alleviate their hardships. The Bundists’ preference for the West was demonstrated by the hundreds of application forms that the Bund groups required prospective members to submit. The forms asked the applicants such questions as where they had been active in the Bund before 1939, where they had survived the war, and where they ultimately intended to settle. Of the hundreds of forms preserved in the Bund’s New York archives, the vast majority indicated applicants’ preference for America.13 Even though the Bund leadership within the camps saw its primary task as trying to facilitate their members’ speedy emigration to a destination of choice, they realized very quickly that they had very limited scope to achieve this goal. Their principal task therefore became to improve morale within the camps. Bundists were active in camp life. They became involved in cultural undertakings like the establishment of libraries in sites such as Stuttgart, Feldafing, and Bad Reichenhal. They participated in setting up theater troupes. Bundist groups organized excursions for adherents, like the visit to the historic Hellbrunn Palace that Salzburg Bundists arranged in 1947.14 The Bund leaders also tried to carry out what they saw as their historic task of representing the Jewish working class, a task in that situation considerable. They put great emphasis into establishing collectives, for example, designed to create work for the high numbers of unemployed Jews. Along with relief and cultural work, this was a major Bundist priority. In the budget of nearly $120,000 sent by the American Representation of the Polish Bund—mainly for relief, medical assistance, and resettlement—about $20,000 was allocated for the purpose of establishing cooperatives for two hundred members in the camps.15 Bundists also attempted to help facilitate emigration and represent members’ interests. Meetings and conferences of the small Bundist groups around the camps were common in the few years of Bundist activity. In early January 1948, a national conference of Bundist groups in Germany was held in Stuttgart. The delegates discussed the situation in the camps for Jews and for Bundists, strategies to manage the situation, and world issues. The conference welcomed representatives from the French Bund, the Bundist executive in Austria, and delegates from throughout the American Zone in Germany.16 Later that year, in June 1948, the Executive of the Bundist Groups in Germany held another conference in Stuttgart, with two hundred delegates welcoming visiting emissary Binyomin Tabachinski, representing both the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee and the American Jewish Labor

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Committee. The delegates reported on life in the camps, and Tabachinski gave a report on the work of the Jewish Labor Committee. The conference passed resolutions relating to emigration quotas and destinations.17 At the same time, a conference of Bund groups in the American and British zones of Austria took place, with the delegates discussing programs to train workers to better equip them for emigration, as well as examining the lack of opportunities for emigration and the focus on Jews in Germany at the expense of those in Austria.18 There are many reasons Bundists would go to such great lengths to organize national conferences and meetings. Raising morale and trying to facilitate emigration were worthy causes. But there was another reason: as Bundists emigrated from the camps, the dwindling groups needed to maintain a critical mass. The activity of the groups in the DP camps was also designed to ensure smooth passage into the newly formed Bund organizations in the cities in which the inmates were expected to settle; this was a justification made by the groups to the World Bund body when pleading for further assistance. A resolution from the German Bund groups’ national conference, in Munich in early 1949, stated that if the World Coordinating Committee worked to strengthen the German Bundist groups, the “storm of Bundists from Germany” would “strengthen the local organizations in their new living places.”19 Because of their marginalization in camp life, Bundists faced many challenges beyond those that most faced in day-to-day life. Certainly, they suffered the same travails as other inmates. In a letter to the Polish-Bundist newspaper Folkstsaytung, G. Gorevich, a Bundist in Feldafing, described the sense of demoralization that prevailed over all camp inmates. They were, he despaired, “forced to live on earth soaked in blood,” among a population that only months earlier had sought to annihilate them.20 Many young people, full of energy, could not find work. Communal activists, powerless to change the situation, went down an “unproductive and often anti-social path,” such as the black market. Gorevich called on the Jewish world to take action for their brothers and sisters still languishing in European camps. “When 80,000 people [this figure would rise to around 250,000] stand at the threshold of the abyss,” he wrote, “We cannot remain silent.”21 Anke Zilberstein, a member of the Bund committee in Dieburg, described the tragic situation: “Can you call it living,” she wrote, “the physical act of breathing? Or by medical examination the beating of a pulse?” Living, as they had known before the war, involved a vibrant network of cultural, social, and political undertakings. “Through all these things,” Zilberstein continued, “we understand the word living. So can we today as uprooted people, who don’t take any active part in society, call our state of living anything else than

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vegetative?” With high unemployment and poor living conditions, morale among the Bundist comrades was dangerously low.22 In early 1947, the French Bundist daily Unzer Shtime described the comments of Elye Dobkin, executive member of the Jewish Agency, who said that morale in the camps was getting worse. Unemployment was rife. Dobkin reported that only 10,000 Jews were working, a situation that had forced many to leave the camps and try to find work in local towns and cities. Further, many Jewish children were not receiving any kind of education. And, with Jews comprising nearly a third of camp inmates, and more still flooding in from Eastern Europe, the situation in the camps was bleak for all Jewish prisoners.23 And the Bundists faced added challenges. Politically in the minority, they faced an even more acute sense of isolation than did many others. In the earliest stages, especially, they had little contact with the outside world and felt great uncertainty. One Bundist, Lily Nutkovich, wrote in August 1945 from Bergen-Belsen of the Bundist inmates’ isolation, imploring her comrades in the West to intervene and show their support. Her fifty comrades had “only one request—remember us.”24 Many Bundists inside the camp also felt disconnected because of the lack of access to the Bundist printed word. One member in Bergen-Belsen, Yankl Leber, wrote to the editors of Unzer Tsayt pleading that they send printed materials: “I am craving our Bundist word.”25 Another member, in Steyr, Austria, wrote the New York organization requesting published materials: “Please send us literature.  .  .  . For so many years we have not read a Bundist word.”26 Because most journals and literature that reached, or were published in, the camps were Zionist in political orientation, the Bundists felt acutely isolated. This sense led to the establishment of a publishing house, Fraye Tribune (Free Tribune), in 1949, although it only seems to have produced one brochure, a collection of articles discussing Jewish life.27 The publishers were seeking to broaden the debate in the camps, which they considered totally one-sided, and, although they claimed not to be exclusively Bundist, the one issue circulated contained mainly articles from leading Bundists—for instance, Emanuel Patt and Yechiel Yeshaya Trunk.28 As well as the isolation and despair obvious in the Bundists’ letters, another theme emerges from the correspondence that the party press publicized: the theme that Bundists were the victims of a systematic campaign of Zionist violence and intimidation designed to ensure Zionist hegemony over camp life. Camps were, according the Moshe Ajzenbud, the chief correspondent within the American zone, “Zionist colonies” backed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Ajzenbud leveled the somewhat spurious charge that the Zionist leadership had put in place a well-coordinated plan designed to create bitterness among camp inmates,

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and to make their lives so desperate that they would have no choice but to nominate Israel as their preferred destination.29 According to the Bund, Zionists inside and outside the camps were not interested in alleviating the ongoing suffering of the Jews, but only in realizing the long-held dream of establishing and consolidating a Jewish state. In their imagination, according to Ajzenbud, Zionist leaders saw the survivors as nothing more than a well of potential soldiers from which the new Jewish state and its army could draw when the need would invariably arise. To support these charges, Bund organs in the West publicized the complaints that their correspondents inside the camps made against the Zionist leadership. The “Zionist terror” of which Bundists claimed to be the victims included employment restrictions, physical violence, verbal abuse, and electoral exclusion. The economic intimidation was perhaps one of the more persistent themes in the Bundist narrative, especially when combined with the spread of conscription into the new Israeli army. Kuper, a party member in Camp Puch near Salzburg, claimed that in his camp those who engaged in Bundist work were terminated from their jobs. “In the camps,” he wrote, “there are different kinds of work, and if you work, you receive a small piece of bread with a little soup. But they do not allow us to work.”30 Moshe Shvartz, a correspondent from Ulm, reported that in the Wasseralfingen camp a communiqué from the military police revealed that a policeman had lost his job because he was a member of the Bund.31 Shvartz wrote that in some camps the allocation of clothing was used as a weapon against nonZionists, who were lucky to receive shmates (rags), with supporters of Zionist parties given the best quality clothing.32 Violence was also seen by Bundists as commonplace. Y. Prav, an Austrian-based correspondent, recounted episodes where Bund leaders had their homes ransacked and were brutally beaten. He also claimed that JDC representatives stated explicitly that, not only would they refuse to defend Bundists against such attacks, but they would annihilate Bundists.33 As already noted here, in most cases there seems little evidence to corroborate these accusations. The Bund was nonetheless eager to publicize them. Doing so served a political purpose. First, by making these claims, the Bund sought to assume the moral high ground in its battle against Zionists. Second, airing these grievances publicly and aggressively escalated the struggle. It was an attempt to maintain the Bund’s relevance in the battle. This was in stark contrast to the nuanced discussions taking place in the ideological sphere, discussions in which numbers and membership carried less weight. In the public sphere, the Bund was trying to maintain a public profile on the question of where large numbers of stateless Jewish refugees should settle. Its struggle to have any discernible impact on this material and measurable

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issue reveals the discrepancy between the Bund’s place in the intellectual sphere—where it could still carry out a full-blown attack against the Zionist movement, even without a large following—and its place within the Jewish world—where its support was waning and its credibility was in tatters. Regularly publishing these reports of intimidation was an attempt to bolster this credibility. With correspondence generally filtered through the Bund committees and the national executives, though, how widespread such a view was among refugees is difficult to establish. There did however, seem to emerge a sense that life in the camps, and the repression that the Bundist refugeees felt they were experiencing at the hands of the camps’ Zionist leaderships, were simply a continuation of their wartime experience. There are cases where these accusations can be confirmed, and where the mentality and perhaps fear of the Zionist movement becomes clear. There is evidence that supports the Bund’s charges that camp administrations undertook measures to intimidate those who refused to be conscripted into the Israeli Defence Force. Armed not only with letters and reports from their correspondents inside the camps, but also with official documentation and communiqués, an executive session of the World Coordinating Committee established in July 1948 that anyone refusing to be drafted was being dismissed from their work, that Zionists were blockading the camps to facilitate the forceful induction of inmates into the Haganah, and that night raids were being conducted in which those who refused were being arrested and denounced by the Jewish police.34 These cases that can be substantiated appear to be the exception to the rule. Many of the stories of repression are based on the reports received by Bundists within the camps, rather than on official records. There was regular correspondence that discussed directly the violence being perpetrated against Bundists. In one camp, Motl Tsederboym wrote to Bund leaders in New York. claiming that the camp leadership had established a lagershutz (security force) whose sole purpose was to “terrorize” anyone who did not join the giyus (draft).35 Another letter that the New York Bund published in its monthly journal asserted that, in Bad Reichenhal, bands of underworld criminals were fostering a lynch-mob mentality. These boyuvkes (armed gangs) were responsible for dragging people out of bed at night, dragging them naked through the streets, and beating them violently.36 Although the accusations of violent conduct are difficult to corroborate, it can be established that the camp leaderships did explicitly seek to sideline those not joining the giyus. With regard to physical intimidation, the only sources that appear to corroborate the claims seem to be letters from Bundists in the archives and in the press. On the question of economic measures, however, there is more substance. For example, a resolution undertaken by the third congress of the She’erit Hapletah on the eve of Israel’s

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establishment stated that all those who did not comply would be “removed from communal and political life and cannot take up any office.”37 Only a couple of months later, the Bund in New York published memoranda from the camp administration stating that the chairman of the Giyus Draft Commission was empowered to take any action deemed necessary against those eligible for conscription who failed to comply. This included removing their names from working lists.38 There is evidence that these directives were carried out. Yitzhak Elster, a Bundist in Steyr, Austria, was ordered to report to the Zionist Federation headquarters “in service of the people” (in dinst fun folk). His conscription notice stated that “failure to report at the allocated time will be interpreted by us as desertion and will invite appropriate consequences.”39 Jacob Celnik, a Bundist in Neu-Freimann, was dismissed from his job as a teacher in the local Jewish school for not reporting for duty after being conscripted.40 These episodes highlight the fact that the prewar conflict was not only continuing in the minds of the Bundists, but was also seen as a real problem by Zionists. It shows that although, in many ways, the Bundists in the West constructed the conflict in a way that suited their propaganda needs, within the camps there was a real hostility between the tiny groups of Bundists and the much larger Zionist organizations that dominated camp life.

FIGUR E 3  Bundist group in DP Camp in Steyr, Austria.

Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

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The story of the Bundists within the camps adds another layer to the painful history of Jewish refugees after the war. It helps explain the actions of the international Bund leaders; it shows the lopsided nature of the renewed conflict between Bundists and Zionists; it underscores the tragedy of the DPs—that they were thrust from one nightmare to the next, with no respite or relief. The Bundist experience also shows that, although in, for example, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires, where the camps represented the front in the Bundists’ battle against Zionism, for most inside the camps, survival trumped ideology. For many who refused to move to Palestine (later Israel), the decision was not necessarily informed by ideological considerations (although in some cases it surely was) but by the view that that land would not provide relief from the harsh conditions of war-ravaged Europe but would only propel them into a new battlefield, this time against a new enemy and in a new, foreign land for which they felt no attachment. More than anything, Bundists inside and outside the camps wanted all DPs to have the freedom to choose their ultimate destination, be it to reunite with family and friends or to find shelter from the seemingly never-ending storm from which they wished only to escape.

Between Fascism and Communism Immediately following Europe’s liberation, Bundists who found themselves suddenly liberated from the yoke of Nazi genocide in Poland, and those returning from years in exile in the Soviet Union, attempted to restore the shattered glory of Jewish Poland. This period would be turbulent for the Polish Bund, as the simultaneous influx of Jews from the East and their exodus to Palestine and other Western countries caused great instability. Any efforts to revitalize Jewish life in such an atmosphere would bear little fruit. These years after the war would see the final nail in the Polish Bund’s coffin, as the rapid advent of communism forced its self-liquidation. Perhaps in hindsight, the Bund’s ultimate demise was inevitable. However, in a stormy era with so much uncertainty, Bundists tried simply to keep their collective heads above water and to keep their party from drowning. The number of Bundists that remained in Poland fluctuated at this time, and it is difficult to give any overall figure for the postwar Bund’s three years of existence. Certainly, there was never a settled number of members in the Bund’s short-lived revival, given the repatriation of Polish Jews from the Soviet Union, as well as the mass migration (especially in the wake of the 1946 Kielce pogrom) of those remaining. It is possible, however, to look at how the Bund’s membership ebbed and flowed through these few years. Historian Natalia Aleksiun reported on the volatile Jewish population trends

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in the five years after the war. Utilizing data from both the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKZP) and a 1949 government census, she concluded that, in June 1945, the Jewish population in liberated Polish territories was over 70,000. After the repatriation of around 136,000 Polish Jews from the Soviet Union, the CKZP registered over 240,000 Jews. By 1947, however, after the Kielce pogrom and as mass emigration took hold, only around 90,000 Jews remained in Poland. Barely months after the fall of the Iron Curtain in late 1948, the Jewish population dropped to around 30,000.41 Like those of the general Jewish population, the number of Bundists fluctuated during these years. Early in this period, local organizations reported small numbers of Bundists in several cities, with a reasonable estimate of the party membership being only several hundred adherents. In Warsaw, 100 guests witnessed the opening of the Bund’s workers’ club in the district of Praga. In Łódź, over 300 comrades attended the Bund’s forty-eighth anniversary celebration, with the Łódź Bund counting, at this early stage, an additional 50 young people in its ranks. In Częstochowa, a full hall of over 600 people celebrated the forty-eighth anniversary, with many more turned away. Smaller numbers—in the dozens—were active in other cities such as Kraków, Tarnów and Bialystok.42 In early 1946, Salo Fishgrund, leader of the Bund’s Warsaw chapter and secretary of its central committee, reported to the American Representation of the Polish Bund a total of 482 branch members, with Łódź the only chapter registering over 100 members.43 In mid1946, after the Polish Jews’ repatriation from the Soviet Union, a prominent member of the communist Polish Workers’ Party estimated the number of Bundists in Poland at around 1,500—which is probably where it peaked, as the July pogroms that year saw large numbers of Jews clamoring to leave the country. In mid-1947, at the Bund’s first world conference, Polish Bund leader Michal Shuldenfray reported that there were thirty-five local organizations representing 1,800 members at the recent national conference in Wroclaw, down from an earlier peak of 2,200 members.44 In 1948, the Bund had 1,400 registered members across Poland.45 It is reasonable to assume that, given the breadth of its activities (in publishing, welfare, and culture), the Bund’s reach also went beyond its official membership. With Poland’s liberation by the Red Army in early 1945, Bundists wasted no time in counting the costs of five and one-half years of occupation and genocide. They aimed to quickly revive their shattered movement. In late 1944, Shuldenfray, one of the central figures in the attempt to revitalize the Polish Bund, was appointed to the Communist-controlled State National Council (KRN). Then, on 20 January, only the second day after the liberation of Warsaw, Bundists in liberated areas successfully made contact with one another. The surviving members of the Bund’s underground central

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committee gathered in Lublin at the death bed of resistance leader Leon Feiner, in what, for Polish Bundists, marked the symbolic rebirth of the movement. On the Bund’s fiftieth anniversary, in late 1947, party secretary Fishgrund hailed Lublin as a place etched into Bundist mythology, playing the same role it had when the Polish Bund was first reconstituted in that city, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution led to both the liquidation of the Russian Bund and to Polish independence.46 In reality, though, the Lublin of 1947 held far less significance than that of 1917, given the greatly reduced scope of the postwar Bund’s pursuits, and, ultimately, its very short life. On 16–17 June 1945, forty-four delegates from Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin, Kraków, Częstochowa, Tarnów, Katowice, and Piotrków gathered in Lublin to begin the uphill battle of rebuilding the Bund anew. The conference, which took place over two days, was considered a huge success, reigniting the flame of the bundishe mishpokhe when it appeared to have vanished. Reporting on the conference, the party Bulletin proclaimed, “The feeling of sincere and warm family-connectedness to the Bund dominated the conference.”47 Political considerations, however, dominated the proceedings, specifically questions of Polish working-class solidarity and the Bund’s postwar relationship to the Soviet Union. After the central role that the Soviets played in Poland’s liberation and in bringing an end to the war in Europe, the party was naturally favorable to the country that it had so strenuously opposed before and during the war.48 In fact, the political resolution that the delegates passed congratulated the Soviet Union on playing the leading role in ensuring world peace, creating positive relations among countries across the world, and establishing international workers’ solidarity. The resolution called on Poland to build closer ties with the Soviet Union, as well as for cooperation of all workers’ parties in Poland. It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which the Bund’s warmth toward the Soviet Union was based on conviction, and the extent to which the Bund’s was a pragmatic decision, given the Soviet terror that the newly liberated Poland was experiencing.49 The delegates also passed a resolution condemning antisemitism and demanding Jewish working-class solidarity with Polish workers. A resolution supporting constructive participation in the CKZP was passed. The conference’s final resolution, which condemned the ideology of “emigrationism” and was directed primarily at the Zionist parties, was perhaps most telling, revealing one of the major obstacles that any Jewish movement in Poland faced. The party reinforced its support for the freedom to emigrate, but reprimanded what it saw as the dark forces propagating an “emigrationist” movement, to the detriment of the local community. In the Bund’s eyes, a movement concerned primarily with the exodus of Jews from Europe was

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reactionary and obstructed the Bund in its struggle for democracy.50 The Bundists believed the answer to Polish Jewry’s woes lay in rebuilding the Polish Jewish community and strengthening the bond between Jews and their Polish neighbors in the struggle to create a democratic, free, and socialist Poland. The American Representation of the Bund cabled the newly reformed Bund central committee saying that the envoys were “deeply moved” by news of the conference. “We are deeply convinced,” they wrote, “that you are all imbued with a powerful desire to re-establish Jewish life in Poland and restore our Bund remaining faithful to its revolutionary and socialist traditions and executing the testament of the underground Bund.” The New York leadership pledged support for the Polish movement’s endeavors.51 Although this relationship would soon be tested, with both sides at odds over recognizing the Polish government, the Polish Bund accepting the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), or the Lublin Committee. The American Bundists, on the other hand, expressed support for the London-based Polish government-in-exile, seeing the Lublin Committee as nothing but an “instrument of Russian politics.”52 Polish Bundists certainly acknowledged the difficult task ahead and were aware that there were questions that remained open-ended. There was no delusion that rebuilding the Polish Jewish community was a given. Bund leaders realized that the task would require enormous energy and careful deliberation. They accepted that the majority of Polish Jews had been murdered and that no semblance of the once flourishing society remained. “The surviving Jew who returns to his home,” wrote Gershon Fogel in the first postwar edition of the Polish Bund’s organ Folkstsaytung (People’s Newspaper), “finds nothing there. What will bind him [to the land]? His family: burnt. His home: demolished. His environment: destroyed. He has tragically experienced all this; seen with his own eyes the downfall of his family, home, people.”53 For Fogel, these were all grounds for despair, panic, and resignation. Still, he maintained, the Bund was a party based in reality and in response to the present. It still believed that the only way to alleviate the plight of Jews in Europe was through global solutions. He wrote: “We look at our surroundings with a clear and sober view. We see the graves and ruins of our lives. We see the tragic glow of the crematoria fires. We still feel the noxious air of the gas chambers. We see all that has cruelly and tragically cut our lives in two. And even in light of the destruction [khurbn] we say that this happened not because we found ourselves on one or another part of the wide world, but because we found ourselves where fascism established its dark power through a vote. And this sword of Damocles hangs over Jewish life everywhere as long as the danger of fascism remains in the world.”54

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The Bund’s most important task at the beginning of the new era was to integrate Jews into the fight against Polish fascism, and into Poland’s economic and social life. From the outset, its activists insisted on restoring Jewish life in Poland and were dedicated to a decisive struggle by both Jewish and non-Jewish organizations against antisemitism. They were aware that they would continue to face major obstacles, the two most threatening of which were the rise of what the Bund referred to as “the ideology of emigrationism,” and the still-raging antisemitic violence that remained part of the postwar Polish landscape. Grisha Jaszunski undertook the theme of emigration in depth in an article in the Bund’s short-lived Yiddish-language Bulletin. There, he argued that the call for a Jewish exodus was dangerous and was no solution to the problems facing European Jewry. Although the Bund had never been an opponent of freedom of emigration, this current trend was alarming: “We have always opposed this, but now, on the ruins of Jewish life in Poland, we find it especially dangerous because it disturbs our efforts to rebuild normal living conditions for the small number of surviving Jews.”55 Jaszunski wrote that the “crimes” of “emigration-panic and voyage-fever” were “the greatest threats to that building work.”56 Finally, the push for Jews to emigrate placed Jews “in opposition to the struggle with the Polish working class to create in Poland the circumstances that would guarantee freedom and prosperity for all citizens of the country, regardless of nationality.”57 The Bund sustained this attack on the “emigrationist” ideology when it took aim at the CKZP in April 1946 for that ruling body’s memorandum to the English and American governments that championed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as the only substantive solution to the problems of Jewish refugees and to the hardships confronting Polish Jewry’s surviving remnants. The Bund published a declaration criticizing the CKZP for ignoring the desire of the many Jews languishing in camps and in Poland who sought refuge in other places, including the United States, Canada, Argentina, or Brazil. The organization demanded that the CKZP shift its priorities from the issue of Palestine to the more immediate concerns of Polish Jews— namely, restoring the community, ensuring the rights and opportunities for those who wished to emigrate to a destination of choice, and supporting the free development of the Jewish community in Palestine.58 Aside from the ever-growing trend of mass emigration, the problem of antisemitism presented the major obstacle to efforts to create a sense of confidence and hope for those Jews wishing to reconstruct their homes anew. The presence of antisemitism only fanned the flames of the “emigrationism” that the Bund feared. Antisemitism was a real and immediate threat in postwar Poland. Blood libels from centuries past were a feature

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in the immediate aftermath of the war. Jews were also accused for the communism by then engulfing the entire country. Antisemitism was often manifested in physical violence, as in the notorious Kielce pogrom of 1946, in which approximately forty-five Jews were lynched, and the lesser-known pogrom in Krakow in late 1945.59 The government and the general population met such violence with ambivalence, ensuring the cycle of Jew-hatred continued unabated.60 The reasons for the persistent hatred are still unclear. In his authoritative study on postwar Polish antisemitism, historian Jan T. Gross argued that the phenomenon “was too lethal, too widespread, too untamed to be grounded in anything else but concrete, palpable fear.” He argued that there existed in Poland a perception that Jews constituted a real threat to the material and physical well-being of the Polish nation. This, rather than some socio-mythic hatred of Jews, was the substance of postwar antisemitism.61 It is estimated that, in the year following liberation, 351 Jews were murdered, and, between 1944 and 1947, approximately 1,000 Jews were killed in Poland. Jews were the victims not only of physical violence, but also of looting and extortion.62 The Bund was not oblivious to this ongoing problem and realized what a huge challenge it presented to the party’s stated goals of recreating Jewish Poland. The first problem was the physical and material threat to Jews around the country. The second was that this threat created an atmosphere of anxiety and prepared the ground for mass emigration. The third was that antisemitism undermined working-class solidarity, which Bundists saw as critical in fulfilling revolutionary socialist goals. In its first conference after the war, in June 1945, the Bund passed a resolution on antisemitism recognizing that there were sectors within the country where antisemitism had in fact been bolstered since the war, and that Jews felt their very existence threatened as long as Jews were being murdered and driven out of their cities or towns. The resolution voiced its protest against reactionary groups that promulgated a message of hatred while projecting to the world an image of democracy and tolerance for minority rights. The Bund demanded equal rights for Jews, and cooperation between the Jewish and Polish working classes as the only road to alleviate the danger of antisemitism.63 The Kielce pogrom, on 4 July 1946, was a major blow to the efforts of all who were trying to reestablish the Polish Jewish community. Antisemitic violence had been a regular fixture in postwar Poland, just as had the theft of Jewish property, but in Kielce it reached new levels. Reacting to bogus claims of Jewish ritual murder and kidnapping of Christian children, a mob mentality swept over Kielce, a town with only several hundred Jews. Not only did antisemitic gangs lynch forty-five Jews, but the reaction in the Polish public sphere and from the Catholic Church was deafening. This event was

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a resounding statement about the possibility of Jewish resettlement in postwar Poland. As Jan Gross argued in 2006, a broad exodus was not necessarily the will of all Polish Jews initially, although it was a goal aggressively pursued by the Zionist youth movements. Kielce however, shattered the hopes of many who had held onto the hope of recreating Jewish Poland alongside the 200,000 or so other Jews returning from Nazi camps and Soviet Russia.64 Less than a year later, the number of Jews in Poland plunged to under half of the CKZP’s estimated 240,000 Jews in the middle of 1946, and by the spring of 1947, only 90,000 Jews remained in Poland, a number that would fall by two-thirds with the advent of Communism at the end of 1948.65 The Bund reacted to these developments with grief and a feeling of helplessness. The only action members could take to combat antisemitism now was to continue their protests against it and reinforce their calls for working-class solidarity. A resolution passed at the National Conference in August 1946 did this, and also upheld the Bund’s attack on so-called emigrationism, which it claimed only incited antisemitism.66 Bundists were certainly alarmed by this latter development. Gershon Fogel wrote of the link between Treblinka and Kielce, despairing that the same dark forces that created Treblinka were responsible for the ongoing violence against Jews in postwar Poland. He called on the world to act, to pressure the Polish government to react, and to open its gates to those that sought refuge.67 Still, many Bundists were determined in the face of such threats to continue rebuilding their community. In February 1947, the eighth conference of the Polish Bund (the figure includes the conferences of the interwar period) recognized the fatal blow that Kielce dealt Polish Jewry, with emigration taking on a “mammoth character” and antisemitism having “not lost any of its sharpness.” The conference vowed to continue fighting antisemitism, but it also resolved to stick to its task of highlighting not only the dangers Jews faced but also their successes. The Bund claimed that the desire of Jews to remain in Poland was by then strengthening; the party’s answer to the ongoing violence was “No capitulation, no giving up on Jewish life in Poland, no fleeing. That is the only way.”68 Despite the challenges of mass emigration and popular and institutional antisemitism, Bundists maintained a stubborn will to continue their struggle in what they considered home. The Polish Bund’s priorities were based on two factors. First, obviously, was the persistent attachment of Bundists to their homes, their obvious desire to return to the world that they knew or, since to recreate prewar Jewish Poland was obviously untenable, simply to return to those homes. Second, although perhaps only important for polemics, was the ongoing espousal of the Bund’s doykayt principle, which mandated the continued activities and rebuilding in a community that, at an estimated peak of nearly

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a quarter of a million Jews, was still significant, albeit tiny in comparison with that of only years earlier. Still, Bundists went to work in cities throughout Poland, establishing working cooperatives, soup kitchens, libraries, and youth and children’s movements under the aegis of the Bund, as well as participating in the general Jewish institutions. They were active in some of the old Bund centers—Warsaw, Lodz, Bialystok—but most notable was their presence in the newly established Jewish communities, primarily in Lower Silesia. After the repatriation of Polish Jews from the Soviet Union, Wrocław in particular became a major center for Bundist activity. Lower Silesia had become a major center for Jewish settlement, with more than 50 percent of the repatriated Jews settling in centers such as Wroclaw (13,000), Reichbach (10,000), Walbrzych (7,500), and Bielawa (5,000).69 For the Bund, too, the newly appropriated western region of Poland was an important center of activity that represented the rebirth of the movement. For many Jews and Bundists, Lower Silesia was a place to start life anew, a place to build a socialist society from the ground up. With new factories, coal mines, markets, and cooperatives, Bundists could work alongside other Jews and Poles in carrying out the historic task of reconstructing Poland. For a party for whom Poland’s renewal was a major goal, this was no minor opportunity.70 Bundists participated in building industry, workshops, and offices. The worked in mines, glassworks, stonemasonry, and textiles. They were active on local councils and in Jewish institutions. Perhaps their most important undertaking was the establishment of workers’ cooperatives, setting up a dozen of the sixty Jewish cooperatives in the region.71 All over Poland, the Bund saw one of its greatest responsibilities as the productivization of the Jewish working class. Bundist cooperatives were set up in cities throughout Poland, including the aforementioned twelve in Wroclaw and nine in Lodz.72 Despite the reservations of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland toward party-run cooperatives, Bundists saw such cooperatives as the only way to guarantee ethical and moral work practices. They felt that the double layer of control (the party and then the community) ensured greater accountability. M. Perlman claimed that the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) had already adopted the model of Bundist cooperatives. He argued that the Bund’s model of cooperatives created and run by political parties had proven the most effective.73 One of the Bund’s most successful undertakings was its press. Party members quickly sought to establish an organ through which to disseminate the party’s message and connect Bundists across Poland. Short-lived Polish and Yiddish Bulletins appeared in 1945, with less than a handful of issues bringing Yiddish-reading Bundists news of the first party conference, local party activities, and official proclamations and resolutions. In April 1946,

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FIGUR E 4  Bund committee in the growing Jewish center of Wroclaw, 1947. The ban-

ner at the top reads: “We are still here.” Below, the banner reads: “Long live freedom! Long live socialism!” Courtesy private collection.

the long-running interwar Bundist daily, Folkstsaytung (People’s Voice), reemerged as a monthly, and then as a fortnightly, newspaper. It was the party’s official voice, through which it reported on party life and activity, on Bundist theory, and on news from the Polish socialist movement. It operated until the Bund’s demise in December 1948, with the final edition (January 1949) carrying news of the party’s liquidation. The Bund also published a Polish-language journal titled Glos Bundu (The Voice of the Bund), which circulated from August 1946 until mid-1948. The Bundist youth movement was also revived during this period, and represented one of the party’s most successful undertakings. The reconstituted Yugnt-Bund Tsukunft (Youth Bund Future) resumed its activities promptly after the war. Having been represented widely in partisan organizations around occupied Europe—Tsukunft activists were among the most energetic participants and leaders in many resistance movements—Bundist youth were called again into action in the rebuilding effort. The first postwar Tsukunft conference was held in Lodz on 9–10 June 1946. Sixty delegates and some one hundred guests from around Poland participated. Many issues

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were discussed, and political resolutions were passed reflecting the broad political line of the Bund. Telegrams of congratulations came from Bund and Tsukunft leaders from around the country and overseas, representatives from the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Workers’ Party, and the leaders of the reestablished Bund children’s organization Sotzyalistisher Kinder Farband (Socialist Children’s Union—SKIF).74 Like its parent organization, Tsukunft was committed to working alongside the Polish and international socialist youth movements in spreading socialist consciousness to the postwar generation. The youth movement had branches all around Poland, in larger communities like Lodz, Warsaw, and Tarnow, and in the smaller and newer communities in Lower Silesia like Bielawa, Wałbrzych, and Ziębice. The Tsukunft’s overarching goal was to inspire Jewish youth to action and to give hope to those who had given up on Jewish life in Poland.75 Tsukunft’s organ Yugnt-Veker (The Awakener of Youth) reappeared as a monthly in October 1946, focusing on “the most important problems that Jewish working youth face today.” Tsukunft activist Ljuba Bielicka-Blum wrote that the newspaper would “arm and strengthen the youth in their fight against fascism and antisemitism. In the new conditions of a democratic Poland, the Yugnt-Veker would call for a ruthless struggle with reactionary forces.” Finally, the organ would promote the idea of unity in the ranks of Jewish youth.76 Sixteen editions of the Yugnt-Veker were published, between October 1946 and April 1948. Camps were one of the central activities of the Bundist youth movement. For the participants, these camps were a partial realization of socialist goals—the temporary creation of youth’s and children’s socialist republics. The activities were varied, but were centered around education and nature. They were designed to give young Jews the opportunity for self-determination, as well as to escape the rigors of poverty and toil. This task was especially important in the wake of the Holocaust. Tsukunft’s first postwar summer camp ran for a month in the summer of 1946 and attracted 120 children from around Poland, many fewer than the thousands who had participated before the war. Despite the small number, an atmosphere of hope and commitment prevailed. The sense of relief and freedom was palpable, as young Jews breathed the carefree outdoor life and fresh air of the mountains of Kamionkowe. Many were experiencing this sense for the first time.77 A year later, the number of participants from around Poland rose to 200.78 An account of the youth movement’s activities published in Unzer Tsayt after Tsukunft’s liquidation divided the movement’s history into three periods. In the first stage, Tsukunft participated in the “productivization” of Jewish youth, helping to create and find jobs and industry; it had great success in the field of socialist education; it began to put out its monthly journal,

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Yugnt-Veker; it established auxiliary organizations—such as the sports organization Morgnshtern (Morning Star), drama groups, evening schools, courses in the Yiddish language, and a network of Yiddish libraries. The second period also included some limited successes, such as: the decision to join the Socialist Youth International and participate in the world Bund, the establishment of a children’s organization, and carrying on the struggles against antisemitism and against Zionism. The third and final, tragic stage was marked by Tsukunft’s covert, and later open, struggle against communism, which culminated in the youth group’s forced liquidation.79 In many ways, Tsukunft’s activities were among the Bund’s most important, although, in the end, members found themselves at odds over the rapidly advancing cyclone of communism. Although Tsukunft was eager to join and participate in the world Bund and in the international socialist movement, the Polish Bund maintained a more complicated and tense relationship to the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee and to socialists outside Poland. In the first two years after Poland’s liberation, the Polish Bundists enjoyed good relations with their American counterparts. In early 1946, a delegation of Michal Shuldenfray, Grisha Jaszunski, and Salo Fishgrund visited New York as guests of the American Bundists. They reported on their activities, discussed the possibilities for furthering Bundist work in Poland, and were received at functions and events in their honor.80 The delegation was warmly welcomed and signaled a bright future for relations between the Polish and overseas Bundists. A report in the New York Bund journal Unzer Tsayt said that the visit was “a long chain of Bundist evenings, full of hope and socialist beliefs, full of Bundist faithfulness, veneration for the ideals that lived and died in Erlich, Alter, Zygielbojm, Abrasha Blum and other unforgettable heroes of the Jewish labor movement.”81 American Bundist stalwart J. B. SalutskyHardman wrote that the visit represented more than simply friendship and comradeship, for it also highlighted the important fact that Jewish life was continuing in Poland. “The Bund lives on,” he wrote.82 Although Jaszunski expressed his pessimism at the future of Jewish socialism in America—he was concerned about the weakness of the labor movement there, and the lack of labor parties, as well as growing assimilation—there was, he noted, clearly goodwill across the Atlantic, and a willingness to cooperate and seek common goals.83 With this goal in mind, the Polish Bund was initially very supportive of the American Bundists’ initiative to establish cooperation among Bundist groups around the world. However, relations quickly cooled as the bipolarity of the world became entrenched and Polish Bundists found themselves looking out from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. When the American

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Representation of the Bund first conceived the idea, the Polish Bund was enthusiastic. In a letter to the American Bundists, the Central Committee of the Bund in Poland accepted the invitation to participate in the upcoming world conference, and described the cooperation of Bundist groups as “desirable and useful.”84 A meeting of the party’s national council elaborated on the Polish Bund’s acceptance of global Bundist cooperation. Two resolutions passed relating to the upcoming world conference made very clear the Polish Bund’s qualified support of the American Representation’s initiative. These resolutions underlined the party’s support for world cooperation and general working-class solidarity, but also emphasized the need for Bundist groups in different countries to maintain their independence. The role of the world Bund should be to formulate policy for the Jewish socialist movement regarding the fundamental problems of political life; to unify the struggle for Yiddish language and culture, and to cultivate cultural undertakings; to act as a united Jewish socialist front in the international arena; and to foster mutual aid among Bundist organizations.85 This idea was reinforced after the first world conference, in Brussels in May 1947. In his reflections on the conferences, central committee member Jaszunski emphasized the differences among, and independence of, all Bundist organizations. He acknowledged that the new circumstances meant that, with Bundists in all parts of the world, the substance of Bundism had become necessarily different from previously. Although the delegates rediscovered a common Bundist language based on their “commitment to socialist ideals .  .  . and the sense of responsibility and the seriousness of the Bundist approach,” the movement’s adherents could not expect simply to carry on where the last conference had ended, in Warsaw in August 1939.86 Jaszunski commended the internal democracy that prevailed over the conference: “We can be colorful and diverse and still not lose any of our wholeness or harmony,” and such variety was important, given the current circumstances. Jaszunski was convinced that “it was not in the interests of sincere socialists to wash away the differences that exist and distinguish the delegates . . . from American and France or from the Polish delegation.” He denounced “the dangerous trend of national passivity,” calling the Jewish world to “national-cultural, progressive, and creative activism.” This, and the general success of the newly established World Coordinating Committee, could best be served by “upholding the political and organizational independence of separate Bund organizations in different countries” (all emphases in original). Jaszunski was adamant that “the vast geographic distances and technological difficulties can and must be overcome.”87 The Polish Bund’s position was obviously wary of the world Bund. Its rhetoric revealed two conflicting messages: at the same time as Polish

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Bundists were welcoming transnational Bundist cooperation, they were resolutely asserting their own autonomy and, in effect, inserting a get-out clause into their agreement to join the world Bund coalition. There was clearly a subtext underlying these reservations: the growing bipolarity between the United States and Western European countries, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, on the other, was setting the scene for a showdown between the Polish Bund and Bund groups in the West. The Polish Bundists were all too aware that they could not become too closely entangled with parties in the West, lest their position in the increasingly totalitarian Poland be compromised. The tension was obvious, especially in July 1947, when Bund secretary Shuldenfray was forced to defend the party’s decision to cooperate with the world Bund against Polish Jewish communist leader Szymon Zachariasz, who had criticized the Bund in the Polish Worker’s Party organ Robotnik (The Worker) for participating in the world Bund conference that had passed resolutions (on a range of issues) at odds with those of the prevailing Polish Communist movement.88 Shuldenfray delivered a rebuttal defending the Bund’s right to join its comrades around the world in cooperation. He affirmed the Polish Bund’s organizational and political independence, and highlighted the differences of opinion that were a fixture of the world Bund conference. Invoking the Bundists’ shared traditions and their united positions on a range of Jewish issues, Shuldenfray argued that it was ridiculous to expect Polish Bundists to isolate themselves from their comrades around the world.89 In spite of Shuldenfray’s best efforts to defend global Bundist cooperation, the underlying tensions between solidarity with the Western-oriented World Bund and the Soviet-dominated Polish socialist movement remained obvious. In the end, these geopolitical realities proved too great to withstand. The early uncertainties of Jaszunski and the Polish Bund delegation to the first world conference proved almost a self-fulfilling prophecy when, in March 1948, after only six months, the Polish Bund declared its withdrawal from the World Coordinating Committee. The decision was carried unanimously by a plenary session of the central committee on 21 March, then confirmed at a national conference of the (Polish) Bund, in Wrocław early in April, attended by 57 delegates. The plenary session issued its declaration at the beginning of April in the Folkstsaytung, which outlined that ideological differences between the Polish Bund and its overseas comrades had over several months widened and rapidly become untenable.90 The national conference elaborated on the decision. Shuldenfray, secretary of the central committee, delivered a speech to the delegates that recounted the sequence of events leading to the withdrawal. He argued that, although there was a need for Bundist cooperation in the years following the war, the Polish Bund

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remained the only chapter of the world Bund to continue its commitment to revolutionary socialism; all others had gone the way of reformism.91 Shuldenfray had a number of broad criticisms of the World Coordinating Committee. First, he attacked it for not limiting its activities to Jewish problems, which he argued was its major mandate. In the Bundist analysis of politics and history, this was impossible, because Jewish problems could not be solved independently of general political problems. Shuldenfray claimed that, during the preceding few months, the world Bund had in fact focused solely on general political issues, ignoring Jewish questions. The main thrust of its activities, he argued, was its participation in International Socialist Conferences in Zurich and Antwerp.92 This set the backdrop for the core of the rift, which reflected the growing crisis between East and West. The split was a microcosm of the beginning of the Cold War. Shuldenfray underlined that the Polish Bund was a party whose foundation was class struggle—it was therefore against collaboration between socialist and bourgeois parties. In particular, the Polish Bund took issue with the Bund groups around the world joining a Western anticommunist front, and rejected the very notion of a “third strength [dritn koyekh]” that was anticommunist and anticapitalist. He argued that the anti-Soviet alliance was an instrument of the bourgeoisie’s struggle against socialism: bourgeois parties were exploiting the socialist movement. The Polish Bund also categorically rejected the Truman Doctrine, dismissing it as an assault of American capitalism through economic and military strength. Further, Shuldenfray condemned the Marshall Plan, which, with its goals of spreading capitalism and rebuilding Germany, was a danger to world peace. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Western Bund organizations took the opposite view on many of these issues, enthusiastically joining the anti-Soviet front.93 These developments were all demonstrated, according to Shuldenfray, at the second International Socialist Conference in Antwerp, when the World Coordinating Committee delegates voted in favor of admitting the German Social Democrats into “the international socialist family.” This brought the issue to a head within the Polish Bund, whose leadership felt that it was no longer represented by the world Bund. At this stage, in January 1948, the Polish Bund still saw some kind of cooperation as desirable, so a compromise was reached whereby the Polish Bund would participate as an independent member within the international socialist arena.94 This arrangement did not last long, for world events moved rapidly and the divisions between the Communist Eastern bloc and the democratic, capitalist Western bloc became firmly entrenched. The split was also manifested within the socialist movement, as socialists in the United States and Western Europe were divorced from Communists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As the Polish

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socialist movement abandoned the socialist movement and sided with the Soviet bloc, the Bund, always seeking solidarity with the Polish working class, was left little choice but to do the same.95 Bundists outside Poland viewed these developments with suspicion. They viewed the Polish Bund’s decision against the backdrop of the Polish Communist government’s liquidation of the Polish socialist movement: under the pressure of the prevailing political atmosphere, the Polish Bund had aligned itself with the Communist government. The World Coordinating Committee claimed that the decision was far from unanimous, and in fact there was a great deal of dissent, which was marginalized. They alleged that, in many places, the delegates to the national conference were only elected if they fell into line with the declaration of the plenary session.96 A statement issued by the World Coordinating Committee stated: “There is no doubt in our minds that this regretful step was a result of Communist coercion aiming to liquidate the last vestiges of an independent Socialist movement in Poland. It is obvious that the Bund in Poland, in a country where only 60,000 Jews out of 3,500,000 are now living, was in no position to defend itself against this brutal act.”97 The coordinating committee saw the Polish party’s withdrawal from the international Bund movement as the prelude to its self-liquidation, which occurred less than a year later—proving the forecast correct. The formal establishment of Poland as a Communist state saw the final liquidation of the Polish Bund. The months following the party’s withdrawal from the world Bund were characterized by efforts to integrate the Bund into the coalition between the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). Jewish PPR activists were, on the one hand, seeking to bring Bundists across to their party, and, on the other hand, trying to discredit the Bund as reactionary and nationalist.98 The pressure on Bundists to abandon their ideas and renounce their history was enormous. Two unity meetings in May and June 1948 were organized between members of the Bund and Jewish members of the PPR. Representing the dominant PPR was Szymon Zachariasz, who had for years been a vocal critic of the Bund. He delivered a speech at the Wroclaw meeting where he talked of the need for the Bund to break from its past if it were to truly embrace working-class unity. According to Zachariasz, the Polish Bund had stalled on this front. Its flirtation with the world Bund signaled an unwillingness to embrace unity with Polish socialists. The party’s withdrawal from the World Coordinating Committee was a step forward, but not enough. The Bund had to do as the PPR and PPS had done and revise its historical mistakes, especially by renouncing its previous anticommunist and anti-Soviet positions, and to embrace the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Stalin.99 The discussion that followed Zachariasz’s speech, which

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included responses from Bundists and PPR activists, was, unsurprisingly, very supportive of Zachariasz’s proposition. One PPR member from Lower Silesia said that the Bund there needed to do a better job to ingratiate itself to the PPR. Another upheld Zachariasz’s argument that the Bund needed to distance itself from its past, and yet another said that Bundists must “throw away their terrible inheritance.” Even Fishgrund, a member of the Bund’s central committee, conceded this point, saying that Bundists should not be bitter about the need for self-criticism: “There is not a political party that does not make mistakes.”100 In his speech, Bundist leader S. Hurwicz was more reticent in welcoming Zachariasz’s solutions, but still conceded the need for unity in ensuring Jewish continuity.101 A further step in this direction was taken in October 1948, when the party conducted a plenary session of the central committee in Lodz. The result of the conference was a declaration that transformed the Bund so dramatically that it was virtually unrecognizable. The declaration, which included four resolutions, renounced reformism and centrism as paths to socialism, censured overseas Bundists as standing for an “extreme right-wing, reformist platform,” criticized the Bund’s history as marred by reactionary Menshevik influence and Jewish nationalist separatism, and resolved to embrace the revolutionary socialism of the PPR.102 The Bund now felt that “organic working-class unity” could only be built “on the foundations of Marxist-Leninism.” This was indeed a radical break from the past. Not only had the Polish Bund come to officially embrace Communism, it had committed to purge all right-wing and reformist elements within the party. The Bund now had to prepare for the “historic moment of alignment [onshlus] with the country’s proletariat.”103 Gershon Fogel summarized the essence of this task: “[To] thoroughly analyze and highlight the ideological and organizational sources of our mistakes and free ourselves from them [and to] not allow any relapse of Menshevik positions and to lead the Bund to organic unity with the working-class.”104 Bundism in Poland had officially been turned on its head. The ground had been laid for the final liquidation of the Bund. The party’s official death notice came only months later, at an extraordinary meeting, the last meeting of the Bund in Poland. The final edition of Folkstsaytung represented the Wroclaw meeting of 19 January 1949 as an historic and decisive moment in the history of the Bund. A report on the conference declared: “With feeling and enthusiasm, with all our energy and revolutionary consciousness, we will enter the ranks of the Polish United Workers’ Party [PZPR], and will incorporate ourselves in the struggling masses of the glorious, internationalist, Marxist-Leninist movement.”105 Hurwicz delivered an address that explained the decision, although by then

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his message was well-trodden territory. He affirmed Communism as the leading strength in the working class, stressed the definitive role of the Soviet Union in directing the socialist struggle, repeated the party’s rejection of its past “mistakes,” and, quoting Friedrich Engels’s 1874 observation on Poland, drew the ultimate conclusion that the Bund’s options were limited—“be revolutionary, or go under.”106 Liquidation committees in cities and towns throughout Poland, including a central committee elected to oversee the process, were set up to manage the logistics, which included dealing with the Bund’s assets, records, and archives.107 These were ultimately turned over to the PZPR. Bundism had been destroyed in Poland months earlier, but now the party that had struggled against Communism for decades succumbed to its pressure. Not all Bundists joined the ranks of the PZPR, and many recused themselves from being part of the decision to liquidate. Most notable was the opposition of Tsukunft. When Communism swallowed the Polish Bund, the Tsukunft leadership chose a different path. These Bundists opted not to capitulate to the Communist pressure to join the Soviet-dominated coalition. In stark contrast to the Bund’s central committee, the leadership of Tsukunft did not speak out in favor of capitulation, and the majority of the youth movement’s membership did not support such a decision. Instead, they liquidated the Polish branch of the organization and encouraged their members to leave Poland, which had fast become a “communist concentration camp.”108 Tsukunft organizations liquidated themselves and dedicated their now-underground activities to helping their comrades emigrate.109 Shuldenfray, who had been so active in the attempts to rebuild the Polish Bund, also did not join the Bundist flight to Communism, resigning from his post as secretary of the party and living in political anonymity in Warsaw until his death in 1965.110 Like Shuldenfray, Marek Edelman, Tsukunft activist and one of the few surviving commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, also remained in Poland, but deserted the Bund before its self-liquidation. In the 1980s, he became a prominent activist in the anticommunist Solidarity movement.111 Others chose to abandon Poland altogether, an act with which the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee energetically assisted. Historian Daniel Blatman estimates that of the thousand or so Bundists remaining in Poland after the post-Kielce migration, around two hundred to four hundred, emigrated in late 1948 and early 1949. Of those that remained, he suggests, only a minority elected to join the PZPR.112 Many were forced to stay, as the World Coordinating Committee could only directly help a small number. Others were forced to try to flee illegally.113 Tellingly, the Bund suffered the same fate as Poland itself. Swallowed up by Soviet domination, the Polish government succumbed to Stalinist rule

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despite a lack of widespread popularity for Communism. Given that Polish socialism and Polish socialist parties did not survive in the face of Communism’s uncompromising demand for their subjugation, Jewish socialism and the Bund stood little chance. It is difficult to know the extent to which the Polish Bundists chose this path, or how much their decisions were acts of survival. Without the aggressive advent of Stalinist Communism, would the Bund have adopted a more democratic line, less embracing of totalitarianism, as historian Norman Davies suggested would have been the case with the Polish Communists had they been freed from the yoke of Soviet influence?114 It is impossible to speculate. Bundists outside Poland certainly believed this to be so. They believed the Polish Bund to have been coerced into embracing Communism. A report in the World Coordinating Committee’s Bulletin argued that “the liquidation of the Bund in Poland, forced upon its members with customary Communist brutality, is an additional confirmation that the Bund . . . can exist and thrive only under conditions of democracy and freedom.”115 The world Bund claimed that the same Stalinist forces that murdered their venerated leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter in 1941 had murdered the Polish Bund. This was a tragedy for the thousands of surviving Bundists scattered around the world. “The Bund in Poland,” a statement in the world Bund’s Bulletin stated, “fell a victim to the hammer and sickle.”116 Perhaps behind the Polish Bund’s unwavering support for Polish working-class solidarity and for cooperation with the Soviet Union was a veiled cry of despair. Perhaps, despite their calls for independence from the world Bund, what the Polish Bund leaders wanted was independence within their own country, particularly as the Jewish population continued to plummet and Jewish autonomy became more difficult. Even the Bundists in the United States ultimately felt that the Polish Bund’s demise was inevitable. They argued: “The postwar existence of the Polish Bund under the conditions of a steadily decreasing Jewish population was primarily of symbolic significance. The banner of an independent Bund movement was again raised in postwar Poland mainly as a tribute to the fighting traditions of the Bund and as a touching confession of the faithfulness to the ideology of the Bund on the part of the members of this movement who miraculously escaped death in the crematoria and gas chambers.”117 Whatever the viability of rebuilding Jewish life in the turbulent postwar years, Polish Bundists swam against the prevailing tide of emigration and antisemitism, and had a sincere desire to return to their homes. Sadly, this turned out to be an untenable proposition, as Jews were once again forced out of the country, and the party itself was marginalized and eventually destroyed. For the third time, after its liquidation first by the Bolsheviks and

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then by the Nazis, the Bund in Eastern Europe fell victim to the scourge of totalitarianism.

Conclusion Bundists seeking to rebuild their shattered communities in Central and Eastern Europe faced significant challenges. First and foremost was the constant shadow of death that haunted all their efforts. In Poland, where the destruction was ever present and survivors were daily reminded of the horrors, resurrecting the Bund ended up a fruitless struggle. Many Jews still saw Poland as their home, and tried to resurrect some semblance of Jewish life in an environment that was tainted by the Nazi genocide and was becoming dominated by the specter of Soviet Communism. Between these two totalitarianisms, Bundists did their best to recover their prewar lives. Each month however, Communism tightened its grip on Poland. The push of totalitarianism, and the pull of a new life in the democratic West, away from the site of so much heartache, proved too tempting for most Bundists. By the time Communism had enveloped the country, most Polish Bundist had migrated westward to the DP camps, to France, to Sweden, and from those places to the United States, Latin America, Israel, and Australia. The DP camps were not fertile ground for Jewish life in general, let alone Jewish socialism. They were not places where Bundist ideas could flourish. Nor were they sites on which Jews—be they Bundist, Zionist, or Orthodox—saw their future. With the final liquidation of the party in Poland at the beginning of 1949, and the generally tenuous state of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, the Bund in the Old World breathed its final breath, and its adherents who now found themselves to the west of the Iron Curtain attempted to resurrect some semblance of their prewar lives under very different conditions.

3 Between the Old World and the New The Bund in France

Western Europe was much better placed than Eastern Europe for a Bundist

revival, for a number of reasons. First, the fate of Western European Jewry was vastly different from that of their kin in the East, since they did not suffer the same proportion of casualties as in the East. The overwhelming majority of Poland’s Jewish population was exterminated, and, although more Jews returned to Poland initially, most did not stay long before heading west. In contrast, the Jewish populations of France, Belgium, Sweden, and Great Britain grew in the decades following the war, mainly due to the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe arriving through the DP camps. Demographically, then, the communities to the west of the Iron Curtain were better placed to rebuild Jewish life. In France, for example, the Jewish community was badly hit by deportations and extermination—of France’s 300,000 Jews, roughly 75,000 were deported, of whom only around 2,500 returned.1 David Weinberg has estimated that in 1946 there were around 180,000 Jews remaining in France.2 In the decades following liberation,

France experienced significant population growth, thanks first to the Eastern European immigration, and then, more significantly, to the large influx of North African Jews from the decolonizing French territories of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.3 Since France’s Yiddish-speaking Jewry was not decimated in the same way as Poland’s, the task of rebuilding Yiddish life was more realistic. In Belgium, where only 18,000 Jews remained out of an estimated prewar population of 65,000, there were early signs of population increase and the community was soon on the way to recovery.4 Great Britain, where the Jewish population was, comparatively, virtually unharmed, received tens of thousands of Central and Eastern European migrants in the decades after the war.5 Ongoing antisemitism and Communist repression in 75

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Poland and Hungary ensured a continual westward flow of Jewish refugees from the East. So did the fact that Western European Jewish communities lived in democratic and multicultural nation-states, where religious, linguistic, and cultural differences were not suppressed in a violent way, such as happened in Russia or Poland. Even though multiculturalism was not always fully embraced and minorities were often simply tolerated, there was much more scope to openly express Jewish identity in the West. Bundist communities were established, and in some cases reestablished, in several countries. Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain, and Denmark were all sites of Bund activity in the postwar period. By far the most significant Bund organization in Europe, however, was the French branch. France was ideally placed for the rise of the Bund: there was already a tradition of Yiddish activism; the nation had been a center for Jewish labor politics before the war; there had been a Bundist organization in some form from the beginning of the century, an organization that, by the late 1930s, had broadened its activities; and France became both a major destination and an important transit point for tens of thousands of Polish Jews in the years following the war. In fact, after the war, France became the center of European Bundist activity: the world’s only postwar Bundist daily newspaper was published in Paris; Paris was the site of the longest running European Bundist youth movement; the local organization provided leadership and assistance to other European Bundist communities; and the European executive of the World Coordinating Committee was based in La Ville lumière. On the other hand, France was still a capitalist country, which put a strain on the Bundists’ fight for socialism. The country was also the site of deportations and collaboration with the Nazis, a fact that would haunt French Jews. Finally, the 1940s and 1950s saw France implicated in bloody wars against decolonization and an increasingly unstable political and economic system. English-language historical writing on postwar France remains an emerging field, especially with regard to the years immediately following liberation. There have been some key works that deal with the history of Jewish immigrants in France in the lead-up to the Holocaust.6 The period during the war has also come under much scrutiny.7 Within general histories of the French Jewish community, there is some consideration of the postwar years, but these works tend to focus more on the wave of North African migration in the 1950s and 1960s than on the reconstruction efforts by those returning from exile or those seeking refuge after the Nazi onslaught.8 There have also been works dealing with post-1968 history, which are primarily concerned with the way French Jewish intellectuals and French Jewry have come to terms with the Holocaust, assimilation, Israel, and Jewish identity after President Charles de Gaulle’s famous 1967 criticism of Israel and the subsequent

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rise in antisemitism, coupled with the disappointment following the revolutionary fervor of May 1968.9 Only recently, though, have a large number of articles and books appeared that look specifically at the years following liberation.10 Overall, postwar Jewish France remains under-researched, and the history of the French Bund in this period has been given no consideration by historians. The fate of the Bund can add to understanding the development of French Jewry more broadly, and can help shed light on the domestic impact of French foreign affairs, particularly as these related to the Jewish community. To understand the way Bundists in France tried to rebuild their lives and to reimagine themselves as both Jewish and French, it is necessary to focus on the 1940s and 1950s, when Bundists were still trying to construct a sustainable French version of Bundism and Jewishness. By focusing on the Bund’s official organ, we can most clearly comprehend the impact that French decolonization had on this journey, and how France’s complicated relationship with Israel affected the Bundists’ understanding of their position as members of France and of French Jewry. The experience of genocide also affected the Bund’s response to events in France. Finally, the rise, fall, and reconstitution of the Bundist youth movement are symbolic of the fortunes of its parent organization. Although there were Bundist organizations in other Western European countries, the circumstances of France in the decades following the war give an indication of the challenges that all European Bundist parties faced, but also show the way that the specific conditions in France contributed to a unique French Bundist approach, often at odds with Bundists around the world.

The French Bund before 1945 In Paris, the French Bund was not a new phenomenon in the postwar period in the same way that it was for most other Bundist cities. France had been a center of Bundist émigrés since just after the movement’s founding in 1897. Russian Bundist students and intellectuals had found refuge in Western Europe after escaping czarist repression, and Paris, along with such other cities as Bern, Geneva, and Berlin, became a theater of battle between exiled Bundist students and intellectuals and members of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. As early as 1898, the Bund set up a “foreign committee,” based in Geneva, that was an arm of its Central Committee. in Russia. Mostly students and intellectuals, the foreign Bundists excelled in producing propaganda and formulating Bundist ideas. While the Bund in Russia was preoccupied with carrying out industrial action and educating workers, Bundists in Western Europe found themselves in the ideal circumstances in

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which to write, discuss, and debate their emerging Jewish socialist philosophy.11 France, however, found itself in a unique position among these groups. In London, Antwerp, and Stockholm, for example, Bundist support groups were composed almost exclusively of workers, though in cities throughout Germany they consisted mainly of students and intellectuals exiled from Russia. In contrast, both workers and intellectuals came together in France in support of the Russian and Polish Bunds and later to struggle on behalf of Jewish workers in France.12 This fundamental difference prepared France to take the reins as the locus of European Bundism after the war. There are two clashing accounts of the genesis of the Bund in Paris. The first, recounted by Bund activist Pinches Szmajer in 1980, claims that the Bund first appeared in 1900 as the Société Culturelle Ouvrière et Socialiste (Cultural Society of Socialist Workers). In 1904, this group of students and intellectuals merged with the workers’ group Kemfer (Fighters), established in 1902. Historian Nancy Green, on the other hand, argued in 1986 that two Jewish socialist groups—intellectuals and students who spoke Russian and Polish, and workers who spoke Yiddish—appeared several years earlier, in 1898.13 Bundists were active in cultural undertakings, usually together with Jewish anarchists and left-wing Zionists. In political matters, the Bundists were involved with the Jewish trade union movement, and were especially influential among the fur workers, although, on the whole, their influence over the Jewish union movement was peripheral.14 A police report from 1907 counted the number of Bundists in Paris at around three hundred.15 The influx of Polish Jews during the interwar period brought a new vigor to Bundist activity in Paris. In the late 1920s, members established the Medem-Klub, named for the Russian Bund leader Vladimir Medem, and followed the lead of the Polish Bund in creating a youth movement and a children’s movement, as well as the mutual aid and cultural organization Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle).16 The movement also set up supplementary schools, a people’s university, and a choir. Perhaps the pinnacle of the movement was its library, which carried thousands of books and published regular bulletins and eventually a biweekly newspaper, Unzer Shtime (Our Voice). Historian Henri Minczeles estimates that the Bund had less than a thousand adherents before the outbreak of World War II, but occupied the third position in French Jewish political life behind the Communists and Zionists.17 The establishment of the Jewish Socialist Union of France in 1932 saw the Bundists’ focus become firmly fixed on alleviating the problems of French Jewish workers. Members stepped up their involvement in the Jewish section of the union movement, and supported the French Socialist Party (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) with election campaigning and participation in demonstrations and public meetings.18 But, although it

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extended this enthusiastic support of the French Socialists and the Popular Front, the Bund was nonetheless considered by the native Left as a wing of the Polish Bund, rather than as a part of the French labor movement.19 Sociologist Michel Roblin estimated that, on the eve of World War II, the Bund counted around five hundred members, with an additional hundred young people involved in its youth movement.20 During the occupation, Bundists were active in the Jewish underground, both in Paris and throughout the Vichy zone in the south. Although badly affected by the mass deportation and the flight of Jews from Paris, many Bundists stayed in the French capital, where they were crucial participants in the underground Amelot Committee, established by various immigrant organizations to coordinate relief efforts.21 From their headquarters at 110 Rue Vielle du Temple, the remaining Bundists continued to operate a soup kitchen, where they helped to support the masses of Jewish refugees that had flooded into Paris from Belgium and Germany. From there, the Bundists also sent supplies to those in need and distributed anti-German propaganda in Yiddish. A May Day celebration was also held, in 1941, with over 150 attendees.22 Because of its prewar activism and its ties to Herschel Grynszpan—a member of the Bundist youth movement in Paris, and whose 1938 assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was used as the pretext for Kristallnacht—the Bund was under constant pressure and surveillance by the Gestapo.23 Given this constant suspicion, the Bund needed to remain vigilant, although even with increased care members were often vulnerable. On 27 June 1941, for example, German soldiers arrested two leaders, Esther Richter and Nathan Shachnowkski, at the Bund’s canteen at Rue Vieille du Temple, for illegal activities. Richter, known by her comrades as Ika, felt that as a woman she would be safe from Nazi punishment, so she took full responsibility for the breach of regulations, thereby exonerating Shachnowski. She was taken to the prison at Romainville, where she died. Ika became an icon in the Bund movement, revered for her tireless commitment to others and for her efforts to rescue children. Her comrades saw her as the first Jewish martyr in the French resistance. Not only were Bundists captured by the Gestapo for covert social work, but many Bundists fell as soldiers in the Jewish underground resistance movement. The Bundist youth was especially active.24 Beyond Paris, Bundists organized themselves throughout the Vichy zone, especially in Toulouse and Lyon, where they carried out similar cultural, social, and resistance activities.25 Although not a leading force in the resistance, Bundists played a role in many aspects of French-Jewish underground activity during the occupation.

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Emerging from the Ashes With the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the Bund immediately set about the task of rebuilding and locating itself within the French-Jewish world. Although the extent of damage was not yet clear, nor the prospects for resurrecting Jewish life in France, Bundists did not wait to resume activities. Alexander Minc, active in the Paris Bund since moving there in 1937, and involved in the Bundist underground in the Vichy zone during the war, wrote of the joy he felt upon returning to Paris in September from Lyon, where he found himself at the liberation. “At the Bundist headquarters, a movement is already functioning. The elation at meeting my old dear comrades for the first time was immense.”26 For French Bundists, returning to old, familiar homes created a joyful reunion in a way not possible for Polish Bundists, who returned often to rubble, or for those in the DP camps, who were thrust from one hardship to the next. The earliest sign that Bundist activity in postwar Paris was returning was the prompt reemergence of the party newspaper, Unzer Shtime. Although it had appeared illegally during the war, it had done so only sporadically. The first postwar edition of Unzer Shtime, which heralded the return of the Bundist press in Europe, appeared in October 1944, only months after the liberation of Paris. At first, even with limited resources and readership, Unzer Shtime managed to come out twice a week. The first issue was delayed because of the material hardships of Parisian Jews and those returning with nothing. Even then, it was mainly circulated as a one-page call to all the freed Jews, and a memorial to all the fallen and tortured.27 In the very early period, the editors worked hard to collect addresses of possible subscribers, and raised funds to support their venture. And, although they would have liked to have brought their journal to the widest possible readership, and to publish articles in French and Yiddish, their limited resources—especially of paper—only allowed them to put out a Yiddish journal.28 On the occasion of the newspaper’s fiftieth issue, Alexander Minc wrote that the goal of any Jewish socialist newspaper, including this one, was to awaken the consciousness of the Jewish working masses. He wrote that Unzer Shtime aimed to “carry the most fiery calls of protest against the violent injustice that rules over the world; against the egoism of the owning classes; against the blood-letting and slaughter of people; [and] against national oppression and antisemitic pogroms.” A socialist newspaper should “open their [Jews’] eyes to the bitter present, and turn their gaze toward the magnificent future.”29 Incidentally, this would be the last issue of Unzer Shtime for a number of months. For reasons that are not clear, the newspaper needed to keep a low profile for some months, and it did not appear between March

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and July 1945. During that period, the Bund and its social and cultural wing, the reconstituted Arbeter Ring, put out two special publications, on the anniversaries of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and on May Day. Then, between 12 May and 14 July 1945, the Bund published an interim biweekly publication, Di Naye Tsayt (New Era), which tried to fulfill the mission of Unzer Shtime. On 21 July 1945, Unzer Shtime reappeared permanently, promising to fulfill its historic role in awakening and educating the Jewish masses in France and around the world.30 Shortly thereafter, with the influx of Polish Jewish refugees, Unzer Shtime began its life as a daily. On 30 December 1946, the editors declared that becoming a daily was the best way to give their readers the fullest picture of international events and Jewish political and cultural life. Their aim to become an “encyclopedia on a small scale” could only be achieved in the new format.31 Most likely, though, the decision of the editorial collective was mainly a response to the establishment of the Zionist Yiddish daily, Unzer Vort (Our Word), and the postwar reappearance of the Communist Yiddish newspaper, Naye Prese (New Press).32 Unzer Shtime was almost certainly the weakest of the three Parisian Yiddish dailies, as Bundism at this time occupied third place in the struggle for the hearts and minds of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Through the late 1940s, the newspaper campaigned for the liquidation of the DP camps and for the opening of Western borders to Jewish refugees. It published letters and reports from Bundists within the camps and fought against the notion of a European exodus. Its writers consistently attacked communism, both within France and without. Unzer Shtime also sought to connect Yiddish-speaking Jews and Bundists around the world, and maintained an active staff of foreign correspondents. These were among the proudest achievements of the newspaper and its supporters throughout its climactic years in the 1950s and early 1960s, when it claimed a readership of around three thousand—although this figure may have been exaggerated.33 Unzer Shtime was the centerpiece of the French Bund’s political program, and was the link in which the Parisian organization continued the prewar European Bundist chain. With prewar French Bundists coming together with postwar migrants, the newspaper was a meeting place for many, a space in which Bundists could locate themselves as a community. It was their location for a uniquely French doykayt: committed to socialism and Yiddish, keenly interested in French and world politics, strongly engaged with French culture and embracing of the French republican tradition, concerned with the stormy decolonizing years, and proud of the Bund’s active role in the French wartime resistance movement. There were times when the newspaper did not play this role as effectively as many leaders would have liked,

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such as in its response to the war in Algeria. However, as a newspaper that for decades brought its adherents news, culture, and political insight, it remains among the most significant achievements of any Bundist organization after the Holocaust. Its reappearance in October 1944 and its eventual closure only in 1995 made Unzer Shtime one of the first and most long-lasting undertakings of the postwar French Bund. In addition to its political activities, expressed mainly through its newspaper, the French Bund had other major concerns unique to its local situation. In November 1944, while deportees were beginning to return to France and everyone was still trying to comprehend the gravity of what had just taken place, the Jewish Socialist Union—the prewar Bund organization—gathered to discuss activities already begun and to examine the questions facing their organization for the future. The delegates who came from around France celebrated the restoration of the Jewish Socialist Union’s cultural and social wing, the Arbeter Ring, the Bundists’ participation in French Jewry’s efforts to provide aid and assistance to those badly affected by the occupation, and the return of Unzer Shtime. In many ways, the need to rebuild and the demand for Jewish social work, coupled with the uncertainty surrounding the situation in Poland, gave the Bundists an opportunity to broaden the scope of their postwar activities beyond that of the prewar years.34 The committee decided that its most important tasks in this new period were to set in place a plan to revive Jewish culture and life, to help provide for the daily needs of Jewish workers, and to play a leading role in uniting the Jewish community.35 Like most other Jewish organizations in this period, the Bund was also very concerned with looking after the thousands of orphans who had been left by the war and the major deportations.36 Through the Arbeter Ring, the Bund moved quickly to assist those most needy in the wake of the Nazi devastation. Working with children became a principle activity of the Bund, and the fluctuating fortunes of its activities are broadly representative of the organization’s ultimate direction. The return of the deported French Jews in 1945 came as a major shock to all who had remained in France. “We must do everything to help them forget their past,” an editorial stated, that May; “We must greet them with a warm and compassionate atmosphere, a home, some rest, so that they will be able to return to a normal life. We are responsible for them.”37 The resources of the Bundist institutions were limited, yet they still sought to put a roof over the head of as many as possible, and provide a peaceful space for the returnees to rest and regain strength.38 In July 1945, the Arbeter Ring in Grenoble, the town at the foot of the French Alps where many French Bundists had survived the war, established a rehabilitation home. There, patients had the opportunity to eat, breathe fresh mountain

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air, sleep in their own beds, and recover from years of transports and concentration camps.39 Children became the major focus of this assistance. The Arbeter Ring set up a number of preventoriums and summer colonies around Paris to help deported children and orphans. In this early period, a children’s home was opened in Le Mans, around two hundred kilometers southwest of Paris.40 Shortly after, in mid-1946, the Arbeter Ring also established the Vladeck Preventorium in Brunoy, just outside Paris. The Arbeter Ring also ran summer colonies where children could spend the warm months in the outdoors and be revitalized by nature. These ventures were only short-lived, lasting only until the deportees and orphans recovered.41 To further its rehabilitation efforts, however, the Bund sought to build permanent structures that would help raise children according to Yiddish socialist values. With this goal, it reestablished its youth movement, the Sotsyalistisher Kinder Farband, or SKIF, immediately after hostilities ceased. These activities, along with regular political meetings, cultural events, and ongoing social work marked the rehabilitation of the Bund toward the

FIGUR E 5  Former French prime minister Leon Blum visits the Bund’s children’s home in Brunoy, France, shortly before his death, 1949.

Courtesy Centre-Medem/Arbeter Ring, Paris.

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end of the 1940s. Between 1944 and 1952, the party also held six national conferences; there, discussions took place on the role of the Bund in France, reports were delivered on recent activities, and resolutions were passed on major national and international political developments. The conferences also provided an opportunity for the World Coordinating Committee to send a representative to assist the work of the local organizations. During this period, the Bund also maintained relations with the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière)—the French Socialist Party—which it supported during electoral and broader political campaigns. The Bund considered itself not only an ally of the SFIO, but almost an organic part of the movement. The party also participated in local Jewish organizations, such as the umbrella body Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions). These years following the Holocaust were culturally creative and vibrant for Bundists, who, along with many other Jews around the world, took to the task of rebuilding their shattered lives with great zeal. They aimed to assert a French-Jewish identity in which they were both an integral part of the local Jewish community and heavily involved in the general socialist movement. It was not long, however, before Bundists’ determination to maintain these dual identities and stay true to their Bundist tradition came under pressure, as France was embroiled in international conflict. Although the Bund experienced some cultural growth in the decade or so following the war, it soon became clear that politically Bundists had not carved out their place in their home country.

The Turning Point of 1956 The 1950s saw the consolidation of the French Bund and its satellite organizations. Their activities expanded and, in general, continued to appeal to a small section of the Yiddish-speaking community. SKIF held regular camps and meetings. Unzer Shtime continued to garner widespread support through its annual fundraisers, which raised millions of francs each year. The party continued to campaign loudly against Communism, and carried on its cultural and social programs through the Arbeter Ring. By the close of the 1950s, however, the Bund had relaxed the political tenacity that had been a part of its post-liberation program. Its traditional antagonism toward Israel had softened, and it had compromised its opposition to French colonialism. This all became clear during the eighteen months of socialist rule in France that began in January 1956. In military, political, diplomatic, and economic terms, 1956 was a year of crisis for France. Historian William Hitchcock argued that it marked the

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beginning of the end of the French Fourth Republic, when a number of crises came together to weaken the power of the French government and its entire political system. It was in this year that the promise of ending the war in Algeria—raging since 1954 as Algerian rebels, vying for their independence, waged war against French colonizers—became a distant prospect. The intensification of the war in the troubled colony resulted in an economic crisis at home. In July, meanwhile, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, virtually cutting off the 90 percent of France’s critical oil supplies that passed through the canal. At the end of October, alongside Britain and France, Israel launched a military campaign against Egypt to reopen the waterway and to shore up Israel’s security. French economic and political decline took place against a backdrop of negotiations between the Western European powers for a European Common Market, which, as Hitchcock has demonstrated, were propelled by these crises faced by France.42 It was, however, the two connected crises in Algeria and Egypt that created the most anxiety for French Jews. These events challenged both the Bund’s universalism and Bundist efforts to integrate into the French polity. The conflicts also forced Bundists to evaluate their place as Jews in France and to rethink their attitudes toward Israel. The Bund’s attitude to French colonial violence in the mid- to late 1950s reveals much about the party’s evolution during these years. The period from 1956 to the middle of 1957, when the SFIO led the French government and oversaw an escalation of the violence in Algeria and the war against Egypt, was an especially significant moment in the evolution of the French Bund—a fact that says much about its struggle to find its place among French socialism and French Jewry. What was common to the Bund’s approach to these conflicts, in which it was implicated as both a Jewish organization and a French left-wing organization, was its failure to respond decisively. Instead of condemning colonial violence and calling for Algerian independence, the Bund equivocated. Further, its criticism of Israel was much more muted by 1956 than it had been several years earlier, underlining the Bund’s increasingly compromised position as an anti-Zionist political organization. In fact, the overwhelming impression of this chapter is that the Bund in fact supported the joint French and Israeli venture. In principle, the Bund supported granting independence to French colonies. One journalist, Sh. Gros, argued in 1954 that the autonomy France had granted its North African colonies was insufficient, and that the French government needed to realize that decolonization was inevitable. He argued that all peoples were entitled to self-determination, and that it was the task of socialists around the world to fight for the rights of the oppressed. He further claimed that the socialist “protest against want, need, human

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degeneration and oppression of all peoples is expressed through the struggle against colonialism.” That fight would bring “social emancipation and economic equality for all the oppressed.”43 Algerian rebels had begun their military uprising against France in the fall of 1954, but the election of a Socialist government led by Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of 1956 brought hope of peace to the embattled French colony. Unzer Shtime welcomed Mollet’s promise to bring a swift and nonviolent end to the two years of bloodshed that had already plagued Algeria.44 The paper was also enthusiastic about the zeal with which Mollet took to the task, his intent signaled by an early visit to Algeria. This enthusiasm quickly turned sour, as Mollet faced violent protests from the pieds noirs (“black feet”—the term for the one million European settlers in Algeria) upon his arrival. The newspaper’s writers showed great concern about the demonstrations, labeling the European protestors fascists, and highlighting the chauvinism underlining their will to dominate Algeria.45 The 6 February protests were a baptism of fire for Mollet’s premiership, as he immediately abandoned his original plan to seek peace negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and instead began to inject half a million troops into the country.46 As the violence escalated through the rest of 1956 and reached a head during the Battle of Algiers in early 1957, Unzer Shtime reported almost daily on the war. It brought its readers speeches from Mollet and other key political and military personnel, as well as reports on debates within parliament and events on the ground. Generally, the tone of the reporting was favorable to the Socialist government. The absence however, of a definitive editorial line on the war is notable. Through this period there was a distinct absence of editorializing on the explosive events taking place. There was an even more remarkable dearth of criticism against a government whose approach was increasingly brutal, incorporating torture and extreme violence to counter the guerrilla warfare of the Algerian revolutionaries. Although Unzer Shtime’s writers did show concern about the torture employed against political prisoners, they generally attributed these actions to the local police force rather than to the French military, which they considered generally was behaving ethically.47 This was part of a general trend, in which Bundist writers for many outlets attributed the problems in Algeria to the European settlers and not to the government’s mishandling of the situation. One writer could not fathom why the military so aggressively pursued Muslims yet made little attempt to reign in the “European hooligans.”48 Occasionally the writers were critical of the government’s tactics on a strategic level, such as when they criticized the arrest of five Algerian rebel leaders because it threatened France’s relationships with other North African countries.49

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On the whole, however, the Bund’s silence was conspicuous. There was no declaration from the party, nor any editorials, condemning Mollet’s Algeria policies, only daily reports of the escalating violence and political postulating; the Bund avoided reacting to the increasing reports of French brutality. This was in stark contrast, for example, to the sustained attacks on the Soviet Union and its aggression in Eastern Europe. The newspaper’s outward support of more peripheral developments, such as the Hungarian uprising in late 1956, in which large numbers of Hungarians across the country revolted against their Soviet-dominated Stalinist government, brought into sharp focus the party’s lack of response to the growing violence in Algeria and to the Socialist government’s responsibility for this development.50 The writers took no clear position on issues that struck at the very heart of the French Republic, issues that directly affected their daily lives and eroded their moral authority. In late 1957, at the party’s seventh national conference (the first in five years), the delegates took a similarly noncommittal approach to the Algerian problem, declaring their “wishes and hope that on the question of Algeria, the French Socialist government would find a solution that would lead quickly to peace on the basis of justice and democracy.”51 Although a socialist government had demonstrated its inability to further the cause of peace in the troubled colony, and had in fact shown its willingness to use excessive force in dealing with the FLN rebels, Bundists continued to put their faith in the SFIO as the only political party that could offer a path beyond war. It is curious that the French Bund was so meek in the face of an international moral crisis. With the French government resorting to torture to quell the Algerian independence movement, still the Bund failed to express its moral outrage and side with a colonized people. Why did it not display the boldness that had characterized it as an illegal revolutionary party in Russia or a mass movement in Poland? There are a number of possible explanations. Composed almost entirely of those who had survived the Holocaust in Eastern Europe or in hiding in France, French Bundists were gripped by a certain post-Holocaust existential anxiety, as were many French Jews. The Holocaust was indeed central to the Bund’s narrative, particularly with regard to members’ resistance activities in France. The memories of the Holocaust were fresh in the minds of the survivors, and with France still a ground zero for so much suffering, Bundists feared to criticize the government, which had only years earlier been implicated in the mass slaughter of European Jewry. France had always been a site of some of the sharpest instances of antisemitism, most famously the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy’s eagerness to cooperate with the Nazi extermination of the Jewish population. This far-right antisemitism had continued into the 1950s, and its extent

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became clear in January 1956 when the party of antigovernment and antisemitic politician Pierre Poujade received 5.2 million votes. This represented 11.6 percent of the total vote and delivered Poujade fifty-two seats in the National Assembly.52 Antisemitism in France had not been eliminated in the wake of the war, and was in fact experiencing a resurgence by the mid-1950s, as populists like Poujade sought to transmute the antisemitic suspicion of former Prime Minister Leon Blum into suspicion of leading radical politician Pierre Mendès-France and of the Jewish population in general. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Bundists were not eager to highlight their political differences with the government, nor did they want to oppose the government when the alternative represented a kind of return to Vichy. The success of the extreme Right was an alarming concern for Bundists, as for all Jews. Although in the cultural sphere they continued to advocate for the primacy of Yiddish, the Bund clearly did not wish, when it came to politics, to rock the boat of Socialist rule. The political instability that plagued the Fourth Republic did not help allay the anxieties of Bundists, who obviously preferred Socialist rule to the alternatives, even if the leftwing governments were responsible for so much terror. When conflict erupted and instability reigned in France, the Bundists’ survival instinct took effect, as the ever-present threat of antisemitism and the ongoing specter of Communism took their toll on a community weary from years of violence and wary of recurring persecution. By confining Jewish difference primarily to the cultural sphere, Bundists could breathe easier in the knowledge that they could not be accused of disloyalty or conflicting interests. Consequently, even if they felt outrage at the escalating war in Algeria, they were careful not to alienate themselves from the only sector in French political life in which they fit comfortably. This situation was unique to the French Bundist community for two reasons: first, France had a much longer and deeper tradition of antisemitism then most other Western communities into which Bundists settled. Second, French antisemitism, unlike that in places like Argentina, was directly connected to the experience of the Holocaust; Jews in Europe were never far away from the site of their anguish, contending with constant reminders of how precarious their situation remained. Apart from the Algerian War, the other major crisis in 1956 to which the Bund’s response revealed much about the group’s postwar mentality was the Suez Crisis, in which France, Great Britain, and Israel retaliated against Egypt after it nationalized the Suez Canal, a major commercial waterway for the two European powers. This was another international conflict overseen by the Socialist government of Guy Mollet, and was directly linked to the economic impact of the Algerian War on the métropole. With hundreds of

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millions of francs being spent on attempts to subdue the FLN rebels, and with the closure of the Suez Canal by Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser, France’s economy was virtually paralyzed by the end of 1956.53 More crucially, Mollet also believed that Nasser’s support for the FLN was a significant factor in prolonging the war and emboldening the rebels; he sensed that, by defeating Nasser, France could break the back of the Algerian resistance.54 The Suez Crisis also brought into sharp focus France’s relationship with Israel, as the two countries joined Britain in attacking Egypt.55 This binding naturally had implications for any Jewish movement in France, and can be considered a major factor in the Bund’s policy shift toward Israel, as Unzer Shtime took an editorial position strongly anti-Nasser and highly favorable to the Franco-Israeli alliance. There were reasons that the Bund was suspicious of Nasser. His relationship to the Soviet Union, his anti-Western rhetoric, and his pan-Arabism were all considered causes for alarm by the Bund.56 Bundists feared Nasser’s expansionist ambitions, even comparing him to Hitler in this regard.57 The Bund also had reasons to take France’s side: it was, after all, a French-based organization. More than a decade after liberation and the party’s reemergence, it was still trying to resolve the tension between being French and Jewish; like Algeria, the Suez crisis gave the Bund an opportunity to assert its Frenchness. Besides, France’s economy, already in crisis with the escalation of the Algerian War, had been crippled by Nasser’s actions in the Suez, with the entire population directly affected. Further, Egypt’s foreign policy was considered a broader challenge to Western countries. These were issues about which the Bund was concerned, fearing that the rise of Egypt was a dangerous development in global politics.58 When Nasser did initially nationalize the Suez Canal, in July 1956, Unzer Shtime did not consider Egypt a major threat to Israel. It warned Israel not to respond militarily, because, according to one commentator, “the spilt Jewish blood will only be of use to the capitalist Suez firms.” Its best course of action would be to stay out of the conflict and trust that negotiations between Western countries and Egypt would bring equal access for all countries.59 When France, Britain, and Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula in late October of that year, Unzer Shtime did not offer any response either in support of or against the offensive. It reported daily on developments, but refused to take a position. Not until several days after the cessation of hostilities—two weeks after the incursion—did an editorial line begin to appear. Even then, when the party’s general secretary, Leon Shtern, gave a lengthy response, it was a careful exercise in equivocation. Shtern’s tone was mildly critical, but he did not directly condemn the actions of his government or its allies. Shtern

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emphasized the French Bund’s deep connection to Israeli Jewry. He also reiterated the party’s principled opposition to war in general, highlighting how the present was a bipolar and nuclear age, where localized wars could easily become catastrophic world wars. There was, therefore, no other path than diplomacy in even the sharpest international conflicts. Still, he highlighted the successes of the war: Israel had seized territory, proved its military prowess, and gained access to the Suez Canal; Britain and France had reestablished control over the waterway. Shtern did concede that these victories were not clear-cut. To achieve those goals, the three aggressors, all democratic countries, had contravened the UN Charter. The invasion also gave cover to the Soviet Union to continue its violent repression of the Hungarian uprising, with the gaze of the world turned elsewhere. Shtern argued that to secure itself, Israel needed to allow UN involvement. It had to avoid the danger of isolating itself from the international community, and strive toward peaceful relations with its Arab neighbors. Although Shtern recognized some of the disadvantages of the war, he stopped short of condemning the invasion and subsequent occupation of the Sinai Peninsula. On the whole, whenever Unzer Shtime’s own journalists covered Suez (which was rarely), France and Israel were treated magnanimously. Other articles on the Suez Crisis, however, were printed from outside the French Bund. Several weeks after the ceasefire, Emanuel Scherer, secretary of the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee, weighed in, dubbing the expedition a “tragic mistake.”60 The newspaper also reprinted the world Bund’s resolution condemning the invasion.61 Further, it brought translations of other Socialist papers to show the range of positions that Socialists were taking on the issue.62 There was however a noticeable absence of any official resolutions or declarations from the French Bund, and there was little indication as to whether or not the local organization endorsed the world Bund’s condemnation of France, Britain, and Israel’s actions, or indeed endorsed the stances of any other socialist organization. The newspaper was clearly concerned with the fate of Egyptian Jewry, which became vulnerable as the enmity between Nasser and the Israeli government deepened.63 It was clear that, by this time, the Bund was trying to reposition itself with regard to Israel. The party was not entirely uncritical of Israel; however, it sought to emphasize its close ties to the Jewish state and its inhabitants. Perhaps this was a way for Bundists to hedge their bets, aware that in the case of a resurgence of French antisemitism, Israel remained a possible, if not likely, destination to which they might escape; thus the Bundists’ postHolocaust anxiety could be considered a major factor in diminishing their hostile attitudes toward Israel. The Bund was also quietly supportive of the French role in the incursion into Egypt. The paper’s later tone suggests that

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perhaps it might have been more sympathetic to France, Britain, and Israel’s taking the diplomatic route instead of rushing into a military response. However, between its need to accommodate the Socialist government of the day, to show its support for Israel, and to show its opposition to Nasser, the party maintained a curious silence until after the military operation had been completed, and even then its criticism remained conspicuously muted. The Bund’s reaction to the Suez Crisis can be viewed as being in contrast to its hesitation over Algeria. Whereas Bundist writers shied away from taking a definitive position over the latter issue, on the former they quite clearly took the side of France and Israel, highlighting how dangerous Nasser was to preserving global peace. These reactions, though, came from the same place: anxiety over Jews’ precarious existence in Europe. The Holocaust loomed large for Jews the world over. French Jews, given their close proximity to the theater of destruction, and the fresh memories of both French antisemitism and Vichy collaboration, were affected perhaps in a more profound way than anyone. The Bund’s meekness in the face of crisis was in strong contrast to its prewar history of bold and decisive defense of oppressed peoples. This episode highlights what a powerful psychological force the Holocaust was for all Jews, even those who sought to restore their earlier enthusiasm for international socialism. Although the party and its organ responded in such a way, not all Bundists were affected alike by Holocaust anxieties. In early 1958, in an independently published leaflet titled Bundishe Fraye Tribune (Bund Free Tribune), a number of Bundist writers took issue with the party’s approach to the crises in Algeria and Egypt. Intended to examine “all nuances of Bundist thought,” the Bundishe Fraye Tribune was a forum for prominent activists in the local movement (primarily Raphal and Dina Ryba, who would later emigrate to Canada) to express displeasure with the direction of the French branch of the Bund and with the World Coordinating Committee. Dina Ryba was especially critical over what she perceived to be a meek response to French colonial violence. She took exception to the argument that, as there was no other prospect for a peaceful solution, the Bund had no choice but to support the Mollet government and its actions. Any other leadership, so the argument went, would only strengthen the forces of fascism in France and in Algeria.64 Ryba condemned the Bund’s capitulation, which went “against the tradition and spirit of the Bund, which has throughout its history always stood straight and openly on the side of oppressed peoples in their struggle for liberation” (emphasis in original).65 With the facts of French torture tactics to suppress the Algerian rebels openly discussed in the French press, Ryba was outraged that the Bundist press remained “deaf” to what was taking place “around them” and “next to

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them.” The Bund organization, Ryba noted, did not even pass a resolution of protest against the government actions.66 Similarly, Kalman Goldwasser condemned the silence of the party and its organ on the question of Algeria: “Whether inside the organization or in Unzer Shtime, one cannot find a clear word on [the Bund’s position on Algeria].”67 Ryba and Goldwasser also agreed that the party had not carved out a specific Bundist response to the Suez Crisis. They claimed that there was no discernible difference between the editorial lines of Unzer Shtime and the Zionist daily Unzer Vort. Goldwasser noted that the only official declaration published by the newspaper came after Israel had already withdrawn its forces from the Sinai Peninsula, and even then the declaration was that of the World Coordinating Committee rather than of the local organization.68 Ryba’s criticisms ran even deeper. For her, it was not that the Bund’s position was indistinguishable from the Zionists’, but that it was no response at all. She was incensed that the Bund only reported, as it had with Algeria, facts on the ground and did not present a Bundist response. Further, the Bund did not respond to Zionist attacks against it, nor when the Zionist press made claims that the forced expulsion of Egyptian Jews as a result of the Sinai War was a positive outcome. She claimed that the Bund had also not responded to the Zionist press argument that Jews remained a foreign element everywhere. Even though there were those in the French Socialist Party who were friendly toward Israel yet still criticized Franco-Israeli actions in Sinai, the Bund remained silent. From time to time, Unzer Shtime printed articles from overseas authors or translations from the French press, but, for Ryba, “not one of our own positions was publicly expressed.”69 This was, for her, the ultimate offense, especially as the Bund had, in various forums, expressed its opposition to the French decision to intervene militarily. None of these instances of protest—such as when Bund leader Peretz Guterman abstained from voting on a resolution, at a meeting of the Journalists’ Union, that welcomed the Sinai invasion, or when the World Coordinating Committee formally advised the Socialist International of its opposition to the aggression against Egypt—were reported in Unzer Shtime. The Bund’s official organ, according to Ryba, had cowered in fear of a backlash.70 Ryba and Goldwasser were highlighting a major shift in outlook of the French Bund, although perhaps even they did not realize what a significant moment France’s decolonization was in the development of their organization. They, along with Ryba’s husband, Raphal, were criticizing a broader realignment of the party, a realignment recognized at the Bund’s seventh national conference, in late 1957. After years that saw economic uncertainty, anticolonial violence across continents, political instability, the rise and consolidation of Israel, and the specter of Communism casting

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a broad shadow across Europe, the Bund had undergone a transformation by the time of that conference, the first in five years. The Bund’s general secretary, Leon Shtern, reported to the conference that, given the changes of those years, and the necessity for the Bund to become a French party rather than a remnant of the Polish party, the organization had become “elastic, yielding, and at times compromising when it comes to questions of tactics, of form, of style and language.” Still, the Bund remained “faithful to the foundations, the essential principles of Bundism.”71 Shtern did not outline in what way the party had become “elastic” or “compromising,” nor what were the “essential principles” of Bundism to which it remained true. The statement did, however, help to explain the party’s silence over the war in Algeria, and its support for Franco-Israeli military intervention against Egypt. For the authors of the Bundishe Fraye Tribune, this willingness to compromise was impossible to fathom. Raphal Ryba already believed that the Bund was facing a significant crisis. The number of Yiddish speakers was in decline and was only being replenished by Eastern European immigrants fleeing Communist antisemitism. He felt that the world Bund lacked direction, with a great deal of policy discord and a general lack of solidarity. And he felt that the local Bund was generally stagnating. It was not tackling tough questions and was not showing enough initiative in broadening the movement’s appeal and shoring up its future. For example, Ryba believed, it needed to supplement its Yiddish propaganda with French writing; it needed to be more than an oppositional movement and to be a constructive force within French Jewish society. “To be successful,” Ryba wrote, “enlightenment-work—like education—needs to be a task that is carried out every day, not only from time to time.”72 The party’s meek reaction to the crisis in Algeria throughout 1956 and 1957 only plunged the party further into crisis, a crisis of identity, of ideology, of strategy. By 1957, the Bund, in its attempt to integrate into France, had compromised its traditional universalism. Its criticism of Israel, which at times had been sharp, was now much more blunted, bringing into question how the Bund in the future should respond to Israeli actions in war or peace. The party suspended Raphal and Dinah Ryba for one year in response to their outburst, after which they spent time in New York before returning to Paris to continue working within the party. Their friend Kalman Goldwasser pleaded with them to return straight away, arguing that, although the party had taken such a decision, they should not have abandoned their work. He was convinced that, after the Holocaust, the Bund had an important shlikhes—mission—in Jewish life, which was “so strongly swamped in the unclean waters and wild growths of nationalism and chauvinism.” The Bund

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had to “make do with whatever powers with which it has been left.” It was, Goldwasser wrote them, “a great sin to depart, great servants leaving their work. . . . You need the Bund and the Bund needs you.”73 The Ryba episode showed two things. First, the Algerian war was a major, even defining, issue for the French Bund. It resulted in two of its most senior leaders (Ryba had been secretary of the Bund’s European secretariat) leaving the country. Second, it showed how deeply the Bund’s adherents felt about their movement: despite their weakness and all the debate, their sense of mishpokhedikayt brought them, like the Rybas when they returned to Paris, back to the movement. The Bund’s relative silence over major international conflicts in which their home country was deeply implicated betrays a distinct lack of selfconfidence. When it came to communal and cultural activities, the Bund displayed a great deal of confidence of its place and role; however, when major international issues dared Bundists to reconsider their places among the French and Jewish communities, their party cowered. By then, it was clearly at a political crossroads, struggling to respond to the many challenges thrust before it. The events of 1956 highlighted the French Bundists’ awareness of their place as Jews and as socialists in France. For them, loyalty to their Socialist comrades in France superseded the stubborn ideological resolve that had guided them in the past. Their commitment to freedom and support for the oppressed became less important given that their own socialist government was spearheading such oppression, and that condemning that leadership might compromise their own status as French. The interests of French socialism supplanted those of universal justice and freedom. In this scenario, the Bundists were caught in a bind. The main French milieu into which they integrated was the socialist Left. Had they come out strongly against a socialist government, they would have isolated themselves from the French working class, which went against their mandate to cooperate with the local labor movement. This compromise became even more pronounced with the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958, when the Algerian crisis finally brought an end to the Fourth Republic, replaced by a government headed by war hero General Charles de Gaulle. The Bund did not welcome de Gaulle’s ascent to the presidency of France, nor did it support the new republic, with its greatly strengthened executive branch. Unzer Shtime vigorously celebrated the dramatic demonstrations in which hundreds of thousands of Parisians rallied to defend the republic against a coup d’état.74 The newspaper’s writers felt that this act had been a resounding response to the antidemocratic forces seeking to install de Gaulle into the premiership and bring down the Fourth Republic.75 Its editors wrote of their concern that, to secure the republic, the

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country’s political leadership was putting power in the hands of de Gaulle, who they claimed had become, “whether he wanted to or not, the symbol and idol of the cluster of armed rebels—the parachutists, colonialists, adventuring extremists—the outspoken opponents of a democratic regime in the country.”76 And when, at the beginning of June, de Gaulle returned to Paris to form a government, the Bund lamented the Fourth Republic’s “impotence and suicide.”77 Indeed, a year into the general’s presidency, the party felt vindicated by its earlier suspicion. Shtern, who led the Bund’s critique of de Gaulle, remained highly critical of his authoritarian rule, claiming that no single person had had as much power in France since 1789, and warning that such authoritarian rule was only putting France on the road to a “renewed, modern Bonapartism.” Shtern claimed that de Gaulle understood French psychology and its “organic attachment” to democracy, and was carefully constructing a smokescreen to convince the population that he was simply reforming democracy, rather than eroding it.78 Shtern later claimed that de Gaulle opposed the essence of democracy, the sense that “a state is just a means and people are the end.” De Gaulle, Shtern said, turned that notion on its head in his will to strengthen and stabilize the French state even at the expense of the population’s basic freedoms.79 Shtern was also critical of de Gaulle’s handling of Algeria, a crisis not resolved until a ceasefire was finally called in early 1962 and independence was granted to the embattled country. Although de Gaulle had brought the pieds noirs, who constituted one of his major power bases, under control, Shtern feared this could only be temporary. He argued that de Gaulle had “only won a battle, but not the war.” By placing preconditions on the Algerian revolutionaries that they could not accept, before he would agree to hold a referendum, de Gaulle showed that he was not really committed to Algerian independence or to a swift settlement of the conflict.80 Even when peace had formally been negotiated between France and the Algerian revolutionaries and independence had been granted the erstwhile colony, Shtern was not convinced that de Gaulle’s iron-clad rule could protect the country from civil war or a fascist putsch. “The supposedly strong government of General de Gaulle,” he wrote to the world Bund journal Unzer Tsayt, “has recently shown its wretched powerlessness in the fight against the impudent [khutspediker] fascist mob.” The Fifth Republic, Shtern argued, could not outlast the authoritarian de Gaulle.81 Of course, in the end, de Gaulle did oversee a resolution to the conflict, and the Fifth Republic did survive his presidency. During this period, the Bund also began to show its deep concern for the Jews in Algeria, calling for their rights to remain safely in their homes or have freedom to migrate to France.82

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The Bund’s attitude toward de Gaulle is significant in highlighting the party’s meek acceptance of the Socialist government’s escalation of colonial violence in Algeria and elsewhere. Its vehement opposition to the de Gaulle government and to its actions in Algeria draws attention to the party’s silence over Guy Mollet’s failure to secure a peaceful settlement or grant the colony independence. Rarely did the Bund make any outright criticism of the government during the stormy period of Mollet’s premiership. However, the adoption of a constitution that granted far-reaching powers to the executive branch was intolerable for the Bund. Its 1957 declaration that the party had become “elastic” and “compromising” in the preceding years was clear when, virtually overnight, it became a vocal opponent of the government. The Algerian war had a major effect on French society, bringing down successive governments and eventually necessitating a systemic political overhaul. Bundists, virtually all of whom had survived the Holocaust, were also profoundly affected by this event, with the SFIO, its affiliate organization, responsible for some of the more brutal episodes of the war and utterly failing to advance the cause of peace or independence. The Bund could choose one of two paths: it could distance itself from the mainstream Left and criticize the government (a choice many within the SFIO themselves took), or it could blindly support Guy Mollet’s premiership and blame external forces for his inability to settle the conflict. In the end, it took the latter path, compromising its commitment to supporting oppressed peoples around the world. In doing so, it aimed to cement its place within the French Left and within the French mainstream. It also sought to define itself as French against both the “fascist” pieds noirs in Algeria and the Algerian Muslims. By opposing de Gaulle, it also sought to assert its Frenchness by evoking the French psyche, with its dedication to democracy and collective and individual freedom. In this sense, Bundists also saw themselves as inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition, defending the republic as the only way to secure democratic freedoms. In the end, the scars of the Holocaust proved difficult to overcome, as Bundists tried to navigate their way through the rocky new terrain of a postwar Western Europe that continued to be mired in violent struggles of decolonization.

The Bundist Children’s Movement and the Fate of the Bund The late 1950s saw another major event within the Bund: the rise and fall of its children’s movement. This was an episode that would have devastating consequences, creating a crisis of regeneration. SKIF was one of the bright sparks of the Bund organization in France in the early 1950s. The French

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chapter had been established in 1932, six years after the children’s movement had initially been founded in Poland. A small group of young activists reestablished the movement immediately after the war, and in 1947, with the assistance of the Jewish Labor Committee in the United States, the Bund bought a chateau in Corvol, 230 kilometers outside Paris. Named for Esther Richter, captured by the Gestapo for her underground wartime activities, Corvol was where SKIF could hold its summer colonies, often hosting Bundist youth from many parts of Europe.83 SKIF, like its parent organization, was highly political. It sought to imbue its members with socialist, secular, and Yiddish-based Jewish spirit. Former SKIF leader Jacqueline Gluckstein explained in 1999, in an interview in the Paris journal Vacarme, that its camps gathered children from all nearby countries: “Personally, we were French, but we represented Jewish children around the entire world.” Camps were conducted with a strong enthusiasm for Yiddish: “We arrived in the camps and struck up Yiddish songs, even though our language was already French.”84 SKIF also constituted the Jewish section of the international Red Falcon movement, which brought together socialist children around the world.85 By the late 1950s, despite approximately a decade of growth, SKIF was treading water. Having lost its appeal to a new generation of acculturated and more affluent French Jews, the organization disbanded in 1962. A few years earlier, in 1956, the leaders of SKIF had identified the need to broaden

FIGUR E 6  En route to SKIF camp in France.

Courtesy Centre-Medem/Arbeter Ring, Paris.

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the emphasis to activities that would be fun for children, and to lessen the focus on political activities. “The weekly meetings of the SKIFistn do not need to be confined only to talks, speeches, and theories,” a report of SKIF’s 1956 conference read, “but should also enrich them with different activities related to arts and crafts, recreation, and club activities.” The leaders felt that these activities should include “drama circles, crafts, choirs, cinema, and scouts.”86 This would be the only way to ensure continued interest in the group’s regular meetings. In 1957, at the Bund’s national conference, several delegates recognized that the difficulties facing SKIF were not specific to the Bund, but to all Jewish and non-Jewish organizations. Although one problem these delegates identified was that most Jewish children were not learning Yiddish at home, another issue cut across all elements of French, and indeed Western, society: young people were more individualistic and materialistic than in previous generations. How could the Bund expect to buck global trends?87 In the end, these discussions and decisions did not shore up the children’s movement’s popularity. By 1962, when only a few dozen children were attending summer camp, SKIF in France became untenable. In 2006, historian and former SKIF activist Henri Minczeles recalled the decision to abandon SKIF. “Bit by bit,” he wrote, “the movement became less attractive. The old blueprints from before the war no longer were able to inspire or mobilize the youth.” It was not only a problem for the youth, Minczeles argued: “This lethargy was not only specific to SKIF, whose members were becoming adults anyway. Others were emigrating to the United States, Australia, and Israel.”88 Clearly there was a problem with regeneration. The community was moving further away from the kind of militant political culture that defined the initial generation of SKIFistn. As Gluckstein recalled in 1988: “The postwar honeymoon did not last long. Little by little the summer camps at Corvol changed, the material conditions improved, the programs became more elaborate. We abandoned the uniforms, the flags, the scout element, and the political emphasis that no longer corresponded to our era. SKIF had had its time: it disappeared [in 1962].”89 Not long after, a group of former SKIF leaders came together with the leadership of the Bund and the Arbeter Ring to try to fill the gap left by SKIF. In the summer of that year, 1962, a colloquium was held at Vladeck Children’s Home in Brunoy, where a new youth movement, the Club Laïque Enfant Juif (CLEJ—Jewish Secular Children’s Club) was established. The participants, formerly active in SKIF, were keen for their children to receive some form of Jewish secular education. They wanted to create an organization that would complement the kind of values that they taught at home. In an interview at the Medem Centre in 2006, Rich Wieviorka, one of CLEJ’s founders, recalled an incident in which her husband, Aby, flew into a rage when his children

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refused to set the table: “He was upset because he had realized that his kids had passed through life not realizing what they could live without, not having contact with a certain reality, with no solidarity toward others.” That was the moment that Aby Wieviorka realized an organization was needed to fill in the gaps of the education that parents gave their children at home.90 The new organization would be “less centered on Yiddish and more on a Jewish socialism in French” while still preserving Bundist ideology.91 This was not a simple decision. The participants needed to identify the ways in which SKIF had failed, and redress them. It was not an easy path, nor was it lacking controversy within the movement. CLEJ would be a new beginning, marking it as distinct from SKIF, but still strongly connected to its parent body, and still carrying an affection for some of the older traditions. Controversially, however, the new organization would be far less political and would place much less emphasis on Yiddish. It would seek to broaden its horizon to welcome French Jewish children from all linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds. Article Two of CLEJ’s founding charter stated its “attachment to Jewish culture in all its forms and to all the values and morals that have been taught through Jewish history.”92 For some in the old guard, like French Bund stalwarts Raphal and Dina Ryba, such a formulation was unconscionable. Such activists, for whom there was no Bundism without Yiddish culture at its core, were deeply disturbed by the phrase “Jewish culture in all its forms.” Henri Minczeles recalls Raphal Ryba vehemently objecting, claiming it was “Jewish history of the Middle Ages! Of religion! Our history is that of the workers’ movement!” Although the older activists did not want any study of Jewish religious texts or premodern Jewish history as part of the CLEJ program, the younger generation saw this sectarianism as untenable and pressed on with their plans.93 Jacqueline Gluckstein also lamented the shift from Yiddish: “I deplored the speed at which we were losing Yiddish. I saw Yiddish dying away. I said that I would fight to the last pupil!”94 The influx of North African Jewish migrants, and the failure of the post-Holocaust generation to pass on a fluency in, and commitment to, Yiddish to their children forced the hands of those participating in the colloquium. If they wanted to establish a youth movement with prospects for survival, they would have to attract a nonAshkenazi, non-Yiddish-speaking constituency. CLEJ, therefore, had to be created at the expense of SKIF. “With the creation of CLEJ,” wrote Gluckstein, “we let SKIF die naturally, painlessly.”95 The reconstitution of the Bund’s children’s movement is symptomatic of the fate of the French Bund in the second half of the twentieth century. Most significant, perhaps, was the shift away from Yiddish as the foundation on which Jewish identity was formed. Even the name of the new organization

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highlights this conscious decision. The elements that comprise the names SKIF and CLEJ are revealing. Whereas SKIF, the Socialist Children’s Union, directly utilized the language of Jewish socialism—that is, its Yiddish name incorporated the words Socialist and Union, although it did not actually contain the word “Jewish”—CLEJ, the Secular Jewish Children’s Club, was much more concerned with creating a more local and less political profile. CLEJ most likely had no choice but to include the word “Juif” in its new acronym, given that it no longer had the Yiddish title to identify it as Jewish. Its key identifying feature was that it was secular and Jewish; there was no political indicator, nor any clear suggestion of what constituted secular Jewishness. In fact, even including the word “secular,” or laïque, was somewhat of an afterthought, as the colloquium had originally designated the new organization Jewish Children’s Club (Club Enfance Juif).96 Perhaps there was also an element of privileging French, a Western European language, over Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish past, as the children of Bundists felt able to locate their Jewish identities more comfortably in the local tongue, their mother tongue, than in the language of their parent’s generation. The shift away from Yiddish and socialism in favor of a more politically neutral approach was undoubtedly part of an attempt to broaden the movement’s appeal. The CLEJ leaders did not aim to create a new generation of Bund leaders, as SKIF had previously sought to do. In fact, the CLEJ leaders had great difficulty communicating with the older Bund leaders, who did not necessarily agree with or understand their approach.97 They therefore tried to appeal to native French Jews, to immigrants and children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and to the rapidly growing North African Jewish community.98 In the end, the establishment of the new organization created a perennial crisis of regeneration. The leaders of CLEJ were seeking to imbue children with a Bundist spirit in the broadest sense—diasporic and committed to social justice. There was no real undertaking to foster any dedication to the Yiddish language and culture, or to create a strong identification with the Bund organization. Further, there was resistance from the Bund leaders to pass on the torch to their children, who they felt could not carry on the movement’s legacy. Jacqueline Gluckstein recalled how her parents’ generation refused to allow their children to be anything more than consumers of the Bund’s cultural wing, the Arbeter Ring. By the time they took over in the 1970s, this younger generation had to establish the Vladimir Medem Cultural Centre to operate in French to try to ensure that the Bund would still have a constituency among French Jews.99 It would therefore only be a matter of time before the Bund succumbed to the same forces that would subsume other Yiddish-oriented organizations throughout France.

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Besides lacking a pool of young Yiddish-speaking Jews on which to draw, CLEJ could not rely on SKIF’s socialist tradition to attract prospective members and their families. French socialism was in disarray by the 1960s. With many people associating the French Socialist Party, the SFIO, with the failed Fourth Republic and the prolonged crisis in Algeria, the French Left faced a crisis. The Socialist Party’s membership dropped from 335,000 in 1944 to 80,000 by 1962.100 Having attached itself to the SFIO even after years of decline, the Bund almost inevitably faced a similar fate, especially as its children’s movement could not create a new generation of activists imbued with the fiery socialist spirit that had characterized the immediate postwar generation. After the Holocaust had wiped out the majority of the Bund’s next generation, this shift away from Yiddish and socialism further reinforced the fact that the Bund did not have a group of young militants ready to take over the reins from the movement’s more established members. Both cornerstones of the Bund’s identity were no longer attractive to a new generation of French Jews. It is no coincidence that this realization came shortly after the movement’s transformation during the Algerian and Suez crises of 1956–1957, where it sought to assert itself both as native to France and as Jewish.

Demographics and the Decline of Yiddish This realization was all in response to the new reality of French Jewry. Decolonization in North Africa, in particular in Algeria, changed the face of the Jewish community in France. With the growing unrest in the French colonies, hundreds of thousands of North African Jews flooded into France from the mid-1950s onward, transforming the French Jewish landscape and posing a major challenge to the native French and largely Ashkenazi organizations that dominated the community. This demographic change also affected smaller Yiddish-oriented organizations like the Bund, whose natural constituency was subsumed by Jews who conceived of their Jewishness in a fundamentally different way. The North African Jews did not speak Yiddish. They were more religious and politically more conservative. The Holocaust had not touched them in the same way it had the French Jews and those who had migrated from the East, although Algerian Jews had been stripped of their citizenship by the Vichy regime. North African Jews also had their own experience of trauma to overcome, with the violence associated with decolonization leaving an indelible mark.101 Still, they did not experience many of the difficulties that the Eastern European Jewish immigrants had faced, given that, for many, French was their native language (although other Jewish languages like Ladino and Judeo-Arabic had a presence), and, unlike

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Russian and Polish Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, many came to France as French citizens.102 The onset of North African immigration raised the question of how the Bund should respond to a major demographic upheaval that left its natural constituency in the minority in terms both of its size in the community and its influence. These developments also forced Bundists to come to terms with what it meant to be a world people. Although the world Bund had, since the war, acknowledged that the Jews were a world people, a position offi cially adopted for the first time in 1955, French Bundists faced this reality more sharply than perhaps any of their comrades around the world, with the exception of those in Israel. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of North African Jews challenged them again to consider—as they had been forced to in the wake of the Holocaust—what being a world people meant for the Jews. It was no longer an abstract question to be dealt with by behaving condescendingly toward Middle Eastern and North African Jews, but a daily challenge to their notions of Jewishness. Certainly the Bund’s response to the Algerian crisis had an impact on their approach to the new immigrants. With the prospect of peace, the Bund urged the Jewish community to call on the French government to make sure that the Jews’ rights in Algeria were protected under any peace negotiations. This included the right of immigration to France, which many had already exercised, and which Bundist writer Raphal Ryba rightly expected would continue into the future. Although he had previously argued that the best outcome would be a guarantee of safety for Algerian Jews to remain in their homes, he welcomed them into France after 1962, as the Bund had Egyptian Jews years earlier, when Nasser expelled French citizens following the Suez Crisis.103 There was perhaps also an element of anti-Muslim sentiment that may have been a factor in the Bund’s refusal to condemn the Socialist government of Guy Mollet and his escalation of violence against Algerian revolutionaries. At the same time that the Bund welcomed the North African Jews to France, the major demographic shift in Jewish France saw the market for daily Yiddish activities decline, as Yiddish was not passed on to the new generation.104 Although the newcomers revitalized Jewish life in France, as Eastern European Jews had at the turn of the century and again in the immediate postwar period, the Yiddish-speaking sector could not hope to ride this wave as it had the earlier ones. French Yiddish writer Moshe Zalcman wrote in 1981 that only one of the three daily Yiddish newspapers remained. Zalcman, formerly a Communist and by then a Zionist activist, lamented that, by the end of the 1970s, the only noteworthy sector in the Yiddishspeaking community were the landsmanshaftn, and even their situation was not encouraging. Yiddish-oriented organizations faced an uphill battle to

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survive.105 Jonathan Boyarin also documented the precarious state of Yiddish by the end of the twentieth century in his 1991 study on the landsmanshaftn in Paris, in which Bundists were not greatly active.106 Still, in some ways the major demographic shift from the 1960s onward greatly benefited the Yiddish-speaking sector. With their rapid cultural and linguistic assimilation, North African Jews helped to revitalize French Jewry. Although these new immigrants were religious and later Zionist by nature, Bundist institutions also were strengthened by the fact that many major local organizations flourished with the new self-confidence brought by the migrants. These newly arrived Jews did not idolize the French state as did the native French Jews and, to an extent, earlier immigrant Jews, but were more comfortable criticizing the nation-state.107 The decline in Yiddish did not come with the arrival of non-Yiddish-speaking Jews (which did not diminish the number of Yiddish speakers), but had started much earlier with the failure of a generation to pass on its language and culture. To an extent, Bundists saw the new demographic of the community as challenging, but mainly because the newest arrivals favored religion and Zionism, rather than language, as major cultural indicators. Still, as Arbeter Ring president and historian Henri Minczeles acknowledged in his report on the situation of the Jewish community in the early 1990s, Sephardi Jews had contributed a great deal intellectually and culturally in reviving French Jewry, especially the community’s central bodies.108 Perhaps this fact helps explain why, in 1993, Minczeles could still boast a movement comprising a political arm, a regular newspaper, a cultural center, the largest Yiddish library in Europe, a children’s movement, and a Yiddish school. Overall, these activities accommodated around 200 families, or up to 700 people. Although these numbers indicated a decline since the 1950s, they also show a resilience on the part of those adhering to the movement, a resilience no doubt aided by the renewed self-confidence that North African, and especially Algerian, Jews brought to France.

Conclusion In the end, the Bund simply tried to keep its head above water. Unzer Shtime was published until 1995, although it ceased to be a daily in the mid-1970s. CLEJ continued to run summer colonies, and the Centre Medem remained one of the major Yiddish libraries in Europe and operated a cultural program. In 2002, a dispute over the political direction of the Bund’s library and cultural hub, the Medem Cultural Centre, caused a split between Bundists who wanted to maintain a distinctive political identity, and the Yiddish cultural activists who felt that Bundism’s role in French Jewish life had finished

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and that the center needed to focus solely on cultural endeavors.109 These two organizations have continued to operate into the twenty-first century, although only the breakaway Centre Medem–Arbeter Ring claims to carry on the legacy of its Bundist predecessors.110 After the 1950s, however, when the French Bund did experience a mini-renaissance, its story was one of a painful slow decline. In asserting its Frenchness and working toward ensuring its relevance, the movement suffered an identity crisis that made difficult the crafting of a cohesive and uniquely Bundist position in the French Jewish world. There is little doubt that the anxiety that Jews felt after the Holocaust, and with continuing antisemitism, played a major role in the Bundists’ depoliticization. A desire to minimize the things that separated Jews and the local population would have been an important part of many Jews’ decision not to pass on to their children the fiery Yiddish identity that had been so important in prewar Europe. Having abandoned the language of socialism and Yiddish, the leaders of the renewed Bundist children’s movement after 1963 failed to create a new generation of Bund activists. In the context of the Bund around the world, this was not unique. However, the circumstances that pushed the French Bund into this compromised position—decolonization, France’s relationship to Israel, the heightened threat of Communism, the influx of Sephardi Jews—were specific to France. The Bund in France remained a leading player in promoting Yiddish, but, like all other Yiddish institutions, it could only survive for so long with an aging and eventually dwindling population of Yiddish speakers. And, with the decline of French socialism as a double blow, the French Bund had little chance of continuing to attract the local Jewish population to its cause, or even of situating itself as a kind of “third way” in the Jewish world, as it had in the decade or so following liberation.

4 The Goldene Medineh? The Bund in the United States

The Bund in the United States was in a unique and paradoxical situation

compared to its sibling organizations in other countries. On the one hand, the Bund’s natural center, New York, was the world’s most vibrant location in the production of postwar Yiddish culture and, alongside Israel, the world’s major Jewish political locus. It also had a proud tradition of Yiddish socialism from the late nineteenth century onward. On the other hand, by the time the Bund sought formally to reestablish itself in the New World, the Socialist Party had run its course and was in retreat. The postwar history of the Bund in America, and in New York in particular, is therefore a study in contradictions. Although it was the intellectual and administrative center of the world Bund, the Bund in the United States was at times far less influen-

tial in its local context than were Bund organizations in other countries. And despite the fact that New York became the postwar locus of Yiddish life, the Bund remained but a small fish in a much larger sea of Yiddish press, politics, and culture. On the other hand, it displayed more self-confidence than just about any other Bund organization in the world, as it regularly declared its antipathy toward capitalism and mainstream politics in a climate growing daily more suspicious of leftist ideas. The Bund joined the throng of organizations voicing support for civil rights and an end to racial discrimination, and, in the 1960s and 1970s, opposed American intervention in Vietnam. I examine here the delicate situation in which the American Bund found itself: torn between expectation and reality; seeking to lead Bundists around the globe, yet struggling to find an audience at home. Bundists sought to understand their role as new Americans and how they fit into the broader American socialist landscape. Similarly, they tried to forge a role within the Yiddish-speaking and broader Jewish community, as American Jewry 105

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embarked on decades of soul-searching following the Holocaust. The American Bund also operated in the context of the global Bundist movement, for which it provided leadership and direction. These were issues that preoccupied the Bund throughout its half century of existence in the United States, particularly in the first two decades after the establishment of the New York Bund, when adherents to the prewar movement felt that there was an opportunity to carve out their own niche in the New World. Although they did play an important role in the lives of several hundred (perhaps several thousand) American Jews, and a more peripheral role in the lives of thousands more, their lofty ambitions were never realized. Sadly, their dream of becoming a broadly popular party among even the Yiddish-speaking population was never fulfilled.

Bundists in the United States before 1945 At the turn of the century, the Jewish labor movement not only was a key player on the Jewish street, but exercised significant influence in the broader American political and cultural arenas. The Bund’s contribution was highly visible, and Bundism was an important part of the American Jewish world for nearly fifty years before a Bund organization was formally established. Although the Yiddish-speaking Left had been an active component of American Jewish life from as early as the 1880s, with the first influx of Russian Jewish radicals, the arrival of thousands of Bundist exiles after the failed 1905 revolution in Russia was what truly energized American Yiddish socialism. Before that, leading Jewish radicals like Abraham Cahan had seen Yiddish mainly as a means to communicate socialist values to the Jewish masses. After 1905, thousands of Bundist migrants imported Bundist national thought that emphasized the inherent cultural value in Yiddish, and promoted Jewish national ideas in a community broadly committed to rapid assimilation and Anglicization.1 There were several attempts to establish Bund clubs and groups. A Central Union of Bundist Organizations was founded around 1905, with its membership reaching three thousand in fiftytwo branches, an indication that there were a large number of Bundists in the immigrant waves from Russia. Rather than to carry out the local struggle, however, the union’s express purpose was to support the Russian Bund.2 Former Bund activists, such as Baruch Charney Vladeck, David Dubinsky, and Sidney Hillman, became prominent in the Jewish and broader American labor movements.3 The major Jewish socialist and labor organizations through the first half of the twentieth century—the Jewish Socialist Federation, its successor the Jewish Socialist Verband, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Workmen’s Circle, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,

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the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union—were certainly influenced by the Bundist background of many of their leaders and members. Through these individuals and organizations, the Bund’s impact on American life was significant. Even though a Bund organization did not dig deep roots at this time, those who had been schooled in the movement exercised great influence over Jewish life and American politics and culture. Still, the first half of the century did not see the formal establishment of a Bund organization in the United States. Primarily, this was because the Bundists in the major centers of Jewish socialism (Russia and then Poland) felt that a Bund organization did not suit American conditions. Whereas Russia was ruled by czarist autocracy, the United States was democratic. American Jews did not face the same employment and living restrictions as Russian Jews, who were confined to certain occupations and could not move freely outside the defined geographic boundaries of the Pale of Settlement. Most critically, antisemitism was much less prevalent in American life, whereas in czarist Russia it was a defining part of Jewish life. This is perhaps the crucial difference between Russia and America: Jews in America harbored a strong desire to acculturate to their surroundings; in Russia, where Jews had for centuries been culturally, politically, economically, and eventually physically separated from their neighbors, the longing among Jews to become Russian was not nearly so strong. Even though thousands of Bundists made the perilous journey from imprisonment in Russia to freedom in the United States, conditions were such that attempts to found a Bundist organization on the model of the Russian party did not succeed. For a time, it seemed that the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF)—established in 1912 by Bundist migrants as the Yiddish-language federation of the Socialist Party—would become the American outpost of the Bund. It shot to prominence in the period surrounding the First World War, growing from 700 members to between 8,000 and 12,000 after the Russian Revolution galvanized the Left.4 As Tony Michels has noted in his recent study on Yiddishspeaking radicals in New York at the turn of the century, the JSF’s influence in these years far exceeded its numbers, because of the prominence of its leaders in the socialist movement. Many of the major figures of the Jewish Left were key leaders in the JSF, including Bundist emigrés like Baruch Charney Vladeck, who would rise to prominence as manager of the Forverts Association and later as a New York City councilor, and Bundist intellectuals Ben-Tsiyon Hoffman (Tsivyon), Moyshe Olgin, and A. Litvak. Still, the JSF failed to emulate the Russian Bund because the conditions it faced were fundamentally different. First, the old-guard socialists active for decades before Bundists reached American shores did not support the Bundist call for the development of Yiddish national culture. To those cosmopolitan

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internationalists, Yiddish was simply a means through which to communicate socialist ideas while migrants assimilated into American life; it held no inherent value.5 The Jewish question in the United States was fundamentally different to that in Russia, and the character of the two nations’ respective Jewish socialist movements diverged. As Tsivyon, leading American Bundist intellectual, noted in 1917 in the JSF journal Di Naye Velt (The New World), “The Federation here cannot develop into an American Bund, because it lacks the foundations and the circumstances.” He wrote that, not long before, there had been few “Jewish socialists” in America, only “Yiddish-speaking socialists.” In the Jewish world, the socialist movement was too splintered and there was still too much jostling for power and influence.6 A year earlier, immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, Tsivyon had written that, at that time, the JSF could not co-opt the Russian Bund’s most important platform, that of national-cultural autonomy, “because in America at this point there exists no national question.”7 Finally, as Jonathan Frankel has also noted, unlike in Russia where the Bund press appealed mainly to party cadres and a larger group of “organized workers,” in America the socialist intellectual movement “found itself appealing to, and dependent on, a great mass of Jews, not hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands.”8 Socialist activity, therefore, “became in varying degrees subject to the laws of the marketplace”; newspapers, for example, became a battleground for mass circulation, rather than a hub of ideas and debate. All these factors made the success of a Bundist organization in America difficult, and eventually were decisive for the fate of such a project. By the early 1920s, when Poland was consolidated as the Bund’s capital, the immigration restrictions that cut off the torrential flow of Jewish reinforcements were tightly in place. The Bund, now a Polish-Jewish movement, did not have the base in the United States in the interwar years to establish an effective movement, with only a trickle of Polish Jews crossing the Atlantic. There were Bundist clubs during these two decades, although their function was limited primarily to providing support for their parent organization in Poland and to promoting the Bund’s interests in the United States. A 1921 split in the JSF precipitated the establishment of the Jewish Socialist Verband. While those remaining within the JSF took a sharp turn toward communism, many chose to remain part of the Socialist Party of America and align themselves with the anticommunist Verband. The Verband was Bundist in orientation, although, like its predecessor, it did not formally become a Bund organization. Baruch Charney Vladeck, who had sided with the Verband during the split and remained fiercely anticommunist, called for much closer relations between the Verband and the Bund in Poland. “The

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Jewish labor movement in America,” he wrote, “was born from the bricks that the Bund fired in the coal ovens of the Russian revolutionary struggle. In the prosaic atmosphere of America, much of that heat was lost.” To regain that passion, building a separate American Jewish Bund was necessary.9 Not everyone in the Verband was so enthusiastic as Vladeck. One common criticism in the pages of the Verband’s long-running journal Der Veker (The Awakener) was that the Bund in Poland was too left-wing. This was certainly at that time an understandable criticism, from the anticommunist American Socialist Party, of a European party that had been outwardly expressing enthusiasm for the Soviet Union.10 The other main reservation of Verband members was that, of the thousands of Bundists still arriving to America in the early 1920s, most did not join their organization. “They,” one editorial in Der Veker read, “the newly arrived intelligent workers who were schooled in the Bund cannot, after everything, adapt to the local circumstances.” The editors of Der Veker complained that the Bundist arrivals looked at the Verband as foreign and could only see its faults. The Polish Bundists saw the group’s American cousins as “too prosaic in comparison with the movement in Europe.”11 The grievances of Verband leaders were not without basis. Bundists arriving from Europe after the heady days of the Russian Revolution found the Jewish socialist movement in America altogether too right-wing and lacking in the radical fervor to which they were accustomed. On top of this antagonism, veteran American Bundists no longer carried the same revolutionary zeal that they had once had, and saw the newly arrived Bundists as “greenhorns.”12 Given their antipathy toward the local organizations, coupled with their natural desire to maintain contact with comrades in their new and old homes, Polish Bundists set up the Bund Club in New York in 1923. The club acted largely as a mediator between American Jewish socialists and Polish Bundists. Never a wealthy organization, its main purpose was to provide financial and moral support to the Bund in Poland, as well as to publicize the activities and ideas of its parent organization. It did this latter through publishing pamphlets, most notably a manifesto from Bund icon Henryk Erlich titled “The Essence of Bundism” and a collection of articles and correspondence on the quarrel between Abraham Cahan, the longstanding editor of the Forverts, and the Polish Bund leadership.13 The club achieved some modest goals: it did play a role in promoting the party in Europe, as an intermediary between Europe and America, and also in paving the way for similar (and often more successful) fundraising groups like the Medem Club.14 However, none of these attempts led to the establishment of a local Bund organization, committed to addressing local questions. When Germany and

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the Soviet Union invaded Poland in August 1939, a handful of Polish Bund leaders managed to escape, landing in the United States and shifting the party’s power base to New York. Even when most of the Bund’s exiled leaders had arrived in New York, by 1942, there was no sense that their mission would be permanent. Three of those leaders—Emanuel Nowogrodski, Yankev Pat, and Binyomin Tabachinski—had arrived in the United States about a year before the war broke out, on a fundraising mission, and remained after Poland had been invaded.15 Others were rescued by the Jewish Labor Committee (established in 1934 at the initiative of Baruch Charney Vladeck) and made their way to the United States through East Asia.16 Together with the earlier arrivals, this group—which included Emanuel Scherer, Chaim Wasser, and Shloyme Mendelson—established the American Representation of the Bund in Poland. The Representation became the nucleus of the efforts to rebuild the Bund as an American and world movement after the war. During the war years, however, the group’s attention was squarely on the events unfolding in Europe, and on doing all they could to raise funds for their embattled brothers and sisters, as well as to pressure Western governments to act to save European Jewry.17 At that stage, many Bundists who had found refuge at the beginning of the war expected to return home to Poland, and, like their comrades in America for forty years, had no intention to transplant the Jewish Labor Bund of Poland onto American soil. In any case, the Medem Club, then the most important Bund group in the United States, claimed a membership of only 290.18

Establishment of the Bund Organization in New York What changed? Why, all of a sudden, did Bundists in America feel it necessary formally to establish a Bund Organization in the New World? Most obviously, the Bund in Europe was physically and structurally decimated by the Nazi onslaught and further damaged by Soviet Communism. The experience of totalitarianism from both the Left and the Right also gave Bundists a greater sense of urgency in their struggle against antidemocratic forces. Further, the situation in Poland was rapidly unfolding, and it was soon clear to the newly American Bundists that returning to their old homes was not an option. It was also clear that the Polish Bund was permanently weakened, and as thousands of its former members escaped their home country for the West, the American leadership realized that the Bundist—as, indeed, the Jewish—map had been irreversibly altered. By then, most of the remaining prewar Bund leaders had gathered in, or were planning to return to, New York. Knowing that the Polish Bund would not survive the onset of Communist domination, the New York Bundists

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made two important decisions. They decided to organize a world conference of Bundist groups, now scattered across the globe.19 Given the geographic centralization of the movement’s leadership and the sheer size of the American Jewish community, it was natural that the conference’s central administration point would be New York. To this end, the Bund needed formally to establish, for the first time, a Bund Organization in New York, an organization whose task would extend beyond the financial and moral support for their European comrades to which Bund groups in America had traditionally limited themselves. Emanuel Nowogrodski, who would become secretary of the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee, argued to the Representation in June 1946 that, because they were now settled in the New World, they could no longer be content with limiting activities there to helping the Polish Bund. Given that they lived in the country with the largest Jewish population in the world, they needed to work toward strengthening socialism locally, and to build a local socialist mass movement. Nowogrodski was hopeful, for a number of reasons. First, America stood, for the first time, “at the threshold” of establishing an independent labor party. Second, American Jewry was being imbued with a greater sense of duty, as a result of the fate of European Jews. Third, they were now aware that Jewish life in all capitalist countries remained precarious. Finally, there was now a small Bundist contingent in America, numbering several hundred.20 Nowogrodski’s plea was one of desperation, and it represented, to an extent, an admission of defeat. By this stage, socialism in America had been in steady decline since its revival over a decade earlier.21 Nowogrodski’s claim that America was on the verge of seeing an independent working-class party was spurious and reflected more than anything his desire for the establishment of such a party. As for his other reasons for hope, there too much remained in doubt. Zionism was stronger than it had ever been in America, with Zionist organizations claiming a combined membership of nearly half a million.22 The Bund, yet to be formally established but with a prospective membership of only several hundred—as Nowogrodski admitted—was tiny by comparison. A few hundred members was hardly the basis of a socialist mass movement in a climate increasingly dominated by Zionism. The advent of a socialist Labour government in Great Britain in 1945 was inspiring for the Bund leaders, and perhaps helps explain Nowogrodski’s enthusiasm the following year. In a May Day greeting cabled to the British Labour Party in 1948, Emanuel Scherer conveyed the Bund’s congratulations on the Labour Party’s “already great internal achievements along with examples of anti-imperialist policy shown in India and Burma,” which, he wrote were “essential for mankind.” The Bund, wrote Scherer, considered “the British Labour government as harbinger of new world order combined

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in true socialism with full democracy.” He also expressed the Bund’s support for the British course of action in Palestine, emphasizing the party’s opposition to Zionism and Jewish statehood.23 He would later write about how the British labor movement could serve as an inspiration to its trans-Atlantic comrades.24 Still, despite Nowogrodski’s optimism, the outlook of socialism and Bundism in America remained grim. The desire to establish a Bund organization in New York was driven partly by despair and partly by an ongoing passion for Bundist ideas that had not been snuffed out by totalitarianism and that, Bund leaders felt, were not represented in America. Many of the party’s adherents also felt that the events of the previous years justified their opposition to capitalism, and strengthened their Bundist resolve. And so, in November 1946, with the world conference just around the corner, the Medem Club and the American Representation came together to establish the Bund Organization of New York.25 In a statement to members, Scherer wrote that it was the task of American Jews to support Jewish communities all over the world, but that American Jewry could only do that through securing and strengthening its own existence. The United States therefore needed a Bundist movement to mobilize the working masses toward this end. Scherer was clear that the Bund did not want to act in isolation, nor did it aim to be a second or third Jewish socialist organization. It wanted to unite and lead the Jewish and broader socialist movements, and he was confident that many socialists in America sympathized with the Bund’s program and yearned for a more unified and more effective socialist movement.26 The Bundists’ task in America therefore was similar to that of Bundists in the United States at the turn of the century: use the experience and energy that they had brought from Europe to educate and lead American Jewish workers in the struggle against capitalism. At the outset, the Bund group saw its principle task as working to unite and strengthen both the Jewish and American socialist movements, which were mired in division.27 The new party also needed to recruit new members, whom it hoped to find in the Bundist-influenced elements of American society. Members of the Bund clubs were informed that they had been automatically co-opted into the new organization and were required to pay one dollar a month in membership fees, although a recruitment drive was also launched.28 In New York, unlike in cities such as Melbourne, Paris, and Tel Aviv where the Bund’s activities extended into the realm of cultural and welfare activities, the Bund was largely concerned with its role as a political organization. In Paris, the party was preoccupied with supporting refugees and orphans returning from the concentration camps. In Tel Aviv, the movement sponsored cultural undertakings such as choirs and supplementary schools.29 New York was already the site of a tapestry of cultural and social

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organizations, and it made little sense for a political movement to compete in an already crowded marketplace. Still, Bundists’ calendars were very busy. In any given year, a party member might attend a May Day demonstration, Holocaust commemoration, Bund anniversary celebrations, regular branch meetings, fundraisers for Bund-sponsored organizations, a commemoration for Bund icons Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, and rallies and lectures surrounding current events, Jewish or otherwise. In the summer they might send their children to the Bundist children’s camp, Hemshekh (Continuity). Some years, the members were involved with national and international Bund conferences. Many participated in local and federal election campaigns. Most were involved in one of the six Bundist branches of the Workmen’s Circle.30 Many lived among their comrades in housing cooperatives like the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx.31 Supported by the activities of the Workmen’s Circle, the New York Bund sought to give its members an all-encompassing environment. It provided a sense of home and of community for hundreds, perhaps thousands, who had been forced from their childhood homes. Poet and activist Irena Klepfisz, daughter of slain Warsaw Ghetto fighter Michal Klepfisz, wrote in 1990 her recollections of growing up in this svive (environment): “A very large number of the lebn-geblibene [survivors] lived in the same cooperative houses in which my mother and I lived, all within a few blocks of each other. . . . For years I thought every Yiddish-speaking adult was to be addressed as khaver or khaverte [comrade]. I simply did not know the Yiddish equivalent of a plain ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’” Klepfisz commented that Yiddish was ever present in her life: “Der Tog, Der Forverts, Unzer Tsayt seemed to be flourishing. Yiddish books were everywhere. And besides, I was attending the Arbeter Ring shule, the Workmen’s Circle secular school, five afternoons a week.”32 Given that most Bund members in New York were Holocaust survivors, the khurbn (Holocaust, in Yiddish) was a major preoccupation of the community, with the annual akademyes (commemorations) the most important event on the Bundist calendar. However, even though the “akademyes and the constant contact with lebn geblibene emphasized what had been lost .  .  . there was a way in which the loss was difficult to absorb. Di svive around me seemed to be thriving.” She recalled the famous Yiddish writer Chaim Grade living only a few blocks away, and poet Itzik Manger coming to visit her Yiddish school (“He wore leather ‘arty’ sandals and was probably the first bohemian I encountered”). She remembered listening to the Yiddish radio station. “It wasn’t even so much that Yiddish was alive,” Klepfisz recounted: A small part of Poland seemed to be alive. Bolek and Anya. Vladka. Brukha and Monye. Rivka and Lolek. Khana. Bernard. Khevka and

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Lutek. All lebn geblibene. So for all the talk vegn khurbn [about the Holocaust] .  .  . when I sat down at Brukha and Monye’s dritn seyder [Third Seder] .  .  . and looked around me and saw our whole community or when I went to an akademye and saw an auditorium completely filled . . . it was hard for me to conceive that an entire world had been destroyed.33

Klepfisz highlighted what she saw as the “contradictions” that characterized Bundist life in the United States, which struggled between a desire to become American and a longing to recreate Jewish Poland in a new setting. Bundist life represented an all-encompassing world, a part of American society but also removed from it: on the one hand, trying to acculturate—on the other, vehemently resisting assimilation. The migrants created a little island of Bundist life in the Bronx, in Manhattan, and in Brooklyn, a life in which they continued their Eurocentric discussion that had been disrupted so catastrophically in 1939. Perhaps this was the real meaning of the postwar Bund—to give comfort to those whose lives had been so utterly destroyed by the Holocaust, to ease the resettlement process as Yiddish institutions like the Forverts and the Workmen’s Circle had done for immigrants for decades before. Perhaps, for all Scherer and Nowogrodski’s lofty hyperbole about the need for a Bundist movement to galvanize the Jewish working masses and to unite the fractured socialist movement, the Bund’s role was much more primal, much more local, and much more urgent. It was the Bundists’ way of refusing to concede that—as Klepfisz could not conceive—“an entire world had been destroyed.” The true believers expressed their ongoing resistance to Nazi extermination through political activism and cultural undertakings. And so, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, with hundreds of thousands of survivors still in limbo and many seeking refuge in the United States, Bundists across North America sought to replicate in any way they could their prewar lives. New York was not the only city in which Bundists settled, nor was it the sole site of organized Bundism in North America. Bund organizations and Bundist branches of the Workmen’s Circle existed in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere. There were also Bundist groups in certain unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Worker’s Union and the Cloakmakers’ Union of the ILGWU. The delegate list from the movement’s first national conference in 1950 indicates the relative size of the organizations. The New York branch was by far the largest, with forty-one delegates, with Montreal sending fourteen and Chicago four; other groups only sent one or two representatives.34 It remains difficult to assess the membership of Bundist organizations in the United States, even harder to gauge the number of Bundists not

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necessarily affiliated with a local organization; lack of affiliation arose from many reasons, including discomfort with the party’s ongoing anti-Zionism, disillusionment with Jewish politics in light of the Holocaust, or personal conflicts. With no official membership records, only clues give any indications of the Bund’s following. Certainly there were hundreds of Bundists in New York, perhaps even between one and two thousand. A 1948 application to the City of New York for a May Day Parade permit lists the membership at 2,500, although this figure is most likely inflated for the purposes of obtaining the permit.35 At this point, there were perhaps several hundred members, with several hundred more arriving from the DP camps, Poland, France, Sweden, and Belgium in the following years. The Polish Bund in 1947 reported a membership of 1,800, down from 2,200. Within two years, that number would dwindle to virtually nothing as Bundists escaped Communist Poland. In the DP camps, during the period 1947-1948, there were around 1,000 Bundists, all of whom were resettled in the West.36 Western Europe was also a site of transit for those wishing to escape Europe. The Bund organizations in France and Belgium, for example, claimed a combined membership of 750 plus several hundred more in the Bundist youth movement.37 With thousands of Bundists fleeing Europe, hundreds, and possibly up to several thousand party followers were, it is safe to assume, among the 140,000 Jews migrating to the United States in the postwar era, especially as, for most, it was the preferred destination.38 There is extensive data in the Bund Archive in New York to support the contention that Bundists overwhelmingly wished to migrate from the DP camps to the United States. One pile of around one hundred membership applications, for example, is among many examples highlighting Bundists’ desire to settle in this country.39 With a growing community of followers, mainly in New York but also scattered in clusters throughout the country, Bundist organizations called their first national conference in New York City in 1950. Seventy delegates from eleven organizations around North America participated. In late September, more than five hundred people attended the conference opening, in which Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas spoke alongside Jewish labor leaders from a range of organizations. The conference was largely concerned with etching out the Bund’s role in a new setting. A central bureau of eighteen members was established to handle all programmatic and organizational questions.40 Most significant, however, was the party’s resolution extolling the virtues of uniting the elements of the Jewish socialist movement.41 This concern highlighted the American Bund’s two biggest preoccupations: general socialist unity and the Bundist role in the wellestablished Jewish Left. This resolution was part of a much broader dialogue surrounding general and Jewish socialist unity that took place in the press,

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public functions, and party meetings. These issues, and the attention given them by the first national conference, would set the scene for half a century of Bundist life in the United States—in particular, in New York, the nerve center of the American Bund.

Reviving American Socialism? Uniting the fractured American socialist movement became the U.S. Bundists’ major concern as soon as they had decided that America would be their new, permanent home. The New York Bund leadership remained hopeful that socialism could make inroads into American society. Emanuel Scherer and Emanuel Nowogrodski, the two most visible public intellectuals in the postwar Bund in the United States, professed that although the situation in the United States did not seem particularly conducive to the onset of socialism (through democratic means, as they had long since abandoned hope of a socialist revolution), the objective conditions were ripe. Nowogrodski argued the case for socialism in America in the November 1946 issue of Unzer Tsayt, published in honor of the New York Bund’s establishment. He argued that socialism was not Euro-specific, and that in fact the kernels of socialist thought had been planted in American minds since the country’s establishment, its claimed dedication to freedom, justice, and equality a powerful driving force in the American population. “This striving,” he wrote, “is not the product of one particular generation and not even the product of modern capitalism.” Rather, he argued, these ideas went back to the “roots of human history.” They could be found “in the works of the Jewish prophets and in the oldest documents in history.”42 Nowogrodski claimed that American workers were as predisposed to socialism as were workers in any other country. The higher living standards that they enjoyed, compared to those in most other places, should actually be considered an advantage, as it created a base for a socialist intelligentsia. People, he argued, were more rational when they were not starving; thus these better living conditions could actually benefit the cause of socialism.43 The main reason socialism had fallen away in the United States, he argued, was that it had failed to adapt to an increase in workers’ living standards. It could “no longer use its old motifs of the ‘sweat shop,’ of hunger and need, of squalor and despair, and has not yet found a new rationalistic approach.” Socialism needed once more to appeal to the rational, not only the emotional, side of Americans; people were better educated than ever, and more able to grasp the reasons to struggle for justice and equality.44 Nowogrodski’s colleague, Emanuel Scherer, the Bund’s leading postwar intellectual, wrote his own manifesto, published in 1950 to coincide with the

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first national conference of the Bund in the United States and Canada, about the prospects of socialism. Scherer analyzed in depth the global situation, outlining his concern for the prospect of war and arguing for general—though not unilateral—nuclear disarmament. The biggest threat to a stable political environment was the growing power of totalitarian regimes, previously fascism and now communism. The only way to fight communism, Scherer argued, was in the field of ideas, by appealing to the masses with big-picture politics. Quoting an English journalist, Scherer wrote that “now is a time for poetry, not for statistics.”45 Scherer then lambasted the concentration of capital in America and the culture of corruption that dominated American business. He found it strange that “such a democratic country—where the parliament is elected every two years, the president every four years and nearly every year there is some kind of political election—allows in the economic arena the domination of a small band of capitalist barons.”46 For Scherer, capitalism and democracy were mutually exclusive. He echoed Marx in arguing that the economic centralization established by monopoly capitalism also created the preconditions for socialism, but it would take broader class consciousness to “turn the clock of history” toward a socialist world order. Like Nowogrodski, Scherer believed that the objective circumstances for the onset of socialism were ripe. He pointed to what he saw as the weakening of capitalism in Europe, highlighting the electoral success of the socialist British Labour Party. He also argued that the welfare state had failed to eliminate poverty or to substantially change the economic order. The majority of Americans, 80 percent, were wage workers, employed by others. Still, he was realistic about the prospects of building an effective socialist political party. Socialism was weak in America, but a socialist mass party would have to grow out of the trade unions, which were not anticapitalist. Building an effective socialist party would require unity among all socialist and labor organizations, surely a long-term project. Ultimately, Scherer argued, it was “better to have a small weak socialist movement than none at all.”47 This last comment highlights, perhaps better than any, why the American Bund failed to make inroads. Although the Jewish labor movement in the United States was still large in number and influence, the reality was that socialism was too radical a proposition in the United States, especially as the noncommunist mainstream Left backed the capitalist system in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. The Bundists’ stubbornness was admirable, but, as Scherer recognized, it was bound to condemn the Bund to a life as a “small, weak” movement. For the American political mainstream, it was clear, there was only one way to oppose Communism: to strengthen the free market forces of capitalism. In this bipolar environment, socialists could only remain on the fringe of American political life.

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Scherer’s attitude did not reflect Nowogrodski’s optimism of only a few years earlier. Most likely this was the result of global shifts in only four short years, with the consolidation of bipolar global relations and an acceleration of the nuclear arms race. Scherer remained hopeful but realistic about the overthrow of capitalism in the United States, but he was, perhaps more than anyone else in the American movement, completely dedicated to the struggle for socialism in his new home. Not only did he and Nowogrodski look to the European past as a model for American socialists to follow, but they also were preoccupied with the European present, in particular the success of the British Labour Party. Thus it is clear that they saw their current struggle in America as a continuation of their prewar commitment to the Polish Bund. Their hope for American socialism reflected their need to resolve earlier unfinished business as much as it did their faith in the American working class, which, as they both emphasized, was better off than any before. Despite Scherer’s and Nowogrodski’s hopes that the objective conditions for political upheaval were ripe, socialism still remained a distant dream in the United States, where, even at its peak, it did not represent a major strain in political discourse. By the 1950s, with the advent of McCarthyism as the dominant narrative in American politics, socialism was an even more remote prospect. The witch hunt being carried out against communists did not really occupy space in the Bundist press. Although the movement was highly preoccupied with communism, there seemed great hesitation in dealing directly with the dramatic political events that were unfolding. Perhaps there was the same kind of fear that gripped the French Bundists when they failed to confront the Socialist government and its use of torture in the Algerian war—an anxiety that they might become the target of FBI harassment—along with a recognition that they could maintain their socialist line as long as they continued their vitriol against the spread of communism. For whatever reason, the pages of Unzer Tsayt and the extensive Bund archives show little evidence of Bundist response to such major political figures and bodies as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Joseph McCarthy, or J. Edgar Hoover. Still, the Bund in the United States sought to maintain its commitment to socialism and apply it to the daily struggle. Its first priority was furthering socialist unity, a priority demonstrated by the fact that the very first public meeting of the newly established Bund Organization in New York was a symposium on the need to unite the splintered American socialist movement. Among the speakers were Scherer, Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of America, Algernon Lee of the Social Democratic Federation of America, and Yitzhak Levin-Shatskes of the Jewish Socialist Verband. The hall in which

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the symposium took place was filled to capacity with Bundists and members of the other three participating organizations, and the event was described in the Bundist press as very successful, although in this case success meant only that it was well attended and the discussion interesting.48 The party was constantly attempting to bring together the disparate elements in the socialist movement, recognizing that an already weak socialist movement could not hope to exert any influence if it remained split. This risk was true also for the Jewish socialist movement, but the Bund never successfully united even the most ideologically linked elements within that community: the Bund and the Jewish Socialist Verband.49 To bring the socialist movements together, the Bund threw itself into organizing major joint events. May Day, the workers’ holiday marking the creation of the eight-hour working day, became a symbol for the Bund, in its striving to unite all American socialists, as it sought broad cooperation from American and other immigrant groups in coordinating workers’ parades each May. In 1949, for example, the Bund cosponsored a May Day Rally with the Socialist Party, the Social Democratic Federation, the Workmen’s Circle, the Workers Defense League, and the Jewish Socialist Verband, a rally that protested segregation and Soviet aggression while promoting civil rights, democracy, and labor solidarity.50 By the early 1970s, these organizations had been joined by the United Hebrew Trades, the Forward Association, and the Young People’s Socialist League, and continued to advocate full civil rights for African Americans, an end to unemployment, improved public housing provisions, and “social, political, and economic equality for all, regardless of race, creed, or national origin.”51 The Bundists’ task was rarely easy, given they could not even unite the factions within the Jewish labor movement. The Bund maintained its warmest relationship with the Socialist Party, even more than with other Jewish labor organizations. Prominent socialist leader and pacifist Norman Thomas was a regular speaker and guest at Bund events, and in 1949 Scherer was invited to join the organizing committee for Thomas’s testimonial.52 No matter who was involved, in fact, the Bund annually sought cooperation with the Socialist Party for May Day rallies; Bundists wanted the demonstrations to break down organizational barriers. Occasionally, such cooperation was not possible, as in 1949 when the Social Democratic Federation rejected the Socialist Party’s proposal to co-opt the Bund onto the negotiating committee for a joint parade.53 By this stage, the Socialist Party was little bigger than the Bund, counting only around two thousand members.54 This situation was reflected in the respective parties’ contributions to the May Day parade of 1949, when the Bund contributed around $120 compared to the Socialist Party’s $134.55 By the mid-1950s, with both parties on a steady decline, there

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were even suggestions of a merger, which the Bund supported in principle, its main demand being that a common program be adopted that deferred all matters regarding Jewish life, including questions surrounding Israel, to the Bund.56 Ultimately, the Socialist Party members who objected to the Bund’s anti-Zionism vetoed the idea of amalgamating.57 The Bund’s efforts at uniting the Left did not include the Democratic Party, which was seen as procapitalist and not substantively different from its Republican rival. At election time, the Bund generally did one of two things: sometimes it threw its support behind the Socialist candidate, as in 1949 when it called on all its members to endorse the Socialist list at the New York City elections and pledged a financial contribution;58 other times, it refused to endorse any candidate, unless there was an independent candidate representing workers, and encouraged its members to vote for whomever they wished, as in the 1965 New York mayoral elections.59 In 1960, the Bund even urged its voters not to vote at all, a decision for which it was roundly condemned in the Jewish press.60 There were occasions on which the Bund felt it had no choice but to support the Democrats, such as in 1963 after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when it considered Republican candidate Barry Goldwater too “sinister” and too conservative. On this occasion, with a Republican victory seen as dangerous, the Bund endorsed Lyndon Johnson, even though its leaders remained critical of his shift to the center as Kennedy’s vice president.61 Ultimately, the Democrats were not seen as a viable alternative for those anticapitalists who yearned for an independent labor party. So, as long as the Socialist Party was fielding its own candidates, the Bund’s endorsement was a given. Even when the Socialist Party was in complete disrepair, the Bund supported its meager efforts at electoral victory, as in 1963 when the Bund supported the Socialist candidate in Manhattan in the New York City elections.62 Perhaps the most important single issue around which the Bund sought cooperation with other parties (primarily the Socialist Party) was civil rights. A major preoccupation of progressive organizations throughout the United States, black civil rights was an issue that brought the Bund together with other Jewish and non-Jewish left-wing parties in a concrete, daily struggle for an oppressed people. Bundists saw something of their own history of oppression in the experience of African Americans. A 1965 resolution highlighted this solidarity. It stated that as Jewish socialists committed to freedom and equality, the Bund felt strongly connected to the “black revolution” and the civil rights movement and to “its struggle for the full of political, economic, and moral emancipation of the black peoples.”63 It expressed the party’s “full solidarity” with the “righteous demands for the local black people,” and its special opposition to southern racism.64

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Immediately after the war, when Bundist life in America began to take on a more permanent character, Bundists voiced their opposition to segregation. In early 1945, for example, one writer criticized the racism that he felt had become prevalent within the trade union movement, as well as racist employment practices throughout the country.65 By the time the civil rights movement gained traction in the early 1960s, this had become a definitive issue for the Bund. It was around the struggle for civil rights that the party sought to build coalitions and strengthen the weak and splintered elements of the socialist Left. Throughout the 1950s, Bund leaders responded regularly to the growing instances of civil disobedience and mass protest in the South. Emanuel Nowogrodski regularly used the Bund’s radio program, “Amol un Haynt” (Past and Present) on the Yiddish radio station WEVD (named for American socialist pioneer Eugene Victor Debs) to enthusiastically update his listeners on the situation in the southern states—for example, during the bus boycotts in Montgomery in 1956. He expressed his solidarity with Martin Luther King and condemned the white reactionaries who were resisting the winds of change.66 As the civil rights movement gained momentum, the Bund and the Socialist Party used the opportunity to establish greater cooperation. In January 1960, Scherer and Norman Thomas, leaders of their respective parties, cosponsored a protest against the emergence of neo-Nazism and antisemitism in Germany (among the other sponsors was Martin Luther King).67 In late 1963, together with the Union of Former Partisans, Concentration Camp and Ghetto Fighters (Katzetler Farband), the Bund and the Socialist Party expressed their solidarity with the fight for black civil rights. They claimed that, because of their socialist universalism and their experiences as victims of racism, they stood firmly alongside African Americans in their struggle. They demanded that blacks in the South be granted their “elementary rights and full possibilities to vote without any disturbances or restrictions.” The declaration called for full desegregation throughout the country, South and North, in education, housing, health care, and all public spaces. It also demanded full employment opportunities for all citizens, regardless of race. The parties also dismissed the Nation of Islam as racist, undemocratic, and antisemitic, and called on the civil rights movement to distance itself from black nationalists.68 The Bund’s joint efforts with other socialist and Jewish organizations did not end with public declarations. Solidarity with both the Left and black Americans became a priority; the Bund was committed to playing an active role in the civil rights movement. In mid-1963, the Central Bureau of the Bund in America and the New York Bund Committee convened to address how best the party could participate in the struggle. The joint declaration

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with the Socialist Party and the Katzetler Farband was only the first step initiated by the party. The meeting also resolved to join the civil rights picketers in the South and fundraise on behalf of the cause. The Bundists also arranged a conference with the Katzetler Farband in June 1963 that brought together black leaders and leaders of the political Left.69 Black civil rights was an issue that went to the core of Bundist ideals. With a long commitment to bringing together diverse elements in the socialist movement, the Bund presented itself as a perfect group to work toward that goal in what it found a perfect moment to give greater weight to its own participation in the struggle for equal rights across the country. Ultimately though, these efforts only highlighted the weakness and decline of the Bund, and of socialism more broadly, in the United States. Coalition building is surely a worthy pursuit, but the fact that it became a major preoccupation for the party showed that it was seen largely as a means to shore up the party’s existence. This is especially true given the Bund’s historic stubbornness and commitment to ideological purity. Sadly, the mini-renaissance of Bundism in the immediate postwar period did not last long, as Holocaust survivors settled into the grind of life in a new country. Bundists seemed to maintain healthy and strong relationships with their non-Jewish counterparts in the Left, but perhaps their party’s decline in the United States was inevitable. It would be wrong to say that their struggle was futile. After all, they were at times part of a mass movement—as in their involvements in the labor movement and in the civil rights struggle—that brought fundamental change to the United States. Nonetheless, they ultimately failed to broaden their membership base. The weakness of socialism in their new country was certainly a major factor, but the Bund’s ultimate weakness lay in its relationship to American Jewry, and in particular to the American Jewish Left.

The Bund and the Jewish Left When Bund leaders undertook to formally establish a local organization in New York in 1947, they did so fully realizing that they were joining a lively Yiddish-speaking Left comprising political, cultural, and social organizations. Among these organizations were the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish Socialist Verband, and the Arbeter Ring, as well as non-politicallyaligned Yiddish organizations like the Congress for Yiddish Culture, YIVO, and the many landsmanshaften. The Bund’s influence on the establishment and ideological path of these organizations in the first half of the twentieth century is substantial, and it is in this context that its relationship with the various elements of the Jewish Left before and after the war needs to be

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understood. There was also a parallel tradition of tension between Bundists and other organizations, like the world’s largest Yiddish daily newspaper, the Forverts, and the Jewish communist movement, which also grew out of Bundist roots.70 The Bund faced a difficult task when it tried to grow new roots on the Western shores of the Atlantic Ocean. All previous attempts to establish a similar organization had amounted to naught. With no Bund organization in Eastern Europe to overshadow them, however, the new wave of Bundist migrants sought to do as those before them had failed to, and to find a niche in the crowded world of Yiddish leftist activism. To do so, they would need to determine where they fit among the already existing structures, to build relationships with those organizations, and to create a unique space. The party’s leaders realized quickly that that space would be mainly political. There were already numerous Yiddish cultural organizations and mutual aid societies. Encouraging members to work within such organizations became a priority. A 1951 resolution penned by Bundist educator Khayim Shloyme Kazdan outlined the Bund’s priorities for cultural work. First and foremost, he argued, Bundists needed to participate in organizations like YIVO and the Arbeter Ring. They needed to be involved in the leadership of these organizations and “present a Bundist standpoint with regards to programs, methods, goals, and ideological content in all areas of cultural work on the Jewish street.”71 They should also carry out independent cultural activities like cultural-theoretical and communal evenings, publishing, seminars, and educational activities. On the whole, he encouraged closer collaboration with the existing cultural and welfare organizations. A year later, the plenum of the Central Bureau of the Bund in America endorsed this proposal with a similar one, calling especially on the Jewish Labor Committee, the Arbeter Ring, and the Congress for Yiddish Culture to work together more closely in the fight against assimilation and Zionist nationalism.72 The Bund felt that these organizations were the major cultural vehicles through which their members could build a healthy Jewish life in America. The resolution stated that, in addition to combating assimilation, these organizations needed to distance themselves from Zionism and Israel in order to “truly struggle for a Jewish national-cultural renaissance.” The Bundists’ hope in other organizations carrying out the struggle for Yiddish and Jewish culture marks their recognition of the different circumstances under which they now operated. Whereas in interwar Poland the party was a leader in the fields of education, literature, and journalism—as practitioners, theorists, or financial backers—the postwar American Bund could not be the major safeguard in the cultural sphere.73 It was too small compared to other organizations. The Arbeter Ring, for example, could boast

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a membership in the mid-1950s of over 70,000, compared to perhaps 2,000 Bundists, probably fewer.74 More than any other organization, it was the Arbeter Ring that became the most important arena in which Bundists hoped to influence the course of Yiddish culture in the United States. The immediate postwar years marked a period of resurgence in the Arbeter Ring, which had been in steady decline from its 1925 membership high of nearly 85,000. After a mini-spike in the early years of the war, its numbers were once again in decline until the wave of Jewish refugees fleeing the DP camps of Europe began arriving in the late 1940s. With the parallel growth of their own party, Bundists also set about establishing their own branches of the Arbeter Ring as an avenue for cultural output. The first Bundist branch was founded in New York in June 1946. Branch 313, the Erlich-Alter branch, was named for the interwar Polish Bund leaders murdered in a Soviet prison during the war. The decision to establish such a branch was made in early 1944 by the American Representation of the Bund in Poland, although it is not clear why its installation took more than two years.75 The branch membership included leading members of the Bund’s American representation, such as Abraham Stolar, Pinchas Shvartz, Leon Oler, Moyshe Kligsberg, Frank Atran, and Khayim Shloyme Kazdan.76 Not long after, in January 1947, the Artur Zygielbojm Branch (number 349) was established. This branch would grow from 66 members at the outset to over 180 two decades later. By this stage, over 300 people had been members of the branch at one time or another.77 It was most likely the largest Bundist branch in the organization, probably because its ranks boasted leading party activists like Scherer and Arthur Nunberg. Several more Bundist branches of the Arbeter Ring were established in the following years, and in 1953 a committee of the six Bundist branches in New York was founded, which, after some vigorous debate, was named the Committee of Six Branches. This committee decided to leave out any reference to the Bund, so that its members could actively try and recruit among other branches.78 A conference was held for Bundists within the Arbeter Ring in December of that year, in which the committee’s role was outlined. It would carry out propaganda work for the Bund within the Arbeter Ring, and vice versa, raise funds for one Bundist institution each year, spread Bundist literature among Arbeter Ring members, assist its cultural and educational work, and organize three joint events each year.79 Although many, perhaps most, Bundists were involved in Arbeter Ring branches, the relationship between the two organizations was often tense and sometimes openly hostile. Tensions often came to a head with the Bund publicly criticizing the Arbeter Ring, which the Bund always found too sympathetic to Zionism and Israel. In May 1953, the Committee of Six Branches

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FIGUR E 7  Bundist delegation at Arbeter Ring conference, New York, undated.

Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

even received a reprimand from the Arbeter Ring’s national executive for a speech delivered at the Committee of Six’s May Day celebration, which members of the executive felt contained bitter and angry criticism of the Arbeter Ring’s spirit and character.80 The Bundist branches defended themselves, arguing that the speech in question was not angry, and that in fact it showed great concern for the future of the Arbeter Ring.81 These tensions never really abated, although Bundists continued active in their Arbeter Ring branches. Further, as Israel consolidated and support for the Jewish state grew among the Jewish population, the Bundist criticism sharpened, although, even as early as 1946, members of the Bundist branches had been fighting the growing tendency toward Zionism within the Arbeter Ring. On that occasion, a number of Bundists published a declaration condemning an Arbeter Ring resolution against the British government and its actions in Palestine. Jewish newspapers like the anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Workers’ Voice) met the declaration with great hostility.82 These tensions continued throughout the life of the Bund. At the 1966 Arbeter Ring convention, the Bund delegation of around 200 persons went

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to great effort to counter Zionist influence within the organization.83 Only two years later, Bundist activists like Warsaw Ghetto courier Jacob Celemenski complained that, despite their 1,500 to 2,000 active members in the Arbeter Ring, their concerns were being seriously ignored. The New York Bund committee members insisted that Bundists were too passive within the Arbeter Ring and needed to become more influential.84 At the Bund’s committee meeting in September 1968, several committee members acknowledged that the Bund had become too small and weak to carry much influence on its own. Many felt that consolidating the Bundist presence in the Arbeter Ring was the most effective way to have an influence among American Jewry, especially given how badly socialism in America had been weakened.85 It is difficult to gauge the actual influence of Bundists within the Arbeter Ring. Leading Bundist intellectuals like Scherer, Nowogrodski, and Hodes did not seem to play a large role within the Arbeter Ring branches, where a second tier of Bundist activists was most energetic. Also, most likely the figures quoted by Celemenski at the 1968 party meeting were inflated. If there were 1,500 to 2,000 Bundists in Arbeter Ring branches, they were probably not active party members, given that, during this period, the New York Bund would only regularly get attendances of several hundred at its major events.86 Perhaps there were up to a few hundred more active members in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and likely there were members who did not attend events regularly. Maybe there were even several hundred lapsed members who had not recently paid dues or who only maintained informal links with the party. But to claim up to 2,000 members within the Arbeter Ring alone seems exaggerated. Like many Bund activities in this period, perhaps the Arbeter Ring’s most important function for Bundists was in helping create that layer of culture and education that helped them ease into American life without totally breaking ties with their prewar life. Whereas the Bund provided a political and theoretical space for the Bundists to express themselves, its branches within the Arbeter Ring helped maintain the sense of Yiddishkayt that remained important to them. It also gave Bundists the opportunity to instill a love for secular Yiddish culture that they could not except in the Arbeter Ring schools. Without their own cultural infrastructure, the Bund organizations in New York left much of that work to the Arbeter Ring branches; the Bund meanwhile aimed to find its niche as a political organization. One factor that complicated its efforts was that the Jewish socialist movement was highly fractured compared to that in Europe. All activities of the Jewish Left were compartmentalized: press, culture, welfare, and politics were administered by different institutions, institutions not formally linked nor always friendly.

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This meant that, politically, each organization followed its own path. For Bundists used to an all-encompassing socialist movement, this proved a challenge. Their answer was the unification of Jewish socialist organizations. They wanted especially to merge with the Jewish Socialist Verband, who they considered natural allies with no fundamental political or organizational differences. Just as the party put a great deal of energy into the general socialist unity, so too did it see its own future success tied to the eventual unification of Jewish socialist groups, and it pushed for this outcome straight away. At the Bund’s first public event, a discussion evening about uniting the socialist movement, Scherer called for “a unification of the Bund Organization of New York and the Jewish Socialist Verband, a unification that would result in a strengthened Jewish socialist movement with the spirit and name of the Bund.”87 This call would constantly be reiterated at public meetings and in the Bundist press. In Scherer’s 1950 pamphlet, Problemen fun Sotzyalizm in Amerike (Problems of Socialism in America), he highlighted the major obstacle—the Bund wanted to maintain the Bund’s name, given all that it represented in the development of Jewish socialism: “We always remember, that outside our organizations ranks, and especially in the Jewish Socialist Verband, we find comrades for whom the Bund is dear and holy. With those comrades and friends we want to fulfill our common holy duty. A duty that was left as our inheritance, by those from Treblinka, by those from Majdanek, those from Warsaw Ghetto and from Kuibyshev, and also those from New York.”88 The American Bund’s first national conference, in 1951, endorsed this position. The fallen Bundists in Europe were invoked as a central reason that Bundists needed to strive to transplant the destroyed Polish party to America. Such a move required the rapid unification of all “Bundist-infused” elements in the Jewish Left.89 A resolution adopted a year later at a plenary meeting of the Central Bureau of the American Bund further reiterated these calls, saying that “now, after the great tragedy, we must together, more than ever, hold high that name, the flag, and the spirit of the Bund. We must not forget the last will and testament of our Bundist martyrs.”90 Clearly the Holocaust loomed large in the minds of Bundists. It was a major motivating factor for them to continue their work and to desire to merge with the existing Bundist-influenced elements. The major challenge they faced, however, was a fundamental difference in experience: the Verband’s membership comprised predominantly Russian and Polish Jews who had migrated decades before those that had survived the Holocaust. There was a major experiential disjuncture between the adherents of the two movements. Scherer seemed to understand this point better than anyone. His effort to highlight that Jewish socialists’ duty was inherited as much

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from the New York pioneers as from those in the smoldering ashes of Jewish Poland was an attempt to bridge this gap. Ultimately, it proved a bridge too far to cross. The Bund’s insistence on a united organization carrying its name and spirit was a concession that the Verband leaders were not willing to make: in their eyes, it would be more a takeover than a merger.91 In March 1952, Verband secretary and former Latvian Bundist Yitzhak Levin-Shatskes informed the Bund committee that there was no possibility for unification and that negotiations should be halted. Instead, he suggested, the parties should establish a joint committee through which they could organize common events, but which did not ideologically bind either side.92 Relations continued to deteriorate. For example, in the lead-up to the Bund’s 1955 world conference in Montreal, a group of Verband members who were also loyal to the Bund penned a complaint to the Verband’s administrative committee, which had decided not to send fraternal delegates to the Bund’s celebration. The group of members felt embarrassed by the Verband’s decision and by the greeting their party sent, which they complained lacked warmth and a friendly tone.93 Another example of the cooling relations between the two parties occurred after the 1968 convention of the Arbeter Ring, when the Bund complained that the Verband’s long-running periodical, Der Veker (The Awakener) had come out strongly against the Bund. The Bund charged the Verband with “further straining relations” between the two parties.94 This all revealed a widening gap between Bundists’ expectation of what role a Bund should play within the American socialist movement (an expectation that Bundists probably never took particularly seriously) and what role it could actually play. The very fact that they gave the Verband an ultimatum for merging—an end for which they advocated fervently—showed how preoccupied the American Bund leadership was with the past, not seeming to realize that the Bund name in 1950s America did not carry the same weight as in 1930s Poland or even in the United States decades earlier. Although the party was physically shattered by the Holocaust, its reputation was continually enhanced in the minds of its adherents. Even though it remained only a small force in reality, in the American Bundist imagination, its adherents bore a grave responsibility of carrying the mantle of its glorious past—a past that, if anything, became even more celebrated as temporal and spatial distances from it grew. If the party’s standing rose in the estimation of its members, for its opponents the opposite was true. Just as the Bund became estranged from the Verband and maintained a tense relationship to the Arbeter Ring, so too its dealings with the other most important Jewish leftist organizations throughout America were unfriendly. The New York Bund was a regular

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target in the local Yiddish press. The Forverts in particular often took aim at the Bund. Its editor, Hillel Rogoff, often used his long-running column to reprimand the Bund for its public declarations, resolutions, and other actions. For example, after the Bund’s third world conference in Montreal in 1955, during which the movement for the first time explicitly announced its belief that the Jews were a world people, Rogoff came out on the offensive, attacking the resolution and the intentions behind it.95 Only seven years earlier, in 1947, Rogoff had sung the Bund’s praises on its fiftieth anniversary, congratulating the party on the important role it had played in Russia, in Poland, and as pioneers in the United States.96 Melech Ravitch, esteemed Yiddish writer and critic who had by then settled in Montreal, also took exception to the Bund’s 1955 resolution asserting that the Jews were a “world people”; he claimed the conference did not outline what it considered a Jew and how the Bund related to all those Jews from diverse backgrounds.97 Through the 1950s, Rogoff—who carried significant influence as editor of the world’s largest Yiddish daily—remained one of the leadings critics of the Bund. He attacked the Bund in 1959, for example, after it took out a full-page advertisement in the Forverts, “Di Shtim fun Bund” (The Voice of the Bund), which it presented as just another section of the newspaper. The advertisement was convincingly laid out and contained a mixture of news and short programmatic articles to briefly introduce the Bund to readers who might not be familiar with its ideas and its history.98 Rogoff’s editorial a week later accused the Bund of dishonesty, claiming that it had tried to deceive readers by designing its advertisement to appear as though endorsed by the newspaper. After admitting that the Forverts printed such advertisements regularly, Rogoff felt a special responsibility to challenge the Bund’s effort, which contained an article critical of Israel—a major sticking point between the Bund and much of the Jewish Left.99 The following year, he also published a scathing attack on the Bund’s 1960 decision to encourage its members to abstain from voting in the presidential election, arguing that it was antidemocratic, and that, with the United States having such powerful unions, the Bund’s demand for an independent labor party was extraneous.100 Rogoff was not the only Yiddish journalist to pick up on this theme. In the communist Yiddish daily, Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom), Peysakh Novick wrote that, although the Bund was correct in asserting that there needed to be an independent workers’ party, the way to work toward such a party was not to alienate oneself from the masses—as he argued the Bund was doing—but to engage directly with them. “Every vote discouraged,” he wrote, “is a vote for Nixon.”101 Although some leadings figures in the North American Yiddish world were skeptical of the Bund’s aspirations, others simply expressed pity that

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a party that had once exerted such influence in the Jewish world had been reduced to a tiny movement of hardcore believers. In his diary, Montreal Yiddish educator and non-Bundist Yaacov Zipper wrote of the sadness he felt attending the Bund’s 1955 world conference in Montreal, “The whole gathering was somewhat pathetic. In addressing the future they fumble among archaic rhetoric and unclear phrases full of flowery language.” For Zipper, only one face on stage, that of Leon Oler, still “retained the aura of the former Bund.” He wrote that Oler “looked like an authentic Bundist: erect, bitterly stubborn, with a gaze that speaks of deep sectarian convictions, ready to transform everything without knowing whence it will lead.” The rest were merely “tired faces, or just reduced to the ordinary.” 102 Abraham Golomb, world-renowned Yiddish educator who lived, from the 1940s on, in Mexico, wrote a number of articles in the world Yiddish press about the Bund in which he criticized its postwar development. In 1951, he argued that it had failed to achieve any of its goals. He wrote that its do-izm (literally, “here-ism”) had been disastrous, and that it had done nothing to bring socialism closer. He did however, emphasize that he felt that the Bund’s role in Jewish life was not finished: Bundists simply needed to revise their ideas about socialism and Zionism.103 By the mid-1960s, in an article, “The Tragedy of a Jewish Party,” Golomb declared the Bund irrelevant. “Bundists are here,” he wrote, “but Bundism is dead.” A Jewish socialist party no longer had any place in the new Jewish communities, and although there was a place for a cultural folkspartey (folk party), the Bund could no longer fill that role.104 Clearly, the Bund was isolated in Yiddish intellectual circles if influential figures like Golomb and Rogoff were sounding its death knell. Like other Yiddish luminaries, territorialist Freeland League founder Isaac Nachman Steinberg also expressed regret at the Bund’s postwar situation. Unlike other organization leaders, however, he sought cooperation with Bundists. In 1949, he invited Bund secretary Scherer to join a new Yiddish club that he was establishing and to which he had already recruited some leading Bund figures, such as Khayim Shloyme Kazdan, Binyomin Tabachinski, and Moyshe Kligsberg.105 Even though the club’s platform shared much with the Bund’s, Scherer declined Steinberg’s offer, stating that the content of the proposed platform made it impossible for him to endorse.106 Steinberg clearly saw a role for the Bund to play in the postwar United States. In a 1953 article in the Freeland League’s journal Afn Shvel (On the Threshold), he questioned the Bund’s notion of doykayt, but he thought the Bund’s commitment to developing local Yiddish national culture was important. He was also critical of the Bund’s refusal to work alongside other parties in this pursuit.107

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These episodes are rather typical of the Bund’s postwar history, and partly help to explain why the Bund failed to make greater inroads in America. Although there were Bundists involved in Steinberg’s proposal, and the club’s platform was rather close to the Bund’s fundamental values, Scherer stubbornly insisted on maintaining the party’s ideological purity. Perhaps implicit in this stubbornness was the recognition that the Bund’s position in the Jewish world had become so precarious that compromise would mean the death of the party. On cultural matters, it did seek broad collaboration, and it did attempt to unite with the Jewish Socialist Verband, albeit unsuccessfully. Ultimately though, the Bund sought its own course and refused to concede ground on political matters. Maybe it was simply refusing to allow itself to be subsumed by the many other forces in the American Jewish world. Of course, there were objective reasons that an American Bund was finally untenable. But the Bundists’ role as agents in their own destiny cannot be denied. In the end, the refusal to collaborate and compromise with other Jewish parties that was a feature of the Polish Bund was untenable in America, where they were tiny fish in the broad and discordant pond of the Jewish Left. Although at times Bundists seemed to recognize this, at others they seemed lost in the struggles of resettlement and the new world.

Bundist Hemshekh (Continuity) The Bund in the United States fought an uphill battle throughout its life. Like Bund organizations in other parts of the world, and indeed like most Yiddish-speaking institutions, the American Bund faced a crisis of regeneration. Simply maintaining its membership seemed a large enough challenge without the added problems associated with passing the torch to a new generation. What must have seemed clear is that New York was the only place with a large enough Jewish and Bundist community to even think about setting up structures to ensure Bundist continuity. It was perhaps the only city in which a child could be totally immersed in Yiddishkayt and could learn the full meaning of the Bundishe mishpokhe (Bundist family). As in Melbourne, Tel Aviv, Paris, and elsewhere, the American Bund tried to put structures in place to ensure that a new generation of Bundists would carry the flame. Because of the still-broad reach of the Yiddish-speaking world at the time, there was some hope that the Bundists might see some success. Children could reasonably grow up in the Bronx or in Long Island in the 1950s and early 1960s speaking Yiddish as a daily language, attend a regular Yiddish school, and spend summer at any number of Yiddish-oriented camps. Still, this created a tension for many children. On the one hand, Jewish

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children had access to a still-thriving Yiddish world. In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward in 2003, world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, who migrated to New York with his family as a thirteen-year-old and attended the Bundist summer camps through his teenage years, described “his ‘fantastic’ teenage years growing up in the ‘completely Jewish neighborhood’ of the Amalgamated Cooperative Houses, a hotbed of Yiddish socialism.” He said that “coming to New York was an affirmation of the things I believed in . . . you could speak in Yiddish, you could do whatever you want. It was the Jewish capital.”108 At the same time, though, it was a world of contradictions. As noted earlier, poet Irena Klepfisz identified this in her autobiographical sketch on the yidishe svive (Yiddish world). Growing up in a Bundist environment in New York, she felt that she “was learning a Jewish politics which was uprooted .  .  . the second [contradiction] was that our presence in the U.S. testified to the fact that Jews did not have the right to be anywhere and everywhere.” Finally, having been raised in hiding by Poles during the war, and then migrating to the United States via Sweden, “Yiddish was not my mame-loshn.”109 Klepfisz wrote that, although children could grow up with their Yiddish and American worlds entirely separate, inevitably these worlds would clash. For her, this initially resulted in a withdrawal from her Yiddish world: “If I had been shown a strong connection between the two worlds in which I lived, if they had been supportive of each other, if biculturalism and bilingualism had been encouraged in my American school, if English had not been perceived only as an enemy by the Yiddish world, then Yiddish would have lived on naturally in my life.”110 Eventually, Klepfisz came to terms with these contradictions, but she highlights the difficulty that children and the Bund both faced in the quest to ensure some form of Bundist continuity. There were continuous attempts to organize the Bundist and Yiddishoriented youth. The most successful of these was Camp Hemshekh (Continuity), an annual summer camp in the Catskills Mountains that was established in 1959 and lasted twenty years. Camp Hemshekh was the brainchild of Polish-Bundist immigrant Meir Rak, who appealed to his friends and comrades in 1957 with a letter saying that “it is now time for our children to have their own environment within the Yiddish-world.” Rak’s plea stirred the interest of many Bundists, particularly those in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, who each managed to donate five hundred dollars to purchase a site and launch the inaugural camp.111 There are no steady membership records to give an exact figure of how many children Hemshekh saw in its lifespan. However, there are some clues. In 1968 there were 120 campers.112 The following year, the new campsite was filled to capacity with 135 children, and 20 had to be turned away.113 This was right in the middle of

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Hemshekh’s existence, perhaps in a kind of transition period between generations. If these were the numbers at that point, it is reasonable to assume there were several hundred children who were Hemshekh members over its twenty-year life. As far as program was concerned, Hemshekh stated in a 1962 declaration that its aim was to continue the principles applied to education in Bundist youth movements in Poland. Its founders wanted it to be the continuation of the institutions in which they had been raised. It sought to develop in children “a tendency to cooperation and solidarity; a feeling for social justice and for the basic ideas of democratic socialism; a knowledge of Yiddish language and close tie with Jewish folk culture and modern Jewish culture . . . [and] an extensive self-government.”114 The movement’s founders hoped that these values would not only be the “main topics of instruction . . . but also the principles of the children’s daily life at camp and of their mutual [the collective to which they belonged].” It sought to instill these values through a program involving sports, Yiddish lessons and singing, drama, discussion circles, festivals and celebrations (including a secular Shabbat and Jewish and non-Jewish holidays), ceremonies, a work program, and children’s self-government. For many children living in the Amalgamated in the Bronx, Camp Hemshekh was simply an extension of their Yiddish world, reinforcing their Yiddish learning and awareness. For others, like Canarsie-raised writer Margie Newman, Camp Hemshekh was “transformational.” She wrote in 2008 that Hemshekh was a world that was “upside-down.” “Suddenly,” she recalled, “the things I tried to hide in Canarsie—being poor and having Yiddishspeaking, immigrant parents—became sources of self-respect and a sense of authenticity.”115 In Camp Hemshekh, the proletarian was celebrated and material wealth hidden: “Better to have parents who didn’t own a car than to be the unfortunate young camper whose parents drove to camp in a Bentley; we snickered at him all summer for being a capitalist.”116 As it did all aspects of Bundist life, the Holocaust overshadowed the youth movement. The most important event on the Hemshekh calendar was Ghetto Day, when campers took a break from their boisterous daily activities to solemnly reflect on the tragedy that had befallen many of their parents and grandparents. A major focus of the program was resistance, with the campsite’s centerpiece being the denkmol (memorial site), which featured a mosaic representing a ghetto fighter, a mosaic created by camper Daniel Libeskind (now the well-known architect).117 This focus on resistance also provided campers with a sense of honor. As Newman wrote, “the shame I felt about having a father who had been in the camps, whom I thought of as a weak victim, humiliated and abused, was transformed into pride and

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strength.”118 Hemshekh was an affirming experience for young Jews navigating the rocky terrain of American Jewish identity. Camp helped ascribe meaning to the Holocaust, especially for the first generation of Hemshekhistn, mostly children of survivors grappling with their painful past. Hemshekh only lasted twenty years. After the initial generation of Yiddish-speaking campers, who came largely from the Amalgamated, creating a new generation of Bundists became a major challenge. In the early 1970s, a New York SKIF organization was established, an extension of Hemshekh that would keep its members connected all year round. SKIF does not seem to have lasted more than a few years, and its lack of success highlights perhaps the greatest hurdle that the Bund faced: that of imbuing a new generation of American Jews, in a time when socialism and Yiddish culture were much less prevalent than before, with Bundist values. During this period, even members of SKIF realized that it was no longer possible to assert that all SKIFistn were, or needed to be, Bundists. For many members of the organization, SKIF or Camp Hemshekh was a first exposure to Yiddish culture. This was, as one leader remarked in a speech to the New York Bund organization in 1974, the organizations’ first function: “to instill in our members at the very least, a healthy respect for Yiddish.”119 SKIF member Adam Teitelbaum argued in a 1974 edition of SKIF’s journal Khavershaft (Comradeship) that, because “most SKIFists are not Bundists,” it should not be a goal of the movement to create a generation of Bundists, but rather to “get people to think about certain things like politics or Jewish identity.” For Teitelbaum, SKIF needed to “be an outlet for those people who think their opinion counts for something and/or those who have nowhere to express their views because of adult intolerance of children’s views.”120 In reply, SKIF leader Moshe Rosenfeld wrote that it was “not the goal of the Bund to force everyone to join it. Rather, the Bund is interested in a children’s organization which has humanitarian (socialist, if possible) goals.”121 For leaders of SKIF, then, creating a new generation of Bundists was not a priority. Perhaps they were responsible for raising a generation of humanitarians with an affection for Yiddish, but this was a far cry from the lofty ideals and stubborn ideological will of earlier Bundists. Later, there were attempts to create a post-Hemshekh space for those who did graduate as Bundists. The Jewish Socialist Youth Bund (JSYB) was one such attempt, spearheaded by an active cadre of committed Hemshekh counselors in 1964. The group’s aim was to bring the idea of democratic socialism to other students.122 It did not last long, although a revival in 1969 proved somewhat more successful, with a more extensive program and an occasional

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publication, Yugnt-Shtime (Voice of the Youth). This new group was heavily influenced by the emerging New Left. Some of the activities of the JSY Bund throughout the 1970s included regularly presenting guest speakers (including Edward Said, on Lebanon, the Palestinians, and the Middle East, in 1977);123 workshops, discussions, and Shabbes (Sabbath) study groups on topics such as socialism, imperialism and U.S. foreign policy, sex roles and sexism, Jewish cultures in the diaspora, and antisemitism.124 The JSYB also tried to carry on the American Bund’s tradition of trying to unite the dispersed factions making up the Jewish Left. In 1973, members cosponsored an Exploratory Conference toward a United Jewish Left, in which youth Bund activists Moishe Rosenfeld and Julius Spiegel, Melbourne SKIF and Yiddish activist Arnold Zable, and economic historian Alexander Erlich were keynote speakers.125 The conference brought together a full spectrum of Jewish leftist youth organizations, including the Radical Zionist Alliance, and was preoccupied with how to divert American Jews’ attention from Israeli politics to local Jewish issues.126 JSYB representative Spiegel considered the conference a success: despite not producing concrete results, it did open dialogue with a broad range of interested parties.127 Although nothing seems to have materialized from the conference, it was perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of the JSYB. It also demonstrated that the young Bundists had learned something from their mentors in the parent organization. This group, too, though, faced bitter troubles with regeneration, and at the beginning of the 1980s the JSYB reorganized as the Medem Jewish Socialist Group to reflect the fact that its members were no longer necessarily young, nor were they drawing new young members. The new group, named for Russian Bund icon Vladimir Medem, was primarily English-speaking, and based its ideas on a broadly Bundist platform, although without any of the zeal that characterized earlier generations of Bundists.128 Interestingly, the program was fashioned as much on New Left ideas as on Bundist ideas. The members were concerned with cultural pluralism, democracy, and internationalism, just as had been generations before. But they were also explicitly committed to feminism and gay rights, and adopted a decidedly New Left approach to these issues.129 The fact that these activists chose to reconstitute the Youth Bund rather than to integrate into the Bund proper speaks volumes about the crisis that the Bund was already in by the 1980s. There was little appeal for the generation raised in Bundist institutions to join the parent body, and, recognizing that the American Bund was in a dire situation, the young activists sought other means of expressing their Bundist ideas. This shift represented the death knell of the Bund’s youth activities: the decades of attempting to organize Bundist youth had not ultimately led

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to Bundist regeneration, without which the organization could not hope to survive in the long term.

Conclusion During the 1960s and 1970s, the Bund in New York was clearly a party in decline. The numbers at its major events went into steep decline, indicating that there was less interest in the movement than at any other time in its history. There were 450 attendees at the anniversary celebrations in 1965, 300 in 1970.130 Even the major celebrations—the party’s seventieth (1967) and seventy-fifth (1972) anniversaries—which typically drew sympathizers and former members as well as current members, saw a major drop, from 1,300 to 800 respectively. The New York Bund committee was expecting 1,000 persons to attend the latter, but even this estimate fell short.131 These figures were indicative of a party in sharp decline. Perhaps the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 played a role, as support for Israel in Jewish communities increased. Although the party still continued to organize regular events, its various attempts at youth organization were not seeing great dividends, socialism was a spent force, and the Yiddish world generally was battling to maintain and broaden its appeal. Another sign of the Bund’s demise can be seen in its scholarly activities. The New York Bund maintained an active publishing house through the 1940s and 1950s. Farlag Unzer Tsayt published a range of books on the Bund’s history, biographies of significant Bund personalities, and works on the Holocaust. The movement’s failure to regenerate was highlighted by the Farlag Unzer Tsayt’s obsession with party history. It published virtually nothing on politics, save a pamphlet or two, until 1950, but worked a great deal on chronicling the history of the party and the people that built it. Unzer Tsayt did appear regularly and served as an outlet for ideological discussions, but books and pamphlets were not a part of this publisher’s program as they had been for Bundist publishing houses in Europe before the war. The publishing house, however significant its activities for contemporary historians who often rely on the epic five-volume Di Geshikhte fun Bund, serves to emphasize that Bundists were only too aware of their own collapse. Led by historian J. S. Hertz, Bundist writers scurried to commit the party’s history to paper before it was too late. By the 1970s, apart from its journal, the Bund’s publishing activities had virtually dried up. Besides running the publishing house, Bundists reconstituted their archives, transported to New York from Paris, where it had been hidden during the war. Hillel Kempinsky worked tirelessly to organize and make accessible the archives, left in a state of disarray during the war.132 The publishing and

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archival work has been critical in advancing our knowledge of the Bund. Still, it is difficult not to conclude that. in the postwar years, historians must have felt the pressure that their movement was under. Their goal was surely to ensure that the movement they held so dear would not be lost from Jewish memory. The Bund’s leadership was aware of the situation. Party discussions in the late 1960s and early 1970s reveal a crisis within the organization. Solutions were discussed and ideas were proposed about how to reorganize and shore up the Bundist base. In May 1968, stalwart Abram Stolar suggested the need to organize on the basis of boroughs, whereby each borough branch would meet monthly, with two general meetings a year and four major events.133 Only two years later, it was evident that such a system was not working. The Bronx and Brooklyn branches seemed to be regularly attracting members and were active in the Arbeter Ring and housing cooperatives. Efforts to organize Bundists in Manhattan and Queens, however, had fallen flat.134 A party debate in 1968 was revealing. Most members complained that the Bund was not exercising enough influence in organizations such as the Arbeter Ring and the Jewish Labor Committee. Some, such as former French Bundist Tsirl Steingart, despaired that they could not stop the march of Zionism. Others, like Dina Ryba and Jacob Celemenski (former member of the Bund underground in the Warsaw Ghetto), complained that there was a lack of organization in the Bund’s ranks. Others were worried that Bundists did not do enough, but were simply content with criticizing Israel and other Jewish organizations. One member argued that the Bund did not need to infiltrate other institutions, and that small organizations also had a role to play. As always, Scherer had the final word. Bundists, he said, did not want to be fellow-travelers for the three major trends in Jewish life: assimilation, religion, and Zionism. “A lack of success is new for socialism,” he wrote. “The Bund stands for the first time on the principle of opposing the Jewish state. We need to pass the exam. Our voice is a voice of nay-sayers—for that we must have courage. We can pass the exam 365 days a year. We need to hope better times are coming.”135 This is ultimately what the Bund in New York was reduced to: a party of nay-sayers. After a brief renaissance in the early 1950s, the party went into rapid decline. With the decline of the Bund’s two major pillars—the socialist and the Yiddish sector—the party found it difficult to regenerate and maintain its relevance. Still, it directly played an important role in the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Holocaust survivors who had migrated to North America after the catastrophe. Through the Bund, they found some comfort, some familiarity. They still felt connected to the

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world that was destroyed. Their transition into American life was made easier, finally, by the institutional and emotional support in the Bund. Sadly, by the close of the 1960s, even the eternally optimistic Scherer, the last of the great Bundist intellectuals, had conceded that, organizationally at least, the Bund in the United States had been reduced to nothing more than “a voice of nay-sayers.”

5 New Frontiers The Bund in Melbourne

The Melbourne Bund was perhaps the most successful of all Bund organiza-

tions in terms of impact and longevity. It ran a busy calendar of political and cultural events, and operated a children’s movement well into the twentyfirst century. As late as the 1990s, it sponsored an annual Jewish cultural festival that attracted, at its peak, up to 15,000 attendees. It was represented on the local Jewish community’s governing body from the 1960s onward. Its members were community leaders from the outset, actively involved in the cultural and social institutions that formed the bedrock of the Jewish community. The Bund in Melbourne was a busy, active, and at times, influential

organization in its local context. The Melbourne Bund’s experience was characterized by its attempt to transplant Jewish Eastern Europe into a new setting. Bundists were realistic that they could not hope to rebuild Jewish life as it had once been. They needed to come to terms with the reality that their lives had been completely overhauled first by the Holocaust, and then by the experience of immigration and settlement in a country that was culturally and politically so different from Poland. The postwar generation of Bundists did, however, attempt to fulfill their desire to build a community resembling those so violently destroyed. For its adherents, the Bund became a meeting place in which to link the past, through anniversaries and commemorations; the present, with a steady stream of, both local and international guest speakers; and the future, through its fundraising, youth, and educational endeavors. The Bund came to represent something heymish (homelike), something permanent and safe that bridged their old world with the new lives they were building in Australia. In many ways, the Melbourne Bund was no doubt similar to other Bund organizations, and perhaps even represented a microcosm of Bund 1 39

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organizations the world over. However, it lasted longer, and had a richer tapestry of activities, than perhaps any of its siblings overseas. There are several possible explanations. Its acute sense of isolation could have acted as a galvanizing force. Isolated geographically from their comrades around the world, and ideologically and culturally from most Jews in their hometown, the Melbourne Bundists approached their task with extraordinary vigor. The Melbourne branch was also part of a community-building project, operating within a fledgling Jewish community where it could carve out its own niche, unlike in other cities with more well-established communal structures. Bundists in Melbourne struggled to adapt to their new circumstances, as well as to deal with the ever-present sense of loss from their Holocaust experiences.

Rise of the Melbourne Bund The story of the Melbourne Bund dates back to 1928, when a small group of Bundist immigrants first congregated in a ceremony to mourn the death of Polish Bund theoretician and activist Beynish Michalewicz. After an uneasy alliance with the Jewish Communists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Bundists set up their own fundraising structures to raise money to assist the secular Yiddish school system in Poland. The group was founded partly because its leader Sender Burstin had fallen out with the Communist group, the Gezerd: for his criticism of the Soviet Union, the Gezerd branded Burstin a “social fascist” and expelled him from the group.1 Bundists at this time participated actively in Melbourne’s Yiddish cultural center, the Kadimah, and were instrumental in the campaign in Australia to boycott Nazi Germany.2 The Bundist group welcomed emissaries from Poland, like Yosef Giligich, who would later settle in Melbourne and become a central figure in the Yiddish schools there. During the war, Bundists continued their opposition to both the Nazi atrocities against European Jews and the Stalinist persecution of Bundists in Russia, most notably the arrest and execution of Bund figures Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter in 1942. Bundists waged a fierce campaign to bring to light the murder of Erlich and Alter, with Australian Minister for Information (and later Minister for Immigration) Arthur Calwell publicizing the tragedy along with the atrocities being committed against Jews in Poland.3 In the postwar years, the landscape of Melbourne Jewry changed dramatically, allowing for significant growth in the Bund. In the years following the Second World War—in which Australian armed forces had been engaged in the Pacific theater and in the Middle East—Australia embarked on a major immigration campaign, convinced that the nation’s postwar reconstruction

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and future prosperity relied on supplementing Australia’s population. “Populate or perish” was the government’s catch cry, as it sought to increase the Australian population by 2 percent each year, half of which goal it wanted to achieve through immigration. With not enough migrants responding from the preferred source of Great Britain, the Australian government, led by a social-democratic Labor government, turned to the wells of displaced persons in continental Europe.4 The expanded immigration program changed the face of Australian Jewry. Before the Holocaust, the community was characteristically AngloJewish and highly assimilated. It maintained a religious focus and kept a low public profile, in the tradition of British Jewry. A trickle of Polish and Russian Jews in the first decades of the twentieth century became the nucleus of the Melbourne community, but it was only after the Holocaust prompted the widespread migration of Eastern European (and especially Polish) Jews into Melbourne that the Jewish community became much more assertive and self-assured. The newly arrived refugees brought a combative style of activism from their old homes. Suzanne Rutland, preeminent historian of Australian Jewry, described this period from the 1930s to the 1950s as “a watershed in Australian Jewish history. The immigrants brought with them a new and stronger identification with Judaism and Jewish consciousness, transforming every aspect of Jewish life in Australia.”5 By the end of the 1950s, the Jewish community of Australia had reached over sixty thousand, with Melbourne Jewry constituting around half of this.6 Melbourne became a center of a national Jewish political life much like that which had characterized Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, owing largely to the high proportion of Polish Jews settling in Melbourne, compared to the largely Central and Western European Jews who moved to Sydney.7 Bundist Jacob Waks somewhat disparagingly noted in 1951, on the changing demographics within Australian Jewry, that it was not only “daytshe shmendrik yidn” (German fool-Jews) migrating to Australia as had been the major trend before the war, but also “unzere heymishe yidn” (our familiar Jews) who by that point made up half of the Jewish population in Australia.8 This postwar influx included hundreds of Bundists, who quickly set about rebuilding Jewish life in their new settings. Although the arrival of Bialystok Bund leader Jacob Waks in 1940 breathed life into the fledgling Australian Bund movement, it was the influx of a Yiddish-speaking critical mass that truly gave Bundist activity momentum.9 Early Melbourne Bund pioneer Sender Burstin commented in 1951 on the rapid growth of the Melbourne Jewish community and the effect this had on Bundists’ self-perception in the years following the war: “The organization has existed already for more than twenty years under the name of Di Bundishe Grupe [The Bund

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Group], but with the influx of immigrants, our organization has grown and is now known under the name Di Bundishe Organizatsye in Melburn [The Bund Organization in Melbourne].”10 This change of name seems minor, but is in fact significant: it was not simply quantitative growth that allowed for this important semantic change, but also a change in attitude of Bundists worldwide, with the new postwar circumstances demanding that, for the Bund to survive, it needed to establish itself on global basis. This changed attitude meant not only the establishment of the World Coordinating Committee of Bund Organizations, but the shift from Bundist support groups to more formalized and independent organizational structures. Bundists attempted to carry on the work they had done in a world left behind. Among the most important endeavors of the Melbourne Bund were the establishment of its children’s movement, SKIF, and a youth movement, Tsukunft (Future). It was highly active within the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Left. Its members worked in the Kadimah and the Yiddish schools, as well as in the Jewish Welfare Society, established to assist the settlement of Jewish refugees from Europe. Within the broader Jewish community, the Bund sat uneasily. Until 1975, it was denied affiliation with the communal governing body, the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies, although Bundists remained active on this board through involvement in other institutions. One of the main preoccupations of the Bund in Melbourne was democratizing the community’s representative umbrella body, the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies. Bundists fought for the right to use Yiddish at the board’s meetings and communal events, and argued for the language to be taught at the newly established Jewish day school. The Bund organized cultural and artistic evenings. It oversaw a children’s movement and a youth movement, hosted guest speakers and political discussions, ran fundraising campaigns to support Bund institutions around the world, and welcomed guest emissaries from Bundist communities in the United States, Israel, Canada, and Mexico. The party also published a journal that discussed local and international politics, as well as questions concerning the Jewish world. A cursory look at any of the yearly reports published in the Bund’s regular Bulletin gives an insight into the depth and variety of activities on the organization’s busy calendar. The Melbourne Bund’s postwar development reveals an effort to establish continuity with the prewar Polish Bund. Bundists understood themselves to be carrying on the half-century tradition of their predecessors in Russia and Poland in their fight for democratic socialism, doykayt and Jewish workers’ rights, and in their struggle against Zionism. Rather than the Holocaust representing a disruption in Jewish history, Bundists viewed the Holocaust

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as a tragic part of Jewish history that linked the new Bund to its forerunner in Eastern Europe. Sender Burstin wrote of how the Holocaust was the bridge between the past, present, and future: “The political and national-cultural traditions that characterized the Bund in Eastern Europe, whose masses perished along with the rest of Eastern Europe in the Hitler-annihilation, have inspired the Bundist movement in Melbourne.”11 Continuity is important in the Bundist narrative everywhere, but perhaps was especially so in Melbourne, where a sense of isolation was much more acute. Without the more present concrete links that Bundists in other countries enjoyed through geographic proximity, the Australian chapter forged stronger ties with the past. Their link to other Bundists was forged in time as much as in space. And unlike New York or Paris, where there were still networks of Yiddish life that extended beyond the Bund, no such Yiddish life existed in Melbourne. For the Australian Bundists, an end to their links through time also meant the end of Yiddish culture. On the other hand, Melbourne provided an ideal setting to shape a movement in the Polish mold. For one, the majority of Jewish migrants who had recently flooded in had arrived from Poland. There was a ready-made base of those with vivid memories of the Bund’s role on the Jewish street in Eastern Europe. So when communal debate took place, it was easy to imagine that it was simply an extension of earlier discussions on the Warsaw city council, or in the Lodz kehille. Another factor that facilitated the Bund’s ability to establish some feeling of continuity was the relationship that the party could build with the Australian Labor Party. As in Poland, the Bund could align itself with the mainstream workers’ political movement and could harbor illusions of the influence it could exercise through these relationships. For the Melbourne Bundists, then, a preoccupation with the past was at the heart of the party’s activities. For example, through their many annual functions celebrating the movement’s founding and of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Bundists paid homage to their heroes and martyrs, celebrated the link among past, present, and future, and established this narrative of continuity of which they were the heirs. Celebrating the party’s founding each November was especially significant. In a 1963 speech marking the movement’s sixty-sixth anniversary, Bund committee member Hershl Bachrach weaved through time in his reflection on “the old but important tradition” of celebrating the party’s anniversary. For him and his comrades, he argued “this is like a yontev,” and he concluded, “Today we are a minority in Jewish life, but it was not always so. We must therefore look with hope to the future.”12 Melbourne Bund founder Burstin, too, placed his local organization within the ongoing Bundist narrative: “The Bund,” he argued, “has gone down in

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Jewish history as a social movement that was established first among the Jewish masses in Czarist Russia, and later, between the two world wars in Poland. Today, because of the dispersion of Jews around the entire world, the Bund works everywhere that Jews live. We, Bundists in Melbourne, make our contribution to the wellbeing of the Jewish community in Australia, and more generally, for the Jewish people.”13 This commitment to continuing the prewar mission characterizes part of the tension inherent in reestablishing Bund organizations after the war. The party’s leaders were constantly torn between carrying on a proud tradition and adapting to a new world order in which circumstances had changed and all Jewish political parties needed to redefine themselves. The organization had to contend with the establishment of the State of Israel—a major achievement for their Zionist opponents—as well as to operate in a setting where revolutionary socialism was not necessarily part of the political landscape, and where its grassroots supporters were shifting into the middle class, thereby depriving the Bund of its natural base. With the upward mobilization of its base, the Bund realized that its most important task was social and cultural work, and, although it did maintain its fervent commitment to democratic socialism, the party’s rhetoric was greatly toned down from that of the Russian and Polish periods, especially as the Cold War set in, and perhaps also a consequence of its alignment with a parliamentary party. Instead, kulturele arbet (cultural work) became the organization’s new mission. Bundist writer Ber I. Rozen alluded to the holiness of this mission in 1952, and to the religious zeal needed to carry out the work. He argued: “God, the religious Jew says, is everywhere here, and we must serve him everywhere. Perhaps there is something of that feeling in our hearts, in the blood of every Bundist. He was raised and grew up in the Bund in his old home. And wherever he goes, he takes with him a part of the modern Yavneh. We see him, we feel him in the Yiddish cultural work as soon as he gets off the ship.”14 For Bundists, this cultural work represented the highest expression of doykayt ideas, because it was through these endeavors that they sought to build a cohesive Australian Jewish community and identity. Such cultural endeavors best typify the Bund’s approach to Jewish identity, rooted in doykayt and based on an affirmation of local efforts and the warm acceptance of the local framework within which the Jewish community needed to operate. This cultural work was viewed as transnational, both in crossing geographical borders and in crossing cultural borders within their local setting. At the same time as Bundists reaffirmed their prewar Yiddish cultural life, they adapted to, and adopted, Australian cultural life. There were two major elements to the Bund’s cultural program. The first aimed to establish a strong and coherent Jewish community in Melbourne

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by its involvement with the Board of Deputies, as well as with other Jewish communal organizations, such as the Yiddish schools and the Jewish Welfare Society. The role of Bundists in the Yiddish cultural center, the Kadimah, is noteworthy here. Bundists came to dominate the Kadimah, placing the Bund at the forefront of Yiddish life in Melbourne. These endeavors were seen as especially critical given that, in Australia, they were truly part of a community-building project. Local Jewish life was not entrenched as it was in New York or Paris, and Bundists aimed to be a part of the emerging Jewish landscape. The Bund’s other cultural program element was to seek to strengthen itself materially and spiritually through its own network of cultural organizations, most notably its children’s and youth movements. It is clear that the Melbourne Bund viewed its Polish predecessor as a model, and the Melbourne Bundists felt that, owing to their unique situation, there was some hope of building something that was, perhaps not in size but at least in character, reminiscent of the Bund in Poland.

(Re-)Building the Kehille Two things typify the Bund’s approach to Jewish communal organization in Melbourne. First, like all Bund organizations, the Melbourne branch idealized the past. The Bund created a mythology around the importance of prewar Jewish communal governing bodies, even though the Bund had been in constant conflict with such bodies since its inception. It only hesitantly decided in 1936 to participate in the Kehille elections in cities throughout Poland—yet after the war, the Bund would seek to adapt the Kehille as a model for Australian Jewish life. The party felt that only a communal umbrella organization could unite an often fractured community. Second, Melbourne Bund intellectuals stressed the existential need to build a strong representative body. Jewish continuity rested on such an outcome. The only way Jews could flourish was through the free elections of an open and broadly representative communal institution that would serve the needs of the whole community. Ber Rozen stressed this “here and now” approach in 1950 when he noted that a lot of effort had been put into “building Jewish existence on the soil of our own land.” The issue was “a fight for survival.” For Rozen, there remained among Jews “the will to redevelop and to strengthen the creative existence of the Jewish people everywhere where there are communities outside the borders of the Jewish state.” This task was urgent: “We must do it today, now,” he urged, “because if we wait until later, it may be too late.”15 The Bund’s relationship to the broader Jewish community was strained in the decades after the war. Not permitted organizational affiliation with

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the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies until 1975, the Bund sought to exert influence through its involvement in other communal institutions, such as the Kadimah, I. L. Peretz School, Sholem Aleichem School, Jewish Welfare Society, and the various Landsmanschaften. Democratizing communal bodies was a major preoccupation of the Bund; it saw the Board of Deputies as unrepresentative, but nonetheless saw involvement in that board as important and, from 1950 onward, sought to influence it from within. The Bund’s approach to the Board of Deputies is typical of the role memory played in its contemporary struggles. It carried on a battle that it had been fighting in interwar Poland, and sought to establish the kind of communal framework around which the Polish Jewish community had been organized: a strong communal body that was pluralist and broadly representative and supportive of the entire community. This vision departed from the strong religious and government-sanctioned body that typified the Polish Kehille. However, Bundists did emphasize the links and continuity between the kind of Jewish communal organization that existed in Poland and that for which they were struggling in Melbourne. Moshe Ajzenbud, Yiddish author and Bundist journalist, drew a direct link between the old Kehilles and the types of structures that the Melbourne Bundists were trying to create.16 Ajzenbud, however, recalled an idealized past. Although Bundists argued that the kehilla was an important vehicle against assimilation, the reality was that, in interwar Poland, the Bund had refused to participate in the kehilla or contest in its elections until the late 1930s, because of the fundamentally religious nature of the communal governing body during this period. Bundists had little interest in participating in a state-controlled institution that did not support secular Jewish cultural organizations; however, in 1936, with growing support for the Bund on the Jewish street, the party bowed to the pressure of its rank and file, who sensed this increasing popularity as an opportunity to entrench itself within the Jewish community.17 Similarly, in Australia the Bund was suspicious of the Board of Deputies, even though the Australian version was organizationally and materially very different from its prewar Polish equivalent. Bundists saw this board as fundamentally undemocratic and unrepresentative. As early as 1947, when the movement was only beginning its major transformation, Hershl Bachrach wrote in the inaugural edition of the Bund’s journal, Unzer Gedank, that, although the range of organizations affiliated to the board was impressive on paper, the reality was that the board was far less representative, with relatively few active members. He called for direct elections to the board, and argued that the strengthening of Jewish life in the wake of the Holocaust could only happen through the reinforcement of Jewish communal democracy. “A democratically-elected Jewish Kehille,” he argued, “which will be

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bound to the popular will of Jews, will play an important role in working to save a greater number of Jews from the DP camps.”18 The Australian Bund, it would appear, had continued the shift begun in the late interwar period, when the Polish Bund decided to participate in the Kehille, under pressure from its members. There were major historical obstacles, however, that would complicate the Bund’s desire for communal participation. The Bund’s history was marked by a strong unwillingness to cooperate with most other Jewish organizations. Its hostility was especially strong toward Zionist organizations, which it charged with undermining the needs and security of the Jewish masses.19 This conflict continued in Melbourne after the war. Just as there was comfort in the communal rituals and practices of the Polish Bund, so too was there comfort in the old conflicts. Bundists saw themselves as continuing a prewar struggle that went to the very heart of the future of world Jewry. The conception of continuity from before the war was important in creating a narrative that would ensure the future of the Bund. “Is the struggle finished?” asked Sender Burstin as late as 1966: “Has Zionism been victorious on all fronts? Has it fulfilled all the hopes upon which it was based? Far from it!”20 For those who still adhered to the ideals of the Bund, there remained work to be done among Australian Jewry. Just as in interwar Poland, so too would Bundists oppose and struggle against Zionism in their new land. Bund organizations opposed Zionism the world over, but, perhaps because of the Bund’s preoccupation with strengthening the Kehille in Melbourne, the conflict was especially sharp there. The Bundist critique of the dominant Zionist faction in Melbourne centered on differing conceptions of diaspora Jewish life, with the Bund objecting to the Zionist focus on the “negation of the diaspora.” The Bund had a different understanding of the way to organize the local Jewish community. It complained that Zionists focused on Israel to the detriment of developing the community at home. Bundists’ critique of Zionism on a practical level concentrated on the lack of fundraising for local Jewish institutions, as well as on the Zionist attitude toward Yiddish, which they saw as representative of the “assimilationist” tendencies of Zionism. A 1958 article in Unzer Gedank celebrated the visit of a representative from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (or “the Joint”) who directed fierce criticism at the Zionist community for its financial reliance on the Joint at the same time as it conducted extensive fundraising operations for the fledgling Jewish state. At a meeting of the Jewish press, Moses Levit, the Joint representative, lashed out at the Zionists, claiming “The freeloading Zionist community is doing little for its own local needs!”21 Bundists proposed the centralization of fundraising in the community, so that the

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funds would be distributed to local organizations as they were needed, which would in turn strengthen Australian Jewry. In the same edition, Mishke Bargman delivered a scathing attack on the priorities of Australian Zionism, claiming that the Zionist factions that dominated the community were “undermining and bankrupting its cultural-national aspirations and needs.” What, he asked, was “Zionism doing to stop the march of assimilation?” Bargman slammed the fundraising appeals of the Zionist organizations, which, he claimed, occupied “nearly 100 per cent of Zionist activity.” Worst of all was that the Zionists had “collected colossal sums of money, energy and toil from the local Jewish community, leaving Jewish life here on the ground poor and dried up.”22 Bundists sought to counteract what they saw as the destructive approach of the Zionist movement in Melbourne. They aimed to revolutionize the structures of the Jewish community so that the energy and creativity of local institutions would be focused on fostering a distinctive Australian Jewish identity. That identity would be constructed primarily around the customs and practices of prewar Eastern European Jewry, with a strong focus on the Yiddish language: to survive, Australian Jews needed to be more inwardlooking. To this end, major effort went toward reforming the Board of Deputies into a representative, democratic body, an effort that proved an uphill battle, especially given the ill-feelings that that board harbored toward the Bund. The board continually blocked the Bund’s efforts at gaining affiliation, further fueling Bundists’ anger at what they labeled the antidemocratic tendencies of the Jewish community. There were two occasions in which this tension came to a head. The first was in 1951, when the Board of Deputies blocked the Bund’s application for affiliation on the grounds that the organization was a political movement. The second was in 1960, when board members rigged the election result, thwarting the Bund’s electoral efforts in the board’s first direct elections. Despite its misgivings about the unrepresentative composition of the Board of Deputies, the Bund committee decided to lodge an application for membership in 1951. At that time, the Board of Deputies was composed mainly of representatives from synagogues and a number of other communal institutions, including the Jewish Welfare Society, Kadimah, the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, and the Zionist organization. Each organization was allocated two representatives (except the Zionists, who had four) and admittance required a board vote with a two-thirds majority.23 Jacob Waks, by then the party’s most prominent leader, wrote that the Bund’s aim in applying for affiliation to the “surrogate-Kehille” was to put “the democratisation of the Jewish community in Melbourne onto the Board’s agenda.”24

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Although the Board of Deputies was required by its constitution to respond to such applications within a matter of weeks, it nonetheless took five months to discuss the Bund’s submission, after which its delegates voted to reject the application on the grounds that the Bund was solely a political organization, and, for the board, “political interests do not constitute a distinct ideal or activity of Jewish communal life.”25 Not surprisingly, the Bund reacted angrily. Waks derided what he called the “anti-democratic representation” of the Board of Deputies led by the Zionists and the Jewish Council. He claimed that the board members were not “grown up enough to understand the demands of the times,” and that by ignoring the basic principle that “every living part of the Jewish community is entitled to participate in the Kehille-leadership, regardless of whether their ideology seems right or wrong,” the board forfeited the right to speak on behalf of the Jewish community.26 Waks vowed that the Bund would continue to agitate for democratization, certain that the community would grow to understand the absurdity of the Board of Deputies’ composition. In the years following the board’s initial rejection of the Bund’s application, Bundists continued to argue for the right of the Bund to be accepted into the communal bodies. Despite its position as an outsider, the Bund’s members were still active participants on the Board of Deputies. This was possible because they were so active in a range of other Jewish organizations. Through such involvement, Sender Burstin maintained, participants managed to represent Bundist ideals within the board, showing their concern with “some of the problems of Jewish life here, such as education, immigration, social welfare, antisemitism, appeals, fight against assimilation, the rights of Yiddish, democracy for the Board, etc.”27 In October 1954, the Bund reopened its campaign for a Board of Deputies restructure in a public meeting at the Kadimah. Writer Ber Rozen, who died in November 1954, almost immediately after the campaign was resurrected, led off with some articles calling for reform within the community. The Bund was already a key player in the community, according to Rozen, but this was in spite of other organizations’ hostility: “The Bund has become naturalized in the local Jewish community. It did not receive this citizenship. Both the Zionists and communists did not want to give it to them. On the contrary, in any way they could, they tried to deny this to the Bund.” Rozen claimed that the Bund attained its importance on its own, and was having a far-reaching influence even beyond Bundist circles. In his eyes, this was surely an argument for its inclusion in the governing structures of the community.28 In October 1954, preempting the public meeting in which the Bund made its position clear, Rozen again wrote about democratizing the board.29

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Four years later, Motl Wilenski continued the campaign, reaffirming the necessity of a democratic Board of Deputies. He wrote that the Bund still wanted a Kehille that was “truly representative, internally, and externally.” Bundists wanted it to be concerned with strengthening the cultural and social needs of the community, both religious and secular.30 He cited the example of Argentina, where all parts of the community participated, with the result that there was a strongly developed Yiddish and Hebrew school system, flourishing cultural events, and thriving publishing houses. The Bund finally got its wish in 1960 when the Board of Deputies went ahead with direct elections. For Bundists, the board would finally receive legitimacy as representing the community, and their struggle for the rights of Yiddish and Jewish continuity in Melbourne (already being carried out through their work in other local institutions) would be greatly strengthened. The party campaigned on a platform of democratization and rights for Yiddish, putting up a list of five well-known and highly respected candidates led by Bono Wiener and including anticommunist intellectual and University of Melbourne politics lecturer Frank Knopfelmacher.31 The Bund’s tightly organized campaign proved highly effective, with the party collecting around 630 votes, but a major scandal erupted after Bund secretary Bono Wiener and treasurer Yosl Winkler hand-delivered the ballot papers to the board offices on the morning of 7 November. On counting the votes a week later, the board reported that the Bund’s total number of votes was only 324. The Bund protested the result vigorously, claiming the ballot had been rigged. It organized a protest meeting in which it called for new elections with stronger safeguards. Later, it came to light that, in fact, the count had been rigged, with a member of the Board of Deputies having disposed of those missing Bund votes, and a reelection was called.32 In the new ballot, the Bund achieved very positive results, receiving 700 votes and six seats, second only to the Zionist list with 1,299 votes and seven seats.33 This episode serves to highlight two important features in the history of the Melbourne Bund. First, despite the hostile and bitter conflict that continued with Zionists and communists, the Bund still saw the only way to ensure Jewish continuity as by strengthening local communal institutions, and to collaborate with other Jewish organizations to achieve this goal; this view grew partly out of the principle of doykayt, but also from the mythologized past that Bundists imagined, as the movement sought to adapt the lessons of its history to build a stronger community in the present time and space. Second, the Bund’s electoral successes also demonstrate the often overlooked significance of the Bund within local Jewish political and cultural life. At the time in question, it was the second most popular bloc, behind the broad coalition of Zionist parties, and its members played an active and

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influential role in a range of different institutions; this role is underplayed in the existing historiography on Australian Jewry, yet nonetheless remains an important factor in establishing the long-term communal structures and direction of this Jewish community. The Bund’s determination to gain representation on the Board of Deputies spoke volumes about its approach to Jewish life. It was interested in collaborative approaches to funding, welfare, and culture. It was dedicated to fostering local Jewish life that drew heavily on the past but also on the surrounding cultures. The will to be part of the board also highlighted Bund vulnerability: its leaders did not feel that they could operate alone. Indeed, given how badly the party was damaged during the Holocaust, this was true. Bundists needed to seek partnerships and ways of working more broadly within the Jewish community, especially to attract members. For the Melbourne Bund, isolation from mainstream Jewish life was not an option. However, it was not only within the Jewish sphere that Bundists looked for partnerships. In the broader political sphere, they quickly set about building relationships and influence in the local socialist movement, which was represented by the Australian Labor Party.

The Bund and the Australian Labor Party The Bund’s policy had always been to work alongside local socialist movements, be it the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party at the turn of the century, the Polish Socialist Party in the interwar years, or the organized labor movement in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.34 The Bund saw the success and the continuity of Jewish life as bound up with that of humanity. For Bundists, it was more important to collaborate with other socialists than with the Jewish middle and upper classes.35 Y. Orbach acknowledged this in 1965 when he wrote that the Bund, the “doykayt party,” needed to show with word and deed its faith in socialism. Socialism was, he wrote, “a belief in the ideas and the worth of one brotherhood of peoples, which will secure the existence of the Jewish people among the peoples of the world.”36 There was no question for Bundists about whether or not to take part in local politics. The struggles for global freedom and Jewish freedom were inseparable, and there was no conflict between the two. Shortly after arriving in Australia, Orbach, who had led the Executive of Bund groups in the Italian DP camps, stated that it was “an old truth that the life of the Jewish people lies not far from the realm of other peoples.”37 Given their desire to collaborate with the broader socialist movement, it was natural for Bundists to gravitate toward the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the established representative of the labor movement and the major

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social-democratic political party in Australia. Although the prewar Bund was revolutionary, the newly arrived immigrants were quick to understand the need to temper revolutionary zeal in their new circumstances. Fostering relationships between the Bund and reformist political parties was a contentious issue for interwar Polish Bundists—indeed, the debate about whether to join the reformist Labor and Socialist International proved very controversial at the end of the 1920s; however, the situation in which the Melbourne Bund found itself necessitated a toning down of its European revolutionary aims.38 The ALP, born from the union movement in the 1890s, was the traditional party of the Australian worker. By the late 1940s, when a critical mass of Bundists arrived in Melbourne, the ALP was entering two decades as an opposition party, exacerbated in 1955 by a split between the party’s Catholic and strongly anticommunist Right, and the Left, with its sympathy for the Soviet Union.39 The relationship between the Melbourne Bund and the ALP was often a warm one, although with the mid-1950s split, it became more complex. In a letter in 1961 to the former minister for immigration and then-leader of the party Arthur Calwell, Bund secretary Bono Wiener summed up this tension. He wrote that, as a socialist organization, the Bund felt that its duty was to support the ALP, even though they were not formally affiliated. “This is not to say,” he continued, “that we necessarily support or identify our organization with every aspect of the ALP policy and organization. In particular we often disagree with the attitude towards Communism of certain elements in the Victorian ALP.” Nonetheless, the Bund recognized that “at election time the needs of the nation come first,” and it fully supported Labor’s campaign for electoral victory.40 A cordial relationship between the parties was an important objective of the Bund, so much so that in 1964 the Bund established a committee to ensure the maintenance of positive relations.41 There were turbulent moments, but on the whole the Bund saw the ALP as its brightest hope. Generally, the two parties did share an affection, and there was a great deal of mutual admiration in their correspondences. There are countless examples of this: Labor parliamentarian Ted Peters, for example, wrote in a letter to the Bund committee in 1956 of his appreciation for the Bund’s work not only for Jewish communities but also in “promoting peace and social justice among the peoples of the world.”42 R. Balcombe, assistant state secretary of the Victorian Branch of the ALP, wrote in congratulating the Bund on its sixtieth anniversary, “May the irrefutable logic of the Bund’s guiding principle of democratic socialism and the sincerity which has enabled so many to withstand oppression and hardship in its attainment, enable anniversaries in the near future to be held in an atmosphere wherein the attainment of the

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ideas which the Bund has always so courageously upheld, may be realised.”43 Arthur Calwell regularly praised the achievements of the Bund in anniversary greetings and at party meetings and celebrations. In 1961, for example, he praised the Bund’s work in fighting for freedom around the world.44 His congratulations also appeared, translated into Yiddish, in the anniversary editions of the World Bund’s monthly journal, Unzer Tsayt (Our Times).45 At times, the ALP also gave the Bund concrete support—for example, the personal interest Calwell took in ensuring that a Bund leader from Israel would be given approval to visit and to give a lecture series.46 Of course, these many expressions of mutual respect are certainly overplayed; although there was most likely some affection between the parties, especially in the personal relationships that had been forged, such statements served the interest of both sides. Affiliation between the parties was mutually beneficial, with the ALP able to tap into a rapidly growing immigrant constituency, and the Bund able to attach itself to a mainstream workers’ party. The relationship with Calwell was central to the ongoing relationship between the two movements. It began during the war years when Sender Burstin and Jacob Waks established friendly relations with Calwell, then deputy leader of the Labor Party. As a result of these friendships, Calwell gave strong support to a number of Bundist campaigns: he became a strong ally in allowing the Bundists to send material assistance to the Jews in occupied Poland, and he brought to attention the Bund’s campaign to publicize the Soviet murder of Polish Bund leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter as well as the Nazi crimes against the Jews in Poland. Most important, though, Calwell, as postwar immigration minister, strongly supported the efforts of Bundists to aid the immigration of Jewish refugees from Shanghai, and later those from the DP camps in Germany and Italy as well as those refugees in transit in France and Sweden.47 Waks’s ongoing correspondence with Calwell reveals a strong personal and professional friendship. In July 1951, he sent Calwell congratulations on his election to the deputy leadership of the Labor Party, and just prior to this (in June) he sent a telegram with a message of condolence on the death of former Labor prime minister Ben Chifley. Waks also sent donations, on behalf of the Bund, to support Calwell’s election campaigns.48 These missives reveal a high level of personal warmth and appreciation, something that could not easily be found in correspondence between the Bund and other Jewish organizations. The correspondence with the ALP also tells something significant about the Melbourne Bund’s self-understanding: within the Jewish world, Bundists viewed themselves as trailblazers. To achieve anything in that sphere, they would need to struggle against the ruling forces. In the non-Jewish political world, however, alliance building was essential, for it was through fostering

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such friendships that Bundists would be able to affect real change in the Jewish world. The arrival of Lodz Ghetto underground activist Bono Wiener in 1950, and his ascendancy to the leadership of the Melbourne Bund, helped entrench the relationship with the ALP, particularly after the death of Waks, in February 1956. Like Waks, Wiener maintained a strong link with Calwell, but the significance of Wiener in the relations between the Bund and the ALP go far beyond this personal connection. Wiener’s commitment to working both within the Jewish community—in the Kadimah, Jewish Welfare Society, and as co-founder of the Melbourne Holocaust Centre—and his loyal participation in the Australian labor movement highlight the inextricable linkage between Jewish continuity and broader social justice that typified the Bund’s approach to Jewish life. Wiener was even touted at one point as a candidate for the Labor Party in the Victorian state parliament, only to be rebuked by the left wing of the party, often at odds with his fervent anticommunism.49 His anticommunism made him the target of much vitriol from the Communist Party and Jewish communist groups, who went as far as to suggest that he was an antisemite.50 Wiener’s anticommunism was such that, when he was expelled from the party in 1960 on technical grounds, the episode was set against a backdrop of his unsuccessful efforts to expose and expel an endorsed Labor electoral candidate, Sam Goldbloom, for being an ongoing member of the Communist Party. Eventually the Victorian Labor Executive, and then, on appeal, Labor’s Federal Executive, ruled that there was insufficient evidence to condemn Goldbloom. This episode was undoubtedly a key factor in Wiener’s later expulsion.51 Many in the party’s Left who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union no doubt saw him as an enemy rather than a comrade. One of the most significant chapters in Wiener’s life in Australian politics—one that marked the intersection of his involvement in the wider immigrant community and in the local labor movement—was his role as founder and secretary of the New Australian Council. Established by the Victorian branch of the ALP in 1954 as a means of recruiting immigrant workers into the party, the NAC was a short-lived organization, and, like Wiener, was tangled up in the internal political struggles of the ALP. With the influx of European immigrants in the postwar years, many of whom were receiving citizenship and voting rights by the early 1950s, a group of socialist immigrants took the initiative to organize and agitate among the newly arrived.52 The Bundist incentive for establishing an immigrant labor council echoed the reasons that Bundists first organized, in the 1930s, in Melbourne. In Sender Burstin’s account of the early history of the Melbourne Bund, he wrote: “Although the local Labor Party is a mass movement

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and plays an important role in political life, it could not be strongly appealing to the fresh Jewish immigrants, because of its ideological positions and the linguistic concerns.”53 In the Bund’s worldview, an immigrant workers’ auxiliary served the party’s commitment to both Jewish and broader concerns. As Wiener argued in 1957 in response to criticism from the Jewish press, “The Jewish activists in the Labor Party work for the general good, with consideration for the Jewish people. They are not Jews who represent Jewish or Israeli interests, but Jews who believe that by fighting for the ideas of social justice through the Labor Party, they are, by extension, fighting for those who are oppressed and persecuted for being Jews, Spaniards, Czechs or Greeks.”54 According to some party sources, the NAC reached a membership of over five hundred “New Australians,” although Wiener conceded this was only a small figure, suggesting that that many New Australians were members of the ALP but not necessarily of the council.55 The NAC’s work included election campaigning among immigrant groups, settlement assistance for new immigrants, translation services (particularly for propaganda materials to be sent to branches with a high concentration of immigrants), and general propaganda work.56 The council acted on behalf of immigrant workers in industrial disputes around Victoria.57 The NAC also sought to imbue the ALP with a stronger appreciation for European socialism, in which most NAC members had been schooled. Wiener worried that “old Australians” were naïve about communism and had little understanding of the ideas of European socialists. He urged the party to set up lectures and seminars for party members to rectify what he saw as a major lack in the consciousness of Australian workers.58 For this, the NAC was looked on suspiciously by its parent organization. Moshe Ajzenbud described this tension: “Conservative in character and mistrustful of anything new, the majority of the Labor Party (among both its leadership and its membership) were frightened by the new phenomenon, which to them looked like a two headed-monster: European socialists and foreigners.”59 Apart from the xenophobic element, a great deal of hostility arose at the NAC’s fervent anticommunism. Like the Bund, the NAC, many of whose members had immigrated from behind the Iron Curtain, treaded the fine line of being socialist but harboring great hatred toward communism, and it sought to remove any Communist influence from the Labor Party. At this time, after a major split in the party created a major shift to the Left, the ALP was clearly concerned about these developments.60 There appeared a lack of understanding that it was possible to be both socialist and anticommunist. Indeed, abuse and hostility were directed toward Wiener by many within the party. At a party conference in July 1957, he was accused of

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FIGUR E 8  Melbourne Bund committee, 1967. Includes Bono Wiener (rear, center) and World Coordinating Committee emissary Arcadius Kahan (front, center). The banner above reads: “Welcome to the anniversary of the Bund.”

Courtesy Henry Nusbaum.

being a fascist, and was greeted with Nazi salutes by conference delegates.61 With such obstacles to overcome before European migrants would be fully embraced by the party, Wiener’s task was much more difficult. The Labor Party leadership was also worried that the NAC—a highly energetic branch—would overrun the party. When it was disbanded in late 1959, to be replaced by subcommittees at branch level, the party’s state secretary, Jack Tripovich, explained that the committee resolved to implement an organizational model that did not “isolate New Australians from the rest of the Party” and that could not “be subject to the criticism of one national group or section of the group dominating all others, or the complaint of the building of a separate Party within our party.”62 There was a clear undertone of antisemitism in this letter, given that Jews comprised the largest proportion of NAC membership. In the aftermath of the NAC’s disbandment, Wiener was expelled from the party. In late 1959 and early 1960, Tripovich repeatedly requested that Wiener return books, documents, and any materials relating to the activities of the NAC. Wiener was not so forthcoming and was slow to reply. On 1 March

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1960, Tripovich wrote to Wiener to inform him of the executive’s decision to suspend his membership due to this disobedience.63 Wiener appealed first to the Central Executive of the Victorian Labor Party and later to the Federal Party’s annual conference, arguing that he needed time to put the material in order, and that he had a moral obligation to keep some of it, which contained sensitive information. He also maintained that the expulsion was not authorized by the party’s constitution.64 In the end, his appeal was rejected on the grounds that “his refusal to comply with the request was deliberate,” and the expulsion was upheld.65 He would not be reinstated until 1971, after an intervention from the Victorian branch of the party.66 The NAC dissolution revealed the party’s fear of another split, only a few years after the debilitating split that had seen its electoral hopes crushed. The 1950s was a turbulent decade for the party, with the anticommunism so prevalent in the United States reaching Australian shores. From the mid-1940s onward, a right-wing, Catholic and virulently anticommunist faction had emerged within the Victorian Labor Party. “The movement,” as it became known, divided the party. Although the defeat of Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ referendum to ban Communist organizations in 1951 saw “the movement” temporarily weakened, it recovered rapidly to cause the famous split of 1954–1955. From this split emerged the Democratic Labor Party, which fought viciously against its former comrades and condemned both the Victorian and Federal Labor Parties to the political and electoral wilderness for decades. After the withdrawal of its right wing, the Labor Party shifted firmly to the Left. 67 Bundists, for their part, despised Communism. From about the mid1920s onward, when the excesses of Stalin began to emerge, the Polish Bund, and subsequently its Melbourne auxiliary, was passionately anticommunist. Many Bundists also survived the war years in the Soviet Union, where they had suffered the realities of life under Bolshevism. Finally, the Soviets had also executed the two most prominent leaders of the interwar Bund. All these factors combined resulted in a powerful hatred of Communism among Bundists.68 As the Labor Party shifted further to the Left in the mid-1950s, the friendly relationship so important to the Bund became frostier, although relations were never severed nor even really threatened; the Bund simply reserved its right to object to ALP policy, especially with regard to communism. In a scathing attack in Unzer Gedank in October 1957, Mishke Bargman argued that, after eight years of a conservative government, and with a Labor Party that had imploded, there was little cause for hope of a Labor victory in the near future. Bargman contended that, although Australia was experiencing greater prosperity under the government of Robert Menzies, only the affluent were benefiting. The Labor Party, under the leadership of H. V.

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Evatt, on the other hand, did not inspire him. He highlighted three major deficiencies in Labor policy, all centered around the party’s policies toward Communism. First, he criticized Evatt’s slow response in supporting the anticommunist uprising in Hungary, especially when the United States and other European countries had long supported it. Second, Bargman felt that, although Evatt was quick to condemn Western imperialism, he was silent with regard to Soviet expansion and intervention. Finally, on the home front, Bargman criticized Evatt for not doing enough to condemn Communist-front organizations. Ultimately, the Labor Party lacked the political strength, leadership, or vision for electoral victory, and needed greater unity and a return to the principles of democratic socialism.69 Another episode that highlighted the tension caused by Labor policy toward Communism is revealed in a 1965 correspondence between Bono Wiener and Arthur Calwell, by then the leader of the ALP, who remained in opposition. Wiener used a speech to the Bund to outline the weaknesses in Labor foreign policy differentiating the party from the government. He expressed his support for Menzies’ policy of sending military forces into Vietnam to contain communism, and said that the ALP needed to come into line with this position if it wished to gain support from the Australian public. Calwell’s response was by no means swift; it was not until 8 November that he responded to Wiener’s remarks from 17 August.70 However, by the end of the year, Calwell had issued Wiener with a stern warning to obey the party line. “Might I suggest,” wrote Calwell, that as a member of the Australian Labor Party you should all support the views of our Party and not give your support to the views of the British Labour Party where these differ from ours on foreign policy. . . . Nobody not associated with the Labor Party should be used by you or me or anybody else to criticise the Federal Conference decisions on any matter of policy whatsoever. To put it kindly, nobody in the Labor Party has the right to criticize the Party, its members or its policy outside its own ranks.71

Such episodes serve to highlight that the relationship between the Bund and the ALP was not always friendly and was not unconditional. Bundists would remain stubborn in their anticommunism. Despite these internal conflicts, however, the Bund continued to wholeheartedly support the ALP at election time, and remained generous financial donors.72 The ALP was seen as the best vehicle through which Bundists could effect positive change, both for the Jewish and the general population. As Bono Wiener wrote in 1957, “We want all the weaker nations and people to have the same rights to live as the powerful. We can only achieve this within the ranks of the labour

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parties and socialist movements around the world.”73 This commitment not only to support, but to actively participate in, the local labor movement is crucial to understanding the centrality of Bundists’ understanding of Jewish identity through the prism of doykayt. Without this involvement, the Bund would not be able to fulfill its mission of ameliorating Jewish problems through creating a more just and equitable society. This activism was part of the broader tapestry of Bundist life, in which party leaders and members aimed to establish continuity with the past and to fight for their vision of a better future. To train the next generation to take over this struggle, the Bund put a great deal of effort into fostering youth organizations.

Development of SKIF and Tsukunft Education and youth work was seen as one of the most urgent activities within the Melbourne Bund. The importance placed on the work of the party’s children’s and youth arms were indicative of the Bundists’ desire to secure their movement’s future, its ideals, and its influence within the Jewish community. “If the Bund organization is to remain powerful in the future,” stated the party’s 1965 annual report, “it will depend on the success of the activities and influence of Tsukunft.”74 Given the great importance placed on Tsukunft (the youth movement) and on SKIF (the children’s movement), it is necessary to explore the history and meaning of this element of Bundist activity in greater depth. Established in Melbourne in 1950, SKIF was the most active and successful of the local Bund’s youth initiatives. Founded by Polish Jewish immigrants Pinye Ringelblum and Simche Burstin, both of whom had spent the immediate postwar years in Paris working in Yiddish education and particularly within the French SKIF organization, SKIF’s philosophy in building a youth movement revealed a tension between the old home and the new similar to that characterizing the development of most aspects of Bundist activity. Ringelblum reflected in 1988 that the experience as a leader at SKIF in France strengthened his and Burstin’s belief that “even in the new conditions of new homelands a SKIF could exist as long as it was not a copy of the SKIF in Poland as was expected by some the older chaverim.” The Bundists would have to adapt. “We did not propose,” Ringelblum concluded, to transplant the Polish SKIF, but to establish a SKIF in Australia under new circumstances—though nevertheless in accord with Bund ideals of socialist development.75 Although the early SKIF leaders deliberately sought not to emulate the Polish SKIF organization, they nonetheless idealized its founders and heroes, particularly those who had fought and died in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was especially significant for SKIFistn when Yankev Pat,

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founder of SKIF in Poland and later leader of the Jewish Labor Committee in the United States, visited Australia in 1956.76 SKIF honored these heroes, such as Bund leaders Arkady Kremer, Shmuel Zygielbojm, and Vladimir Medem, as well as SKIF members who had fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, such as Dovidl Hochberg, Asie Bik, and Jurek Blones, by naming camps and groups after them and honoring them in literature and activities.77 By placing themselves within this narrative, but also understanding the need to create a new modus operandi specific to the time and place, SKIF leaders sought to ensure the continuity of the movement as well as the ideology espoused for decades. After its first camp, with seventeen participants, in 1950, SKIF grew quickly, and by 1954 it boasted 120 participants in its yearly summer camp. This figure would grow to nearly three hundred lageristn (campers) over two separate camps by the end of the decade.78 An article in 1959 in the Parisian Bundist daily Unzer Shtime described the camps’ aims and the means of achieving these: “The camp, which seeks to bring the children closer together, bring them closer to nature, and acclimatize them to collective living, also has as its goals: self-development, self-management, committees, daily leaders, Yiddish lessons. We work toward these goals through clubs, group discussions, lectures, and the traditional campfires. On camp, the SKIFistn break out of childhood—they become independent people who show initiative and collect experiences.”79 The intellectual and educational focus of the camps was supplemented by hiking, sports, and music and cultural activities.80 The centerpiece of the SKIF calendar, the four-week summer camps very quickly found a permanent home when, in 1953, the Friends of SKIF organization, established to support the young leaders of SKIF and oversee the movement, purchased a campsite in Dromana, a town fifty kilometers outside Melbourne. Dromana would become the home of SKIF camps for a number of decades, until being sold in the mid-1980s.81 SKIF remained very active throughout the year, also, with weekly meetings at its premises in the northern Melbourne suburb of Carlton, as well as meetings of members living in the southern suburb of St. Kilda.82 The organization also trained its members to become leaders of the movement, with series of seminars on Bundist and socialist ideology, democratic and economic theory, Jewish issues, Israel, child psychology, and the practice of being a helfer (counselor).83 Following the lead of its parent organization, SKIF placed itself within the broad narrative of Bund history. The movement sought to instill in its members ideals that reflected those of Bundism. In a 1971 edition of the bilingual SKIF journal Chavershaft (Comradeship), SKIF leader David Preiss wrote, “SKIF is a Jewish socialist children’s organization that strives to instill

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in its members feelings of friendship and solidarity with all children around the whole world under the banner: all people are brothers.”84 The editorial in the English version of the same edition argued that what differentiated SKIF from other youth movements was its “strong emotional tie to Yiddish and Yiddish life all over the world,” as well as its “concern with people and improving their lives.”85 Arnold Zable reflected in 1970 that for those involved, “SKIF provided a home away from home. Its number one concern was the human being in relation to his fellow human being.” Its socialist background ensured that “SKIF stressed the principles of co-operation and the value which could be derived from an awareness of both Jewish traditions and the principles of Socialism and Social involvement.”86 Even more telling than the development of SKIF, perhaps, was that of Tsukunft, whose members and leaders were at an age of political consciousness and maturity that challenged the older generation of Bundists as SKIF could not. Tsukunft was the real test of whether or not the Bund’s attempts to establish a mechanism ensuring continuity would be successful. The youth arm of the Bund, Tsukunft was dedicated to providing a pathway into the Bund organization for those who had grown up in SKIF, and also for university students interested in the Bund’s approach to socialism and Jewish identity. Established in Melbourne in 1949 by twenty newly arrived immigrants who had been active in SKIF and Tsukunft in interwar Poland, Tsukunft sought to create an atmosphere of camaraderie for Jewish youth.87 It ran camps and social events, and it worked to bring more Jewish refugees from the DP camps in Germany to Australia. For this goal, Tsukunft achieved a measure of success, with over fifty permits granted as a result of the work of its members.88 Once large enough, Tsukunft also oversaw the establishment of SKIF. Tsukunft faced a rocky initiation, thrust into the center of a conflict between the Bund and Melbourne’s Jewish communists. Just as the Bund’s efforts to gain membership to the Board of Deputies were met with hostility, so too was Tsukunft’s 1951 application to join the Melbourne Jewish Youth Council. The rejection of Tsukunft’s application was the first time that the Youth Council had denied affiliation to any organization, and the reasons were clearly political, reflecting the antagonism of the board toward the Bund. Wiener, then secretary of Tsukunft, argued in an open letter to the Jewish press that there were three major reasons given for the rejection of the application: the council had judged that Tsukunft was “an organization of hooligans” with a “mentality which is strange to the Australian way of life”; second, Tsukunft members were seen as “disturbers and destroyers of Jewish communal life,” just like the Bund; third, the council believed Tsukunft’s aim was to break up the unity of the council.89

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Bund leaders viewed Tsukunft as critically important to the survival and continuity of the Melbourne Bund. SKIF was viewed as a key to the future, but Tsukunft was given even greater significance in the Bund’s narrative of continuity, largely because it had a much more intellectual and philosophical focus and was seen as the real training ground in Bundist ideology and organization. Reflecting on the revival of the Melbourne Tsukunft organization in the mid-1960s, the Bund’s 1966 annual report emphasized the youth wing’s importance: “The current manifestation of Tsukunft activity, beginning in 1965, is the result of a group of twenty older SKIFistn, who would have been lost to us, had we not restructured our organizational framework. A new direction was necessary. . . . If the Bund organization is to remain powerful in the future, it will depend on the success of the activities and influence of Tsukunft.”90 Efforts to reestablish the Tsukunft organization typified the Melbourne Bund experience. Tsukunft was created not only to try to ensure the Bund’s survival, but also to reconstruct in a new setting the social and political structures that had been typical of the Polish Bund. Since many leading Bundists had received their political, Jewish, and socialist education in the Tsukunft movement in Poland before and during the war, for them, the importance of establishing such a movement was self-evident. The political program of Tsukunft indeed broadly reflected Bund ideals. It echoed the Bund’s universalism and its commitment to doykayt. A 1976 edition of Tsukunft’s official organ, Link, outlined the movement’s ideology in seven major points. Interestingly, four of these seven points refer explicitly to Israel and the movement’s attitude toward the Jewish state. These primarily emphasize the importance of doykayt and the problem of Israel being placed at the center of Jewish life around the world. The policy paper is also critical of assimilation, and emphasizes the movement’s dedication to framing its Jewish policies around the “principles of freedom, democracy, international justice and brotherhood.”91 Tsukunft was largely a political and philosophical organization, so its activities revolved around public lectures, discussions, reading groups, and social events. Tsukunfistn met regularly on Fridays for either a discussion or to hear a speaker, often a guest from outside the Bund. Once a month the group hosted a kave ovnt (coffee evening) at the Bund’s headquarters, Waks House. They also ran camps for members at Apollo Bay, around two hundred kilometers southwest of Melbourne.92 Although these activities were in no way so extensive as those of the prewar Polish Tsukunft, and even though the group only had a fraction of the Polish Tsukunft’s membership and support, there were times when Tsukunft ran a rich cultural and intellectual program reminiscent of the old organization’s. And the newer group’s goals were broadly similar to those of its predecessors in Eastern Europe: to continue an education and immersion in Bundism, and

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to provide a pathway for youth into broader Bund activism. This continuity provided a great comfort and hope for those Bundists who had fled Poland searching for a new beginning, and those moments when Tsukunft was most active gave great validation to the Bund’s postwar attempts to ensure its survival and relevance. The relationship between Tsukunft and the Bund committee was not always simple. The 1960s and 1970s was a time of generational change within the Bund, with a group of young activists who had grown up mainly in Australia (many had immigrated at a young age) leaving their roles as SKIF leaders and taking on the work of Tsukunft. This generation was shaped by the emergence of the global New Left, which called for fundamental societal change and veered away from the traditional Marxist Left. Young Bundists were greatly influenced by this shift. The chasm created by the youth’s turning toward the New Left was deep. It became an issue raised on a committee level, with the 1967 annual report characterizing the problem as a “lack of contact between the committees of the Bund and of Tsukunft.” As New Left ideas began to take hold, tensions over policy started to boil over. The Bund committee complained that “Tsukunft did not always agree with the positions of the party and the Tsukunft committee felt that the party committee too often dictated to the Tsukunft committee.”93 Melbourne author Arnold Zable, who was raised in SKIF and was later active in Tsukunft, wrote in 1970 that “to the older generation, the ‘New Left’ often represented the ‘Old Left’ in disguise.” They feared “that all roads lead to Stalinism. They judge mainly by their European experience.” This experience of antisemitism, displacement, and physical destruction at the hands of both Nazism and Soviet Communism led to a shift in the Bund’s focus. “In my opinion,” Zable argued, “there was a greater trend in the postwar period towards emphasis on the national programme and cultural survival and the growing tendency towards assimilation today.” In the aftermath of the Holocaust, “their primary aim has been to establish themselves firmly in ‘liberal’ Western Societies.”94 The Vietnam War became an especially divisive issue, with the Bund committee supporting the Australian involvement in Vietnam, while Tsukunft opposed the war and lent moral and material support to the National Liberation Front.95 The Bund’s position on the engagement of the United States and Australia in Vietnam was one of unequivocal support. Given their fiery anticommunism, the older generation of Bundists found it natural to support the attempts of the West to curb communist expansion into the third world. A 1965 Bund resolution on the Vietnam War stated: “The Melbourne Bund Organization is of the opinion that the war currently taking place in Vietnam between the southern side and the communist north is

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a result of the general communist assault which aims to capture power in the Afro-Asian countries, who have only recently won their independence, and to establish dictatorships ruled by their Sino-Soviet masters.  .  .  . The victory of the communist side will mean the enslavement of the Vietnamese people and a further step towards the capturing new countries and ruling over new peoples.”96 Conversely, Tsukunftistn were much more likely to oppose both Australia’s involvement in Vietnam and the war itself. Zable wrote at the time that “the increasing tendency [of the younger generation] is towards support of the N.L.F as the group which, with all its faults and potential shortcomings, seems to more genuinely represent the principles of self determination and social justice.”97 Tsukunft initially did not vote in a resolution condemning the war: the July 1967 edition of Link published two opposing proposals for resolutions, neither of which received the 75 percent majority required to make them party policy.98 Nevertheless, as local historian Philip Mendes highlighted in his work on Jews in the Melbourne New Left, Tsukunft’s members generally opposed the war, and many even contributed material assistance as well as moral support for the Vietcong.

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tudes evolved through the late 1960s, and in May 1971 the youth movement adopted a firm anti–Vietnam War platform, the resolution for which was passed by at least a two-thirds majority. In the resolution, the movement condemned the presence of Australian troops as “morally indefensible and politically unfeasible,” and insisted that “all foreign armed forces should therefore be withdrawn from that country immediately.”100 This intergenerational conflict was telling. It was ominous for the Bund, trying simply to survive beyond a generation who grew up virtually in a Bundist totality in Poland.

Decline of the Melbourne Bund The 1950s marked a renaissance of Bundist activity in Melbourne. Weaknesses began to show early, though, and by the 1960s the generational shift within the community began to take its toll. One major concern was that Yiddish was spoken less among the younger generation, and English was beginning to prevail. “Yiddish is a problem in our children’s- and youthwork,” lamented the 1967 annual general report of the Bund. Because many helfer no longer had the ability to carry out their work in Yiddish, “an increasing proportion of activities are being run in English.” Clearly, the party recognized that it needed to do more to strengthen the role of Yiddish within the youth organization.101 This problem was highlighted with the shift of the SKIF journal, Chavershaft, from a monolingual Yiddish publication to

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one not only bilingual but having for major focus he English section, which contained much richer and more analytical content. A more fundamental and structural problem for the Bund, however, was the upward mobility of Melbourne Jewry. The Bund tried to maintain its Marxist ideology throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, at the same time as its leaders and its grassroots supporters were moving out of the working class and into the middle class, if not further up the socioeconomic ladder. This general shift of the community from its prewar proletarian state damaged the Bund beyond repair. Indeed, this trend toward affluence was moving swiftly by the mid-1960s and has continued into the twenty-first century. There is no denying that the Australian Jewish community has become thoroughly middle class and, by Australian standards affluent. That is not say that all Jews in the country are wealthy, but communal institutions are generously funded and they reflect the middle-class nature of the community. An indicator of the affluence of the community is that 77 percent of Jewish students attend private schools, compared to 34 percent of students in the general population.102 According to income data in the 2001 national census, as quoted by sociologist John Goldlust, the average income of those who identify as Jewish (an identification itself inherently problematic) is well above the national average ($61,000 per annum as compared with $39,000). Occupationally, Jews have increasingly come to occupy managerial and professional positions: nearly 70 percent of Australian Jewry compared to around 40 percent of the rest of the population hold such positions.103 Even by the 1960s, the upward socioeconomic shift was rapid and widespread and had a discernible impact on the Bund. Marxism’s place as a bedrock of Bundist thought was being challenged. For some younger Bundists, socialism was not only taking a backseat to Jewish cultural questions, it needed to be completely reconsidered. A couple of episodes reflect the beginning of this shift. First, as early as 1954, Beynish Burstin, son of the founder of the Melbourne Bund organization, Sender Burstin, wrote an article in Unzer Gedank arguing that Marxism was becoming less relevant, especially in the Western world where Marx had predicted proletarian revolution was most likely to take place. “All of this is no surprise,” argued Burstin, and “political and national movements are denouncing and dissociating themselves with remarkable ease from ideologies that are no longer appealing under new economic and political circumstances.” He continues: “Marx’[s] dire prognosis, that the rich will become richer and the poor poorer is today simply not true, especially in the industrialized West.  .  .  . The workers today are benefiting from greater financial security and continually improving living standards.”104 The Bund itself did not endorse this position, saying as much

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in an editorial note at the end of the article. However, the article’s significance lies in the fact that Burstin, as Sender Burstin’s son, was practically part of Melbourne Bund royalty. If the leaders’ own children were beginning to abandon Marxism, then there was little hope that the Bund could survive. A second episode that highlighted this shift away from Marxism occurred within the SKIF movement itself. This was a minor occurrence but very telling. Sometime in the 1970s (the exact year is not clear), SKIF leaders made the decision to change some lyrics of the Bundist youth anthem “Di Yunge Gvardie” (The Young Guard). There were two changes to the song: the first saw the line “We are the young guardians of the proletariat” change to “We are the young guardians, we are SKIFistn.” The second involved the line “The poor shall triumph, and the rich will be buried in the ground”: from the 1970s onward, it would be the wicked, rather than the rich, who would be “buried in the ground.” In another version of these lyrics implemented by the SKIF leaders, “the rich will be buried in the ground” became “the spoils of victory will go to the Bund.” These new lyrics show that, by the 1970s, it was no longer tenable for Bundists to talk of representing the proletariat, or even of being a proletarian party.105 (Note that these changed lyrics marked an even more dramatic shift from an earlier version of the song, in which the second verse—not a part of the Melbourne SKIF canon—proclaimed: “From childhood on we’ve known/The yoke of heavy toil/When children should play/We work to earn our bread.”106 The income shift of Australia’s Jews from the proletariat should not, however, obscure the fact that another factor in the shift away from the Bund’s traditional Marxism was indeed the influence of the New Left on Tsukunft’s young activists. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose ideas impacted the evolution of the New Left, argued that the agents of social and political change needed to be intellectuals and students rather than, as Marxists argued, the working class.107 Looking at the platform of Tsukunft, summarized in Link in 1976, there is a notable absence of Marxist language. In the seven points highlighted, only one refers directly to democratic socialism, and none of the sections make mention of the role of the working class in effecting positive social change. Rather, it is much more concerned with broader ideas of social justice typical of the New Left.108 This shift from Marxism was also reflected in the debate between the generations over Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War. This trend was symptomatic of a more extensive intergenerational conflict taking place within the Bund. In a clear example of this divergence, veteran Bundist activist and Yiddish writer Moshe Ajzenbud’s 1976 article in Tskunft’s journal Link showed both the perceptions and the expectations of older Bundistn toward the youth. He attacked the “fruitless idealism” of the New Left, which brought

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nothing but disappointment, and lamented what he, like many, saw as its creed that people over thirty years of age were not to be trusted. He criticized the “bourgeois youth” who made enemies of capitalism and the democratic regime, “even though they loved the comforts of bourgeois-democratic society.” Their negative attitude, he said, was “expressed through anti-patriotic actions (like collecting money for the Vietcong), or simply demonstrations— even just for the sake of demonstrating—as an expression of their unhappiness.”109 He saw a particular problem in this for Jewish youth, who were overwhelmingly educated and, as part of a world people, highly influenced by their surroundings. There was hope though, because “after absorbing the culture, knowledge, and language of the country in which they were born— many of them feel a need to identify still with the Jewish people.” He rejected considering Zionism and religion the only ways for Jewish youth to express their Jewishness, and said that socialism, too, was not enough (“One can be a socialist in any language”). The older generation of Bundists, he asserted, wanted the youth to immerse themselves in, and commit themselves to, Yiddish language and culture.110 Ultimately though, Yiddish could never occupy the place it had for a generation raised in a much larger and all-encompassing Yiddish-speaking society. Although it would remain the defining factor in the Jewish selfidentification of many young Jews, by the 1970s it was no longer the primary language of the young Bundists. This is clear in the linguistic composition of Tsukunft’s journal, which was primarily in English, with the Yiddish articles more often written by veteran Bundists like Ajzenbud and Bargman. By the turn of the new century, English would also be the primary language of the now-irregular Unzer Gedank. The new intergenerational dynamics were clear not only in Link’s language, however, but also in its content, which reflected the shift away from traditional Marxist thought and showed the influence of more contemporary leftist ideas. Tsukunft activist Sylvia Leber’s 1976 article, “A Jewish Feminist View,” is symptomatic of this new approach. Leber offered a highly critical appraisal of the role of women in Australian Jewish society and within Judaism, before describing her own shift away from mainstream “Jewish community standards.” She described such standards as “being dominated by anti-joy paranoia—vulgar materialism—Zionist escapism—and the attitudes against the single independent women who is always a traditional target for rumour mongers.”111 Her recommended reading included such important feminist theorists as Simon de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer, highlighting the influence of second-wave feminism and the New Left. Leber seemed to be articulating a new kind of Bundism, one that rejected the Jewish mainstream and embraced the broader society yet was

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still self-consciously Jewish: a Bundism not grounded in Marxist theory but in poststructuralist critiques of modernity. A decade earlier, Zable had also articulated the need for a new Bundism, in a 1967 article published on the seventieth anniversary of the Bund’s founding. He identified a “gulf between generations.” For the older generation, the reality of their historical experiences—their upbringing in Jewish Poland and their survival of the Holocaust—meant that they invested much more into the national and cultural survival of the Jewish people and embedded themselves into their liberal Western democracies. This, said Zable, led to “an erosion of the revolutionary temperament of their pre-war consciousness.” They now supported reform and the welfare state. The younger generation, on the other hand, were “products of a liberal democratic, affluent, post world war and post messianic environment.” Zable recognized a growing trend to political and social apathy, and he pointed out that, for a bicultural generation, Yiddish was losing its relevance.112 The Bund’s renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s ended swiftly; after these decades of prominence within Melbourne Jewish life, the organization would no longer be the antagonist it once was. It remained active but did not operate at the frenetic pace that it had during the postwar decades. This is evident in comparing the annual reports published each year in the Bulletin of the Jewish Labor Bund in Melbourne, which, by the 1980s, were noticeably emptier than previously. By this time, Bund activities revolved largely around a number of key dates in the Bundist calendar—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration on 19 April, May Day, and the anniversary of the Bund’s founding. Bundist life was no longer punctuated by regular lectures, fundraisers, celebrations, commemorations, and political engagement; the calendar became practically empty. Unzer Gedank was published more and more infrequently, with fewer pages in each edition.113 Despite the steady decline in its activities and membership, however, the Bund has remained a visible force in the life of Melbourne Jewry, and Bundists remained active participants and leaders in communal institutions: Bono Wiener, for example, was cofounder of the Jewish Holocaust Centre in 1984. Bundists remained active in community organizations like the Kadimah and the Jewish Welfare Society, and continued their support for the Labor Party, although not with the same close relationship that such figures as Wiener and Waks had established earlier. Bundists were also the driving force behind the establishment of Sholem Aleichem College, Melbourne’s Yiddish day school, in 1975. In fact, although Sholem Aleichem College was avowedly apolitical and inclusive, it operated along a broadly Bundist platform. This is not say it adopted a democratic socialist program, but it did conform to the Bundist

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notion of doykayt. The founding principal, Doris Burstin, described the school as seeking to enrich “the children’s cultural experiences in areas such as: a) Yiddish language and literature; b) Jewish history (from Genesis to the present day); c) Jewish festivals; d) Hebrew and Hebrew literature,” and the school sought to develop “the Secular Jewish National Spirit.”114 It did not seek to do this in a vacuum, however. In the true spirit of doykayt, to which most of the early school activists adhered, the school also was concerned with “preparing the children to become participating Australian citizens . . . Also the Sholem Aleichem College aims to emphasise humane values such as consideration and understanding for others and tolerance of other people’s beliefs.”115 Although the language is not overtly Bundist, the influence of the movement and its principles are clear: the striving to create a Yiddish-Jewish identity that included a strong sense of belonging within the broader society was characteristic of doykayt. Bundists remained active as teachers and committee members of the school through the 1980s and 1990s, a fact of which the waning party continued to be proud.116 The school was not the only aspect of youth work to which Bundists continued to commit their energy and resources. SKIF remained one of the most important and successful activities with which the Bund occupied itself in the 1980s and 1990s. It continued to attract and introduce new members and new families into the movement. Unfortunately for the older Bundists, there was a paradox in this continued success. That is, that although numbers remained steady, the movement’s evolution shifted it further and further away from the Bund and from the kinds of expectations Ajzenbud had highlighted in 1976. Yiddish became a symbol rather than a living language in SKIF life. In fact, the fears that the party had expressed in the 1960s about the place of Yiddish within SKIF had already, by the 1970s, materialized. It was in this decade that SKIF went from a politically engaged and actively Yiddishist movement, to what former SKIF helfer Sefra Burstin described in 1988 as “a conservative and complacent youth movement.” Apathy toward social awareness and Yiddish culture was now typical of its membership. “SKIFistn were part of the ‘me’ decade,” Burstin argued. “It was a time when people focused their thoughts on self-exploration and self-fulfilment and the rights of others seemed irrelevant and distant.”117 A further change was the focus of the movement’s leadership: “Rather than seeing their aim as one of educating children, the helfer of the late seventies aimed to make SKIF fun for the SKIFistn, because Jewish families were now sending their children to the youth movement at which the children had the most fun, rather than the one with which they agreed politically or ideologically. So SKIF focused on giving the children who attended a good time, with a minimum political

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content (which might offend parents) or too much Yiddish (which might bore the SKIFistn).”118 There is clearly a link between the trajectory of SKIF and the decline of the Bund movement as a whole. The 1980s saw more of the same for SKIF, as camps shifted from tents into dormitories and became physically much more comfortable; as the community continued its socioeconomic ascent, and the market for Jewish youth became ever more competitive, SKIF had to become more of a social group than a political and cultural movement. Michael Burstin, former head of SKIF, explained in 1988: “When we run summer camps, we have to compete with Surfers Paradise, Israel and the United States along with all the other Jewish Youth Group camps.” SKIF had become a “matter of choice rather than a matter of following previous generations into SKIF.”119 Perhaps it was this compromise that allowed SKIF to continue to flourish, but there is surely a link between this compromise and the Bund’s meager undertakings in the following decades. Apart from the continuing success of SKIF in attracting children and families, the Bund’s greatest success in the 1980s and 1990s was the establishment of the annual In One Voice festival, Melbourne Jewry’s largest communal event. The inaugural festival was held in 1988 as a concert of Jewish music and culture in Caulfield Park, by then at the geographical heart of the community. The concert was originally conceived as a way for SKIF to put its ideas about doykayt into practice. The In One Voice committee sought to celebrate Australian Jewish culture, encourage increased participation in communal life, especially among the youth, provide new forms of expression for Jewish culture, provide a forum to showcase the cultural, political, social, religious, and linguistic diversity of the community, and to increase the appreciation of all forms of Jewish culture among Australian Jewry.120 The concert was considered by the Bund to be a resounding success and a strong affirmation of the importance of a kind of doykayt that had permeated through the broader Jewish community. Organizations across the political, religious, and social spectrum participated. An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 people attended the inaugural concert in 1988, a number that by 1990 had already reached 15,000, and the sum remained steady throughout the next decade.121 A high point in the festival came in 1990 when Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke opened the event wearing a SKIF t-shirt, which thrust the festival into the national spotlight as an evening news item. Although Hawke’s appearance was clearly opportunistic, coming only a week before the 1990 federal election, it was no small achievement that the prime minister of Australia would be wearing a SKIF shirt.122 The festival could only achieve such success because of the continued attempts to resurrect some form of a Yugnt Bund-Tsukunft, which in the late

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1980s and early 1990s again saw a revival of activity, and which provided a ready-made committee to carry out the In One Voice undertaking. Apart from this festival, Yugnt Bund ran fundraising activities, published a regular newsletter, acted as an advisory committee and support group for SKIF, wrote and administered the education program for upcoming SKIF leaders, and generally acted as a link between all levels of the Bund movement.123 Yugnt Bund also sought to give former SKIFistn and SKIF leaders a space to continue involvement in the movement and an arena for political engagement and social functions.124 But the generational problems between the old guard and a generation raised primarily in the 1960s and 1970s continued to surface. The language issues remained, with the Bundists who sat on the committee still wanting the president to conduct meetings in Yiddish and to circulate Yiddish minutes of the meeting alongside the English.125 There were problems with the way younger members of the party were treated by the veterans, with one Yugnt Bund member complaining the the head of SKIF was being bullied by older Bundists.126 At the turn of the new millennium, the Bund was a greatly diminished movement. Its party organ came out sporadically—once a year, sometimes twice, and sometimes not at all. Its contents were by then almost entirely in English, having completed the transition that began in the late 1980s, when English first appeared on the pages of the then forty-year-old journal. Moshe Ben Gershon lamented the shift to English in the November 1992 edition, but called it pragmatic. Outside Israel, he wrote, “the use of Yiddish and other Jewish languages, other than in ritualistic form has become the exception rather than the rule.” Although many regretted these developments, they belonged to “nevertheless a trend that cannot be ignored, especially for a movement of Jewish ideas. Such ignorance,” Ben Gershon concluded, “can lead to isolation and the withering of the great flowering bloom of possibility for the lack of fertilisation of the Bund Idea.”127 A noticeable difference between the English and Yiddish sections of the journal was the focus of each. The English section concerned itself much more with the possible future of the Bund and Bundism and with addressing what the Bund stood for at the time. The younger Bundists then still saw a constructive role for the Bund in the English-speaking future. For instance, Henry Nusbaum wrote in 1992 that “the ideals of the Bund are still relevant. The world, even our Jewish world, is far from being perfect. Idealism, strong beliefs and rich cultural expression are required.”128 Ben Gershon wrote again in 1997 on the continuing relevance of Bundism: “No one sector of Jewish life can said to be ‘more important’ than another. Each segment represents a part of the web of our existence which is multi-faceted and multi-textured.” His message was that, although the Bund was a strong

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supporter of “Jewish existence in the State of Israel,” the Bund’s idea continued to be “relevant in defending Jewish rights irregardless of where Jews live.”129 Whereas the English section was concerned with the contemporary significance and future prospects of the Bund, the Yiddish section contained much more historical and nostalgic content. Reflections on the history of the Bund, as well as articles on certain key moments and personalities, predominate in the Yiddish section. The way the content was divided between the languages became a metaphor for the state of Yiddish and the Bund in Jewish life. Yiddish remained a daily vernacular for an older generation, while English was the lingua franca of the new Bundists, and Yiddish represented a nod to their nostalgic past. In assessing the historical fate of the Bund, former editor of the Australian Jewish News Sam Lipski argued in 2006: “Zionism and Israel won the argument. Conclusively. The Bund and doykayt lost. Overwhelmingly.”130 Clearly this is too simplistic and even ahistorical. The Melbourne Bund is a unique and instructive case study in the postwar history of the Bund and Jewish communities. Unlike that in most places where Bund movements arose during this period, the organization in Melbourne developed alongside a still-fledgling community, participated in the creation of long-term communal structures, and helped foster a unique national Jewish identity: an Australian Jewish identity. It was a participant and contributor in the world Bund movement, although it operated independently. It welcomed guests and emissaries from other countries, and it acted as an example to other Bundist organizations of what a small band of committed activists could achieve. The Melbourne Bund demonstrated resilience in a community that has been described as perhaps “the most Zionist Diaspora Jewish community,”131 and it fought hard to play a key role in communal politics and in the construction of a local Jewish identity.

6 Here-ness, There-ness, and Everywhere-ness The Bund and Israel

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 presented a huge chal-

lenge to the Bund, which had, for the first fifty years of its existence, been vehemently anti-Zionist. Its hostility to Zionism can be traced back to the very early years of both movements, which were established in 1897, and their struggle continued right through World War II, for their conceptions of how to secure the future for world—or, more specifically, European— Jewry differed radically. Rather than bring together Bundists and Zionists, the situation in Europe in the 1930s and even through the very first years of the war only served to intensify the conflict between the two movements.1 The birth of the Jewish state following the war appeared an unequivocal triumph for the Bund’s longstanding foe and presented an existential quandary for a movement that staked its future on a decentralized model of Jewish life. Bundists now had to reconsider their position toward Zionism and their relationship to the rapidly growing Palestinian Jewish community. They would have to formulate a response to the rise of Israel as a major factor in the Jewish world. For many, the initial answer was a resounding rejection of Israel. It is no surprise that, after decades of struggle against the very notion of a Jewish state, the newly reconstituted world Bund did not readily embrace the new Jewish world order. Very quickly though, Bundist soul-searching led to a major policy reversal, and in 1955, at its third world conference in Montreal, the world Bund officially endorsed Israel as a positive factor in Jewish life.2 The Bund’s postwar opposition to

Zionism, which took place against the backdrop of Zionist predominance in Jewish communities around the world and the eventual establishment

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of a Jewish state, was characterized by the question of how 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. The Bund developed a complex relationship with Israel. Heated debates took place in the Bund during the first decade following the war, with the Bund eventually coming to accept Israel as a permanent and creative force in the Jewish world. These debates took place mainly in the Bund’s journals, which became the location of the Bund’s anti-Zionism. Before the war, the Bund’s struggle against Zionism was a true battle for the hearts and minds of millions of Jews on the ground; after the war, the conflict became largely intellectual, especially with the establishment of a Jewish state, a realization of Zionism’s ultimate goal. The resolutions that local branches passed give some indication of the grassroots support that the various positions articulated by Bund leaders maintained, and also underline how Bundism very quickly transformed to accommodate Jewish statehood. Another development of importance was the small Bund organization that appeared in Israel in the early 1950s and for decades served a small community of Yiddish-speaking socialists. It was here that the movement’s anti-Zionism took on a more urgent character, as Bundists were engaged in a daily battle with Zionism on the ground. The rise of the Israeli Bund had an impact on the world Bund’s prompt policy reversal on the question of Israel in the 1950s. My discussion of the Israeli Bund focuses only on the 1950s: it was during these years that the organization forced a serious policy reappraisal on behalf of the world movement, and the movement reached its peak in the latter part of that decade, after a number of waves of Eastern European refugees had bolstered its ranks. (When the Israeli Bund unsuccessfully ran in the Knesset elections, the party came to the realization that political influence was too great a hill for Bundists to climb in a sociopolitical landscape totally dominated by Zionism. Thereafter began the slow decline of the Israeli party, as it shifted to cultural work and struggled to transmit a commitment to Yiddish culture and socialism to a new, Israeli-born generation.) 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. Nowhere were these tensions more acute than within Israel itself, where local Bund activists immersed themselves in local political and cultural life.

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Resuming Hostilities Just as the Holocaust served to strengthen the Bundists’ commitment to doykayt and socialism as the only viable option for Jewish continuity, so too did it sharpen the Bund’s enmity against Zionism. In early 1944, before the Allies’ victory in Europe and before the extent of the Nazi destruction had become clear, Emanuel Nowogrodski, secretary of the American Representation of the Polish Bund, responded to an anti-Bundist article by journalist Shloyme Grodzenski in the New York Labor Zionist newspaper Yidishe Kemfer (Jewish Fighters). Grodzenski, a Labor Zionist activist who had been in New York for a number of decades, attacked the Bund on three fronts.3 First, he argued that the party should acknowledge the achievements of the socialists in Palestine as other, non-Jewish socialist organizations had; second, he argued that it had so far failed to provide a “rational answer to the worth and common sense of Jewish distinctness”; third, he asked why the Bund did not “argue against the essence of Zionism—that a normal national life is possible only where the nation is concentrated in its own territorial domain.”4 Nowogrodski’s response is a telling summary of the Bund’s position toward Zionism. To Grodzenski’s charge that the Bund needed to give credit to the achievements of the socialist movement in Palestine, Nowogrodski responded that such an acknowledgment was unnecessary. Of course Bundists were pleased that the Jewish working class in Palestine was well organized, but, he said, this bore little relevance to the Bund’s position toward Zionism. He also dismissed the endorsements of other socialist parties as merely patronizing, noting that they were only impressed because they had not expected that Jews could organize so successfully. 5 Nowogrodski’s answer is very telling in the way it related to Zionism and to the future State of Israel; it would set the tone for the postwar Bundist approach to the question of Jewish statehood. His seemingly flippant comment is indicative of how the Bund viewed Zionism and the Jewish community in Palestine as separate entities; while it continued to be a vocal opponent against the former, it expressed tentative support and even grudging respect for the Yishuv. This support for the local community would be a consistent feature of Bundist discourse surrounding Israel in the following decade. To Grodzenski’s second charge, that the Bund had given no “rational response to the worth of Jewish singularity [yidishe eygnart],” Nowogrodski questioned the value of any peoples’ singularity. He challenged Grodzenski to: “Give me a rational answer about the common sense and worth of German singularity, with or without its latest Hitlerist variation; or give me

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a rational answer to the common sense and worth of Russian singularity with or without its latest Stalinist variation. I can even lower the stakes a little and be satisfied with a rational answer about the common sense and worth of Chinese singularity, Polish, Czech, Italian and every other people.” 6 Each nation had its own different problems and issues, argued Nowogrodski, but ultimately it was the possibility of living among and interacting with other peoples (felker tsuzamenlebn) that had ensured Jewish survival over thousands of years, when many other nations with their own territory had risen and fallen. On Grodzenski’s third point, that Jewish life was only possible in a Jewish state, Nowogrodski conceded the idea that Jewish cultural production would be most effective in places where Jews were territorially concentrated. “Just as trees need to grow in one place so that they can create a forest,” he argued, “so too do people need to be concentrated in a set place, in order to live a ‘normal national life.’”7 This territory, however, need not “belong” to the Jewish people. Two thousand years of the Jewish diaspora proved, for Nowogrodski, that Jewish cultural life benefited most, and that Jews’ survival best relied upon its status as a world people, when scattered around all parts of the globe as concentrated communities. He wrote: “A large part of the old Jewish religious culture and the entire modern Jewish culture, Jewish literature and Jewish poetry, the forms of Jewish communal activity and Jewish science/knowledge, bloomed and grew—in Zionist terminology—‘away from home,’ in countries where Jews lived in larger, more concentrated, cohesive mass communities.”8 Rather than attempting to solve Jewish problems through “changing the geographic map,” the real task for Jewish leaders was to “change the living circumstances for humanity, in the middle of which Jews live.” Nowogrodski’s shift to the offensive ushered in a long and sustained attack on Zionism in the pages of the Bundist press over the coming years, an attack that only intensified as the State of Israel became more than a pipe dream. Leyvik Hodes, a Bundist leader and writer in interwar Poland who had escaped that country at the outbreak of the war, became one of the most vocal critics of Zionism in Unzer Tsayt during the second half of the 1940s.9 Like many Bund leaders of the interwar period, Hodes divided his time and energy among his roles as teacher, speaker, political leader, union activist, and school principal. Committed to children’s socialist education, Hodes was part of the small group of party activists that set up the SKIF. When SKIF expanded to incorporate thousands of children in dozens of cities around Poland, Hodes became secretary of its central organizing committee. He was also the principle theorist of Bundist youth education.10 Hodes was a prolific Bundist journalist until he fell ill in the late 1940s; his work covered a gamut

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of issues, and he wrote a series of articles, in the years after the war, that took aim at Zionist aspirations to establish a Jewish state, that vehemently opposed the Zionist policy of “ingathering of exiles,” and that defended the ongoing importance of doykayt and the diaspora in the resurrection and future survival of world Jewry. Two consecutive articles in June and July of 1945, which addressed the writings of Zionist demographer Jacob Lestschinsky, underscore Hodes’s contempt for the Zionist project. Lestschinsky had been a territorialist before the war, but by the late 1930s had become entangled in Labor Zionist circles. He was also a major critic of the Bund and, after the Holocaust, came to view the very notion of a Jewish diaspora as dangerous to Jewish continuity.11 Hodes challenged Lestschinsky’s analysis of Jewish continuity, which said that there was no hope for the Jews to survive in a diaspora, that another Holocaust lurked around the corner, that world Jewry was already morally and spiritually bankrupt, that exile was a plague for the Jewish people, and that the only way to escape this plague was through establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Hodes was skeptical about the prospect of securing a Jewish future in a place where Jews had been engaged in decades of hostility with little prospect of friendly relations in the foreseeable future.12 He also questioned how many of the world’s Jews actually desired to move to and build the new Jewish state rather than return to their old homes or make new homes in prosperous and democratic Western countries such as the United States.13 At the beginning of 1947, when a Jewish state was not yet imminent and the Jewish population in Palestine was engaged in a guerrilla war with the British, Hodes continued his attack on the Zionist movement in a report on the twenty-second congress of the Zionist movement in Basel. He reflected on what he called the “hopelessness” and “despair” of the Zionists, in particular the American Zionists, arguing that there was a divergence between the two major delegations, the American and the Palestinian, partly because the communities that the two delegations represented had for so long insulated themselves from the tragedy taking place in Europe. Hodes further charged the movement in the United States with willfully ignoring the Holocaust, and argued that their despair, therefore, did not originate from the realization of the extent of the destruction during the previous years. “The Zionists have always shown the greatest skill at extracting the drunken hope of Zionist redemption from the deepest abyss of Jewish grief,” he wrote. According to Hodes, “Zionism is grounded in the belief that the path to a Jewish state leads through fire and flames, destruction and mass murder, and, looking frozen with a loving gaze to the contours of the Jewish state, they remain blind and deaf to reality’s valley of lament.”14 The Zionists’ despair came, according to Hodes, from a lack of hope at their prospects of

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establishing a Jewish state. Their congress had made no major decisions and was marred by ambiguity. The congress’s position on violence, on negotiation with the British, on the composition of its leadership remained unclear and revealed an organization in shambles. Later in 1947, in a reflection on the fiftieth anniversary of both the Bund and political Zionism, Hodes took the opportunity to again take aim at the Zionists. By now the Bund’s unofficial spokesperson on the question of Zionism, Hodes recognized that both movements grew out of similar circumstances; they were each modern, secular, and challenging of those Jews whose conception of yiddishkayt (Jewishness) was based solely on religion. Bundism and Zionism were, he said, the two most important of four trends in Jewish life (others being assimilation and Orthodoxy) that sought to improve and adapt the lives of Jews in a rapidly modernizing world. After the Holocaust, Hodes conceded, “on the surface, the sum total is as follows: good for the Orthodox, good for assimilation, magnificent for Zionism, and not good for the Bund.” The call for a return to tradition was widespread, and some of the major creative centers of Jewish secular life had been destroyed. Equally, assimilation was becoming more attractive, as people sought to escape the differences that they saw as a major obstacle to their security and prosperity; this was manifested especially in the way many European Jews were abandoning the Yiddish language.15 According to Hodes, it was Zionism that had benefited the most from the Holocaust. The Jewish community had grown to over six hundred thousand, with many Jews in the DP camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy clamoring to emigrate to Palestine. Organizations that had previously been neutral or opposed to Zionism had come to support the goal of a Jewish state. The establishment of the Jewish state was looking likely, following the British handover of the task of solving the question of custodianship of Palestine to the United Nations.16 To say, though, that this all amounted to a victory for Zionism would be fatuous. “A dance of triumph,” Hodes wrote, “would be a macabre dance on top of graves. In reality, Zionism was not victorious. Hitler won, and the Zionist movement are merely benefiting from his victory.”17 For Hodes, although the Bund was severely weakened by the war, it was a fallacy to talk in terms of winners and losers: “All parts of the Jewish people came out of the war as losers.”18 Hodes used this point to highlight that the struggle in the Jewish world had not changed. He contrasted the fundamental difference between Bundism and Zionism: “The idea of the Bund is a deeper belief in people [Di ideye fun Bund iz tifer gloybn in mentshn].” Although this belief was not popular in the wake of such inhumanity, Hodes believed that it was critical to maintain the idea that, without “healing humanity, there is no healing for the Jews.” Zionism, in contrast, was based on the mistrust

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of humankind: “A victory for the Zionist idea is a victory for a lack of faith in people, and that is a complete victory for hopelessness.”19 The Bund had always fought, and would continue to fight, “for continuity, for creative national life, and for doykayt.” The way to ensure all these results was not through perpetuating “helpless wandering” or by continuing to uproot, but through “building and re-building.”

Partition and the Establishment of Israel With the momentum for a Jewish state steadily growing throughout 1947 and early 1948, Hodes’s thunderous attacks against the very notion of Jewish statehood subsided, as Bundists began to accept that such statehood was becoming an increasingly likely prospect. These writers began to focus instead on the complexion of the future state. They argued that, if there was going to be a country, it did not need to be built on Zionist principles, which would diminish Jewish culture both within and outside Palestine and would lead to perpetual war with the surrounding Arab peoples. There was initial reluctance, with the establishment of the International Jewish Labor Bund at this time, to take an official line on the issue of Palestine itself, which the first world conference left open to local organizations and especially to the Bundists in Palestine.20 However, with the proposal of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in late 1947, the Bundists’ response shifted largely from the theoretical question of organizing Jewish life to more focused discussion of the likelihood of a long and costly war with the local Arab population. The question of Jewish security and survival was no longer a matter that would be settled in the long term. There was now an immediate threat to a large population of Jews as a result of the new developments, and this threat would be reflected in the rhetorical shift. A resolution opposing the establishment of a Jewish state was passed by the Bund Organization in New York in late 1947 by an overwhelming majority and ratified at the second world conference in late 1948. “The Palestine question can only be solved on a basis of democracy and justice,” the resolution stated. Freedom and equal rights for all the inhabitants of the land was the only solution. A government of the minority (Jews) over the majority (Arabs) was not an option, and cooperation was the key to ensuring security for Jews in Palestine; therefore, Zionist goals of a separate Jewish state needed to be abandoned. The resolution called for independence of Palestine, with recognition of the local Jewish population as equally invested stakeholders in governing the country. A Jewish state could not be the solution to global Jewish problems or even for Palestinian Jews. It

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could only lead to perpetual war with the local Arab population and the surrounding Arab states.21 Following the resolution, a discussion in the January–February 1948 edition of Unzer Tsayt was dedicated to formulating a position surrounding these new developments, underlining the breadth of debate on the issue, and highlighting that, although the resolution had passed with a majority, there was far from a uniform approach within Bundist ranks to the question of a Jewish state. Shloyme Mendelson, a surviving member of the Polish Bund’s central committee, and a kind of spiritual leader inside the movement, led this discussion, dismissing the Zionist notion that saw the “diaspora Jew [goles yid] as a dying and degenerate being—spiritually, nationally and morally.” The basis of Zionism, he argued, was the national impotence of diaspora Jewry, which led to Zionists’ call for the ingathering of exiles, and to their claim that “one Jew by the Jordan [River] has more worth than fifty Jews by the Vistula [River].”22 Mendelson expressed his concern that a Jewish state would make no Jews safer, least of all those in the midst of a looming war with their neighbors. The major question for the Bund to address, then, was, what sort of relations would the organization maintain with the Yishuv. He recognized the importance of the Yishuv by virtue of its numbers and its well-organized structures; however, the development of a Hebrew culture that totally rejected Yiddish and formulated itself against “diaspora culture” was of grave concern for Jews around the world. The real issue, then, was not “our relationship to the Yishuv, but the Yishuv’s relationship to us,” on whom it materially relied. The only answer was for Palestinian Jews not to see themselves apart from or above world Jewry, but as an organic part of a global Jewish community.23 Mendelson, who had been elected to the Warsaw City Council in 1938, was considered by his colleagues an inspiring orator and a prolific writer. He was a giant in the movement, who died from a heart attack in Los Angeles in February 1948. His article on Jewish statehood would be his last. Mendelson’s memorial service in Los Angeles was attended by over five hundred people, and thousands attended his funeral in New York City, demonstrating how popular and influential a figure he was in the movement.24 Emanuel Scherer took Mendelson’s argument further, particularly with regard to the pending war with the Palestinian Arabs. Scherer was also one of the most staunchly anti-Zionist spokespeople in the movement.25 In this immediate postwar period, his views not only reflected, but steered the party’s official position. In a discussion published alongside Mendelson’s critique, Scherer opened with the observation that, although the Zionists claimed that the UN’s decision was legitimized through its approval by a majority of the world’s nations, the fact that Zionist leaders had earlier

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declared that they would only accept a decision that supported their goals made the global support null and void.26 The main thrust of Scherer’s argument, though, in line with the New York Bund’s resolution passed a few months earlier, was that the price of establishing a Jewish state was too high. First, it would lead to a perpetual war with the local and surrounding Arab peoples: “Redemption does not come cheaply, and countries are always built with fire and swords.”27 Second, it would give the Soviet Union, which previously had no influence on the question or in the region, a say in the destiny of a large Jewish community. This was especially concerning for Bundists, given their insistence that the solution to the conflict would only be found through democracy. At least when Palestine was ruled by the British Mandate, the influence of Western democratic countries had been primary. Now, not only did the Soviet Union have a say in the decision, they had the power to veto any decision with which they disagreed. Scherer lambasted the Zionist movement, saying that, “for them, a Jewish state is worth any price: war, permanent conflict with the Arabs; harnessing Jewish politics for different bandwagons . . . [or] sacrificing the interests of the goles; nothing is too dear in achieving a Jewish state.”28 Reiterating the resolution passed by the New York Bund several months earlier, Scherer offered another way forward in solving the conflict. He said that, although recent events had fueled nationalism and a retreat from the principles of internationalism, it would be senseless to seek so-called “practical” solutions for the present that would sow the seeds for conflict in the future. What was needed was a solution for the present and the future. “Only in our minds can we separate the future from the present,” he wrote; “In real life, the future grows from the present and past.”29 For Scherer, it was self-evident that a regression to nationalism would ensure the future growth of nationalism. The Bund’s answer to the crisis—consistent with its half century of campaigning for national-cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe—was the establishment of a federative democratic state, which would include territorial and cultural autonomy for the inhabitants of the region. Although hostility to a Jewish state was the dominant tendency within the Bund, there was also support for the UN Partition Plan and a Jewish state in Palestine. Pinchas Shvartz, who had been a journalist in the interwar Bundist press and a member of the central committee of Tsukunft for over a decade, was a prominent voice in this opposition. Only months earlier, Shvartz, by then executive secretary of both the World Congress for Yiddish Culture and YIVO, had expressed his opposition to establishing a Jewish state.30 But in a spectacular about-face, he now claimed that changed circumstances meant that the Bund, whose approach in the context of interwar

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Poland remained justified, needed to revise its position vis-à-vis Zionism.31 Shvartz argued that, during the Holocaust, any class distinctions between Jews had been shattered, and that, in the wake of such a tragedy, any such categorization was irrelevant. Jewishness trumped any other form of identification. Jews, Shvartz pleaded, must come together in this time, because if Bundists waited for socialism, they might not be able to avert another catastrophe. It was time for a practical solution, not to revive the now irrelevant prewar conflict between the Bund and Zionism. The situation, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews in Palestine stood on the brink of total war, necessitated a united Jewish response, and this included an official endorsement of statehood from the Bund. All the Bundists’ proposals so far, for a federation with protections enshrined in the constitution, would come to naught if not accepted by the Arabs. And, as Shvartz saw it, a lack of progressive forces on the Arab side meant that they were enemies of the Jews and were not be trusted to follow such an arrangement.32 With the proclamation of the State of Israel in May of that year, the Bund’s official position remained the same. In the middle of June, the executive of the World Coordinating Committee assembled once again in Brussels, where it passed a resolution reiterating its previous positions on the solution to the situation in Israel. The resolution condemned the powerful Zionist propaganda, which, it argued, took advantage of the desperation of Jews and fostered a “psychosis of Zionist-Messianic illusions.”33 The resolution then turned to the precarious situation of the Jewish population of Palestine, reaffirming its skepticism about the establishment of Israel: “The Jewish community is more important than the Jewish state. The interests of the community are in peace, but the path to a state is war.”34 It condemned the “growing aggressive nationalism on both sides,” and called for “democratic understanding between the Jewish and Arab peoples.” It argued that a democratic state that guaranteed the natural rights and freedoms for all its citizens needed to be implemented, and should, like any democratic nation, open its gates to the uprooted Jews of Europe. The resolution concluded by restating its position that two thousand years of Jewish history meant the Jews were a world people. It stated: “We cannot turn the wheel of history back. The Jewish people, spread around the whole world, can further exist and best develop its national-creative qualities under conditions of freedom, equality, economic security, and tolerance.”35 By October, Bund organizations and groups in the United States, France, Belgium, England, Australia, Mexico, and Uruguay, as well as in the DP camps of Germany, Austria and Italy, had passed the resolution. Of those organizations that had reported on their decision, only the Argentine Bund remained divided.36

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The Debate Sharpens The second world conference of the Bund in New York, at the beginning of October, 1948, saw the intensification of the debate, with a vocal opposition following the earlier lead of Pinchas Shvartz and making its presence known. A similar resolution to the earlier one was passed with a majority of thirty-nine out of sixty-one delegates; ten delegates voted against the resolution and passed a minority resolution; and three delegates abstained. Although by a significant majority, the passage of the resolution was by no means unanimous or simple. There was notable dissent and a lively debate, culminating in the publishing of the minority resolution alongside that of the majority. The minority resolution declared its support for the Jewish state, while retaining its opposition to Zionism. It acknowledged the rapid growth of the Jewish community in Palestine in the years following the war, as well as the growing importance of Israel in global Jewish affairs. The resolution’s authors laid the blame for the increased violence in the area at the hands of the British colonial rulers, whom they accused of supporting Palestinian Arabs with funding, weapons, and military training. Because of this collaboration, the Zionists in Palestine had no choice but to declare a state and fight a defensive war against their neighbors. Finally, the resolution called for political and cultural rapprochement between Israeli Jews and Jews around the world, without the elevation of the Zionist agenda of ingathering all Jews to Israel, and without mobilizing all Jewish resources and energy in the service of the Jewish state.37 Although the general consensus about Zionism—that it could never be a solution for Jewish problems—continued unanimous, the matter of how the Bund should react and relate to the newly established and still unstable State of Israel was much more tenuous, and with two resolutions on the table, it occupied the main part of the session that had been dedicated to discussing general Jewish matters.38 The conference discussion was foreshadowed by an exchange in Unzer Tsayt, in which both the majority and minority positions were delineated. Representing the dominant view was Lucjan Blit, who settled in England after the war, and the stalwart of the anti-Zionist majority, Emanuel Scherer. Blit raised seriously, for the first time in the Bund’s debate over Israel, the question of how diaspora Jews’ relationship to Israel would affect their standing in their home countries. He argued that there was a major difference between “community movements and states, governments.” The latter, he argued, were part of a system of global governance. The issue of whether or not to recognize Israel lay with states, and not with political and social movements such as the Bund.

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The key question for the Bund, therefore, he said, was not one of recognition, but of how to relate to the new state. The first problem with a relationship between Jews and Israel—especially if predicated on Zionist terms—was that diaspora Jews would have little actual influence over the direction of Israel: should Jewish socialists “recognize their duty to give up political leadership to an extreme Jewish nationalism, governing from Tel-Aviv?”39 Blit objected to a relationship of deference without democratic structures in place. The bigger issue for him though, was that the Zionist solution would create split loyalties for the majority of Jews who were citizens of other countries. For example, should an American Jew’s primary duty be to Israel because it is a Jewish state, or to America? And in Blit’s eyes, it would not be difficult to imagine that Israel’s interests would often clash with those of America, England, or any other country Jews called home. Such clashes would be impossible to avoid given geopolitical realities and the fledgling state’s ambition to grow in stature and influence. “What would happen,” asked Blit, “if, in today’s stormy time, Israel joined the AngloSaxon bloc? Would Jews in Russia and Poland support its policies and defend it when [to do so] would put them in danger?”40 Accepting Israel as world Jewry’s spokesperson would mean the end of Jewish socialism, because the belief in a belligerent nationalism was incompatible with the internationalism crucial to socialism. The overarching reality for Blit in 1948, however, was that 94 percent of the Jews in the world lived outside Palestine, and the majority of those had no great desire to leave their homes to participate in building Jewish statehood: this was an “important, practical-political argument,” in support of the Bund’s majority resolution. Yosef Brumberg and Yankev Pat put the case for the minority position. They argued that the Bund needed to embrace the newly established state, especially as it was in the midst of a bloody and dangerous war. Brumberg, for his part, was exasperated that the Bund reaffirmed its opposition to the Jewish state, in light of new developments. Given his background, it is not surprising that he was in the pro-Israel minority. As a young law student at the Vilna University, he was found guilty of treason for his social and political activities, and to avoid imprisonment he fled in 1924 to Palestine, where he remained for a number of years. Brumberg was a regular correspondent to the party’s Warsaw daily newspaper, and became somewhat of an expert on Zionism and the Yishuv.41 At the conference, he fully endorsed the minority resolution, which claimed that the state was the only way to secure the Yishuv and that the only other option would have been a brutal military dictatorship. The simple truth lay in the minority resolution: that the Jews could only defend themselves through “creating the necessary apparatuses, strength, and authority of a state.”42 He also expressed his mistrust of the

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local Arab leadership and of the possibilities for a peaceful federation. Finally, he argued that to remain true to the Bundist principle of doykayt, the party would have to foster a positive and productive relationship with Israel, whose existence and potential had become a fact beyond dispute. “With a fight ‘against,’ we cannot achieve positive results,” he wrote. “We therefore need first-of-all to carry out the struggle for the spread of positive values, of positions that build, of programs that create.”43 Pat was by then no longer an active member of the Bund. He had left the movement believing that it no longer had any relevance in the postwar context, although, in the interwar period, he had been crucial in the development of secular Yiddish education and the SKIF.44 Pat supported the minority position. Like Shvartz, he had traveled to Palestine in the 1920s, and his attitude toward the Yishuv was also heavily shaped by that experience.45 He was adamant that he did not oppose or support the majority resolution, because in essence “it was absurd.” It was not based in reality, and was certainly not Bundist in style. It did not reflect the ideas of the great Bund luminaries, who put great emphasis on yiddishkayt. Pat ridiculed it as “a hastily mashed kharoyses from bitter herbs and almonds.”46 A new resolution, he wrote, needed to be written by those opposing Jewish statehood. In contrast, he broadly agreed with the terms of the minority resolution, which “accepted the fact that the State of Israel was necessary and positive; it welcomed the Jews of the State of Israel into the family of the Jews outside Israel.” This resolution also opened the possibilities for socialist influence in Israel, and, most of all, it was guided by logic.47 Pat also pointed out that all other Jewish labor organizations and most socialist governments had publicly supported the fledgling state, with the Bund putting itself at odds with the rest of the workers’ movement. “Should we have acted differently?” Pat asked. “Acted against the Jewish workers in the State of Israel, against the socialist governments in different countries, against even the Bundists in the State of Israel? Why?” By rejecting the State of Israel, the Bund would only isolate itself from the Jewish and socialist worlds. “We can only reasonably see the two resolutions,” Pat concluded, “in the reflection of reality and not of conceited trope.”48 Scherer, who was by this time the leading figure in the Bund and a spokesperson for the World Coordinating Committee, as usual had the last word on the issue, reiterating the party’s opposition to Zionism and the establishment of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. In a lengthy response to Pat and Brumberg, Scherer dismissed their arguments as based on “inaccuracy, half-truths, or just manipulated facts,” and painstakingly deconstructed their claims, emphasizing that the Bund’s struggle against Zionism was still as necessary as it had been before the founding of Israel and before the Holocaust.49 He stressed that “Zionism is a Jewish state, [and]

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a Jewish state is Zionism.”50 Therefore, if Zionism remained the Bund’s natural enemy, the issue of a Jewish state was still an open question. “It is not the existence of a Jewish state,” Scherer concluded, “but our evaluation of it, our relationship to it that can liquidate the very essence and core of the Bund and Bundism.”51 By the time the conference took place and the debate finally moved beyond the pages of the Bundist journals, the result, a resounding condemnation of the establishment of Israel, was virtually a foregone conclusion, given the overwhelming support for the majority resolution by local Bund organizations. The discussion in the September issue of Unzer Tsayt did, however, precipitate a fiery debate at the world conference. The session on Jewish world affairs, which in the end was dominated by the question of Israel, opened with speeches from Liebman Hersch, Bundist writer Khayim Shloyme Kazdan, and French Bund leader Fayvel Shrager. Hersch and Shrager both spoke in favor of the minority resolution, while Kazdan voiced his concerns that the Zionists wanted to “build Israel on our shoulders.” He was also wary about the “totalitarian Hebraism” that ruled the Yishuv.52 Hersch reiterated the major points that Pat and Brumberg had made earlier. “I do not want to be ambivalent towards Palestine,” he said, adding that there were positive outcomes from the establishment of Israel that needed to be taken into account; for example, the Jewish people would now be represented in the United Nations. He emphasized, however, that everyone agreed on the most important point—that Zionism and the Jewish state could not solve the problems of world Jewry.53 Shrager also gave a speech supporting the minority resolution, saying that any criticism that its supporters were “proZionist” was false.54 He repeated the argument that, for the Yishuv, there was no other option to ensure security but by declaring a state. Such a state had another positive impact: there was now a place for the displaced Jews of Europe to settle. Although the solution was only “palliative,” he added, those who supported the minority position did so because their sympathy lay with the embattled Jews in their struggle against the Arab aggressors.55 The discussion that followed reflected the relative support for each resolution, with only a handful of those involved speaking out in favor of the minority, and with heavyweights pushing from both sides. Moyshe Kligsberg, active in YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute) and the New York Bund, argued that the question should not occupy a large role in the overall work of the American Bund, while Leon Oler, member of the Bund’s central committee, claimed that no resolution was necessary as the State of Israel was not a new problem, but a new stage of an old conflict. Like Kligsberg, Oler also emphasized the importance of Bundists focusing their energy on strengthening local activities.56 Many of the movement’s leading writers and

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activists were zealous in their attacks on Israel. Y. Y. Trunk urged Bundists not to abandon their universalist ideals for the narrow possibilities that Israel offered. Melbourne Bund leader Jacob Waks took the Zionists to task for their role in the sharpening of Arab nationalism, and claimed that the major reason that democratic countries supported Israel was that they did not want an influx of Jewish refugees from Europe. Even John Mill, a founding member of the Bund and by now a party elder, accused the minority of being “pro-Zionist.” In his eyes, there was “no relationship” between the Zionist struggle for a Jewish state and the Bund’s goals.57 Only Hersch and Shvartz spoke out in favor of the minority resolution. Given the broad support from Bundist organizations around the world for earlier motions, in the months leading up to the conference, the result seemed a foregone conclusion, and the majority statement passed comfortably by a nearly two-thirds majority. This would be the Bund’s official position—until the next world conference in 1955 embraced Israel and its potential to play a positive role in ensuring the future of world Jewry.

Bundist Intellectual Soul-Searching As Israel consolidated, Bundist intellectuals embarked on a soul-searching mission, which was reflected especially in the writings of Yehiel Yeshaya Trunk and Liebman Hersch. These two writers approached the question of Israel rather differently—Trunk remained a vehement opponent of the state, while Hersch saw the potential that a Jewish state could offer. With Israel strengthening and developing, the discussion turned to an historical evaluation of the histories of the Bund and Zionism, and how these histories interacted and diverged. From February to May of 1949, Trunk, a member of the majority on the Israel question, wrote a series of introspective articles examining the roots of this conflict. Trunk was a literary critic and novelist who had survived the war in the United States, where he was one of the first to recognize that the Jewish world was irreparably damaged. The overarching thesis in his articles was that people had for too long looked at the Bund–Zionist conflict in a vacuum, and that the histories of the Zionist and Bund movements were grounded in millennia of Jewish history. He identified an ongoing dichotomy in Jewish history between the movement toward “concentration”—which sought to secure Jewish continuity through concentrating Jews—and the movement toward “expansion”—which saw greater security for the Jews as a “world people.” These “cardinal yearnings” were antitheses, and were represented in the modern era by Zionism and Bundism. The two streams went back to ancient times, when Jews in Palestine were surrounded by far

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more powerful forces. Trunk wrote of how the striving for expansion arose in this period: “In their night of need, under skies that thundered and darkened around them in a wild storm, Jews saw a vision [emphasis in original] of a global existence that was absolutely independent of the strength of armies and of the bloody rattle of weapons. If Jews were too weak to take arms against the great powers that sought to destroy them, for the first time in their history, they prioritized spiritual power that would change the world.”58 The Bund was thus part of a long tradition of ancient prophets and pioneers. It was the “modern form of the ancient Jewish world expansion motif that so fruitfully functioned throughout Jewish history and gave Jews their global spiritual meaning.”59 This was in stark contrast to its antithesis, represented by Zionism, which was “a game with fire, that would, in the end, make Jewish survival nothing but dust in the wind.”60 Trunk argued that the establishment of Israel would finally show the limited possibilities of Zionism to ensure Jewish survival; the concentration theory served, in this case, only the Jews within the borders of the Jewish state and offered little to Jews outside Israel, where the majority would remain.61 For Trunk, the two “conceptions of survival” were a central motif throughout Jewish history and would continue so in the future. Even though the Bund had seen itself as the victor in the period before the Holocaust, the concentration notion was always simmering: “Psychic historical processes like Zionism do not liquidate themselves so easily.” Trunk believed that the new era in which Jews had entered since the destruction of European Jewry would see America supersede Europe as the “center of gravity” in Jewish history. His outlook, which placed the current conflict in a broader context of Jewish history, allowed for the possibility that, even though the situation for the Bund looked bleak with the recent establishment of Israel and Zionism’s ever-growing support, Bundists could expect that in the future, and perhaps in the near future, doykayt would again become a dominant governing principle in Jewish life. Hersch, who still led the minority with regard to the Israel question, offered at this time a bridge between doykayt and Israel. Hersch was a demographer at the University of Geneva, where he specialized in Jewish migration. For a number of years, he had been a supporter of the Yishuv and accepting of Jewish statehood. This support can be traced to his 1947 visit to Palestine, in which he was taken by the country’s beauty, by its sense of dynamism and perpetual motion, by the modern technology that was driving industry in “Jewish Palestine,” and by the social and political institutions that had been built over a number of decades. He recognized that the Yishuv was built “on a volcano” of Arab hostility that could erupt at any time, yet he was filled with wonder at its achievements.62 As a result, he both accepted

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the idea of the Jewish state and not only led the minority, but provided the impetus for the soul-searching that would eventually lead to the Bund’s position toward Israel shifting radically. Like Trunk, Hersch undertook the question of the historical basis of the conflict between the Bund and Zionism. He had previously examined the idea of Jewish statehood in its varying forms throughout history, concluding that Jewish autonomy was important and necessary and would take different forms in varying times and spaces, including a state. He warned, however, against establishing a state not based on social democratic principles and the rule of justice.63 One of Hersch’s most important works on the topic was a two-part article in 1949, “Our Historical Dispute with Zionism,” in which he discussed how the conflict had changed since the Holocaust. He outlined eight areas of disagreement between the two camps in the prewar period, including their social bases, political strategy, attitude toward Yiddish, and emphases on local Jewish life, as well as the Zionists’ nationalist character. After the war, however, he noted, circumstances had changed so that the essence of the conflict was also different. Israel was a reality; thus, older struggles for supremacy on the Jewish struggle were superseded by contemporary struggles about what role Israel would play in the Jewish world, and how Jews in Western countries would foster their own local communities and engage with a Jewish state.64 The core of the conflict was now the question of “here or there.” The major difference between the Bund and Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel was that “they [Zionists] want only there, and we want here and there” [Zey viln nor dortn, un mir viln do un dortn].” The Zionists fought for the “negation of exile” and wanted to focus all Jewish resources and energy into building the Jewish state at the expense of the many dispersed Jewish communities. Bundists, on the other hand, fought for their survival and continuity everywhere, including in Israel.65 “For them,” Hersch argued, “the essence of all essences is the land. That is their pathos, their love. . . . For us, the essence of all essences is the people. That is our pathos, our love. For them, the essence is the land of Israel [Eretz Yisroel]; for us—the people of Israel [dos Folk Yisroel—all emphases in original].”66 Hersch deconstructed the Bund’s official position toward Israel, highlighting the Bund’s five main justifications for its continuing opposition, including Israel’s attitude toward Yiddish, its birth in war and its basis in nationalism, and finally, the Bund’s view that Jews, as a dispersed people, were not a “people like all other peoples.”67 Despite all this, Hersch was adamant, the Bund “must not be Israel’s enemy.” It remained in Bundists’ interests that “the state should have more solid foundations, should be happier, freer, more just, more socialist.” The Bund around the world still had a role

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to play as a friend of Israel, criticizing the state as a friend does. It needed to be not Israel’s adversary but “her majesty’s loyal opposition.”68 It could do this without betraying its principles or acquiescing to Zionism. Despite Hersch’s attempts at soul-searching and bringing about broad change within the movement, the Bund’s ambivalence toward Israel continued. Immediately, the editorial collective of Unzer Tsayt published a long rebuttal, in which it took issue with Hersch’s definition of nationalism, his comments that objectivity was difficult for those reared in the interwar Bund, and his five “justifications” for the Bund’s attitude to Israel.69 Most important, the editors’ rebuttal argued that there was no such Jewish duality as “here and there,” only one singular “here.” Although built on the notion of Jewish unity, Hersch’s conception remained a dualistic and irreconcilable paradox, they said; although Hersch tried to construct it as a border between the Bund and Zionism, it did nothing but blur the lines. The worst contradiction of all was that “deciding to create a symmetry [glaykhgevikht] between ‘here-and-there’ fed the consciousness of ‘there-ness’ [dortikayt], which has today spread enough through Jewish life ‘here.’” 70 With all the discussion about an “own state,” the editors put the question to Hersch, “whose ‘own state’ [vemens eygene melukhe] is the State of Israel; of the whole Jewish people, or just of the Jews ‘there’ [di dortike yidn]; or, of the local Jews and the local Arabs?” If the state belonged to the entire Jewish people, they argued, then Hersch’s whole “here-and-there” formula became meaningless, because the Jewish people would cease to be a world people and become a “state-people” [melukhe folk]. The editors’ response concluded: “Everywhere is one ‘here’; one equal ‘here’ of the Jewish people, with equal rights and duties to their people and to the world [emphases in original].”71 This idea was a fundamental ingredient to doykayt, which aimed for a culture of exchange and communication between communities of all different sizes, and rejected the notion that one Jewish community should be privileged over all others.

Responding to the Arab-Israeli Conflict For all the historical soul-searching immediately following the proclamation of Israel, the Bund still did not consider Jewish statehood a desirable end, and continued to voice its concern over the ongoing Arab-Israel conflict, as well as to the state’s suppression of Yiddish. The Bund was quick to pounce on anything as evidence against Israel’s viability. In particular, the emigration of a small number of Jews from Israel and their reception by established Jewish organizations in Italy, as well as their reports of the hardships experienced in Israel, were the cause of great concern for the Bund.72 There was no schadenfreude on the part of the Bundists, but a strong sense

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of justification in their own insistence on alternative solutions to the question of Palestine and of Zionism more broadly. Perhaps the biggest ongoing problem, however, was the impasse between Israel and its Arab neighbors, an impasse that represented a grave threat to the growing Jewish population, which had reached over a million—more than half of them newly arrived since the proclamation of the state—by May 1951, Israel’s third anniversary. A reflection on this anniversary in the Bund’s English-language Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin highlighted this fact, citing the ongoing clashes on the Syrian border, the unresolved issue of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees who, according to the Bund, were “prevented from returning to their homesteads and villages and whose property is as good as confiscated by the conqueror.” This dispossession only served to incite “the hatred of the whole Arab world against the Jewish state,” and added “oil to the already brightly burning fire.”73 The State of Israel was also nurturing a militaristic spirit that scorned peace and turned the youth into soldiers who derided Jewish life outside of the Jewish state. At the same time, the Bund despaired at the lack of willingness on the Arab side to achieve peace and normalize relations with Israel. The only outcome of the competing forms of nationalism would be a perpetual state of hostility, as both Israeli and Arab nationalisms intensified in response to each other. The Bund maintained, even in mid-1951, that, although a common Israeli-Arab state was the ultimate aim, it was by then well and truly a fantasy.74 The issue of the hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees brought concern even for those in the Bund who supported the fledgling state. Pinchas Shvartz, who had argued in favor of the minority resolution in 1948, was by 1949 questioning the viability of Israel’s refusal to repatriate Arab refugees displaced during the war a year earlier. It had become clear, Shvartz argued, that the war had not been an internal civil war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, but a war between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, and the refugees were victims of both sides. He was concerned that the historically oppressed Jews had now become the oppressors, a result that created real danger for Jews in Israel and abroad: “Have they all become so drunk and deluded that they don’t see how dangerous the current Israeli policies towards the Arabs are?”75 For Shvartz, Israel had abandoned the democratic principles of representing its constituents in favor of a narrow and false conception of Jewish security, which would only create a mindset of revenge in the minds of those Palestinians affected. “In the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people,” wrote Shvartz, “a latent spark of hatred and a thirst for revenge is smouldering—a spark that can at the very first opportunity flare up into a new anti-Jewish blaze.”76 The only answer was for Israel to more tightly regulate immigration, because it could not absorb so many

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immigrants so quickly; the answer was not to annex Arab villages and homes to that end. The Zionists would also have to end their aggressive campaign in the DP camps in Europe that branded as “traitors” any Jews who sought refuge in Jewish communities outside Israel.77 In 1952, with still no solution to the refugee problem, the Bund called for a swift end to the impasse in accord with the wishes of the displaced Palestinians. An article in the English-language Bulletin derided both Arab and Jewish leaders who were using the refugee victims as political pawns with little regard for their desires and wellbeing.78 The passage of the Nationality Act in April 1952 was another worrying development for Bundists who opposed the continued antagonism between Israel and its local (and neighboring) Arab communities. The act, which would only allow a fraction of the 170,000 remaining Palestinians to attain citizenship, would only continue the downward spiral of Israeli-Arab relations, and ensure the long-term hostilities that had been brewing for decades. Ben-Tsiyon Hoffman, stalwart of the American labor movement and an active Bundist, argued that discriminating against the Arabs offered no benefit to Israel and actually created problems for Jews around the world, who lost their moral standing. According to Hoffman, the struggle against antisemitism would be far more difficult if Israel persisted with its oppression of its non-Jewish residents.79

The Development of the Israeli Bund A complicating factor during this period was the growth of a Bund organization inside Israel. Although the Israeli Bund remained small throughout its life, its existence challenged the long-held opposition that Bundists around the world expressed about Israel, as they now had comrades with a direct stake in the fortunes of the Jewish state. Israeli Bundist journalism, for example, was highly influential around the Bundist world community, as prominent local Bund figures reported on the situation in Israel on the ground. The Israeli Bund put out its own monthly journal, Lebns-Fragn (Life Questions), which was circulated worldwide. Its leaders also corresponded with Bundist journals and newspapers around the world, keeping its international comrades abreast of developments in Israel from a first-hand (and Bundist) perspective. The life of the Bund in Israel was probably more difficult than that of Bunds in any other place. Bundists there were going against the current not only of a community, but of the state. It was a difficult environment for any Yiddish activists, let alone those also anti-Zionist. The organization itself was established in early 1951, shortly after Israel’s establishment. In Israel as in many other places, how many Bundists there were is difficult to accurately determine. There are some indicators. At

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the sixtieth anniversary celebrations in 1957, a crowd of over 1,000 people packed the hall.80 In 1959, when the Bund contested the parliamentary elections, it received in excess of 1,300 votes.81 Shortly after, the Bund claimed a readership of around 2,000 for its journal Lebns-Fragn.82 Further, the number of people involved in Bund activities—libraries, cooperatives, unions, and afternoon Yiddish schools, for example—exceeded the number of actual members. Finally, the Bund’s monthly journal was distributed beyond solely Bundist circles. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the Bund’s membership numbered certainly in the hundreds, and its sphere of influence was even greater. Although the organization was not officially proclaimed until 1951, Bundist activity was not necessarily new to the Yishuv. A small number of Bundists had been in Palestine as early as the 1920s. The arrival of Bialystok Bund activists Bentzl and Itke Tsalevich marked the beginning of Bund activism in the Yishuv, and would lay the foundation for the small Bundist group that would arise after the founding of the state. Bentzl Tsalevich arrived in Israel in 1922 after decades of involvement with the Bund in Bialystok, and after escaping imprisonment during the Soviet occupation of his hometown. A baker by trade, he settled in Tel Aviv with his wife, Itke, where he continued to ply his skills. Bringing his talent in industrial organizing from Poland, Tsalevich established a Bakers’ Union in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, through which he led numerous successful strikes, which eventually saw the reduction of bakers’ workdays from eighteen hours to eight hours. He remained chairman of the union for twenty-five years. Throughout his years as one of only a handful of Bundists in Palestine, he maintained his commitment to Bundist ideals through union activism and through ongoing dedication to promoting Yiddish among the Yishuv population. For these activities, he was eventually expelled from the Workers’ Council.83 The Tsalevich home on Basel Street became known as the de facto “Bund address” in Palestine.84 It was where all newly arrived comrades turned upon arrival, to be warmly received by familiar faces in a friendly environment. The Tsalevich home was a center for Yiddish books. From the same location, care packages were sent to comrades in the Stalinist labor camps of the Soviet Union.85 The home of Avram and Genia Rinkevich, a Bundist couple who had emigrated from Wloclawek in 1932, was similarly inviting for the trickle of Bundist migrants. The couple’s apartment was a site of Bundist meetings and lectures, and eventually became a major hub of the Israeli Bund organization.86 During the first few years of the war, dozens of Bundists made their way to Palestine. They came along the Caspian Sea through Persia as soldiers in the Polish army and as refugees from Europe. Many had played leading

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roles in the unions, in the political work of their city councils, and in the local communal and school organizations.87 Among those who came were such prominent figures as Hershl Himmelfarb, who had been a Bund representative on the Warsaw City Council before the war and would become an important figure on the World Coordinating Committee after his postwar migration to New York, and Jerzy Gliksman, brother of Polish Bund leader Victor Alter, who would also migrate to the United States once the war ended.88 Alongside Himmelfarb, Gliksman, and a number of other Polish Bund émigrés, was Oscar Artuski (pseudonym for Yisachar Eichenbaum), who had joined the Warsaw Bund in 1935 after years as a communist activist, and who would prove to be the most energetic and inspiring personality within the Israeli Bund.89 Together, these refugees organized the small number of Bundists into a Bundist group that would be active during the remaining couple of years of the war. They coordinated political discussions, protests and commemorations. Perhaps most significant was their work in arranging packages containing clothing, shoes, and food to be sent to comrades trapped in the Soviet Union.90 Supplies were also sent to Bundist soldiers who had continued with the Polish army to the front lines in Italy; supplies included journals, newspapers, brochures, and Bulletins. These were intended to raise the morale of the soldiers and to alleviate their strong sense of isolation from their comrades, families, and the wider world.91 After the war, the sense of isolation and despair led to the emigration of a number of Bundists from Palestine back to Europe. The majority, however, stayed put and joined the state-building project as more of their comrades arrived as refugees. The small but steadily growing group continued their support work for their embattled friends in Europe, sending deliveries of books to France, and collecting money for the reconstituted Warsaw Bundist newspaper, Folkstsaytung (People’s Newspaper).92 The Bundist group also sent a delegation to the first world Bund conference in May 1947 in Brussels, where Himmelfarb and Tsalevich reported on their group’s attitudes toward the ongoing developments in Palestine.93 With the declaration of independence in May 1948, and the war that followed, Bundists were not shielded from the violence. Tsalevich, for example, who had for decades embodied Bundism in the Yishuv, lost his own son in the military campaign that ensued.94 Up to this point, most of the Bundists in Palestine saw themselves as a refugee group, waiting to return home when the situation allowed. However, with the formal establishment of the state, and the arrival of hundreds of comrades from Poland and Romania, the Bund’s scope needed to be revisited.95 And so it was in the carpentry workshop of Avram Rinkevich in

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July 1950, less than two years into the life of the Jewish state, that Bundists undertook to formally establish their own organization, and in February 1951 the first meeting of the Bund in Israel took place.96 This was clearly a statement by local Bundists that they wanted to take root in the new country and to play a role in its cultural and political life. With the decision to create an Israeli Bundist organization, Artuski (who had fled Palestine after the war for Paris, where he worked as an editor for Unzer Shtime) was sent back to Israel by the World Bund executive to lead the fledgling organization.97 The question for the new organization then was how to overcome the seeming paradox of a Bund organization in the State of Israel. This issue was addressed quickly at the first countrywide meeting of the new organization, when the delegates in attendance sought to adapt Bundist ideology to local realities. They challenged the “legend that the interests of the state were identical to the party-interests of Zionism.” According to Artuski’s report, the meeting resolved that the Zionist policy of ingathering exiles would lead to an economic catastrophe within Israel and that the state would need to be “freed” from Zionism.98 The first national conference, a year later, explored these issues further and continued to carve out a unique Israeli Bundist philosophy with regard to both Jewish questions and issues of state-building. This conference was the Bund’s opportunity to really delve deeper into some of the issues and details that would preoccupy the party. In the lead-up to the conference, Artuski outlined seven of these pressing problems: the economic situation and the detrimental impact of wide-scale Jewish immigration; the social inequality that had so quickly become entrenched in Israeli society; the Bund’s relationship with the central trade union congress, the Histadrut, and the Israeli labor movement; its approach to the Kibbutz movement; equal rights for the Palestinian minority and peace with the surrounding Arab states; the place of Yiddish in Israel; and how to attract the Hebrew-speaking youth of the nation.99 The conference itself, which took place in May 1952, carved out a unique position for the Bund in Israel. It reaffirmed the party’s outright opposition to the Zionist project of Kibetz Golyes, “the ingathering of the exiles.” It also outlined its relationship to the state. “The Bund Organization,” the resolution read, “sees the positive role of the State of Israel not in the false or unrealistic redemption-illusions that Zionism puts forth, but in the way the state can be built upon principles of democracy and social justice, on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity [frayhayt, glaykhhayt, un briderlekhkayt] for all its citizens and can work together with the Jews of the world to strengthen and consolidate the Jewish people.”100 The conference also dealt with the question of Yiddish, which it argued must be recognized as a Jewish national language alongside Hebrew. The Bund resolved to lead

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the fight against the discrimination that Yiddish-speakers faced. It also addressed the issue of its relationship to the Histadrut. Although the Histadrut was Israel’s only mass workers’ movement, Bundists remained critical that it did not actually work in favor of the workers. In the end, the delegates resolved that Bundists should join the Histadrut and fight against the corruption from within. They also wanted to lead the struggle for Yiddish within the labor movement, and for the rights of Arab workers to organize within its ranks.101 The first national conference of the Bund in Israel carved out a niche for the movement that was pro-Yiddish, anti-Zionist, and social democratic. Its critique of the state and the government came from a position of concern for the state’s ultimate prosperity and viability. This outlook was disputed. By the second national conference, in October 1954, the circumstances in Israel had changed dramatically. The country was economically weaker, the wave of immigration had abated, and major powers were beginning to provide political and military support to Israel’s Arab neighbors. Artuski reported that this had led to a division in the party, in which a minority felt that the Bund ought to end its dispute with Zionism and focus its energies elsewhere.102 Bentzl Tsalevich, stalwart of the movement, represented this minority position. He delivered a speech in which he argued that it was impossible to separate Zionism from the state: “Zionists created the state. [They] fought for it on the frontlines against the Arab countries, and Zionists are building and leading the country. . . . Are all the Zionists who fought as Zionists and created the state going to separate the state from Zionist ideology?”103 He argued that Zionism would prove itself ideologically bankrupt within years, when the idea of “the ingathering of exiles” was proven a “utopian fantasy.” In reply, Y. Samter (one of Artuski’s pseudonyms) argued that the Zionist atmosphere prevalent in Israel had affected Tsalevich. He asserted that “the ingathering of exiles” was the very essence of Zionism, upon which the ruling forces in the country were trying to build the state. He also claimed that, although it was true that Zionists did indeed build the country, Bundists should be able to see that the realities of running a state were constantly clashing with Zionist ideology. Finally, he argued, “a Zionist state, which strives toward ‘the ingathering of the exiles’ cannot make inroads towards a stable peace with the Arabs.”104 The minority position, represented by Tsalevich, was ultimately defeated by the majority, which saw it necessary to intensify the party’s battle against Zionism, although Artuski was careful to note that the difference of opinion was a normal part of Bundist life: “Freedom of conscience is not in opposition to, but lies at the foundations of traditional, Bundist mishpokhedikayt [kinship].” The majority of delegates agreed that, if the Bund renounced its opposition to Zionist hegemony, it would lose its raison d’être.105

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Despite their sustained opposition to Zionism and its influence on the state, Bundists saw no contradiction between their status as Israeli citizens and being members of an anti-Zionist organization. In fact, they saw their position as quite natural, with the well-being of the state their primary concern. Their starting point, in contrast to the official world Bund position at the beginning of the 1950s, was in support of Jewish statehood and a positive Bundist relationship to the state. Artuski argued not long after the Bund was first formed: “The Bundists in Israel are citizens of the state [emphasis in original]. The majority of them are workers and are helping to build the state. Like all other citizens, they carry out their obligations to the state: they pay taxes, they serve in the army—what else can a democratic country demand of its citizens? 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.”106 He 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?”107 These activists were careful not to harbor unrealistic expectations. They never expected to play a major role in Israeli political life, but they did feel that there was a place for a Bundist organization to represent the Yiddish-speaking, non-Zionist element inside Israel. They realized that the objective conditions in the country were not conducive to Bundist activity: a political landscape overwhelmingly dominated by Zionist parties with a strong antipathy toward Yiddish and with great disdain for the very notion of the Jews as a diasporic, world people. In 1953, Artuski wrote of the Israeli Bund’s prospects, arguing that the objective conditions were indeed difficult, although they were starting to shift in favor of the Bund. He claimed that this was because of the weakening of Zionism among the Israeli population, especially the Sabra youth, and of the fact that the Zionist call for the “ingathering of exiles” was not proving hugely successful. The situation of Yiddish had simultaneously improved, with the immigration of a large number of Yiddish speakers, the expansion of the Yiddish press, and the establishment of a Yiddish chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.108 Despite the improving objective conditions, however, the subjective conditions remained a major obstacle with a lack of funds making political activity difficult. Culturally, the Bund had seen some growth, but, as Artuski pointed out, many Yiddish writers and activists were wary of participating in cultural undertakings overseen by the Bund.109 Artuski concluded that the Israel Bund must continue to struggle, as it was a young, poor organization with an overwhelmingly poor, working-class, refugee membership.

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Several years later, Artuski reexamined the Bund’s prospects of gaining a foothold in the sociopolitical life of Israel. This time he presented a slightly revised forecast. Whereas previously he had hoped that the Bund would set itself up to again become a mass movement, this time he argued that the rationale behind a Bund in Israel was to give a social, political, and cultural space to people who, at heart, concurred with the Bund’s broad platform. He estimated that there were hundreds in Israel who had been active in, or sympathetic to, the Polish Bund, but who in the new country joined other parties for pragmatic reasons.110 Artuski reiterated that the objective factors were still shifting in the Bund’s favor: for example, with the arrival of hundreds of Yiddish-speaking refugees from the Soviet bloc who were not Zionist. Artuski still saw his organizations as the “nucleus of a mass movement,” yet his tone in 1958 was much more tempered than earlier in the decade. Still, the first decade of the Israeli Bund was a productive one. The fact that it had firmly rooted itself in Israel in this period would affect the world organization and its debate surrounding Israel. During the 1950s, the Israeli Bund oversaw the establishment of Yiddish libraries in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, Bersheva, and other towns, libraries that held tens of thousands of volumes and, altogether, serviced over a thousand readers.111 In Tel Aviv, an afternoon Yiddish school was formed that taught over sixty children by the end of the 1950s.112 Later, the Bund would establish such schools in Haifa and Beersheva.113 With the help of the Jewish Labor Committee in the United States, the Bund was able to open its new headquarters in 1957, at 48 Kaliszer Street in Tel Aviv, to serve its expanded needs; the headquarters included the Franz Kurski Library, the afternoon school, and the Shmuel Zygielbojm Hall, with its four hundred seats, for political meetings. Even this capacity was barely enough, for over five hundred people squeezed into the ceremony marking the opening of the new location.114 Most important among the Bund’s activities were its endeavors in the printed word. Israeli Bundist thought found its voice in May 1951, when the first edition of its monthly organ Lebns-Fragn appeared, under the editorship of Artuski. It was not an easy journey to the first edition, as the Bund’s initial application to the government for permission to publish its own journal was rejected. Through some luck and through personal contacts, Artuski managed to obtain the permit for this task.115 The journal then set out to carry on the traditions of the Bundist press in interwar Poland, specifically the journal from which it took its name, and also the Warsaw daily, Folkstsaytung (People’s Newspaper). As the Bund’s official organ, Lebns-Fragn shared its party’s aims of challenging Zionism and promoting democracy in the Yiddish language.116 Lebns-Fragn was not the first or the only Yiddish periodical

FIGUR E 9  Committee of the Bund in Israel at tenth anniversary celebration, 1961,

Tel Aviv. Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

FIGUR E 10  Audience at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Bund in Israel,

1961, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

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in Israel, but it would be the medium through which Bundism was expressed there for over six decades, outlasting all other Yiddish publications.117 It was also a major means through which the Israeli Bund exercised its influence over the world Bund, especially during its embryonic stage, when the movement was still crafting its position toward the Jewish state.118 Encouraged by these first several years of steady growth and minor successes, the Bund sought to play a more active role in the political life of Israel. After the 1955 elections, in which many Bundists felt that they could not fully throw their support behind any party, the party decided to run in the 1959 elections on its own independent ticket.119 The Bund went into the elections with realistic expectations: it did not expect to attract a large proportion of the vote; indeed, its aim was not even to gain representation in the Knesset, which required a minimum one percent of the total ballot, or around nine thousand votes.120 The party’s aim was to create awareness of the Bund’s platform. It wanted to give its supporters an alternative to the major parties, and an opportunity to vote with a clear conscience and without compromising their long-held values. Its election platform was based on three major principles. One principle was the fight for freedom and equality for all the state’s citizens, regardless of “religion, nationality, ethnicity, linguistic or political affiliation.”121 The Bund demanded an end to the country’s discrimination against the Arab minority, and to the anti-Arab measures, which it likened to antisemitic discriminatory practices in Europe. The second major principle in the Bund’s election platform was transforming the relationship between Israel and diaspora Jews. Bundists wanted to see the state work with Jews around the world to create and strengthen Jewish cultural life; naturally, then, it opposed the state’s policy that encouraged diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel. This transformation would also require recognition of Yiddish as a national Jewish tongue, not as a language foreign to the country.122 The third major component of the Bund’s agenda was peace with the surrounding Arab states, which would require great compromises from both sides.123 Ultimately, the Bund’s modest efforts proved fruitless. Officially, it received a total of 1,322 votes, although it challenged this figure, claiming that there may have been some underhanded dealings at local polling stations. In a report on the election results, Artuski cited a number of examples where votes might deliberately have been not counted or have been invalidated. He also explained that the figure was low because of other factors that made it difficult to assess how accurately the official figures represented the Bund’s support and popularity; for example, the Bund ran its campaign with a shoestring budget of only several thousand pounds, whereas larger parties

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like Mapai reportedly spent millions of pounds on their campaigns.124 Artuski also suggested that a high level of corruption marred the election, disadvantaging the Bund’s ticket, and that the major parties exploited the desperation of many immigrants newly arrived from Eastern Europe, who otherwise might naturally have gravitated toward the Bund.125 The 1959 elections would be the only ones the Bund contested. As a party, it was simply too poor to compete against the major parties, which were spending millions of pounds, and it could not garner enough support to justify spending even what it could afford. The following election, in 1961, was already too difficult for the Bund to enter, especially as new lists needed to receive at least one percent of the total vote, as it well might lose the five thousand pounds required to pay simply to compete.126 The 1950s were definitely the high point of the Israeli Bund, as it continued to see growth and to expand its activities. Artuski, sent from Paris especially to spearhead the party, was a major reason for this, as his energy and commitment was untiring. It was also in this decade that the Israeli Bund was able to exert significant influence over the world movement, and to craft a sophisticated theory on Jewish identity that allowed for the Bundist dedication to doykayt even in a Jewish state. The Bund in Israel always remained a tiny organization, especially in relation to the size of the Jewish community; it did, however, like many other Bund organizations around the world, witness minor successes in the fields of culture and education, and it maintained a political and cultural Yiddish journal for close to sixty years, without question its most significant achievement. In the end, the Bund in Israel was built and maintained on the backs of a number of energetic activists, in particular, Tsalevich and Artuski and later Yitzkhak Luden, who each took responsibility for editing Lebns-Fragn. Because theirs was a poor organization (much poorer than most other Bund organizations), it was thanks to these few activists’ dynamism and lively commitment to the Bundist cause that the organization saw even the minor successes that it did.127 Their dedication was also the basis for the world Bund’s ultimate acceptance of Israel: through the hard work of such activists, Bundists around the world came to accept the idea that a Jewish state held great potential—albeit for fostering Jewish life everywhere, and not as the Jewish cultural center. These activists’ contributions (especially Artuski’s) to the debate within the world Bund movement was likely the most important factor in bringing about a change in attitude within a movement that, in the first few years after the establishment of Israel, had continued to vehemently oppose the existence of a Jewish state. With the influx of Bundists into Israel and the rapid growth of the movement there, a rapid shift occurred in the Bundist approach to this question.

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On the Road to Acceptance With the development of the Bund in Israel, the sharpness in the global Bundist critique of Jewish statehood was dulled, as the focus of writers shifted after the establishment of the state in mid-1948. Calls for the establishment of a federative binational state, a feature of earlier Bundist writing, occupied a more marginal role in the anti-Zionist polemics of the Bund in this period, and the focus was more on attacking Israel on the basis of the movement’s doykayt principle, which called for the end of the center-periphery model as an organizational principle, justice and social-democracy for all, and cultural and political exchange with surrounding peoples. Following the earlier lead of Liebman Hersch and the Bundists in Israel, there was now a more focused attempt to treat Zionism and the state as distinct entities. This was the continuation of the group’s minority position (from the 1948 world conference), claiming that the Bund could have a positive and constructive relationship with the Yishuv without compromising its anti-Zionism. For example, long-serving Argentine Bund leader Pinie Wald wrote in 1953 that although a Jewish state existed, it did not represent the realization of Zionism. For one, the state did not encompass the entire territory of Palestine. It also did not, and could not, incorporate all, or even a majority, of the world’s Jews. The majority of Jews who remained outside Israel’s borders lived an “intimate, local life [a heymish, ortikn lebn].” They were not isolated, but participated in the surrounding society. “As much as it [Israel] draws the attention of world Jewry,” argued Wald, “it equally pushes Jews away from attending to Jewish life in their own countries.”128 One of the major factors in shifting Bundist public opinion was the rise in opportunities for Bundists and their leaders to travel to Israel. With the establishment of the state and the influx of Bundists from the DP camps, Bund leaders and activists were visiting the newly established state. There, they saw the dedication of the activists in the local branches of the organization, and recognized their difficulties in a hostile environment. The country itself also left a major impression on many of the visitors, in particular the landscape and the technological advances continually taking place. These visits helped to demystify Israel and to create an affinity with the fledgling state. In many ways, this effect carried forward an earlier trend within the Polish Bund. Historian Jack Jacobs has noted how the changed conditions in independent Poland after the First World War allowed Bundists for the first time to travel to Palestine. This led Polish Bundists to reconsider the traditional enmity that they had felt toward both Zionism and the Yishuv when the Bund was centered in czarist Russia. The position that a number of Bund leaders expressed in light of this, in which they supported the well-being of

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the Jewish community in Palestine while maintaining their abhorrence of Zionism, was in fact the prototype for the Bund’s attitude toward Palestine in the post–World War II era.129 The first significant postwar visit by a Bundist leader was that of Genevabased demographer Liebman Hersch in 1947. In his report from his travels, Hersch looked at various aspects of Israeli life: economic, social, and cultural. He was struck by how urbanized the Jewish population was, especially in light of Zionist reports that claimed the Yishuv was primarily agricultural. He also noted the high percentage of Jews in liberal professions (over 20 percent), a fact made possible by foreign contributions.130 The physical beauty of the land captured him. He wrote: “I flew to Palestine in the middle of summer, during the greatest heat, over middle Italy, Turkey, Greece. From the air I saw almost endless deserts, wild and vast mountains, valleys burnt by the sun. And there, all of a sudden, I saw a shoreline covered with green trees growing regally, green stretches of land dissected with straight roads that bear witness to difficult, conscientious, carefully-planned labour; it was the shore of Jewish Palestine between Tel Aviv and Haifa. And just like Balaam the Wicked, only with another sensation, I shouted out: ‘How fair are your tents, O Jacob! Your dwellings, O Israel!’”131 It was not only the physical beauty that so impressed Hersch. He was struck by what Jews had created: “I took shelter,” he wrote, “under the simple shade of the trees, which toiling Jewish hands made bloom despite such heat. I refresh myself with water that they had to dig out of the depth of the earth.”132 Hersch felt proud of the hard-working kibbutzniks. The automotive advances in the country amazed him, as did the number of roads and cars. The development of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was especially uplifting for Hersch, a professor in demographics at the University of Geneva. He also noted the social progress, which saw low child mortality rates, a flourishing political life, and a powerful labor movement.133 Hersch was obviously impressed, although in 1947 his enthusiasm clearly only infected a minority within the movement. It would take years of increased travel, and the growth of an Israeli Bund organization, for Bundists to develop a stronger affinity to Israel. In 1952, Yiddish writer and former Bund activist Binyomin Demblin, too, traveled to Israel. In an interview for the Paris Bundist daily, Unzer Shtime, Demblin reported on what a positive impression the dynamism of the “compact Jewish masses” of Israel left on him. He also explained some of the difficulties that the local Bund organization faced, but reiterated what an important role Bundists had to play within Israel and how they could gain sympathy among Yiddish-speaking Jews.134 Although no longer an active Bundist, his glowing reports of the country and of its Bund

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organization no doubt helped to break down the barriers between Bundists in the West and Israel. One very telling visit to Israel was that of Bund leader Emanuel Patt in the spring of 1954, followed by the series of letters that he published in 1955. His letters reflect the wonder with which he met the Jewish state. They reveal a Bundist who had come to terms with the existence of Israel and its role as a major cultural center. He acknowledged the potential of the kibbutzim as leaders within the global Jewish socialist movement. In a letter to a friend in Kibbutz Netzer, Patt expressed his admiration of the work of the socialist farmers living there, writing that the commune left the greatest impression on him during his time in Israel. He was especially impressed with the way kibbutzim fostered a strong Jewish identity and socialist ethic in the youth.135 In his letter to Moshe Sneh, a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, he wrote of how comfortable he had felt in the Knesset, despite the fact that he was not familiar with the language, people, or issues, and that he hoped that one day the Bund would have elected representatives in it.136 He still showed his concern about the growing militarism of the youth and their bleak attitudes toward Yiddish and the diaspora.137 Still, Patt’s glowing evaluation of the country’s progress, and his affection for the small Bund organization there, show what an overwhelmingly positive impression his travels made on him. The rise of the Bund in Israel after 1951 can be seen as another major factor in preparing the way for the world Bund to formulate its more positive approach toward the notion of a Jewish state, and helped foster the idea of “de-Zionization” of Israel. Not only did many travelers feel a strong affinity toward their comrades, but Israeli Bundists, armed with firsthand understanding of the situation in Israel, also led the debate inside the world movement. Their most important method for carrying out this task was through journalism, regularly corresponding with Bund publications around the world, including those in New York, Melbourne, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Paris. The Israeli Bundist journal, Lebns-Fragn, was distributed to and supported by Bundist communities around the world. Artuski, its editor, with his prolific writings on Israeli politics, was crucial in formulating Bundist responses to key issues. Written under various pseudonyms, Artuski’s monthly reports in Unzer Tsayt, and his regular columns in Unzer Shtime, informed the Bund’s shift away from its hostility toward Jewish statehood. The relationship between diaspora Jews and Israel remained a complicated question; however the presence of a small but growing number of Bundists forced the world movement to engage with and support its embattled kin. The Israeli branch was at the forefront of the battle, and so its approach to the question held much sway. Artuski linked the struggle of

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his local organization with that of Bundist organizations around the world, a concept no doubt critical in convincing many of his comrades of Israel’s promise. He argued that the Bund’s struggle against Zionism was still important everywhere. Like most Bundists in Israel, he was a vocal supporter of the existence of the state and saw the potential for a Jewish state to play a constructive role in Jewish culture around the globe. He believed, however, that Zionism had no constructive role to play in Israel or in the diaspora: although a Jewish state was still viable, a Zionist state was dangerous to the Jews in Israel and abroad. “It is necessary,” Artuski argued, “that the state free itself from Zionism.” For him, Zionism was driving a wedge between Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews; the Bund therefore needed to continue its war against the old foe: “The conflict between the Bund and Zionism takes place in all varieties and in all territories of Jewish life—in the diaspora and in Israel.”138 Further, Zionism could not engineer peace with the Palestinians and other Arab countries: Artuski’s call for a state without Zionism was grounded in the old idea of a federation with Arab nations, in which Jews would not have to fear a “second round” of war; other benefits would be the curbing of the growing militarism of the Jewish state, greater economic and cultural opportunities, and a resolution to the issues of refugees, borders, and Jerusalem.139 Artuski was realistic, conceding that the Bund was too weak compared to Zionism to bring his vision to fruition, yet in the tradition of Bundist idealism he remained steadfast that Bundism was the best hope for Jews everywhere.140 This article represents only one example of how Artuski and his fellow Bundist writers in Israel crafted an Israeli Bundist position that, at the Bund’s 1955 world conference in Montreal, the first since 1948, would become the dominant approach throughout the world Bund. What is clear is that Israeli Bundists, especially Artuski, and the rise of their local organization was a significant factor in the world Bund’s official change of heart on the question of Israel.

Embracing Jewish Statehood The early 1950s were hectic years for Bundists across the world as they sought to build not only their fledgling movements but, in most cases, their communities. In Israel, the Bundists tried to be part of the larger state-building project. In these few years between the Bund’s second world conference (1948) and the third world conference (1955), the world changed radically. The Jewish world was especially affected, with the consolidation of Israel and the closing of the DP camps requiring Jewish movements to engage in ever more soul-searching.

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With so much changing so quickly, the Bund undertook a radical revision of its traditional ambivalence toward the Yishuv. This took place at the 1955 world conference in Montreal. For the first time, the Bund acknowledged the positive role Israel could play in Jewish life. Although the shift was rapid, it was not sudden. The groundwork had been laid in the previous years, through greater contact with Israel and its local Bund organization. Changes in the world also played a part. These factors were already clear in the debate in Unzer Tsayt in the lead-up to the conference. Although World Coordinating Committee secretary Emanuel Scherer did not relent in his antagonism toward Israel, he seemed at times more willing to move beyond the Bund’s initial opposition to a Jewish state. Scherer, for his part, emphasized the extraterritoriality of the Jews. Whereas Zionists, he claimed, argued that Jews were bound by the state, Bundists said, “A people, and in our case a world-people, is above the state [emphasis in original].”141 For Scherer, 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.142 Pinchas Shvartz, a leading voice in the early minority that demanded greater recognition of Israel, was now more forceful in arguing that the Bund needed to revise its position. He wrote that, although Bundists should continue to criticize the Israeli government, the movement’s current position—that Israel’s existence could not be seen as a positive factor in Jewish life—was no longer tenable. Shvartz argued that the conference must accept that the existence of Israel represented the only guarantee for the survival of the Jews living there. He also felt that, although current government policies were problematic, pressure from outside and within could help shift the mentality that ruled Israeli politics. Finally, Shvartz was convinced that the survival of world Jewry had become bound up with the fate of Israel: Jewish continuity would require reconciliation between Hebrew and Yiddish, and between Israel and the active Jewish national movements in “the so-called goles [exile].”143 Shvartz wrote, too, that the Bund needed to see that “the Jewish future is dependent solely and exclusively on friendly cooperation of all active-national Jewish forces in today’s world, of which Israel is the strongest factor.”144 A kind of middle ground was found by Jacob Sholem Hertz, the party’s leading historian, who argued that, when “the Bund came face to face with a Jewish state that it never wanted, a state that had taken in over 10 percent of the Jewish people,” it had to come to terms with that reality and articulate its relationship to that state. Somewhere in between Scherer and Shvartz, Hertz claimed that the Bund’s position toward Israel would be dependent

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on Israel’s actions. For him, this was not a new development, but marked the continuity in the party’s approach, which, throughout its history, drew its inspiration “not from national sentimentality, but from common sense, objectivity, equity, and justice [seykhl-yosher, zakhlekhkayt, yoysher, un gerekhtikayt].”145 It would support the Jewish state when the state did good things, and condemn it when it committed injustices. “We cannot place ourselves on the standpoint, that ‘ours’ are always and in advance right.”146 This became the essence of the Bund’s resolution in which it acknowledged the potential of a Jewish state to play a positive role in Jewish life. At the world conference that took place in mid-April 1955 in Montreal, the delegates unanimously passed a resolution that, for the first time, welcomed Israel as a part of the Jewish world. It stated: “Israel is a significant factor in Jewish life. As a self-contained, self-governing Jewish community, Israel can play an affirmative role in Jewish life.”147 It then argued that a Jewish state could only play such a role if it undertook certain major overhauls. The Bund demanded: that Zionist leaders end their insistence that Israel was “the home of the entire Jewish people and all Jews in the world as its potential citizens”; that “concern for the Jewish community in Israel [be] subordinated to the well-being of the Jewish people the world over”; that Israel’s democratic principles should apply equally to all its citizens, both Jewish and nonJewish, and should protect the non-Jewish minorities; that Israel establish a long-lasting and just peace with its Arab neighbors, which was “a question of life and death for the 1,500,000 Jews in Israel”; and finally, that Yiddish be given greater respect and taught widely in schools.148 The motion went on to argue that a Zionist state did not secure Israel’s citizens, and that the Jewish state had in fact complicated the situation of Jews around the world. It maintained that Israel’s eventual goal should be the creation of a “Jewish-Arab Federation,” that would “remove all forms of theocracy [and] grant equal rights to Yiddish.” Israel should “strive for a true socialist way of life, based on democracy and social justice for all inhabitants, regardless of their nationality.”149 The resolution then, was clearly a begrudging acceptance of the Jewish state as a reality in Jewish life, and a symbolic coming to terms with having now to function within this new reality, a reality that also signified the strength of the Bund’s traditional rivals. It is noteworthy that the Bund’s declaration on Israel was only one part of a broader resolution on Jewish life, a resolution that incorporated sections on what it meant for the Jews to be a world people, as well as reaffirming the doykayt principle. In his report of the conference, Scherer considered this resolution, which was passed unanimously, the historic moment at the conference. He did, however, downplay the importance of the Israel section and its language. Referring to the opening line of that section (“The State

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of Israel is an important event in Jewish life”), Scherer wrote: “With these words the declaration stated no more than a fact. A fact, which in essence we never disavowed.”150 He claimed that there was never really any question of recognizing that the state was a fact, or even whether or not it was an important event in Jewish life; the debate, he argued, had always been about how to appraise the event. In reality, he argued, the resolution did not really embrace Israel, but demanded that it transform itself to “be able to play a positive role in Jewish life.” The question of Israel was not seen as separate from other problems in Jewish life, thus highlighting the way doykayt did not privilege certain Jewish communities over others. To Bundists, it was clear that the rise of a Jewish state had serious implications for Jews everywhere, and needed to be considered as one of many issues to be addressed. Although Scherer downplayed the significance of the resolution, what is perhaps more suggestive is that he was in the minority that did not support the historic shift in the Bund’s approach to Jewish statehood.151 Also noteworthy was his acknowledgment that the Bund in Israel exercised great influence on the matter, as the small band of comrades there shored up the Bund’s struggle against Zionism on these new front lines.152 Scherer’s writings surrounding this issue, both before and after the conference, seem tinged with a sense of desperation and defiance. Having been one of the party’s most vocal spokespersons against Zionism and the State of Israel, he continued to cling to his convictions even as the party looked to move beyond its previous steadfast opposition to Jewish statehood. Despite Scherer’s attempts, it is difficult to minimize what a watershed moment the 1955 world conference was in the Bund’s history. This marked the first time that the Bund officially admitted that a Jewish state could play a positive role in Jewish life. The organization maintained its steadfast opposition to Zionism inside and outside Israel, but the very fact that Bundists recognized that Jewish statehood could have redeeming features nevertheless stood out. This was not something that, as a world movement, the Bund had yet conceded. Although Israeli Bundists and a minority of Bundists around the world—including Liebman Hersch, Pinchas Shvartz, among others—had been arguing for this recognition for years, only this moment did it finally officially occupy a place in Bundist policy.153

Conclusion The decade following the Holocaust was hectic for the Bund movement, as for all Jewish organizations. It had little time to recover from the trauma of the previous years before it was forced to reevaluate what Bundism meant

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in light of both the Holocaust and of the rapid developments taking place in Palestine. Given how dramatic and swift the overhaul was, it is not surprising that the Bund did not readily embrace the establishment of the Jewish state. For decades, Bundists had fought against the notion of a Jewish state, arguing that it would not solve antisemitism and that it undermined the Jews’ struggle for autonomy and freedom in the places where they actually lived. This remained the Bundist line on the question of a Jewish state in the immediate postwar period, with the smoke in Europe only beginning to clear. With the establishment of the State of Israel, Bundists again took up arms through their official organs and rejected any notion that the new state could play a positive role in Jewish life around the globe. Israel consolidated, however, and even though it lived under constant threat of war, it very quickly became a major force throughout the Jewish world. As Israel strengthened, its local Bund organization grew, and the number of Bundists migrating or traveling to the fledgling state increased. It did not take long for the Bund to come to terms with the fact that Zionism could boast a major achievement in Israel, and that its influence among world Jewry had grown exponentially. What is most significant in the Bund’s debates during this period is the sophisticated alternative model for Jewish life that the Bund continued to offer. It continued to challenge the nation-state model favored by Zionism, instead highlighting the possibilities for strengthening Jewish culture without a single political, cultural, or spiritual center. Bundists grudgingly recognized the important role that Israel could play in the production of Jewish culture and the cultivation of Jewish communities abroad, given its size and resources. However, the movement did not see statehood as desirable, nor did it recognize Israel as a homeland or center of world Jewry. Bundists were also wary about the type of Jewish identity cultivated by the Israeli and world Zionist leadership, an identity formulated against the Ashkenazi Yiddishcentered identity that was being actively repressed within the Jewish state despite the high proportion of native Yiddish speakers who had entered the country in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Further, Bundists were concerned about the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, and about the policies and actions of the Zionist movement since the early twentieth century, policies that, Bundists argued, did nothing to create a peaceful and productive relationship with Israel’s Arab neighbors, but instead contributed to a situation of perpetual war and hatred. The Bund’s position was not naïve, desperate, or monolithic. It evolved in response to continually shifting circumstances and was vigorously debated at conferences and in the Bundist press. The party’s outlook was, therefore, nuanced, grounded not only in the Bund’s traditional enmity

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toward Zionism but in the Bundists’ continuing commitment to doykayt as the only logical response to the postwar reality of the Jewish people, most of whom were scattered around the globe and who functioned in vastly distinct settings. For the majority of Bundists, this was a situation more or less consistent with thousands of years of diaspora Jewish life. The lesson they had learned from the Holocaust was not that this structure of Jewish life was inherently flawed and led only to mass destruction, but that nationalism led only to despair and conflict, and that nation-states as a model of societal organization did not necessarily protect their populations from devastation. Bundists also forecast a long-lasting war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, a war representing too great a risk for an end that they regarded as inherently flawed. In the end, though, the Bund accepted that the State of Israel could play a positive and creative role in Jewish life worldwide. Ongoing opposition to its existence would have been untenable. Doykayt however, continued to define the Bund’s relationship to Israel, in with the movement was still committed to developing local Jewish communities, even while recognizing the legitimacy of Israel as a sizeable, well-resourced, and therefore important Jewish community. Although Israel would continue to preoccupy Bundists around the globe, the struggle against Zionism was more prevalent on a local scale and was focused primarily on questions surrounding Jewish communal organization.

Conclusion

Like many Holocaust survivors, Bundists tried to pick up the pieces of their

shattered lives and rebuild new ones wherever they could in the decades following the war, a task that they undertook with gusto. Like other Jews who faced the arduous challenge of moving past their trauma to deal with the day-to-day concerns of reestablishing normality in their lives, Bundists

did their best to come to terms with their loss and refocus their energies on ensuring Jewish continuity. In the new Jewish world order, however, the Bund could no longer be as it had once been, and Bundists set about tailoring their movement to account for their postwar circumstances. Bundists grappled with the question of whether their movement could be anything other than a Polish Jewish political movement, bound to a particular time and space. To adapt, its members remained faithful to the principles of doykayt, which called on Bundists to foster Jewish life wherever they lived, whether in smaller or larger Jewish communities. This meant, however, that the Bund could not survive as a singular, united party as it had before. In Russia and Poland, although disagreements and debate had been an important feature in the party’s daily life, the Bund ultimately maintained a remarkably united front. For many Jewish workers, the Polish Bund provided a sense of hope that they could escape the ghetto and build a more just world. It gave them a family, a social milieu. Many grew up in its youth movements, were educated in its reading circles, played sport for its sports clubs, participated in its organized self-defense groups, and benefited directly from its union activism. Although this world was destroyed during the war, Bundists’ attachment to the Bund was not. It was no surprise, then, that thousands of surviving Bundists, many of whom had lost their families, found comfort in their other family, the Bund. 211

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Given the new circumstances, it was impossible for the Bund to be centralized and united as it had once been. In many cases, local circumstances dictated the direction of each Bundist organization. The groups’ organizational and philosophical approaches depended on the local political environment and on the nature of the local Jewish community. Although the surviving interwar leaders tried to create an administrative and ideological center in New York, the reality was that this attempted center could exercise little authority over local organizations. Even on broader Jewish questions and global politics, the World Coordinating Committee had limited powers and could only hope to influence groups in other cities. Still, it played an important role in the lives of the movement. It was the body through which Bundist transnational communication was facilitated. It published a journal that carried party debates, commentary, and reports from local organizations, and was distributed around the world. It conducted world conferences every decade until the 1990s. It conducted fundraising and assisted local organizations financially. Members of the Coordinating Committee—not only from the United States but also from Canada, Israel, Mexico, and Australia—traveled as emissaries to other cities. Their visits energized local movements, strengthened transnational networks, and provided a bridge to the past, as former comrades reunited, often for the first time in decades. Still, the committee’s desire to be a cultural, spiritual, political center—as Israel was to Zionists—was hampered by the realities that Bundists faced in their various locations. Bundists in these locations were trying to achieve similar outcomes, trying to rebuild Jewish life based on the structures that they had known in Poland before the war. For most, reared in Bundist children’s camps, schools, youth movements, and unions, the Polish Bund and its wide-ranging network of institutions provided the model for all rebuilding efforts. Many Bundist communities around the world therefore established similar institutions. Libraries, for example, became a focal point for the Bundists’ activities. In Melbourne, Paris, and Israel, the Yiddish libraries became like homes for refugees seeking family. Melbourne’s Kadimah, the Medem Bibliothèque in Paris, and Brith Avoda in Tel Aviv, served as a place to meet, to debate, to celebrate, to commemorate. These were places for Bundists to catch up on the world news from many Jewish perspectives, with their vast collections of Yiddish books, newspapers, and journals. Such libraries, whether explicitly Bundist, like those in Israel and France, or Yiddish libraries in which Bundists carried significant influence, as in Melbourne, became hubs of Bundist life. Indeed, the DP camps themselves were indicative of the importance of libraries in the movement worldwide. A common theme among the Bundists’ pleas in the camps was for Bund organizations in the West to

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send reading materials. Establishing Yiddish libraries in the major centers like Feldafing was considered an important achievement. In New York, by contrast, libraries played a much less significant role in the life of the Bund; that was a city with a long-established Yiddish-speaking community with a range of Bundist-influenced organizations and institutions. Many Bund organizations attempted to establish youth movements, with varying degrees of success. These efforts highlight the different trajectories that each organization followed. The Melbourne Bund ran the most successful youth movement. Its branch of SKIF has now operated uninterrupted for six decades, although, since the 1970s, it membership has fluctuated and its content lacks the socialist optimism of earlier generations of Bundist youth. In Paris, the SKIF organization faced problems early in its postwar life, disbanding by the beginning of the 1960s and reconstituting itself as a Jewish secular children’s club with Yiddish and socialism playing more minor roles. Bundists in the United States also established an annual summer camp, which ran for twenty years, but efforts to replicate a SKIF movement meeting regularly and operating between camps ultimately bore little fruit; indeed, efforts to organize Bundist youth in the United States ended with the closure of Camp Hemshekh in 1979. This marked perhaps the beginning of the end for the American Bund, as a new generation was no longer being groomed to take up the reins. In other places—Israel, Mexico, Argentina—Bundist children’s organization, the foundation of the movement’s future, never succeeded. In many ways, the fate of youth movements is a telling indication of the direction of the parent organizations. Some Bundist youth movements thrived; others did not. Melbourne, for instance, was by no means the largest Bundist organization, yet its youth movement outlasted all others, even those in much bigger Jewish communities. Perhaps the fact that the Melbourne Jewish community was growing allowed the local organization to flourish. Although Jews had been in Australia since British settlement in the late eighteenth century, it was not until tens of thousands of Eastern European refugees began arriving, from the 1930s onward, that Melbourne Jewry began to expand rapidly. This immigration also meant that the local community took on a Polish Jewish flavor, as most of these migrants came from Poland. Whereas in Paris or New York there were diverse Jewish communities with much longer histories, in Melbourne the community was still growing, and there was room for Bundists to become integral to the community’s development. The waves of Eastern European migrants who had arrived decades earlier to the United States, France, and Argentina did not reach Melbourne until the 1930s; thus the period of Melbourne Jewish history from the 1940s onward can be compared

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with that of New York Jewry at the turn of the twentieth century. Being a smaller community also meant being able to operate with fewer numbers. For the Bundists in Melbourne, the community’s small size and geographic isolation served to bolster their organization. In New York, on the other hand, the size of the American Jewish community, especially of the Yiddish-speaking sector in New York, proved an obstacle to the development of postwar American Bundism. It was much more difficult for the New York Bund to find its niche on a Jewish street already crowded with Yiddish leftist activity. Another complicating factor was the decades of Bundist activism in the United States: the party’s task was made more difficult by the fact that many veterans of the Jewish labor movement who had been members of the Russian and Polish Bunds decades earlier were by this point convinced that there was no place for a Bund in the United States, especially with an existing network of Bundist-inflected organizations like the Jewish Socialist Verband and the Jewish Labor Committee; and, with a range of Yiddish leftist summer camps on offer, Camp Hemshekh faced stern competition in attracting families. The Israeli Bund faced an even more complicated situation, for it grappled with a Zionist government and outright hostility toward its anti-Zionist agenda and toward the Yiddish language in general. Although the Bund opened supplementary Yiddish schools in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and elsewhere, there was never really any momentum for a Bundist youth movement. These two locations, the United States and Israel—housing two of the largest Jewish communities in the world—did not end up conducive to longterm Bundist renewal. The trajectory of the Parisian Bund was entirely different. With a Jewish population far bigger than that in a location like Melbourne or Mexico City, but far smaller than New York or Tel Aviv, the Bund in France was complex. Although it became the center of European Bundism after the mid-1940s, it displayed a great deal of anxiety about its place in the world. Its two most successful undertakings were the daily newspaper that appeared well into the 1970s, and its Yiddish library, the largest in Europe. Yet the fate of its SKIF organization is telling. With a lack of numbers, it disbanded in 1962, only to be replaced a year later by a group much less committed to the Bund’s ideological principles. Why was there no demand for a Yiddish socialist children’s organization? The Holocaust was a factor, along with the history of French intolerance toward public displays of difference. Still firmly entrenched on European soil, in a country where Jews were targeted not only by the Germans but also by locals, the anxiety that the Holocaust created in the minds of all the nation’s Jews was palpable. The post-Holocaust anxiety that Jews felt in France led Bundists to maintain a low profile, unlike those

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in other countries where they sought to expand their presence within and beyond the Jewish world. The political life in differing countries gives an indication of why Bundist organizations developed as they did. Bundists, of course, were committed to working toward a democratic socialist order. However, in different countries, socialism took on different meanings. In 1940s Melbourne, the Bund attached itself to the ruling Australian Labor Party, the local workers’ party. This relationship bore some fruit, as Bundists lobbied the government and the immigration minister to assist Jewish refugees to migrate to Australia. It also meant that the Melbourne Bund was in the political mainstream, even if the ALP spent two decades in opposition after being voted out of office in 1949. In contrast, the American Bund felt it could not back the Democratic Party, of the two large U.S. political parties, the one slightly further to the Left on the political spectrum, as that party was pro-capitalist. The Bund therefore gave its support to the Socialist Party of America (or SP), which was in a period of steep decline after moderate success in the early part of the century. By throwing in its lot with the SP, the Bund rejected mainstream politics, thereby losing much of its appeal as a political organization. The Polish Bund was ultimately liquidated by the Communist government, and the Israeli Bund, refusing to endorse even the socialist Zionist parties, remained on the periphery of Israeli politics; in 1959 it sought to enter the political mainstream when it contested the Knesset elections, but, for a variety of reasons, it won only a fraction of the votes required to gain a seat; thus, in the new major center of Jewish politics, the Bund could only effectively operate as a cultural organization, a sign of how radically different this new world was for Jews. Again, it was in France that this situation became even more complicated. The Bund aligned itself with the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), which, at various times during the Fourth Republic, sat in government. The Bund was in a difficult situation: feeling that it could not alienate itself from what was then the political mainstream, it remained silent during the months that the French Socialist Party, led by president Guy Mollet escalated the war in Algeria. No longer siding with the oppressed, the Bund faced the same political oblivion that French socialism did during the years of de Gaulle’s presidency. From there, the Bund never recovered. A consequence of the French Bundists’ anxiety was that many important Bund figures emigrated. Some of the French Bund’s most active and talented postwar leaders, those involved in rebuilding the party, the press, and SKIF, ultimately left France for a more secure life in the United States, Canada, Argentina, or Australia. With the deaths of other prominent figures, and the departure from the organization of yet others, the result was predictable:

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a leadership vacuum, in which regeneration was much more difficult. In contrast to the French Bund’s anxiety was the self-confidence of American Bundists. They joined the struggle for black civil rights, with Bund organizations and Bundist branches of the Arbeter Ring using their limited resources to organize discussions and events to increase consciousness and support around the issue. Unlike the case in France, where the Bund’s position in society seemed much more tenuous, the American segment of the movement did not carry heavy anxiety about an antisemitic backlash; it displayed far more self-confidence in dealing with local political issues. In contrast to France, with the complications created by the Holocaust and by French collaboration as well as resistance, liberal New York provided a comfortable backdrop for Bundists to voice political and moral opposition to ethnic oppression—in this case, the treatment of African Americans. With regard to Jewish life, the varied Bundist organizations also took different paths. Whereas in czarist Russia and interwar Poland, the Bund had advocated a policy of national-cultural autonomy, in the postwar era such visions were no longer possible. As Bundists moved to democratic, multiethnic countries in Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia, they faced a very different cultural landscape. In some cities, like Melbourne and New York, Bundists sought to be active in local Jewish life through participation in a range of social and cultural institutions. In Israel, on the other hand, where Zionism prevailed over the country’s national and cultural affairs, Bundists needed to establish their own outlets for social and cultural work. They still believed that doykayt provided the only guide to ensuring Jewish continuity, and this necessarily meant that each organization engaged with their local Jewish community in locally appropriate ways; it also meant eschewing the prevailing Zionist consensus, which placed Israel at the center of the Jewish world. Despite their differences, though, Bundists around the world shared a common, overarching goal: to rebuild their lives, their communities, and their families. Perhaps more important than ideology were their bonds of history, memory, and language. Although often at odds on issues surrounding Israel, Bundists still felt a strong connection and responsibility to Jews the world over. Oceans and continents separated members of the Bund, yet many remained spiritually close; they kept in contact through correspondence, through the proliferation of the postwar Bundist printing presses, and, where possible, through travel. This meant for example, that Melbourne’s Bund remained slightly more isolated than the North American Bundist groups, and that Latin American Bund organizations maintained close ties. Still, by the 1940s and the 1950s, the world was much smaller than before, especially with party journals emanating from four continents, and,

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as long-distance travel became more accessible, transnational communication was strengthened by more frequent visits. Like all organizations, the Bund was at times mired in internal conflict. The regional organizations often clashed with each other and with the World Coordinating Committee over questions of ideology and organization, bringing to the fore the permanency and strength of their familial ties. In 1958, for example, some disgruntled Paris members published a brochure that took aim at both the local organization and the World Coordinating Committee. Raphal Ryba, who had been chair of the Bund’s European secretariat, complained that the notion of Bundist solidarity, articulated at the first three world conferences, was simply empty rhetoric and that the World Coordinating Committee had not carried out its commitment to support vulnerable local organizations. Nor, he argued, was there uniformity in each branch’s approach to Jewish questions. He also criticized the Bundist printing press in New York for focusing too heavily on printing history books rather than on publishing leaflets dealing with contemporary political problems, as interwar Bund publishing houses had done.1 For this, Ryba and his wife, Dina, were suspended by the party for a year, after which they traveled to America, eventually finding a home among their comrades in Montreal.2 The fact that the Rybas could maintain their fierce Bundist passion in Canada more comfortably than in France also highlights the precariousness of the French Bund’s situation by the end of the 1950s. Internal debate, disagreement, and organizational independence had always served as sources of pride for the Bund. One of the benefits of the proliferation of Bund organizations was that Bundists could easily find a community if they needed to migrate. They tread a careful balance between their intimacy with overseas Bundist kin, and their identification with local colleagues in the labor movement. For many Bundists, these multiple layers of solidarity did not compete, but rather complemented one another. Why is the story of the Bund after 1945 significant? Is it, as one scholar suggested to me, nothing more than a footnote to an otherwise rich story? No, for, although Bund organizations have all but vanished—the Melbourne chapter remains the only one active—their story is a worthy one in the postwar scramble to return Jewish life to a secure and creative normality. Certainly, the postwar Bund was nowhere near as successful as its predecessor. Numbering only several thousand members at its high point in the 1950s, the world Bund could not contribute broadly to Jewish debates over nationhood, identity, and continuity as the Russian and Polish Bunds once had. With the socialist movement weakened, it would also fail to play any meaningful role in the national politics of any country, as it had in interwar Poland and especially in czarist Russia. In Poland, the Bund had been a

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leading political, social, and cultural force, having a direct impact on the lives of tens of thousands of Polish Jews. The sheer size of the community was one factor that allowed the growth of such a movement, as was the prevalence of socialist organizations in eastern Europe. At that stage, Zionism was only one force among many in a vibrant and often fractured Jewish world; antisemitism had not yet shown its full destructive potential. From 1945 onward, however, only small remnants of the Bund remained. Most critical, of course, was that most of its members were murdered during the Holocaust. The movement could claim a membership in the thousands after the war, compared to nearly ten thousand in interwar Poland. Further, most surviving Bund members were dispersed around the world after the war. They were not, as previously, geographically concentrated in the major cities of a single country. Given the falling numbers, dispersion created an extra obstacle to developing Bundist life, which had for so long benefited from high geographic concentrations of Jews. Further, the Bund’s main ideological opponents, Zionism and Communism, had grown in esteem after the devastation of the Holocaust. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews survived in the Soviet Union also elevated the status of Communism in the Jewish world. Even were it only a footnote to the Bund’s earlier history, the Bund’s postwar history, as one uncovers its multiple layers (ideological, organizational, personal), provides broader insights in Jewish and world history. This postwar history of the Bund tells us something about the host societies in which Bundists settled, as well as about the nature of postwar Jewish communities, especially those with high concentrations of Holocaust survivors, where Bund organizations fared best. Considering the possibilities available to the Bund, and the external factors that played a role in its development gives a broader understanding of local political life in Western countries during the Cold War. More pertinent, perhaps, the fate of the Bund tells much about the communities in which Bundists lived. The directions that the various groups took help expand the understanding of the anxieties, hopes, and relationships of Jewish communities around the world. It underlines the complex and often hostile interactions between Jewish organizations, and the many loyalties to which Holocaust survivors tried to be faithful in migration. Looking at the history of the postwar Bund also helps scholars move beyond the bipolar transnationality between the United States and Israel, and to see the fully global nature of world Jewry. It also suggests that Southern Hemisphere Jews played an important role in establishing postwar Jewish transnational relations. With the demise of the Bund, the Jewish world lost a militant voice in the struggle of Yiddish culture, for Bundists brought their experience in the political sphere to the fight for the status of Yiddish. The Jewish world also

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lost one of its more colorful and serious twentieth-century political movements, one that participated in, and often led, the march toward democratization of Jewish life. It lost a movement that taught destitute Jewish workers to read, write, and think; that provided social services and welfare to those who had no other means to survive; that offered comfort and a path to help overcome the trauma that would accompany European Jews for generations after the Holocaust. The Bund was indeed tiny and did not overtly influence the course of the second half of the twentieth century. For those thousands involved directly or indirectly with the Bund, however, the movement played a real and important role in what was a very turbulent time in their lives, marked by trauma, displacement, and resettlement. Bundists played a noteworthy part in building and rebuilding dozens of local communities. And although Bundist activity has virtually disappeared, there is much still to be learned from the efforts of a small group of Holocaust survivors to sustain one another’s hope in a better future and to remain faithful to their vision.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. “Vi bundistn in oysland zeyen undz,” Byuletin f un Bund [Melbourne] (August 1966): 3. 2. One notable exception is Daniel Elazar and Peter Medding’s comparative study of the Australian, Argentine, and South African Jewish communities, although the authors are concerned more with the sociological character of those communities. Mostly, they treat these locations in isolation, rather than as counterpoints to the histories of the more celebrated European and American Jewish communities. Even Jonathan Frankel’s authoritative work Prophecy and Politics does not consider this global element of Jewish labor history. See Daniel Elazar and Peter Y. Medding, Jewish Communities in Frontier Societies: Argentina, Australia, and South Africa (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983). See also Nancy Green, ed., Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 3. On the Austro-Marxists’ influence on Bundist thought, see Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and “The Jewish Question” after Marx (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 118–141; Roni Gechtman, “Conceptualizing National-Cultural Autonomy: From the Austro-Marxists to the Jewish Labor Bund,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 17–49. 4. For a discussion of this narrative, see Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (London: Macmillan, 1989), 72–77. 5. Ibid., 105. 6. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 171–185. 7. Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale. 8. See Henry J. Tobias and Charles E. Woodhouse, “Political Reaction and Revolutionary Careers: The Jewish Bundists in Defeat, 1907–10,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no. 3 (1977): 367–396; Vladimir Levin, “The Jewish Socialist Parties in Russia in the Period of Reaction,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 111–127. 9. See Bernard K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers’ Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 82–122; Abraham

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Brumberg, “The Bund: History of a Schism,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 81–89. 10. For a summary of these results, see Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 1–7. 11. In his recent book, historian Jack Jacobs neatly summarizes this debate (ibid., 4–7). See also Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 76–77; Antony Polonsky, “The Bund in Polish Political Life, 1935–1939,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 166–197; Johnpoll, Politics of Futility, 223–224. 12. See Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture; Roni Gechtman, “Yidisher Sotsializm: The Origin and Contexts of the Jewish Labor Bund’s National Program” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2005). 13. Gertrude Pickhan, “Gegen Den Strom”: Der Allgemeine Judische Arbeiterbund “Bund” in Polen, 1918–1939 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001), 413. The degree of antisemitism is hotly contested, especially more recently by Polish historians; however, for many Jews, the feeling that antisemitism was widespread remained. See Ezra Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography on Polish Jewry in the Interwar Period,” in Polin: Jews in Independent Poland, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Antony Polonsky, and Jerzy Tomaszewski (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 3–13. 14. Zvi Gitelman, “A Century of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Legacy of the Bund and the Zionist Movement,” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 12–19. 15. Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). 16. Including, but not limited to, Marek Edelman, “The Ghetto Fights,” in The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising (Poland: Interpress Publishers, 1987), 17–39; Vladka Meed, Fun beyde zaytn geto-moyer (New York: Bildungs-Komitet fun Arbeter-Ring, 1948); Bernard Goldshtayn, Finf yor in Varshever geto (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1947); In heldishn gerangl: Der onteyl fun Bund in di geto-kemfn (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1949); Geto in Flamen: Zamlbukh (New York: Amerikaner reprezentantz fun Bund in Poyln, 1944); Jacob Celemenski, Elegy for My People: Memoirs of an Underground Courier of the Jewish Labor Bund in Nazi-Occupied Poland 1939–1945 (Melbourne: Jacob Celemenski Memorial Trust, 2000). 17. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 224–226. 18. Yosef Gorny, Converging Alternatives: The Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement, 1897–1985 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 207–236. 19. Abraham Brumberg, “Anniversaries in Conflict: On the Centenary of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund,” Jewish Social Studies 5, 3 (1999): 211–212. On the Bund’s decline in postwar Poland, see also Natalia Aleksiun, “Where Was There a Future for Polish Jewry? Bundist and Zionist Polemics in Post–World War II Poland,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 227; and David Engel, “The Bund after the Holocaust: Between Renewal and Self-Liquidation,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 213–226. 20. For a discussion on membership figures, see chapter 1 of this volume.

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CH A PTER 1 A NEW WOR LD OR DER 1. There were smaller independent Bund organizations also in Latvia, Romania, and Lithuania, but the movement remained centered in czarist Russia and thenindependent Poland. 2. Claudie Weill, “Russian Bundists Abroad and in Exile, 1898–1925,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 46–47. 3. On migration figures, see Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 148–149. 4. Marek Web, “Between New York and Moscow: The Fate of the Bund Archives,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 243–254. 5. Tsirl Shtayngart, “Der Bund in Frankraykh,” Unzer Tsayt (October–December, 1972): 105–108. 6. For a discussion on the influence of Bundists in America in the first quarter of the twentieth century, see Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 154–178. 7. Khanine Kramarski, “17-yor a poylisher Bundist in Amerike,” in Zamlheft fun Bundishn Klub in Nyu-York (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu-york, 1938), 8–11. 8. Weill, “Russian Bundists Abroad,” 46–47. 9. For more discussion on the shift of power from Warsaw to Vilna and then finally to New York, see Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 121–128. 10. The Bundists in New York were also concerned with aiding their embattled kin in Eastern Europe and with bringing the latter’s plight to the attention of the western world. However, they also had the luxury of being able to try and think beyond the tragedy. On the American Representation of the Bund in Poland, and on Bund and the Polish government-in-exile, see Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 121–159. For a biography of Zygielbojm, see J. S. Hertz, ed., Zygielbojm-Bukh (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1947), 11–42. 11. Piotr Wróbel, “Introduction,” in Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, Poyln: My Life within Jewish Life in Poland, Sketches and Images, trans. Anna Clarke, ed. Piotr Wróbel and Robert M. Shapiro (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), ix–xi. 12. Y. Y. Trunk, “Bundishe Problemen,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1942): 20–26. 13. Ibid., 24. 14. Ibid., 24–25. 15. “Metafizishe blonzhenishn un lebns-realitetn (entfer fun der redaktsye dem kh’ Trunk),” Unzer Tsayt (June 1942): 27. 16. Ibid., 28. 17. Shloyme Mendelson, “Problemen fun yidishn lebn,” Unzer Tsayt (May 1942): 29. For a biography of Mendelson, see Khayim Shloyme Kazdan, Mentshn fun gayst un mut (Buenos Aires: Farlag Yidbukh, 1962), 253–280. 18. A. Menes, “Di natsyonale shlikhes fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (February 1941): 6–9. 19. Ibid.

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20. Y. Y. Trunk, “Bund un Bundism,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1944): 35. 21. Ibid., 31. 22. Minutes from the Presidium of American Representation of the Bund in Poland [hereafter: Representation], 11 February 1945, Bund Archives (hereafter: BA), RG-1400, Box ME-18, Folder 43 [form hereafter: 18/43]. 23. Minutes from the Presidium of Representation [hereafter: Presidium], 5 May 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/43. 24. See telegrams from Emanuel Scherer to Shloyme Mendelson, 21 May 1945 and 7 June 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/26. 25. See Minutes from Representation and Minutes from Presidium, 11 February, 5 May, 8 May, 26 June, and 26 July 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/43. 26. Minutes from Representation, 31 July 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/43. 27. Minutes from Representation, 15 October 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/43. 28. Declaration, 4 December 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-17/147. 29. Minutes from Representation, 4 December 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/43. 30. Minutes from Presidium, 21 May 1946, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/46. 31. Minutes from Representation, 10 September 1946, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/46. 32. This is true although, due to further complications with visas, the conference was again delayed, until May 1947. Minutes from Representation, 24 September 1946, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/46. 33. Emanuel Scherer, “Emanuel Nowogrodski,” Doyres Bundistn, vol. 3, ed. J. S. Hertz (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1968), 11–22. 34. Emanuel Nowogrodski, “Velt-Konferents fun Bund in Brisl,” Unzer Tsayt (December 1946): 13. 35. Yedies vegn Algemeynem Yidishn Arbeter-Bund in Poyln, distributed by the American Representation of the Bund in Poland [hereafter: Yedies] 76 (1946): 1. 36. Emanuel Scherer, “Bundishe Velt-Kooperatsye,” Unzer Tsayt (May 1946): 20. 37. Ibid., 21. 38. For examples of Hersch’s writings on Israel, see Liebman Hersch, Oyf der grenetz fun tsaytn (Buenos Aires: Gezelshaft far Yidish-veltlekhe shuln in Argentine, 1952), 103–192. See also Gur Alroey, “Demographers in the Service of the Nation: Liebman Hersch, Jacob Lestschinsky, and the Start of Jewish Migration Research,” Jewish History 20, no. 3–4 (2006): 265–282; on Hersch’s role within Bundist debate, see Gorny, Converging Alternatives, 216–223. For a biography of Hersch, see Y. Charlash, “Profesor Liebman Hersch,” in Doyres Bundistn, vol. 2, ed. J. S. Hertz (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1956), 32–40. 39. Liebman Hersch, “Di ideyologishe evolutsye fun Bund,” in Di Tsukunft (May–June 1947), reprinted in Hersch, Oyf der grenetz fun tsaytn, 86–90. 40. Ibid., 88. 41. Ibid., 89. 42. Emanuel Nowogrodski, “Velt-Konferents fun Bund in Brisl,” Unzer Tsayt (December 1946): 13. 43. Y. Y.Trunk, “Velt Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1946): 32.

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44. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 197–198. 45. Yedies 74 (1946), 1. 46. G. Jaszunski, “Nokh der Briseler konferentz (etlekher batrakhtungen),” Folkstsaytung 7 (1 June 1947): 1. In 1948, not long after the first world conference, the Polish Bund would withdraw its membership from the World Bund. The group’s reservations proved too great to overcome, especially with the pressure that was mounting on the Polish Bund to align itself with the Communist government. For more on this, see chapter 2. 47. For a biography of Pat written by his son, see Emanuel Patt, In Gerangl: Yankev Pat un Zayn Dor (New York: Yankev Pat Familye-Fond, 1971). See also Emanuel Scherer, “Yankev Pat,” in Doyres Bundistn, vol. 3, ed. Hertz, 61–65. 48. Yankev Pat, “A bisl apikoyres vegn velt-tsuzamenfor fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (December 1946): 15. 49. Ibid., 17. 50. Ibid., 18. 51. Patt, In Gerangl, 408–413. 52. Ibid., 411. For a broader discussion of the Bund’s debate surrounding Israel and of Pat’s opposition, see chapter 6. 53. Letter from Yankev Pat to Binyomin Tabachinski, 18 March 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 54. “Di velt konferents fun Bund in Brisel,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1947): 44. 55. Ibid., 45. 56. Emanuel Scherer, “Zin un gayst fun Brisl: Nokh der ershter velt-konferentz fun Bund in Brisl,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1947): 3–9. 57. Emanuel Scherer, “10-yor velt koordinir komitet,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1957): 34–38. 58. Emanuel Scherer, “Di kraft fun unzer gloybn,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1948): 3–4. 59. “Barikht fun der konferents,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1948): 8. 60. Emanuel Nowogrodski, “Brisl—Nyu York,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1948): 4–5. 61. “Second World Conference of the Bund,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1, no. 11 (1948): 3. 62. “Barikht fun der konferents,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1948): 13. 63. “Concerning the Coordinating Committee Report,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1, no. 11 (1948): 7. 64. Scherer, “Di kraft fun unzer gloybn,” 4. 65. Scherer, “10-yor velt koordinir komitet,” 36. 66. “Bund World Coordinating Committee Resolutions: On the Aims of Local Work,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 3, no. 1–2 (1950): 5–6. 67. Scherer, “10-yor velt koordinir komitet,” 38. 68. On the development of local communities, see chapters 2–6. 69. Scherer, “Bundishe velt-kooperatsye,” 20. 70. “Farbreyterte plenare zitsung fun koordinir-komitet: 29–31er October 1999, New York,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1999): 20–27.

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71. German historian Gertrud Pickhan discussed this idea at length as it applied to the Polish Bund, in her recent history of that organization. See Pickhan, Gegen Den Strom, 138–148. 72. Yitzkhak Lipski, “Bundishe Mishpokhedikeyt,” Unzer Shtime, 2–3 November 1957, 4, 6. 73. Ibid., 4. 74. Motl Zelmanowicz, “107 yor Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (October–December 2004): 7. 75. Ibid., 6. 76. Tuvie Maizel, “Yidish-sotsyalistishe prese in Unzer Tsayt,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvlnumer (November 1955): 11. 77. Julius Braunthal, ed., Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, vol. 2 (London: Lincolns-Prager International Yearbook Publishing Co., 1960), 267. 78. “Di ferte velt-konferentz fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (June–July 1965): 9. 79. Jewish Labor Bund, 1897–1957 (New York: International Jewish Labor Bund, 1958), 13. 80. See Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1957): I. 81. See Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1967): I. 82. See Unzer Tsayt (October–December 1972): I-L; Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1977): 141. 83. “Tsu di leyzer,” Unzer Tsayt (February 1941): 3. 84. Leyvik Hodes, “Tsvishn angst un hofnung,” Unzer Tsayt (March 1945): 5. 85. Ibid., 9. 86. “Fun der redaktsye,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1947): 46. 87. Report from J. S. Hertz to the World Conference on the Bundist press, in “Di tsveyte velt konferents fun Bund—Organizatsyonele Fragn: Prese un farlag,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1948): 34–35. 88. Moyshe Lokiec, “Sotsyalizm in Unzer Tsayt,” Unzer Tsayt (July–August 1991): 4. 89. Emanuel Scherer, “Bundizm far der noenter Tsukunft,” Unzer Tsayt (January 1965): 25–31 90. Ibid., 31. 91. Emanuel Scherer, “Nekhtn—haynt—morgn,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1967): 17. 92. Ibid., 18. 93. Motl Zelmanowicz, “Bundizm in der hayntiker tsayt,” Unzer Tsayt (May 1992): 25–28. 94. Motl Zelmanowicz, “Unzer Veg,” Unzer Tsayt (September–October 1997): 16–19. 95. See also, “In farteydikung fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (March–April 2002): 26–27; Motl Zelmanowicz, “Der yoyvl fun Bund [rede],” Unzer Tsayt (January–March 2004): 4–8; Motl Zelmanowicz, “107-yor Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (October–December 2004): 3–7. 96. “Editors’ Note,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1947): 1. 97. These include the single issue of The Other Way (Spring 1971), BA, RG-1400, MG-9– 10/313. See also the longer-running Yugnt Shtime, published irregularly through the 1970s by the Jewish Students’ Bund in New York. 98. “To Our Readers,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 2, no. 18–19 (1949): 2.

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99. See Braunthal, ed., Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, 267. 100. Sh. S., “Der veg fun Unzer Shtime,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvl Numer (November 1955): 4–5. 101. “Unzer Tsayt in di yorn fun milkhome un daytsher okupatsye,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvl Numer (November 1955): 5. 102. Unzer Shtime, 4 October 1944, 1. 103. “Fun unzer tribune,” Unzer Shtime, 4 October 1944, 1. 104. “Tsu der yidisher bafelkerung in Frankraykh,” Unzer Shtime, 29–30 December 1946, 1. 105. Sh. S, “Der veg fun Unzer Shtime,” 5. 106. Y. Vaynberg, “Tsvontsik un tsen,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvl-numer (November 1955): 20. 107. Jacob Waks, “A grus fun Oystralye,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvl Numer (November 1955): 26. Another letter that arrived from the Melbourne Bund was from Binem Warshawski, “Mayn vort,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvl Numer (November 1955): 3. 108. M. Rosenberg, “A grus fun Bundistn in Toronto,” Unzer Shtime: Yoyvl Numer (November 1955): 19. 109. See http://www.lebnsfragn.com/. This website has an archive dating back to its first online edition. 110. “Di ferte velt-konferentz fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (June–July 1965): 9. 111. Yitzhak Kahn, “Briv fun Melburn,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1957): 129–130. 112. Moshe Ajzenbud, 60 Yor Bund in Melburn (Melbourne: Bund Organization of Melbourne, 1996), 40. Melbourne in fact, was considered a neglected locality in terms of visiting emissaries, a fact that perhaps heightened members’ sense of excitement at the few official visitors they received. See “Di ferte velt-konferentz fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (June–July 1965): 9. 113. See “B. Tabatchinsky in Eyrope,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1957): 128–129; “Tetikayt barikht fun der 7-ter land konferentz fun Bund in Frankrayhk,” Unzer Shtime, 2–3 November 1957, 2; “60 yeriker yovlay fun Bund farvandlt in Pariz in a groyser un ayndruksfuler manifestatsye,” Unzer Shtime, 4 November 1957, 1–2. “Rede fun B. Tabatchinsky oyf der Yoyvl Akademie in Zal ‘Chimie,’” Unzer Shtime, 5 November 1957, 2, 4. 114. Y. L., “Hershl Himmelfarb in Los Angeles,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1957): 130, CII. 115. “H. Himmelfarb in Los Angeles,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 4, no. 6 (1951): 6. 116. “Di fayerungen fun 70 yor Bund: in Doyrem Amerike,” Unzer Tsayt (November– December 1967): 159–161. 117. “Bazukh fun shaliakh fun Koordinir Komitet Khaver A. Kahan,” Byuletin fun Bund [Melbourne] (October 1967): 1. 118. “Aktsye—70 yor Bund,” Byuletin fun Bund [Melbourne] (November 1967): 4. 119. On Nowogrodski’s visit through South America, see BA, RG-1400, ME-18/97; “Dr. Emanuel Scherer in Europe,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 4, no. 6–10 (1951): 6. “Prof. Hersch’s Bund Tour,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 5, no. 18–24 (1952): 6. Artuski actually visited Melbourne in 1961, against the wishes of General Secretary Nowogrodski, who thought his work in Israel was too important to leave. See Ajzenbud, 60 yor Bund in Melburn, 162, 222–223. For more on Artuski’s visit, see Yitzkhak Kahn,

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“Y. Artuski in Melburn,” in Yid, Mentsh, Sotsyalist: Y. Artuski ondenk-bukh (Tel Aviv: Farlag Lebns-fragn, 1976), 99–106. 120. “Di ferte velt-konferentz fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (June–July 1965): 9. 121. See, for example, Scherer, “10-yor velt koordinir komitet,” 34–38. 122. “Di akhte velt-konferentz fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1992): 3–18. 123. “Di fayerungen tsum 100 yorikn yoyvilay fun Bund in Nyu York,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1997): 3–9. 124. Motl Zelmanowicz, “Der yoyvl fun Bund (rede),” 4. 125. Ibid., 4. Zelmanowicz may have been overstating the circulation of the Forverts even at this time, as this was the tendency of the Bund’s polemicists throughout the party’s postwar life. 126. Ibid., 7. 127. Motl Zelmanowicz, “107 yor Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 2004): 4. 128. Ibid., 4.

CH A PTER 2 ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD WOR LD 1. Israeli scholar Yosef Grodzinsky has written a critical history of the Zionist treatment of non-Zionists in the camps, but on the issue of the Bundist experience he relies solely on Bundist sources and takes them at face value. His is the only serious historical work that has so far taken Bundist claims seriously. See Yosef Grodzinsky, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004). 2. Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah (New York: Random House, 1970), 178. Bauer reaffirmed this argument in a more recent book. See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 247–248. 3. Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939– 1949 (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 203. 4. Avinoam Patt, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 253, 330n62; Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 163. 5. Zeev Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69–76; see also Mankowitz’s “Zionism and the She’erit Hapletah,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference), ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 211–230. 6. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 202. On the fluctuation in the camps’ Jewish populations generally, see Mark Wyman, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1989), 155. 7. The Executive of Bundist Groups in Germany sporadically published a bulletin. For more on this body, including conference and meeting minutes, correspondence, and reports, see BA, RG-1400, ME-18/16.

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8. The Bund archives at the YIVO institute in New York contain folders with minutes and reports from conferences, as well as correspondence between the Executive of Bundist Groups in Germany and the various groups throughout the camps. See BA, RG-1400, ME-18/16. 9. Avrom Alter, “Der emes vegn yidish un di Bundistn in di daytshe lagern,” Unzer Shtime, 6–7 July 1947, 2. 10. For a broader discussion on the intellectual debates surrounding Zionism and Israel that took place in Western countries, see chapter 6. 11. “More about the DP Camps,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 2 (1949): 6–7. 12. See the discussion on this in the report from the Bund’s first world conference in Brussels, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/8. 13. See for example the pile of approximately one hundred forms in BA, RG-1400, ME-18/173. 14. Litvak Leon, “Bundistn in Mozart’s geburt-shtot,” Unzer Shtime, 24 June 1947, 3. 15. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 202. 16. Khil Infeld, “Di tsveyte land konferents fun di Bundishe grupn in Daytshland,” Unzer Shtime, 10 February 1948, 4. 17. Byuletin fun der Bundisher Grupe in Daytshland 3, 1–2. See also protocols of the Bund Conference in Germany, Stuttgart, 3–4 June 1948, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/161. Tabachinski later gave an interview to Unzer Shtime, serialized over the last week of June 1948, in which he discussed his impressions of the situation in the camps. 18. “Conference of the Bund in Austria,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 6–7. 19. Resolution on the WCC and European Secretariat, Bund Conference MunichPasing, March 1949, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/161. 20. G. Gorevich, “S.O.S.: Vegn di lagern in Daytshland,” Folkstsaytung 4 (June 1946): 3. 21. Ibid. 22. Letter from Anke Zilbershtayn, 21 September 1947, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/161. 23. “Moralisher metsev fun di yidishe pleytim in di daytshe lagern—vert alts erger,” Unzer Shtime, 8–9 June 1947, 3. 24. “Briv fun di lagern in daytshland,” Unzer Tsayt (November 1945): 26–27. 25. Letter from Yankl Leber (Bergen-Belsen) to Unzer Tsayt editors, 15 February 1946, BA, MG-1/88. 26. Letter from Steyr Bund committee to Emanuel Nowogrodzki, 18 March 1947, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/51. 27. Oyfn Shaydveg: Hayntike problemen fun yidishn natsyonaln kiyum (Germany: Fraye Tribune, 1948). 28. Letter from publisher Fraye Tribune to Bund groups, 2 January 1949, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/522. 29. Moshe Ajzenbud, “Lagern—a tsiyenistishen kolonye,” Unzer Tsayt (January 1949): 32. 30. Reports of Zionist terror in the camps, Kuper from Camp Puch near Salzburg, 25 October 1946, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/108. 31. Moshe Shvartz, “Blimelekh fun Tsiyonistish-‘demokratisher’ hershaft in di lagern,” Unzer Shtime, 24 April 1947, 3–4.

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32. Moshe Shvartz, “Di valn tsue di lager komitet in Ulm,” Unzer Shtime, 20–21 April 1947, 3. 33. Letter from Y. Prav to American Representation of the Bund in Poland, 31 March 1947, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/54. For more accounts of violence and intimidation, see the “Reports of Zionist terror in the camps,” which is a compilation of incidents reported by correspondents, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/108. 34. “Jewish Displaced Persons,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 7. 35. Letter from Motl Tsederboym to Bundists in New York, 22 May 1948, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/108. 36. “Oystsug fun a briv,” Unzer Tsayt (July–August 1948): 16. 37. “Der 3ter kongres fun der shires-hapleyteh,” Der Veker (May 1948): 11. 38. “Documents of Shame from the DP Camps in Germany,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 6. 39. Conscription notice for Yitzhak Elster, Steyr, undated, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/172. 40. Telegram to Celnik from Employment Office, Neu Friemann, 22 August 1948, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/108. 41. Natalia Aleksiun, “Where Was There a Future for Polish Jewry? Bundist and Zionist Polemics in Post–World War II Poland,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 227. 42. “Partey-khronik,” Byuletin fun Bund [Warsaw] 3 (August 1945): 21–27. 43. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 173. 44. Report from first world conference of the Bund, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/8. 45. Ibid., 176–183. 46. Salo Fishgrund, “Der Bund in Banaytn Poyln,” Folkstsaytung 16–17 (15 November 1947): 2. 47. Byuletin fun Bund [Warsaw] 2 (July 1945): 1. 48. After the early 1920s, when the Bund in the Soviet Union was shut down, the Bund saw the Soviet Union as totalitarian and its rise detrimental to socialism. Further, after the execution of Bund icons Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter by the Soviet government in 1941, Bundists’ hostility to the Soviets sharpened. For a further explanation of this evolution in the 1920s and 1930s, see Brumberg, “The Bund: History of a Schism,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 81–89. On the Erlich and Alter affair, see Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 69–89; Gertrud Pickhan, “That Incredible History of the Polish Bund Written in a Soviet Prison,” in Polin 10 (1997): 247–272. 49. On Soviet domination of postwar Poland, see Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 411–431. 50. “Ershte land-konferentz fun Bund,” Byuletin fun Bund [Warsaw] 2 (July 1945): 13–14. 51. Cable from the American Representation to Central Committee of Bund in Poland (c/o Michal Szuldenfrei), 30 July 1945, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/26. 52. A more detailed discussion on the Polish Bund’s relations with other Bund organizations follows. On the initial tension, see Minutes of the American Representation, 16 January 1945; BA, ME-18/43; cable from Nowogrodski to Gershon Zybert

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(Johannesburg), 25 January 1945; cable from Emanuel Scherer to Shloyme Mendelsohn, 21 May 1945, BA, ME-18/26. 53. G. Fogel, “Oyf bundishe vegn,” Folkstsaytung 1 (April 1946): 2. 54. Ibid., 2–3. 55. G. Jaszunski, “Emigratsye un emigratsyonizm,” Byuletin fun Bund [Warsaw] 3 (October 1945): 10–14. 56. Ibid., 14. 57. Ibid., 14. 58. “Tsu der yidisher bafelkerung in Poyln,” Folkstaytung 1 (1946): 2. 59. On the Kielce pogrom, see Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006), 81–166; on the Krakow pogrom, see Anna Cichopek, “The Cracow Pogrom of August 1945,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. Joshua Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 221–236. 60. For a detailed account of the persistence of antisemitism beyond the war, see Gross, Fear. 61. Ibid., 247. 62. Cichopek, “The Cracow Pogrom of August 1945,” 221. 63. “Rezolutsye vegn antisemitism,” Byuletin fun Bund [Warsaw] 2 (July 1945): 14. 64. Gross, Fear, 33. 65. Aleksiun, “Where Was There a Future for Polish Jewry?” 227. 66. “Far rekht un fraye antviklungs-meglekhkeytn fun di Yidishe masn,” Folkstsaytung 4 (June 1946): 4. 67. G. F., “Treblinke un Keltz,” Folkstsaytung 5 (July 1946): 1. 68. This is from the text of a resolution on Jewish life in Poland. See “Nokhn akhtn tsuzamenfor fun Bund in Poyln,” Folkstsaytung 3 (1 April 1947): 4–5. 69. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 175. 70. Y. Perlshteyn, “Di rol fun tsurikgevunene mayrev-gebitn in bafraytn Poyln,” Folkstsaytung 14–15 (1 July 1948): 8–9. 71. Ibid., 9. 72. M. Perlman, “Unzer arbet in di kooperativn,” Folkstsaytung 9 (December 1946): 6. 73. Ibid. 74. “Foroys di yunge gvardie: ershte (zibete) land konferentz fun Y. B. Tsukunft,” Folkstsaytung 4 (1946): 4. 75. M. A., “Bundishe yugnt bay der arbet,” Folkstsaytung 4 (June 1946): 4. 76. Ljuba, “Der Yugnt Veker—der veg-vayzer fun der yidisher arbeter-yugnt,” Yugnt Veker 1 (1946): 2. 77. “Unter bloyer himlen—a frayer dor,” Yugnt Veker 1 (1946): 8–10. 78. “Sotsyalistisher Yugnt-Republik,” Yugnt Veker 7–8 (1947): 11–14. 79. For more on this third stage, see below. “Trayshaft un mut,” Unzer Tsayt (April– May 1949): 37–39. 80. Yedies 76 (1946): 1.

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81. “Di delegatsye fun Ts. K. fun Bund in Poyln in Nyu-York,” Unzer Tsayt (March–April 1946): 8. 82. Y. B. Salutsky-Hardman, “Mir do—un der Bund in Poyln,” Unzer Tsayt (March–April 1946): 18–20. 83. His concern was possibly part of the East/West antagonism that we would see later, as the Cold War became consolidated and Polish Bundists found themselves at odds with their comrades in the West. See G. Jaszunski, “Pesimistishe ayndrukn fun Amerike,” Folkstsaytung 4 (June 1946): 3. 84. Yedies 74 (1946), 1. 85. “Far rekht un fraye antviklungs-meglekhkaytn fun di Yidishe masn,” Folkstsaytung 6 (1946): 4. 86. G. Jaszunski, “Nokh der Briseler konferents (etlekhe batrakhtungen),” Folkstsaytung 7 (1 June 1947): 1. 87. Ibid., 1. 88. “Di frage un der entfer,” Folkstsaytung 9 (1 July 1947): 4. 89. M. Shuldenfray, “Vos zog der Bund in Poyln,” Folkstsaytung 9 (1 July 1947): 4. 90. “Deklaratsye fun Bund in Poyln,” Folkstsaytung 8 (1 April 1948): 1. 91. “Politisher referat fun Kh’ Dr. Dep. M. Shuldenfray,” Folkstsaytung 9 (15 April 1948): 2–3. 92. Ibid., 2. The reality is that the World Coordinating Committee’s mandate did extend beyond dealing with Jewish issues, which is something that the Polish Bund had earlier acknowledged (see above). The World Coordinating Committee had also been concerned with Jewish issues during this period. Most likely, ignoring this fact served Shuldenfray’s propaganda demands, as he sought to convince the party members that they needed to disassociate themselves from their comrades. 93. Ibid., 2–3. 94. Ibid., 2–3. 95. Ibid., 3. 96. “Behind the Iron Curtain (News from Poland),” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 5–7. 97. “One Year after the World Conference of the Bund in Brussels,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 8. 98. See Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 211–212. 99. “Referat fun Kh’ Zachariasz,” Folkstsaytung 14–15 (1 July 1948): 6. 100. “Diskusye arum di referatn,” Folkstsaytung 14–15 (1 July 1948): 6–7. 101. Sh. Hurwicz, “Rede fun Khaver Sh. Hurwicz oyf der konferents fun di Voyevodishe aktivn fun Bund un PPR in Wroclaw,” Folkstsaytung 14–15 (1 July 1948): 5, 7. 102. “Dekleratsye fun dem farbreytertn plenum fun Ts. K. fun Bund in Poyln mitn onteyl fun di forshteyer fun ale Bundishe organizatsyes, vos iz forgekumen dem 23-tn un 24-tn Oktober 1948 yor in Lodz,” Folkstsaytung 20 (7 November 1948): 3–4. 103. Ibid., 4. The use of the word onshlus is noteworthy. Generally, the writers and polemicists talk about aynhayt or farbindung to discuss unity or connection, but at the end of the declaration, they refer to the onshlus, which could denote a less voluntary affiliation, perhaps more like Germany’s Anschluss with Austria in 1938.

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104. Gershon Fogel, “In an antsheydnkiker sho,” Folkstsaytung 20 (7 November 1948): 2. 105. “Oyserordntlakher tsuzamenfor fun Bund in Poyln,” Folkstsaytung 21 (25 January 1949): 1. 106. S. Hurwicz, “Politisher referat fun Kh’ S. Hurwicz,” Folkstsaytung 21 (25 January 1949): 3–4. 107. “Komunikat fun der tsentraler likvidatsye komisye,” Folkstsaytung 21 (25 January 1949): 4. 108. “Di Tsukunft in Poyln hot nisht kapitulirt,” Yugnt Veker 1 (1949): 2. 109. “Trayshaft un mut: Dekleratsye vegn der Bundisher yugnt in Poyln,” Unzer Tsayt (April–May 1949): 37–39. 110. Emanuel Scherer, “Dr. Michal Szuldenfray,” in Doyres Bundistn, vol. 3: 103–108. 111. Hannah Krall, “To Outwit God,” in The Subtenant: To Outwit God (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 129–247; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Observations: The Curious Case of Marek Edelman,” Commentary 83, no. 3 (1987): 66–70. 112. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 216. 113. Ibid., 214–215. 114. See Davies, God’s Playground, 410. 115. “Behind the Iron Curtain,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 2 (1949): 4. 116. “The Murder of a Movement,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 2 (1949): 1–2. 117. Ibid.

CH A PTER 3 BET W EEN THE OLD WOR LD AND THE NEW 1. Patrick Weil, “The Return of Jews in the Nationality or the Territory of France,” in The Jews are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WWII, ed. David Bankier (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 58–59. 2. David Weinberg, “The Renewal of Jewish Life in France after the Holocaust,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference), ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 169–174. 3. See Michel Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews in France,” trans. Alan Astro, Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 248–261; Irvin Wall, “Remaking Jewish Identity in France,” in Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard K. Wettstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 164–170. 4. Daniel Dratwa, “Genocide and Its Memories: A Preliminary Study on How Belgian Jewry Coped with the Result of the Holocaust,” in Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998), 523–524. 5. Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 231. 6. Nancy Green’s monograph on the rise of the Jewish labor movement in France is noteworthy: Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the “Belle Époque” (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986). See also David Weinberg’s authoritative work on French Jewry in the interwar period: David Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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See also Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7. Most notable is Marrus and Paxton’s groundbreaking reappraisal of the Vichy regime: Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981). On Jewish resistance in France, see Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 8. See Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 193–214; Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 179–200. 9. Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Raymond Aron, De Gaulle, Israel, and the Jews, trans. John Sturrock (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004). 10. Leora Auslander, “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 237–259; Annette Aronowicz, “Homens mapole: Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 3 (2008): 355–388; Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); K. H. Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Renée Poznanski, “French Apprehensions, Jewish Expectations: From a Social Imaginary to a Political Practice,” and Patrick Weil, “The Return of Jews,” 25–71; David Weinberg, “The Reconstruction of the French Jewish Community after World War II,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference), ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 168–186. 11. On the establishment of the Bund’s foreign committee, see Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From its origins to 1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 92–94; see also Claudie Weill, “Russian Bundists Abroad and in Exile, 1898– 1925,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 46–55. 12. See Claudie Weill, “Le Bund Russe à Paris, 1898–1949,” Archives Juives 34 (2001– 2002): 30–42. 13. Ibid., 37–38. See also Green, The Pletzl of Paris, 98; Pinches Szmajer, “Contribution à l’histoire du Bund à Paris,” Combat pour la Diaspora 4 (3rd trimester, 1980): 51–60. 14. Green, The Pletzl of Paris, 169–170. 15. Ibid., 98. 16. Henri Minczeles, “La résistance du Bund en France pendant l’Occupation,” Le Monde Juif 51, no. 154 (1995): 139. 17. Ibid., 140. 18. Tsirl Shtayngart, “Der Bund in Frankraykh,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1972): 106–107.

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19. Ibid., 141. 20. Michel Roblin, Les Juifs de Paris: Démographie, Économie, Culture (Paris: Éditions A. et J. Picard, 1952), 171. 21. On the Amelot Committee, see Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution, 165–195. 22. Minczeles, “La résistance du Bund en France pendant l’Occupation,” 141–142. 23. Ibid., 141. 24. Nicole Mandolinier, Maurice Rothnerer, and Raoul Rouan, “Les Jeunesses du Bund dans la Résistance,” Combat Pour le Diaspora, 23–24 (3rd Trimestre, 1988): 25–34. 25. On Bundists around the Vichy zone, see the memoirs of French and later Argentine Bund activist Alexander Minc. P. Minc (Alexander), Yidisher Umkum un Vidershtand in Frankraykh (Buenos Aires: Farlag Yidbukh, 1956). See also F[ayvel] Schrager, Oyfn rand fun tsvey tkufes (Paris, 1976). 26. Minc, Yidisher Umkum un Vidershtand in Frankraykh, 263. 27. “Fun unzer tribune,” Unzer Shtime, 4 October 1944, 1. 28. “Tsu undzere leyener,” Unzer Shtime, 25 October 1944, 2. 29. Alexander [Minc], “50-numern Unzer Shtime: A yoyvl vos vekt un mutikt,” Unzer Shtime, 24 March 1945, 1. 30. “Unzer Shtime—Unzer Tribune,” Unzer Shtime, 21 July 1945, 1. 31. N. Khilman, “Farvos a teglekhe Unzer Shtime,” Unzer Shtime, 30 December 1946, 1. 32. On the rise and fall of the Yiddish press in Paris, see Nicholas Simon, “Nu, So Stop the Press Already,” Jerusalem Report, 27 January 1994, 32; and Valérie Duponchelle, “Le crépuscule de la presse Yiddish,” Le Figaro, 20 February 1997. 33. See for example, Alexander [Minc], “Unzer Shtime,” Yoyvl-oysgabe fun Unzer Shtime (November 1955): 3. On the circulation figures, see Julius Braunthal, ed., Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, vol. 2 (London: Lincolns-Prager International Yearbook Publishing Co., 1960), 267. 34. “Vikhtike land baratung fun Yidishn Sotsyalistishn Farband,” Unzer Shtime, 22 November 1944, 1. 35. Ibid., 1. Although this last point did not materialize, as Fayvel Schrager, former chair of the Arbeter Ring, recounted in his memoirs. In fact, the Bund’s stubborn refusal to work alongside other sections of the Jewish community was, he said, a major reason that he recoiled from the Bund in the early 1950s and shifted his focus to social and cultural work. See Schrager, Oyfn Rand fun Tsvey Tkufes, 84–88. 36. On the community operation to rehabilitate the thousands of orphaned children, see David Weinberg, “The Reconstruction of the French Jewish Community after World War II,” in She’erit Hapletah, 172–173 37. “Hilf—di deportirte,” Di Naye Tsayt, 25 May 1945, 8. 38. K. Fish, “Unzer alarm-ruf,” Di Naye Tsayt, 26 May 1945, 1. 39. Shimen, “Di fayerlekhe derefenung fun opru-hoyz far yidishe deportirte baym Arbeter Ring in Grenobl,” Di Naye Tsayt, 14 July 1945, 14. 40. F.K., “Di kvaln shlogn vider,” Di Naye Tsayt, 26 May 1945, 9. 41. On the closure of the homes, see F. Schrager, Oyfn Rand fun Tsvey Tkufes, 84.

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42. See William I. Hitchcock, “Crisis and Modernization in the Fourth Republic: From Suez to Rome,” in Crisis and Renewal in France, 1918–1962, ed. Kenneth Mouré and Martin S. Alexander (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 221–241. 43. Sh. Gros, “Dos problem fun kolonyes un fun nisht-antviklte lender,” Unzer Shtime, 27–28 November 1954, 2, and continued on 30 November 1954, 3–4. 44. “Di hoypt punktn fun Guy Mollet’s regirung program,” Unzer Shtime, 1 February 1956, 1. 45. See “Guy Mollet in Algier,” Unzer Shtime, 7 February 1956, 1; “Nokh di fashistishe umruen in Algiers,” Unzer Shtime, 8 February 1956; Y. Spektator, “Di psikhologye fun frantsoyzn in Algeria,” Unzer Shtime, 10 February 1956, 2, and continued on 11–12 February 1956, 2. 46. On Mollet’s policy shift, see Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (London: Macmillan, 1977), 147–164. 47. See “Tsi iz dos meglekh?” Unzer Shtime, 5 October 1956, 2; Y. Spektator, “Vu halt es mit Alzhir?” Unzer Shtime, 30 October 1956, 5. 48. Y. Ferkun, “Zayt dem 6tn Februar hot zikh gornisht geendert,” Unzer Shtime, 3 January 1956, 1–2. 49. Y. Ferkun, “Der arest fun di alzhirianer firer—a geferlekher akt,” Unzer Shtime, 24 October 1956, 1. 50. Examples are too numerous to list, but a cursory glance through the newspaper in the second half of 1956 and first half of 1957 leaves no doubt as to where their outrage lay. 51. “Rezolutsyes fun der 7ter land konferents fun Yidishn Sotsyalistishn Farband ‘Bund’ in Frankraykh,” Unzer Shtime, 13 November 1957, 2. 52. Edward G. DeClair, Politics on the Fringe: The People, Policies, and Organization of the French National Front (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 19–21; on Jewish anxiety over radical French antisemitism, see Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 209–211. 53. Hitchcock, “Crisis and Modernization,” 232. 54. Matthew James Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102–109. 55. On the evolution of France’s relationship to Israel, see Zach Levey, “French-Israeli Relations, 1950–1956: The Strategic Dimension,” in Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath, ed. Simon C. Smith (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 87–106; on the direct link between the war in Algeria and French policy vis-à-vis the Suez Canal, see Motti Golani, Israel in Search of a War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955–1956 (Brighton; Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), 39–45. 56. See for example, Vladimir Grossman, “Nasser inem Moskver kreml,” Unzer Shtime, 12 November 1956, 3. 57. A. Politikum, “Nasser’s bukh vegn bahershn di velt,” Unzer Shtime, 28 August 1956, 3. 58. D. Merlin, “Di gesheyenishn in Mitzrayim un di Yisroel-medine,” Unzer Shtime, 28 August 1956, 3–4.

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59. Ibid., 4. 60. Emanuel Scherer, “A tragisher feler,” Unzer Shtime, 12 December 1956, 2. 61. “Di krig-gesheyenishn in miteln-mizrekh: dekleratsye fun velt-kordinir komitet,” Unzer Shtime, 21 November 1956, 2. 62. See for example, that of French socialist leader Robert Verdier, “Di sho fun dreyste initsyativ,” Unzer Shtime, 17–18 November 1956, 3; or, from a Viennese socialist newspaper, P. S, “Di derfarung fun Suez,” Unzer Shtime, 14 November 1956, 3. 63. “Di ershte egyptishn yidn zenen ongekumen keyn frankraykh,” Unzer Shtime, 28 November 1956, 3. 64. Dina Ryba, “A naye bundishe filozofye?” Bundishe Fraye Tribune (March 1958): 14. 65. Ibid., 14. 66. Ibid., 16. 67. Kalman Goldwasser, “Iz dos Bundish?” Bundishe Fraye Tribune (March 1958): 6–7. 68. Ibid., 7. 69. Ryba, “A naye bundishe filozofye?” 13–14. 70. Ibid., 13. 71. “Tetikayt-barikht oyf der 7ter land konferents fun der Bund in Frankraykh,” Unzer Shtime, 2–3 November 1957, 2. 72. Raphal Ryba, “Fragn, oyf velkhe m’darf zikh fartrakhtn,” Bundishe Fraye Tribune (March 1958): 3–4. 73. Letter from Kalman Goldwasser to Raphal and Dina Ryba (in New York), 20 September 1958. BA, RG-1400, ME-40/145. See also a letter from Dina Ryba to J. S. Hertz, 12 May 1958, in the same folder. 74. “In kamf far demokratye un frayhayt: Mekhtike demonstratsye fun Parizer folk unter der lozung ‘Zol Lebn di Republik,’” Unzer Shtime, 29 May 1958, 1. 75. R. N. “Frayhayt, Tayere Frayhayt,” Unzer Shtime, 30 May 1958, 2. 76. L. Sh[tern] , “Der shrayendike kegnzats,” Unzer Shtime, 30 May 1958, 1. 77. L. Shtern, “Nokh a groyser korbn,” Unzer Shtime, 3 June 1958, 1. On the Bund’s skepticism, see also L. Shtern, “De Gol—an Oysnam?” Unzer Tsayt (November 1958): 16–17. 78. L. Shtern, “Bilans fun a yor Golizm: tsum ershtn yortsayt nokh der frantsoyzisher 4ter republik,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1959): 7. 79. L. Shtern, “De Gol hot gevunen bloyz a shlakht,” Unzer Tsayt (March 1960): 8. 80. Ibid., 9–10. 81. L. Shtern, “Tsvishn krig, sholem un birger-krig,” Unzer Tsayt (February 1962): 19–21. Of course, the Fifth Republic did survive its founding president. At the time, however, it was not self-evident that it could last beyond De Gaulle, a war hero who twice galvanized a majority of the population during major crises. See Nicholas Atkin, The French Fifth Republic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–7. On Gaullism and French political power after 1958, see David S. Bell, Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 82. This issue is discussed in more detail later in this chapter. 83. See Tsirl Shtayngart, “SKIF-heym Ika in Corvol (Nièvre),” Unzer Shtime, 9 August 1947, 3.

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84. “Fils et filles de Bundistes,” in “Le yiddish, une langue pour territoire,” Vacarme 7 (Winter 1999), http://www.vacarme.org/article969.html [accessed 24 May 2011]. 85. Jacqueline Gluckstein, “Corvol, 1947–1968: lettre a des préados,” in Tous la main dans la main: 60ème anniversaire, Foyer Ika, 1947–2007 (Paris: Centre Medem, 2007), 68–72. 86. “Konferents fun SKIF nemt a vikhtiker bashlus,” Unzer Shtime, 28 November 1956, 3–4. 87. “Brayte diskusye vegn tetikayt barikht fun general-sekretar,” Unzer Shtime, 6 November 1957, 2. 88. Henri Minczeles, “Corvol—du SKIF au CLEJ,” in Tous la main dans la main, 88. 89. Gluckstein, “Corvol, 1947–1968,” 72. 90. “Interview des fondateurs du CLEJ,” in Tous la main dans la main, 92. 91. Minczeles, “Corvol—du SKIF au CLEJ,” 87. 92. “Interview des fondateurs du CLEJ,” 95. 93. Ibid., 95; Minczeles, “Corvol—du SKIF au CLEJ,” 89. 94. “Interview des fondateurs du CLEJ,” 95. 95. Ibid., 93. 96. Minczeles, “Corvol—du SKIF au CLEJ,” 88. 97. Aby Wieviorka, “Intervention au 35ème anniversaire,” Tous la main dans la main, 99–100. 98. “Unzer Shtime 1964: L’Organisation juive d’enfants CLEJ,” Tous la main dans la main, 101–102. 99. “Fils et filles de Bundistes.” 100. Atkin, The French Fifth Republic, 68–69. 101. On Algerian-Jewish trauma and memory, see Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford, New York: Berg, 1999), 167–184. 102. On the North African migration, see Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews in France,” 248–261; Todd Shepherd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 169–182. 103. Raphal Ryba, “Oyfn veg fun sholem,” Unzer Shtime, 3–4 March 1962, 2–4; Raphal Ryba, “Di gesheyenishn in alzhirye un di yidn,” Unzer Shtime, 17–18 December 1960, 2–4. On the Egyptian Jews, see, “Di ershte egyptishe yidn zenen ongekumen keyn frankraykh,” Unzer Shtime, 28 November 1956, 3. 104. In his well-known autobiographical critique, Le Juif imaginaire, conservative philosopher Alain Finkielkraut lamented the gap left by his parents’ generation and its failure to transmit Yiddish language and culture. See Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew. 105. Moshe Zalcman, Di Groyse Enderung in Yidishn Lebn in Frankraykh: fun der zekstogiker milkhome biz 1980 (Tel Aviv: Farlag Yisroel-bukh, 1981), 133–135. 106. Jonathan Boyarin, Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 107. Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews in France,” 259.

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108. Henri Minczeles, “Di situatsye fun yidishn yishuv in Frankraykh,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1993): 34–36. 109. See Uri Ayalon, “Yiddish Culture is Thriving in Paris,” Haaretz, 23 July 2003, http:// www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=321010&contrassID=2&sub ContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y [accessed 24 May 2011]. 110. See “Notre Histoire,” http://www.centre-medem.org/spip.php?rubrique15 [accessed 24 May 2011].

CH A PTER 4 THE GOLDENE MEDINEH? 1. Irving Howe’s account of the history of Jewish migration to the United States is one of the seminal works on American Jewish history. Tony Michels’s recent work on the radical Jewish Left is the most thorough analysis of the history of the Jewish Left in the United States. Jonathan Frankel’s work also stands out in its thorough analysis of the rise of Jewish socialism in the United States. See Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 453–547; Y. Sh. Hertz, Di Yidishe Sotsyalistishe Bavegung in Amerike (New York: Farlag Der Veker, 1954). 2. Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 156. 3. See B. Vladeck: In Lebn un Shafn, ed. Yefim Yeshurin (New York: Forverts, 1936); Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 4. Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 172–173. 5. Ibid., 123–124, 142. 6. Quoted in Hertz, Di yidishe sotsyalistisher bavegung in Amerike, 166. 7. Quoted in Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 176. 8. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 461. 9. Hertz, Di yidishe sotsyalistisher bavegung in Amerike, 239. 10. The Bund was not outwardly anticommunist until the late 1920s. In fact, in the early years of that decade, a majority of the party was willing and ready to accept nineteen of the twenty-one conditions to join the Communist International. See Abraham Brumberg, “The Bund: History of a Schism,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 81–89; Bernard K. Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers’ Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 82–120. 11. Hertz, Di yidishe sotsyalistisher bavegung in Amerike, 240. 12. Khonine Kramarski, “17 yor a Poylisher Bundist in Amerike,” in Zamlheft fun Bundishn Klub in Nyu York (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu York, 1938), 8–11. 13. See Henryk Erlich, Der Iker fun Bundizm (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu-York, 1935); Ab. Kahan un der Bund in Poyln (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu York,

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1932); Der Forverts un der Bund (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu York, 1935). See also Vegn Bund in Poyln (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu-York, 1937). See also the club’s fifteen-year anniversary booklet, Zamlheft fun Bundishn Klub in Nyu York (New York: Bundisher Klub in Nyu York, 1938). 14. Frank Wolff, “Singular Islands or a Transnational Sphere? Bundist Revolutionary Culture in the Process of Migration” (paper presented at conference: Working Men of All Countries, Unite! Crisis and Revolution in Today’s World—analysis and Perspectives, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 30 October–1 November 2008). 15. Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939– 1949 (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 121. 16. Catherine Collomp, “The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of European Socialists, 1934–1941,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 68 (Fall 2005): 112–133. 17. Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours, 121–128. 18. List of Medem Club members, undated, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/32. Although the list is undated, the presence of many of the postwar Bund leaders indicates that it was written in 1945–1946. 19. See chapter 1. 20. Minutes from American Representation of the Bund in Poland meeting, 25 June 1946, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/46. 21. The high point for the Socialist Party of America was, under the leadership of Eugene Debs, the years surrounding World War I, when it claimed a membership of approximately one hundred thousand. Subsequently, after years in the wilderness, the socialist movement took renewed energy from the Great Depression, although Roosevelt’s New Deal effectively undermined popular socialist leader Norman Thomas. Irving Howe discusses the success of the Debs era and explains the many factors that led to the decline of U.S. socialism in the 1930s. Irving Howe, Socialism and America (San Diego: Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, 1985), 1–86. On the decline of U.S. socialism in the mid-1930s, see also Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 135–177. 22. Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews, and American Zionism: 1933–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 151. 23. Telegram from Emanuel Scherer to British Labour Party, 29 April 1948, BA, RG-1400, O/26. 24. See Emanuel Scherer, Problemen fun sotsyalizm in Amerike (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1950). 25. A.A., “Di bundishe organizatsye in Nyu-York,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1947), 50. 26. Draft statement from Emanuel Scherer, December 1946, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/138. 27. Ibid., 50–53. 28. Circular from E. Scherer (secretary) to members, 3 April 1947, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/21. 29. On Paris, see chapter 3 of this volume. On Tel Aviv, see chapter 6.

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30. For broader discussion of these activities and their significance, see my discussion on the Arbeter Ring later in this chapter. 31. In some cases, Bundists were very involved in the activities of cooperatives, as in 1970 when a Bundist candidate contested the election for director of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative. He received 270 votes, only 11 short of being elected. See protocol of New York Bund Committee meeting, 2 June 1971, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. For more on Hemshekh and the Bundist youth, see below. 32. Irena Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity: Yiddishkayt in America (1986),” in Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes, (Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1992), 144–145. 33. Ibid., 145–147. 34. See both the delegate list and list of participating organizations from the first national conference of the Bund in the USA and Canada, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/125. 35. Application for Parade Permit, Police Department, City of New York, BA, RG-1400, O/26. 36. See the report from the first world conference, May 1948, Brussels, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/8. 37. Minutes to the second world conference, 2 October 1948, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 38. On the arrival of Holocaust survivors to the United States and the development of the Truman administration’s migration policy, see Beth Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 8–29. 39. See BA, RG-1400, ME-18/173. 40. For a report of the conference as well as copies of resolutions and other materials, see BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/125. 41. See Resolution on Uniting Jewish socialist movement, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/125. 42. Emanuel Nowogrodski, “Sotsyalizm vet onyogn Amerike,” Unzer Tsayt (November 1946): 12. 43. Ibid., 13–14. 44. Ibid., 15–17. 45. Emanuel Scherer, Problemen fun sotsyalizm in Amerike, 9. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. Ibid., 21–32. 48. See invitation from Jewish Labor Bund in New York to members for event titled “United Socialist Movement in America,” 24 January 1947, BA, RG-1400, MG-9, MG-10/49. For a detailed report of the event, see A.A., “Di Bundishe Organizatsye in Nyu-york,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1947): 50–52. 49. See my discussion on the Bund and the Jewish Left later in this chapter. 50. Poster for May Day rally, 1956, Conference for Joint May Day Celebration, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/138. 51. Poster for May Day rally, undated, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/118. 52. Letter to Scherer from John Haynes Holmes (chair Norman Thomas Testimonial Committee), 2 December 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34.

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53. Circular from Emanuel Scherer to Bund members, 27 April 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 54. See the Socialist Party’s centennial leaflet, “A Century of Struggle: Socialist Party USA, 1901–2001” (New York: Socialist Party USA, 2001), available at http://socialist party-usa.org/literature/ [accessed 24 May 2011]. 55. Letter from Samuel Friedman to Scherer, 6 May 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 56. See draft resolution to the SP, Central Bureau of the Bund in America, February 1961, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/119. For more on the Socialist Party’s decline, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 67. 57. A Century of Struggle. 58. Circular from Bund in New York, 13 October 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 59. Protocols from New York Bund committee meeting, 4 October 1965, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. For more on how Socialist candidates fared at election during the first half of the twentieth century, see David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955); Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970). 60. P. Novik, “In der yidisher prese: Bund un Rogoff,” Morgn Frayhayt, 3 November 1960, in BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/32. 61. Emanuel Scherer, article draft for “Goldwater Must Be Defeated,” undated, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 62. However, in other boroughs where there were no Socialist candidates, the Bund endorsed the Liberal Party candidates. See 1963 election leaflet, and a public statement from the Bund on the New York elections, in Forverts, 16 November 1963, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/138. 63. Although the Bund used the Yiddish term neyger, which literally translates to “negro,” I have translated it here as “black,” which more accurately captures the intentions of the Bundists. Such language highlights the unwitting racism that even advocates of civil rights practiced, although I believe their commitment to advancing the cause of black civil rights is more significant than the archaic terminology that they employed. See Rezolutsye vegn tsivile rekht, fourth world conference of the Bund, 1965, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/21. 64. Ibid. 65. Sh. Vays, “Neyger-segregatsye in trade-unions,” Unzer Tsayt (February 1945): 14–16. 66. See transcripts from Amol un Haynt, 25 February 1956 and 17 March 1956, BA, RG-1400, ME-34/33. 67. See poster for Protest against Racism, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/138. 68. “Sotsyalistishe dekleratsye vegn kamf far neygers in Amerike,” Forverts, 22 June 1963, in BA, RG-1400, ME-18/119. 69. “Bundishe organizatsye bahandlt di frage fun onteyl nemen in kamf fun di neyger far glaykhbarekhtikung,” Forverts, 12 July 1963, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/138. 70. Tony Michels gives the most comprehensive account of the Bundist role in the development of the Jewish Left in the United States. See Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 125–178. Jonathan Frankel paved the way for American Jewish labor history with his pioneering Prophecy and Politics, and Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers highlights the importance of the Jewish Left in the development of American culture, including the role of Bundists.

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71. Resolution on Cultural Work, May 1951, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/119. 72. Resolution on Jewish communal life in America, plenary meeting of the Central Bureau of the Bund in America, 21–22 June 1952, BA, RG-1400, O/35. 73. For more on Bundists and Yiddish culture in Poland, see Nathan Cohen, “The Bund’s Contribution to Yiddish Culture in Poland between the Two World Wars,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 90–111. 74. See “Report from General Secretary of Workmen’s Circle N. Chanin,” Der Fraynd (May–June 1958): 28–35. 75. See letter from Chaim Wasser to Lucjan Blit, 23 February 1944, BA, RG-1400, Workmen’s Circle box (hereafter, WC)/136. 76. See invitation to establishment of the new branch, 9 June 1946, BA, RG-1400, WC/136. 77. Dovid Kirshentsvayg, “A por verter tsum vuks un tetikayt fun unzer brench,” in 20 yor Artur Zygielbojm Brench 349 (New York: Arbeter Ring, 1967), 11. 78. See minutes from committee meeting, 1 June 1953, BA, RG-1400, WC/89. 79. Minutes from Conference of Bundists and Friends of the Bund called by the Committee of Six Branches, 16 December 1953, BA, RG-1400, WC/89. 80. Letter from B. Gebiner to seven Bundist branches, undated, BA, RG-1400, WC/89. 81. Letter from Bundist branches to National Executive of Arbeter Ring, 2 June 1953, BA, RG-1400, WC/89. 82. See letters pages from Fraye Arbeter Shtime, 6 September 1946, 11 October 1946, 25 October 1946, BA, RG-1400, WC/136. 83. Protocols of New York Bund committee, 18 May 1966, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 84. These were the figures claimed by Bund committee members, although as always they are almost certainly inflated, given that the largest Bundist branch at the time, the Zygielboym branch, had less than two hundred members. See Protocols of New York Bund committee, 14 September 1968, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 85. Ibid. 86. See protocols of New York Bund Committee throughout the 1960s and 1970s, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 87. A. A., “Di bundishe organizatsye in Nyu-York,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1947), 50. 88. Emanuel Scherer, Problemen fun sotsyalizm in Amerike, 32. 89. “Resolution on Uniting the Jewish Socialist Movement in America,” Unzer Tsayt (December 1950): 38. 90. See “Resolution on Uniting the Jewish Socialist Movement in America,” 27 April 1951, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/119. 91. See Hertz, Di yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung in Amerike, 382–383. 92. Letter from Levin-Shatskes to Bund, 7 March 1952, BA, RG-1400, O/35. 93. Declaration from members of Jewish Socialist Verband (New York), undated, BA, RG-1400, MG-2/16. 94. Protocols from New York Bund committee meeting, 14 September 1968, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 95. See Hillel Rogoff, “In itstikn momemt,” Forverts, 5 May 1955, 4.

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96. Hillel Rogoff, “In itstikn moment: Fuftsik yor Bund,” Forverts, 11 December 1947, 4. 97. Melech Ravich, “Dos idishe folk un di rezolutsyes fun Bund,” Der Veg [Mexico], 12 July 1955, 3. 98. See “Di shtim fun Bund,” Forverts, 2 January 1958, 12. 99. Hillel Rogoff, “In itstikn moment: Di shtime fun Bund,” Forverts, 8 January 1959, 4. 100. Hillel Rogoff, “In itztikn moment: Di erklerung fun Bund vegn di Prezident valn,” Forverts, 27 October 1960, 4. 101. P. Novik, “In der idisher prese: Bund un Rogof,” Morgn Frayhayt, 3 November 1960, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/32. 102. Yaacov Zipper, The Journals of Yaacov Zipper, 1950–1982: The Struggle for Yiddishkeit, trans. Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2004), 64. 103. Avram Golomb, “Vegn dem Bund itst,” Kiyem (June–July 1951): 230–236. 104. Avram Golomb, “A tragedye fun a yidisher partey,” Fraynt (November–December 1964), 14–22. 105. Letter from Steinberg to Scherer, 27 April 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 106. See manuscript Tasks of the Club, and see letter from Scherer to Steinberg, 5 May 1949, BA, RG-1400, O/34. 107. Y-N. Steinberg, “Der Bund un zayn goyrl,” Afn Shvel (September–October 1953): 10–12. 108. Lisa Keys, “Libeskind’s WTC Vision Was Born of Socialist Bronx,” Jewish Daily Forward, 7 March 2003, http://www.forward.com/articles/9392/ [accessed 17 November 2009]. 109. Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity,” 144. 110. Ibid., 153. 111. Sore-Rokhl Shaechter, “Der utopisher experiment, Kamp Hemshekh (lecoved dem 50tn yor zint der grindung),” Forverts, 23 January 2009, http://yiddish.forward .com/node/1849 [accessed 17 November 2009]. 112. See protocols of New York Bund committee, 3 October 1968, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 113. See protocols of New York Bund committee, 2 July and 17 December 1969, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 114. “The Educational Principles of Camp Hemshekh, 1962,” BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/29. 115. Margie Newman, “Resistance: Camp Hemshekh and a Survivor’s Daughter,” Jewish Currents (March 2009), http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2009_mar_newman.htm [accessed 17 November 2009]. 116. Ibid. 117. Shaechter, “Der utopisher experiment, Kamp Hemshekh.” 118. Newman, “Resistance.” 119. See Khavershaft, 1974, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/28. 120. Adam Teitelbaum, “SKIF—Where It’s At and Where It’s Going,” Khavershaft, (1974), 11–12, 16. BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/28. 121. “Rock Replies,” Khavershaft (1974), 14, 16. BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/28.

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122. Letter from organizing committee, 4 November 1964, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/126. 123. See poster for event, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/28. 124. See topics for workshops and discussions for Jewish Socialist Youth Bund, undated; and letter from Chutzpah West (Los Angeles) to members, undated, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/28. 125. Agenda for Exploratory Conference toward a United Jewish Left, 1973, BA, ME-14B/28. 126. Statement for conference, 8–10 June 1973, NYC, BA, ME-14B/28. 127. Letter from Julius Spiegel to Lisa Bengson-Abramowicz (Sweden), 11 July 1973, BA, ME-14B/28. 128. Daniel Soyer, “Medem Jewish Socialist Group,” Shmate 1, no. 2 (April–May 1982): 24–25. 129. Medem Jewish Socialist Group Statement of Principles, February 1983, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/28. 130. Protocols of New York Bund committee, 1 December 1965 and 16 December 1970, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 131. Protocols of New York Bund Committee, 16 December 1967 and 6 December 1972, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 132. On the Bund’s archive, see Henry J. Tobias, “The Archives of the Jewish Labor Bund: New Materials on the Revolutionary Movement,” American Slavic and East European Review 17, no. 3 (February 1958): 81–85; Norma Fain Pratt, “Archival Resources and Writing Immigrant American History: The Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement,” Journal of Library History 16, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 166– 176; Marek Web, “Between New York and Moscow: The Fate of the Bund Archives,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 243–254. 133. Protocols of New York Bund Committee, 28 May 1968, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 134. Protocols of New York Bund Committee, 15 June 1970, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23. 135. Protocols of New York Bund Committee, 14 September 1968, BA, RG-1400, ME-14B/23.

CH A PTER 5 NEW FRONTIER S 1. See David Rechter, “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne” (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1986), 45. 2. Sender Burstin, “Di Bundishe Grupe in Melburn,” Unzer Gedank (October 1947): 13–14. All citations in this chapter from Unzer Gedank refer to the postwar Melbourne title. 3. Moshe Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 1928–1988, trans. Chana and Moishe Mrocki (Melbourne: Jewish Labour Bund, 1996). 84. This book is bilingual, but the Yiddish material has not been fully translated, so I have used only the Yiddish section of the book and provided my own translations. 4. The government’s policies, spearheaded by the country’s first minister for immigration, Arthur Calwell, were actually designed to restrict the number of Jewish refugees entering Australia. See Leon Glezer, “Jewish Refugee and Post-war Immigration,” in The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People, and Their

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Origins, ed. James Jupp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 534–543; Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 174–175. For more on Australia in the 1950s, see John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000). 5. Suzanne Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10. 6. Suzanne Rutland, “Australia’s Postwar Jewish Migration: The Transformation of a Community,” Teaching History (June 2005): 12–15; Sender Burstin, “Di Bundishe Organizatsye in Melburn,” Unzer Gedank (October 1957): 9–10. 7. Rutland, The Jews in Australia, 153. 8. By “unzere heymishe yidn,” Waks is arguing for the authenticity of Eastern European Jews, with a rich Yiddish culture, in contrast to what he sees as the assimilated German Jews. Jacob Waks, “A Skandaliezer Bashlus,” Unzer Gedank (August 1951): 1. 9. On Waks’s arrival, see Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 15. 10. Sender Burstin, “Di Vendung Fun Bund Tsum Board of Deputies: Di Rede Fun Khaver Sender Burstin Oyf Der Zitsung Fun Board,” Unzer Gedank (November 1951): 2–3. 11. Ibid., 2–3. 12. “Di Zeyer Gelungene Fayerung,” Byuletin fun Bund (December 1963): 2. In this chapter, all references to the Byuletin fun Bund refer to the Melbourne version. 13. Sender Burstin, “Di Bundishe Organizatsye in Melburn,” Unzer Gedank (October 1957): 10. 14. Ber I. Rozen, “Kultur Arbet—di vikhtikste oyfgabe,” Unzer Gedank (October 1952): 13. 15. Ber I. Rozen, “Medines yisroel un medines yidish,” Unzer Gedank (December 1950): 8–9. 16. Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 125. 17. Robert Moses Shapiro, “The Polish ‘Kehille’ Elections of 1936: A Revolution ReExamined,” in Jews in Independent Poland, 1918–1939, ed. Antony Polonsky, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry (London: Littmas Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), 296–317. 18. Hershl Bachrach, “Mir Darfn a Folkstimlekhe Yidishe Kehille,” Unzer Gedank (October 1947): 25. 19. For an account of the hostility between Bundists and Zionists in interwar Poland, where the conflict reached its zenith as both movements’ popularity fluctuated and the contest for Jewish support turned fierce, see Jack Jacobs, “Bundist AntiZionism in Interwar Poland,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 33 (2005): 239–259. For more on the Bund’s approach to Zionism, see chapter 6. 20. Sender Burstin, “Bund, Tsiyonizm, un Medines Yisroel,” Unzer Gedank (November 1966): 7–9. 21. In the original Yiddish, the quote reads, “Di dozike tsiyenistisher-durchgefresene gemeinde tut veynik far ire ortike hitstarkhes!” Quoted in Hershl Bachrach, “The Zionist Ridden Community . . . ,” Unzer Gedank (October 1958): 3.

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22. M. Bargman, “Vegn Yidishe Problemen,” Unzer Gedank (October 1958): 8. 23. Sender Burstin, “Di Vendung Fun Bund Tsum Board of Deputies: Di Rede Fun Khaver Sender Burstin Oyf Der Zitsung Fun Board,” 2. 24. Waks, “A Skandaliezer Bashlus,” 1. 25. As quoted in Rachel Hand, “The General Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne Jewish Community, 1920–1961” (honors thesis, La Trobe University, 1995), 5. 26. Waks, “A Skandaliezer Bashlus,” 1. 27. Sender Burstin, “Board of Deputies,” Unzer Gedank (November 1960): 5–6. Bundists’ involvement within these communal organizations was extensive. Holding leading positions in each, and especially dominant on the Kadimah committee, Bundists were much more involved in the broader community than has been recognized in Australian Jewish historiography. Each annual report of the Bund, reprinted in the regular Bulletins, contained a section detailing the work of Bundists, such as Bono Wiener, Sender Burstin, Jack Kronhill, Avraham Zeleznikow, and Jacob Waks, in the upper echelons of these institutions. 28. Ber I. Rozen, “Kultur-Arbet- Di Vikhtikste Oyfgabe,” Unzer Gedank (October 1952): 13. 29. Ber I. Rozen, “Nokhamol- Vegn a Demokratisher Kehille,” Unzer Gedank (October 1954): 2–3. 30. M. Wilenski, “Der Ruf Fun Der Tsayt,” Unzer Gedank (July 1958): 6. 31. Election pamphlet for the 1960 Board of Deputies elections, Melbourne, 1960, Melbourne Bund Archives (hereafter, MBA), Board of Deputies Folder. 32. Hand, Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne, 7–10. 33. “Rezultat fun di Tsugob-Valn tsum Board,” 22 December 1961, reprinted in Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 140. 34. On the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, see Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford: Stanford Universtiy Press, 1972); on the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), see Joshua D. Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Piotr Wrobel, “From Conflict to Cooperation: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party, 1897–1939,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, ed. Jacobs, 155–171; on the U.S. labor movement, see Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 35. See for example Henryk Erlich, “Tsi Iz Der Tsionizm a Bafreyendike, Demokratish Bavegung? (an Entfer Prof. Sh. Dubnow),” Naye Folkstsaytung, 29 July 1938, 5. 36. Y. Orbach, “Mitn Ponim Tsu Doykayt,” Unzer Gedank (April 1965), 9–10. 37. Y. Orbach, “‘Alte’ Un ‘Naye,’” Unzer Gedank (July 1950), 13–14. 38. For discussion of this debate in the late 1920s, see Brumberg, “The Bund: History of a Schism,” 81–89. 39. For a general history of the Australian Labor Party, see John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre, eds., True Believers: The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (East Melbourne: Allen and Unwin, 2001). 40. Letter from Wiener to Calwell, 5 May 1961, MBA, ALP Folder.

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41. “Unzere Batsiyungen Mit Der Laybor Partey,” Byuletin fun Bund (November 1964): 2. 42. Letter from Ted Peters to the members of the Bund, 27 April 1956, MBA, ALP Folder. 43. Letter from R. Balcombe to Bono Wiener, 10 July 1957, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 31, “New Australian Council 1957” Folder. 44. Arthur Calwell’s message to the sixty-fourth Bund anniversary celebrations, 18 November 1961, MBA, ALP Folder. 45. See, for example, Arthur Calwell, “Bagrisungen,” Unzer Tsayt: Zibetsik Yor Bund (November–December, 1967). 46. Letter from T. H. E. Heyes to Arthur Calwell, 9 July 1958, MBA, ALP Folder. 47. Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 84. 48. Letters from Calwell to Waks, 24 April 1951, 17 July 1951, 19 June 1951, MBA, ALP Folder. 49. Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 84. 50. Mugga, “‘Anonymous’ Smearers,” The Observer, 25 June 1960, 9. 51. See ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, Box 111, “File on Wiener, New Australian Council” Folder. This folder includes press clippings, correspondence between Wiener and the party secretary, letters from Goldbloom to the ALP Executive, as well as minutes from the hearings. 52. Moshe Ajzenbud, “Di laybor partey un di naye oystralier: A Shmues mitn Sekretar fun Nay-Oystralier Komitet B. Wiener,” reprinted in Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 96. 53. Burstin, “Di Bundishe Grupe in Melburn,” 13–14. 54. Bono Wiener, “Mayn entfer der yidisher gezelshaft,” Unzer Gedank (October 1957): 19. 55. Letter from Wiener to J. M. Tripovich, 2 February 1960, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, Box 80, “New Australian Sub-Committee 1960” Folder. 56. See for example, circular from Jack Tripovich, 17 October 1958, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 50, “New Australian Council 1958” Folder. 57. Letter from J. M. Tripovich to Bono Wiener, 4 September 1958, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 50, “New Australian Council 1958” Folder. 58. Letter from Bono Wiener to ALP Victorian Central Executive, 30 November 1956, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 50, “New Australian Council 1958” Folder. 59. Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 89. 60. Bono Wiener, “A Shedlekher Bashlus: Vi Azoy M’hot Oysgeshlosn Dem Kh’ B. Wiener Fun Der Laybor Partey,” Unzer Gedank (July 1960): 7–8. 61. Bono Wiener, “Statement by Bono Wiener Regarding Creating Statements and Allegations Made at the Victorian ALP Conference, June 14th-17th, 1957,” ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 31, “New Australian Council 1957” Folder. 62. Letter from J. M. Tripovich to Bono Wiener, 11 November 1959, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 65, “New Australian Council 1959” Folder. 63. Letter from J. M. Tripovich to Bono Wiener, 1 March 1960, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 80, “New Australian Sub-Committee 1960” Folder.

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64. Letter from Bono Wiener to Full Central Executive of the Australian Labor Party Victorian Branch, 2 May 1960, ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 80, “New Australian Sub-Committee 1960” Folder; Bono Wiener, “Appeal to Annual Conference,” ALP, Victorian Branch Branch Archives MS 10508, Box 80, “New Australian Sub-Committee 1960” Folder. 65. ALP Appeals Committee, “Report and Decision Re: Appeal by Mr. Bono Wiener,” ALP, Victorian Branch Archives, MS 10508, Box 80, “New Australian Sub-Committee 1960” Folder. 66. Barry Jones, “Bono Wiener (1920–1995),” in Bono Wiener Remembered, ed. Chava Rosenfarb (Montreal: privately published, 1997). 67. For a Bundist account of the Labor split, see Bono Wiener, “Nokh Di Valn in Victoria,” Unzer Gedank (July 1955): 15–17. For a general history, see Brian Costar, Peter Love, and Paul Strangio, eds., The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective (Carlton North, Victoria: Scribe, 2005). For a view more sympathetic to the Movement, see Gavan Duffy, Demons and Democrats: 1950s Labor at the Crossroads (North Melbourne, Victoria.: Freedom Publishing, 2002). 68. For a summary of background of the Bund’s enmity toward communism (Bundist press from before and after the war is full of such discussion), see Bono Wiener, “A Vort Tsu Di Antoyshte,” Unzer Gedank (May 1958): 15. 69. M. Bargman, “Tsu Der Lage in Der Labor Partey,” Unzer Gedank (October 1957): 16–17. 70. Letter from Arthur Calwell to Bono Wiener, 8 November 1965, MBA, ALP Folder. 71. Letter from Arthur Calwell to Bono Wiener, 24 December 1965, MBA, ALP Folder. 72. A cursory look through the annual reports published in the regular Bulletins highlights the Bund’s ongoing financial support and its commitment to maintain friendly relations. 73. Bono Wiener, “Mayn Entfer Der Yidisher Gezelshaft,” 19. 74. “Tetikeyt barikht fun SKIF un Tsukunft farn yor 1956,” in Byuletin fun Bund (June 1966): 6–7. The year of this report should be 1965. 75. Pinye Ringelblum, “A SKIF in Melbourne?” http://www.SKIF.org.au/history%20files/ SKIF_history.html. [accessed 8 January 2008]. Actually, the Kadimah sponsored the visit of Pat, who was by then no longer a member of the Bund. See Yitzhak Kahan, “Kh’ Yakob Pat in Oystralie,” Unzer Gedank (August 1956): 2–3; “Opklangen: Yontevdike Teg,” Unzer Gedank (August 1956): 3, 15. 76. Pinye Ringelblum, “A SKIF in Melbourne?” 77. See, for example, “Geto Heldn: Unzer Frayhayt Kemfer,” Chavershaft (Yiddish) 22, no. 1 (1971). Chavershaft was originally printed as supplement in Unzer Gedank, whose purpose was to report the movement’s activities. Later on, it became a bilingual newsletter that appeared sporadically with SKIF news, comic writing, and games and activities. A limited run of Chavershaft is available in the SKIF folder of the Melbourne Bund Archives. 78. Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 165, 181. 79. There are a couple of unavoidably problematic elements to this translation. One instance is when the author says that the SKIFistn become independent people, or in the original Yiddish, zelbstshtendike mentshn. Although “people” is the literal translation of the word mentshn, the term really means a person with integrity and

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values. Similarly, when Moyshel (presumably the writer Moshe Ajzenbud) refers to “collective living,” the original Yiddish talks of kolektive tsuzamenlebn, which, if literally translated, would roughly mean “collective together-living” (the emphasis here is on the communal experience, with the use of “together” accenting the term “collective”). Finally, “daily leaders,” derived from the term tog komendantn, refers to the rotations of the person responsible for the smooth running of the daily activities. Moyshel, “Bay Di SKIFistn in Dromana,” Unzer Shtime, 29 January 1959, 2, 4. 80. Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 181. 81. Ibid., 253. 82. For a discussion on the shift of the geographic Jewish center from Carlton to St. Kilda, see Rechter, “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne,” 19–25. 83. Ringelblum, “A SKIF in Melbourne?” 84. David Preiss, “Layt-Artikl,” Chavershaft 22, 1 (1971), 2. 85. “Editor’s Comments,” Chavershaft 22, 1 (1971), 3. 86. Arnold Zable, “20 Years,” in 20th Anniversary of SKIF in Melbourne, 1950–1970: Souvenir Programme (Melbourne: SKIF, 1970). 87. M. Gelbron, “Yerlekhe Tetikayt Barikht Fun Der Melburner Organizatsye, 1949,” MBA, Tsukunft Folder. 88. Simche Burstin, “Di Bundishe Yugnt in Melburn,” Unzer Gedank (July 1950): 24. 89. Bono Wiener, “Tsukunft and the M.J.Y.C,” reprinted in Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 193. 90. “Tetikeyt Barikht Fun SKIF Un Tsukunft Farn Yor 1956,” Byuletin fun Bund (June 1966): 6–7. The year of this report should be 1965. 91. “Summary of the Tsukunft-Bund Ideology,” Link, no. 2 (1976): 5. 92. “Yugnt Tetikayt,” Byuletin fun Bund (August 1968): 1. “Tetikeyt Barikht Fun SKIF Un Tsukunft Farn Yor 1956 [sic],” 6–7. The year of this report should be 1965. 93. “Tetikayt Barikht Fun SKIF,” Byuletin fun Bund (November 1967): 5. 94. Arnold Zable, “20 Years,” 2. 95. Philip Mendes, The New Left, the Jews, and the Vietnam War, 1965–1972 (North Caulfield: Lazare, 1993), 136–137. 96. Resolution reproduced in Moshe Ajzenbud, Sixty Years of Bund in Melbourne, 52. 97. Zable, “20 Years.” 98. “Tsukunft Statements of Resolutions,” Link (July 1967): 18. 99. Mendes, The New Left, the Jews and the Vietnam War, 137. 100. “Tsukunft Statements of Resolutions, 1971,” MBA, Tsukunft folder. 101. “Tetikeyt Barikht Fun SKIF Un Tsukunft Farn Yor 1956.” The year of this report should be 1965. 102. Philip Mendes, “Jews and Poverty Down Under,” Jewish Currents (July–August 2007): 14–16. 103. John Goldlust, “Jews in Australia: A Demographic Profile,” in Jews and Australian Politics, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levy and Philip Mendes (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004), 18. 104. Beynish Burstin, “Gedanken Vegn Marxism,” Unzer Gedank (April 1954): 12–13.

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105. For the updated lyrics, see “SKIF Songbook,” Melbourne, 1994; and for a recording with the original lyrics, see Yiddish Youth Ensemble, “Di Yunge Gvardie,” in Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle (New York: Jewish Students’ Bund)—this is an old vinyl record, undated but probably from the 1960s or 1970s. 106. Abraham Brumberg, “Yiddish in My Life,” Jewish Quarterly, no. 2004 (Winter 2006/2007), available at http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=269, [accessed 2 June 2008]. In fact, the song came, as did many a piece of Yiddish socialist music in prewar Eastern Europe, directly from a Soviet song. 107. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” in Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61–66. 108. “Summary of the Tsukunft-Bund Ideology,” Link, no. 2 (1976): 5. 109. Moshe Ajzenbud, “Vos viln mir fun unzer yugnt,” Link (September 1976): 6. 110. Ibid., 6. 111. Sylvia Leber, “A Jewish Feminist View,” Link, no. 2 (1976): 21–22. There is not a great deal written about the Bund’s attitude toward women’s rights and feminism, nor about women in the Bund in general. In Melbourne, there was a Women’s Committee throughout the Australian Bund’s existence, but material on the committee’s activities in the annual reports published in the Bulletin make it clear that the committee’s main purpose was maintaining Waks House and taking care of function arrangements such as cooking, setting up, and cleaning. Leber’s critique, then, was also directed at the continuing subjugation of women within her own community. For a discussion of the role of women within the interwar Polish Bund, see Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland, 82–97; Daniel Blatman, “Women in the Jewish Labour Bund in Interwar Poland,” in Women and the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 68–84; Rebekka Denz, Bundistinnen: Frauen im Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbund (“Bund”) dargestellt anhand der jiddischen Biographiensammlung “Doires Bundistn” (Potsdam: Pri ha-Pardes, 2009). 112. Arnold Zable, “Foundation: Past and Present,” Link (September 1967): 2–6. 113. For evidence of this downward spiral, one need only compare a Bulletin from the 1950s, with its pages of activities on its regular calendar, to the scant offerings by the 1980s and especially into the 1990s. (Incomplete runs of these Bulletins are available in the Melbourne Bund Archive and at the Jewish National Library Kadimah in Melbourne.) The Bulletin in March 1983, for example, which contained the party’s annual report, was only four pages long, whereas the editions that contained the annual report had previously been eight pages. See Byuletin Fun Bund (March 1983). On the cutback of Unzer Gedank, see Byuletin Fun Bund (March 1983): 2. 114. Doris Burstin, “The Philosophy behind Sholem Aleichem College,” Link, no. 1 (1978): 25. 115. Ibid. 116. One need only look at any of the annual reports from this period, which contained reports of who was still active and in what capacity. 117. Sefra Burstin, “SKIF in the Seventies,” Chavershaft: 60 Years SKIF Special Edition (1988): 23–24.

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118. Ibid., 23–24. 119. Michael Burstin, “SKIF in the Eighties,” Chavershaft: 60 Years SKIF Special Edition (1988): 27–28. 120. “Objectives of the In One Voice committee, Draft #2,” SKIF Folder, Box “Bund and other related publications,” Jewish National Library Kadimah, Melbourne (hereafter, Kadimah) 121. Lilly Kochen, “In One Voice—1988,” Chavershaft: 60 Years SKIF Special Edition (1988): 15; “In One Voice All Set to Go,” Australian Jewish News, 16 March 1990, 1; Lani Zelazne, “Voice in the Park,” Australian Jewish News, 27 March 1992, 4. 122. On a side note, Hawke’s Labor Party won the election, albeit with a swing against it, and both major parties claimed that the Jewish vote was crucial in deciding the result of Melbourne Ports, an electorate with a large concentration of Jewish residents. In jest, festival organizers took credit for this success. See Bernard Freedman and Peter Kohn, “Both Parties Say of Crucial Melbourne Ports: Jewish Votes Were Critical,” Australian Jewish News, 30 March 1990, 3; see also Yugnt Bund Newsletter (April 1990): 1. 123. See for example, “Yugnt-Bund Meeting Minutes, 16/2/87” SKIF Folder, Box “Bund and other related publications,” Kadimah. 124. Circular announcing the revival of Yugnt Bund in 1987, in SKIF Folder, Box “Bund and other related publications,” Kadimah. 125. Yugnt-Bund Meeting Minutes, 16 February 1987, SKIF Folder, Box “Bund and other related publication” , Kadimah. 126. Minutes of Yugnt Bund Meeting, 28 June 1983, SKIF Folder, Box “Bund and other related publications,” Kadimah. 127. Moishe Ben Gershon, “Yiddish in English,” Unzer Gedank (November 1992): 1, 4. 128. Henry Nusbaum, “The Bund—The Future,” Unzer Gedank (November, 1992): 2. 129. Moishe Ben Gershon, “What Does the Bund Stand For?” Unzer Gedank (September 1997): 1–3. 130. Sam Lipski, “Under the Sunlight,” Australian Jewish News, 8 June 2006, available at http://www.ajn.com.au/news/news.asp?pgID=766 [accessed 2 June 2008]. 131. Danny Ben-Moshe, “The End of Unconditional Love: The Future of Zionism in Australian Jewish Life,” in New under the Sun, ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau, and Nathan Wolski (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006), 108.

CH A PTER 6 HER E-NESS, THER E-NESS, AND EV ERY W HER E-NESS 1. A famous example illustrating how this was manifested can be found in an exchange between interwar Bund leader Henryk Erlich and his father-in-law (and preeminent Jewish historian) Simon Dubnow in 1938. In an open letter to Erlich, Dubnow—not a Zionist but an advocate for a united progressive Jewish front—urged the Bund to end its isolation from other Jewish parties and align itself with progressive Zionist forces. In response, Erlich launched an unrelenting attack on the Zionist movement, claiming that Zionism had become an open ally of antisemitism and was generally an obstacle in the development of Jewish culture. See Simon Dubnow, “Vegn der izolatsye fun Bund (a briv tsu a Bundistishn fraynt),” Naye Folkstsaytung, 29 July 1938, 5; Henryk Erlich, “Tsi iz der tsiyonizm a

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bafrayendike, demokratish bavegung? An entfer Prof. Sh. Dubnow,” Naye Folkstsaytung, 29 July 1938, 5. See also Jack Jacobs, “Bundist Anti-Zionism in Interwar Poland,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 33 (2005): 239–259. 2. Statements and Resolutions Adopted by the Third World Conference of the Bund, April 8–15, 1955, Montreal, Canada (New York: World Coordinating Committee of the Jewish Labor Bund, 1955), 19. 3. For a short biography of Grodzenski, see Berl Kagan, Leksikon fun Yidish-shraybers (New York: Rayah Ilman-Kagan, 1986), 168. 4. Emmanuel Nowogrodski, “Der iker fun tsiyonism,” Unzer Tsayt (January 1944): 17–22. 5. Ibid., 18–19. 6. Ibid., 19–20. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Ibid., 22. 9. For a biographical profile of Hodes, see Sofia Dubnow-Erlich, “Dos lebn fun Leyvik Hodes,” in Leyvik Hodes: Biografye un shriftn, ed. Sofia Dubnow-Erlich (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1962), 9–38. 10. Emanuel Patt, “Mir zaynen yung un dos iz sheyn,” in Dubnow-Erlich, Leyvik Hodes, 342–356. 11. See Gennady Estraikh, “Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist,” Science in Context 20, no. 2 (2007): 215–237; Gur Alroey, “Demographers in the Service of the Nation,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 265–282. 12. Leyvik Hodes, “Der krumer shpigl,” Unzer Tsayt (July 1945): 10–15. 13. Leyvik Hodes, “Di atake oyfn goles,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1945): 12–15. 14. Leyvik Hodes, “In goles bay di Amerikaner tsiyonistn: Nokhn 22tn tsiyonistishn kongres,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1947): 9. 15. Leyvik Hodes, “Mitn ponim tsu der Tsukunft,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1947): 11–14. 16. Hodes reported on this handover in early 1947; the handover, he said, showed the weakening of British imperialism and a shift in the geopolitical dynamics of Western countries. He also warned that the United Nations General Assembly might not resolve the matter by granting the Zionists their dream of a Jewish state, highlighting that political realities might get in the way of such a resolution. See Leyvik Hodes, “Der Palestiner knoyl un di United Nations (U.N)” Unzer Tsayt (March 1947): 10–11. 17. Hodes, “Mitn ponim tsu der Tsukunft,” 13. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Ibid. 20. The conference did pass resolutions condemning Zionism as an idea that could not solve the hardships experienced by Jews, and was in fact creating new hardships, especially for the Jews in Palestine. See Emanuel Scherer, “Zin un gayst fun Brisl,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1947): 9. 21. “Rezolutsye vegn tsiyonizm un Palestine fun der Bundisher Organizatsye in NyuYork,” Byuletin fun Bund 5 (1947): 1–3. In this chapter, Byuletin fun Bund refers to the

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New York edition published by the World Coordinating Committee, except where noted, e.g., “[Melbourne].” 22. Shloyme Mendelson, “Goles un yidishe melukhe,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1948): 4. 23. Ibid., 8–9. 24. See “Shloime Mendelsohn Dead” and “Life and Death of a Socialist,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 2–5. 25. See “Khaver Dr. Emanuel Scherer,” Byuletin fun Bund [Melbourne] (June 1977): 1–2. On Scherer’s tenure in the Polish government-in-exile, see Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 150–159. 26. Emmanuel Scherer, “Unzer shtelung tsum bashlus fun U.N vegn Palestine,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1948): 15. 27. Ibid., 18. 28. Ibid., 19. In fact, as historian Matityahu Mintz has recently demonstrated, David Ben-Gurion had secretly canvassed the Soviet leadership in his attempt to garner broad support for the goal of establishing a Jewish state, although geopolitical realities and an increasingly bipolar world forced his silence. See Matityahu Mintz, “Ben-Gurion and the Soviet Union’s Involvement in the Effort to Establish a Jewish State in Palestine,” Journal of Israeli History 26, no. 1 (2007): 67–78. For more on the Soviet role in the establishment of Israel, see Gabriel Gorodetsky, “The Soviet Union’s Role in the Creation of the State of Israel,” Journal of Israeli History 22, no. 1 (2003): 4–20. 29. Ibid., 20–21. 30. Pinchas Shvartz, “Haynt—nisht veyniker vi ven es iz,” Unzer Tsayt (November– December 1947): 23–24. For Shvartz’s biography, see M. Perenson, “Pinchas Shvartz,” Doyres Bundistn 3, ed. J. S. Hertz (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1968), 116–122. 31. Pinchas Shvartz, “Bund, tsiyonism, Palestine—1948,” Unzer Tsayt (January–February 1948): 9–15. 32. Ibid., 13–14. 33. “Unzer Shtelung: Der Bund vegn Medines-Yisroel, Rezolutsye fun velt-koordinirkomitet fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (July–August 1948): 3. The resolution was also published in the Bundist press around the world, including those publishing in English. See “The Jewish Labor Bund and the State of Israel,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1, no. 8–9 (1948): 1–3. 34. Ibid., 4. 35. Ibid., 6. 36. “Statement on Israel Adopted by Bund Organizations,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 7–8. 37. “The Jews in the World and the Tasks Ahead: the Minority Proposal,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 1 (1948): 4–5. 38. Emanuel Scherer, “Di kraft fun unzer gloybn,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November, 1948): 6. 39. Lucjan Blit, “Dos, vos iz der iker,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1948): 30–31. 40. Ibid., 31.

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41. Kh[ayim] Sh[loyme] Kazdan, “Yosef Brumberg,” Doyres Bundistn 3, ed. J. S. Hertz (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1968), 142–144. 42. Yosef Brumberg, “Tsvey Rezolutsyes,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1948): 36–37. 43. Ibid., 38. 44. For a biography of Pat written by his son, see Emanuel Patt, In Gerangl: Yankev Pat un zayn dor (New York: Yankev Pat Familye Fond, 1971). 45. Ibid., 205–211. 46. “Es iz a tsunoyfgeklapter kharoyses fun maror un mandlen.” Kharoyses is a sweet festive dish served on Passover and made from apples and almonds. It symbolizes the cement used by Jews in ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. Bitter herbs are another Passover symbol, which represent the bitter times of slavery. Pat uses this metaphor to underline his point about the absurdity of the Bund’s position. Bitter herbs are not used to make kharoyses, and to claim otherwise totally mixes up the symbols, as does the Bund’s resolution, in Pat’s eyes. 47. Yankev Pat, “In shpigl fun virklekhkayt: Di bundishe rezolutsyes vegn Medines Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1948): 39–43. 48. Ibid., 43. 49. Emanual Scherer, “Unzer Shtelung—Unzer Entfer,” Unzer Tsayt (September 1948): 43–52. 50. Ibid., 51. 51. Ibid., 52. 52. A summary of the speeches, and the text of the responses, were reproduced in Unzer Tsayt. See “Barikht fun der konferents,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1948): 17. 53. Ibid., 16–17. 54. For more on Shrager, see his autobiography, F. Shrager, Oyfn rand fun tsvey tkufes (Paris, 1976). 55. Ibid., 17–18. 56. Ibid., 18–19. 57. Ibid., 20–21. 58. Y. Y. Trunk, “Di historishe vortslen fun Bund un tsiyonizm,” Unzer Tsayt (February 1949): 39–40. 59. Y. Y. Trunk, “Di prognozn fun Bund un tsiyonizm—in likht fun der yidisher geshikhte,” Unzer Tsayt (March 1949): 18. 60. Trunk, “Di historishe vortslen fun Bund un tsiyonizm,” 42. 61. Y. Y. Trunk, “Di bagrenetskayt fun Yisroel—un der veg fun der yidisher diaspora,” Unzer Tsayt (April–May 1949): 40–41. 62. Liebman Hersch, “Nokh a reyze in Eretz-Yisroel in yor 1947,” in Oyf der grenetz fun tsaytn (Buenos Aires: Farlag Yidbukh, 1952), 103–131. 63. Liebman Hersch, “A zelbshtendike melukhe in der yidisher geshikhte,” Unzer Tsayt (April–May 1948): 42–50. 64. Liebman Hersch, “Unzer historisher shtrayt mitn tsiyonizm [1],” Unzer Tsayt (August–September 1949): 10–16; Liebman Hersch, “Unzer historisher shtrayt mitn tsiyonizm [2],” Unzer Tsayt (October 1949): 22–28.

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65. Hersch, “Unzer historisher shtrayt mitn tsyiyonizm [1],” 14. 66. Hersch, “Unzer historisher shtrayt mitn tsiyonizm [2],” 28. 67. Ibid., 24–27. 68. Ibid., 28. 69. “Entfer fun der redaktsye oyfn artikl fun kh’ L. Hersch,” Unzer Tsayt (October 1949): 28–32. 70. Ibid., 33. 71. Ibid., 33. 72. “Refugees from Israel,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 3 (1950): 8. Historian Marcos Silber estimates, for example, that between the establishment of the State of Israel and April 1950, between 2,500 and 5,000 applications (between 100 and 200 per month) were made to the Polish consulate for Polish passports, indicating high interest in returning. For many reasons, however, the rate of actual emigration was much lower, only around 5 to 10 percent of the figure for applicatons. In the end, only about 665 people had returned to Poland by 1960, a fraction of those who applied. See Marcos Silber, “‘Immigrants from Poland Want to Go Back’: The Politics of Return Migration and Nation Building in 1950s Israel,” Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 2 (2008): 202–204. 73. “Third Anniversary of Israel,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 4, no. 3–5 (1951): 3–4. 74. “A Nationalist Impasse,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 4, no. 6 (1951): 2. 75. Pinchas Shvartz, “Medines Yisroel un di Araber,” Unzer Tsayt (August–September 1949): 20–26. 76. Ibid., 24. 77. For a broader discussion on the Bundist struggle in the DP camps, see chapter 2. 78. “Jewish-Arab Relations,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 5, no. 13–14 (1952): 2. 79. Ben-Tsiyon Hoffman, “Israel Passes a Discriminatory Law,” Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin 5, no. 15–17 (1952): 3. 80. M. Kushnir, “Impozanter yoyvl-fayerung in Tel-Aviv,” Unzer Tsayt (November– December 1957): 127–128. 81. For more on the Bund’s participation in the Israeli political process, see my discussion on this topic later in this chapter. 82. Julius Braunthal, ed. Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, 267. 83. Y. Hart [J. S. Hertz], “Bentzl Tsalevich,” in Hertz, Doyres Bundistn 3, 71–75. 84. The irony of the Bund address being located on a street named for the location of the first Zionist congress was not lost on Israeli Bund writer and activist Yitzhak Luden, who discussed it in a 1967 tribute to Tsalevich. See Yitzhak Luden, “Der bundisher adres in Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1967): 73–76. 85. Ibid., 75. 86. A. Eydelman, “Bund un Bundistn in Palestine,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1947): 170–171. See also J. S. Hertz and M. D. Yunger, “Avram Yankev un Genia Rinkevich,” in Hertz, Doyres Bundistn 3, 446–447. 87. Eydelman, “Bund un Bundistn in Palestine,” 171. 88. J. S. Hertz, “Hershl Himmelfarb,” in Hertz, Doyres Bundistn 3, 35–43; Emanuel Scherer, “Dr. Jerzy Gliksman,” in Hertz, Doyres Bundistn 3, 172–177.

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89. Later on, Artuski became a symbol of the Israeli Bund, and his influence on the world movement was widely felt through his regular correspondence to the Bundist press in various countries and also through his work in the World Coordinating Committee. His visit to Australia in 1961, for example, for a time energized that local movement. For a biography of Artuski, see Yitzhak Luden, “Y. Artuski der symbol,” in Yid, Mentsh, Sotsyalist: Y. Artuski ondenk-bukh (Tel-Aviv: Farlag Lebns-Fragn, 1976), 25–42. 90. Eydelman, “Bund un Bundistn in Palestine,” 171–172. 91. Ibid., 172. 92. Ibid., 172. 93. Ibid., 173. 94. Luden, “Der bundisher adres in Yisroel,” 74. 95. M. Grin, “Issachar Artuski: Byografishe shtrikhn,” in Yid, Mentsh, Sotsyalist, 123. 96. M. Grin, “Bund in Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (October–November 1977): 76–78. 97. Grin, “Issachar Artuski: Byografishe shtrikhn,” 123. 98. Y. Artuski, “Bundishe problemen in Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (March 1952): 16. 99. Ibid., 15–19. 100. Y. Artuski, “Di ershte land-konferents fun Bund in Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (July– August 1952): 9–10. 101. Ibid., 11. 102. Y. Artuski, “Der veg fun Bund in Yisroel: Nokh unzer tsveyter land-konferents,” Unzer Tsayt (February 1955): 14–17. 103. Bentzl [Tsalevich], “Di batsiyung fun Bundistn tsu melukhe un tsiyonizm,” Unzer Gedank (December 1954): 13. 104. Y. Samter, “In netz fun tsiyenistisher propaganda,” Unzer Gedank (December 1954): 14. 105. Artuski, “Der veg fun Bund in Yisroel: Nokh unzer tsveyter land-konferents,” 17. 106. Y. Samter, “Vegn der Bundisher Organizatsye in Yisroel,” Unzer Gedank (November 1951): 8–10. 107. Ibid., 9. 108. Y. Artuski, “Di perspektivn fun der bundisher organizatsye in Yisroel,” Unzer Gedank (October 1953): 7–8. On the history of Yiddish in early Israel, see Rachel Rojanski, “The Status of Yiddish in Israel, 1948–1951: An Overview,” in Yiddish after the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Sherman (Oxford: Boulevard, 2004), 46–59. On the establishment of the Yiddish chair at the Hebrew University, see Avraham Novershtern, “Between Town and Gown: The Institutionalisation of Yiddish at Israeli Universities,” in Yiddish in the Contemporary World: Papers of the first Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), 1–19. 109. Ibid., 8. 110. Y. Artuski, “Di perspektivn fun Bund in Yisroel,” Yid, Mentsh, Sotsyalist, 299–305. 111. Peysakh Burshtin, “Di bundishe organizatsye in Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (November– December 1957): 126. 112. Ibid., 126.

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113. Grin, “Bund in Yisroel,” 77. 114. Y. Artuski, “Der koyekh fun yidish,” in Yid, Mentsh, Sotsyalist, 329–335. Kurksi and Zygielbojm were both stalwarts of the Polish Bund. Zygielbojm is best known as one of two Jewish representatives in the Polish government-in-exile in London during the war. In 1943, in protest of the world’s silence over the genocide in Europe, Zygielbojm took his own life. 115. Y. Artuski, “15 yor Bundishe organizatsye un Lebns-Fragn in Yisroel,” Yid, Mentsh, Sotsyalist, 324–325. 116. “In an akhriyesfuler tsayt,” Lebns-Fragn 1 (1951): 1–2. 117. At the time of writing, Lebns-Fragn appears online and in print bimonthly, although the pool of readers and, especially, writers has dwindled. See http://www .lebnsfragn.com/. On the establishment of the Yiddish press in Israel, see Rachel Rojanski, “The Beginnings of the Yiddish Press in Israel,” Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture 5, no. 1 (2008): 141–148. 118. “Di 2-te land-konferents fun Bund in Yisroel,” Unzer Shtime, 24 November 1954, 3. For a discussion on how the Israeli Bundist journalism influenced Bundists around the world, see my discussion later in this chapter. 119. The Bundists did not feel as though even the socialist Zionist parties represented a form of socialism palatable to them. The Bund charged even those most closely aligned to it ideologically with having become bourgeois. Bundist journalists were especially disappointed with the ruling Mapai. See Y. Samter, “Erev di valn,” LebnsFragn 46–47 (1955): 6–7. 120. Election results are available on the Knesset website, although details are not provided for the parties that failed to win any seats: see http://www.knesset.gov .il/description/eng/eng_mimshal_res4.htm [accessed 24 May 2011]. 121. “Morgn—di kneset-valn in Yisroel: Radio rede fun kh’ Y. Artuski durkhn radio kolyisroel,” Unzer Shtime, 2 November 1959, 3. 122. Ibid., 4. 123. Ibid. For a full outline of the Bund’s election platform, see “Val platform fun Bund in Yisroel,” Unzer Tsayt (October 1959): 9–11. See also election materials, BA, RG-1400, ME-18/179. 124. Y. Artuski, “Der Bund un di valn,” Unzer Shtime, 8 December 1959, 3. An article from Lebns-Fragn that was reproduced in the Parisian Unzer Shtime on election eve suggested that Mapai spent between fifteen and thirty million pounds on its election campaign, breaking an earlier pledge to keep election spending modest. See “Haynt di valn tsum knesset in Yisroel: ‘Basheydene’ un ‘erlekhe’ valn,” Unzer Shtime, 3 November 1959, 3. 125. Artuski, “Der Bund un di valn,” 3. 126. Y. Artuski, “Medines Yisroel in onblik fun naye valn,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1961): 18. 127. So much poorer were the Israeli Bund than other organizations, that Bundists around the world were constantly raising money to help fund the activities of their comrades in the Jewish state. A brief survey of any Bundist journals or bulletins shows that this was a major concern for all Bundist organizations. 128. Pinye Wald, “Farvirklekhter tsiyonizm un der Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (June 1953): 17–20. For a biography of Wald, see Sh. Zhitnitski, “Pinye Wald,” in Hertz, Doyres Bundistn 3, 279–280.

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129. Interestingly, one of those who traveled to Palestine was Yankev Pat, who, after the war, would leave the Bund over its refusal to recognize and embrace Israel. See Jacobs, “Bundist Anti-Zionism in Interwar Poland,” 239–259. 130. Liebman Hersch, “Nokh a reyze in Eretz Yisroel in yor 1947,” in Oyf der grenetz fun tsaytn, 103–106. 131. Ibid., 107. This is a reference to the biblical story of Balaam, who had been instructed by Balak, king of the Moabites, to curse the people of Israel. Balaam feared God however, who twice directed him instead to bless the people and land of Israel. When Balak brought Balaam to the peak of Peor to try for the third time to convince Balaam to damn Israel, Balaam, this time without God’s urging, blessed Israel, saying: “How fair are your tents, O Jacob/Your dwellings, O Israel!” It is interesting that Hersch would compare his own revelation with that of Balaam. Not only did Hersch draw a direct analogy to a tale from the Torah, but the story he cited was one where a person who had been sent to Israel to damn the nation came instead to see the beauty of Israel on his own. Also noteworthy was that Hersch recounted that he shouted his praise in the original biblical Hebrew. See Numbers 22:24, in JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 341. 132. Hersch, “Nokh a reyze in Eretz Yisroel in yor 1947,” 108. 133. Ibid., 109–117 134. S. K., “Der shrayber B. Demblin vegn zayne rayze-ayndrukn fun Yisroel,” Unzer Shtime, 17–18 May 1952, 3. 135. Interestingly, Patt is Yankev Pat’s son. Given that his father was so enamored by the state and such a staunch supporter, it perhaps is less surprising that his son, Emanuel, was so open to the notion of Jewish statehood. Emanuel Patt, Briv keyn Medines Yisroel (Tel-Aviv: Farlag Lebns-fragn, 1955), 15–24. On Yankev Pat’s impressions from his first travels to Israel in the early 1920s, see Jacobs, “Bundist AntiZionism in Interwar Poland,” 245–246. 136. Ibid., 137–139. 137. Ibid., 53–62. 138. Y. Artuski, “Bund un di Yisroel-medineh,” Unzer Tsayt (July–August 1953): 20. 139. Ibid., 22. 140. Ibid., 22. 141. Emanuel Scherer, “Etlekhe grunt-fragn,” Unzer Tsayt (March–April 1955): 22. 142. Ibid., 24. 143. P. Shvartz, “Zakhn, vos darfn revidirn vern,” Unzer Tsayt (March–April 1955): 29–31. The article is concerned not only with changing the Bund’s attitudes toward Israel, but with revising a whole array of Bundist policies, such as the Bund’s approach to socialism, its mode of organization, and its practical work. 144. Ibid., 31. 145. J. S. Hertz, “Unzer hemshekh,” Unzer Tsayt (March–April 1955): 49. 146. Ibid. 147. Statements and Resolutions Adopted by the Third World Conference of the Bund, 19. 148. Ibid., 19–20. 149. Ibid., 20.

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150. Emanuel Scherer, “Mit akhriyes farn haynt un morgn,” Unzer Tsayt (May 1955): 6–7. 151. Ibid., 5–6. 152. Ibid., 6–7. 153. Subsequent world conferences reinforced this acceptance of Israel’s potential while still rejecting its Zionist character. They reiterated the critiques regarding the treatment of the country’s non-Jewish minorities, peace in the region, and the status of Yiddish. The Bund continued to wage its war against Zionism. The basic problems of Israel-diaspora relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the status of Yiddish continued to be major bones of contention for the Bund. Such concerns were present until the Bund’s last world conference, in New York in 1992. At that conference, the Bundists threw their support behind the fledgling peace process and demanded an end to violence on both sides, rejected Israeli occupation, and called for the establishment of Palestinian self-determination in the Occupied Territories. See Report and Resolutions of the Seventh World Conference of the Jewish Labor Bund, October 20–25, 1985, New York City, U.S.A. (New York: World Coordinating Committee of the Jewish Labor Bund, 1986), 14–15; “Di akhte velt-konferentz fun Bund,” Unzer Tsayt (November–December 1992): 3–13.

CONCLUSION 1. Raphal Ryba, “Fragn, oyf velkhe m’darf zikh fartrakhtn,” Bundishe Fraye Tribune (March 1958): 1–4. 2. See letter from Dina Ryba to J. S. Hertz, 12 May 1958, and letter from Kalman Goldwasser to Raphal and Dina Ryba (in New York), 20 September 1958, both in BA, RG-1400, ME-40/145.

INDEX

Ajzenbud, Moshe, 52–53, 146, 155, 166–167, 169 Algerian War, 75, 82, 85–89, 91–96, 101, 215; economic impact on France, 75, 82, 85, 88–89; escalation of, 86; French Bund’s attitude toward, 86–88, 91–92, 93–96, 102, 118, 215 ALP, see Australian Labor Party Alter, Victor, 7, 66, 73, 113, 140, 153, 194 Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union, 107, 114 Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, 113, 132, 133, 134 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 147 American Representation of the Polish Bund: and Arbeter Ring, 124; and establishment of Unzer Tsayt, 32; and international Bund cooperation, 18–20, 22, 67; as nucleus of Bund in New York, 110, 112; relationship with the Bund in Poland, 22, 57, 59, 67; as seat of exiled Polish Bund leadership, 16; and support for DPs, 50 antisemitism, 3; in Australia, 149, 156; Bund struggle against, 24, 182, 209; in France, 75, 77, 87, 88, 90–91; in Poland, 6, 13, 58, 60–62, 65–66, 76, 218; and Soviet Union, 93, 163; in United States, 107 Arbeter Ring: and Bundist branches in New York, 114, 124–126; conflict between US Bundists and, 125–126; and decline of Yiddish in France, 98, 100, 103 (see also Centre Medem-Arbeter Ring); in New York, 113, 114, 122–126; and orphans in postwar Europe, 81, 82–83, 84; in prewar France, 78; in United States, 123–124; US Bundists’ involvement in, 113 Argentina, 4, 9, 13, 21, 29, 30, 32, 48, 88, 150, 213, 215 Artuski, Yisachar, 40–41, 194; on Bund’s struggle against Zionism, 196, 204–205;

editorship of Lebns-Fragn, 198, 204; on Knesset elections, 200–201; outlines Israeli Bund platform, 195–197; on prospects of success for Bund in Israel, 197–198; pseudonyms, 194, 196, 204; as Y. Samter, 196 Australia: Jewish immigration to, 141; postwar immigration policy, 140–141 Australian Labor Party (ALP): Bund’s relations with, 142–143, 151–159, 215; in government, 141; and the split, 152, 157 Bachrach, Hershl, 143 Bargman, Mishke, 157–158 Belgium, 9, 13, 22, 37, 40, 76, 99, 115, 182 Ben-Gershon, Moshe, 171 Blatman, Daniel, 7–8, 48, 72 Blit, Lucjan, 183–184 Blum, Leon, 83, 88 Board of Deputies, 142, 145, 146–147, 148–151, 161 British Labour Party, 111–112, 117–118 Brumberg, Abraham, 2, 8 Brumberg, Yosef, 184–186 Brussels, as location of first world conference, 7, 13, 20, 21, 24 Bulletin of the Jewish Labor Bund in Melbourne, 168 Bund: in czarist Russia, 4–6, 12, 14–15, 58, 77–78, 87, 106–107, 108, 129, 144, 202, 211, 214, 216, 217; emissaries, 29, 38–43, 140, 142, 172, 212; as a transnational movement, 2, 11, 21, 24, 27, 29, 30–31, 42–43, 44, 68, 144, 212, 216–217, 218. See also diaspora; doykayt; Unzer Shtime; Unzer Tsayt; world conferences; World Coordinating Committee of Bund Organizations; Zionism Bund in Paris: attitude toward de Gaulle, 94–96; before 1945, 77–79; children’s homes, 82–83; and French wartime resistance, 79; and North African

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2 62

INDEX

Bund in Paris (continued) immigration, 96, 115; postwar priorities, 82; relationship with the French Left, 84, 94; response to the Suez Crisis, 88–91; response to the war in Algeria, 85–88 Bund in Poland: activities, 63–66; before 1945, 2, 6, 7, 15, 19, 107–108, 111, 112, 211, 217–218; and CKZP, 58, 60, 63; debate over world Bundist cooperation, 22, 32, 66–69; impact of Holocaust on, 16–19, 20, 23, 59; liquidation of, 15, 70–74, 213; number of Bundists, 56–57; opposition to emigration, 60, 62–63; postwar attempt to rebuild, 56, 57–58; as pro-Soviet, 58, 59; withdrawal from World Coordinating Committee, 68–69. See also Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKZP); emigration; Poland; Tsukunft (Poland) Bund Organization in Israel, 174, 192–201; activities, 198–200; and Arab rights, 195– 196, 200, 205; establishment of, 194–195; and Israeli-Arab relations, 195–196, 200, 205; and Knesset elections, 200–201; opposition to Zionism, 195–198; platform, 195–197; prospects of success, 197–198 Bund Organization in Melbourne: and the ALP, 151–159; attempts to join Board of Deputies, 146–147, 148–151; critique of Zionism in Australia, 147–148; decrease in activities, 168; focus on youth, 159–164; and intergenerational tension, 164–168; preoccupation with continuity, 142–145; relative success, 140; and upward mobility of Australian Jewry, 165 Bund Organization in New York: attacked by Jewish left, 128–130; before 1945, 106–110; cooperation with American socialist organizations, 116–122; decline of, 136–138; establishment of, 110–111; involvement in American Jewish life, 122–123; involvement in Arbeter Ring, 123–126; membership, 114–115; and national conference of Bund organizations, 115; participation in civil rights movement, 120–122; relations with Jewish Socialist Verband, 127–128. See also Arbeter Ring; Jewish Socialist Verband; Nowogrodski, Emanuel; Scherer, Emanuel Bundishe Fraye Tribune, 91–93 Burstin, Beynish, 165–166 Burstin, Michael, 170 Burstin, Sefra, 169–170 Burstin, Sender, 140, 141–142, 143–144, 154–155, 165 Burstin, Simche, 159 Calwell, Arthur, 140, 152, 153, 158 Camp Hemshekh, 113, 131–134, 213–214 Canada, 9, 37, 48, 60, 91, 117, 142, 212, 215, 217 Central Bureau of the Bund in America, 115, 121, 123, 127

Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKZP), 57–58, 60, 62 Centre Medem-Arbeter Ring, 104 Chavershaft (Melbourne), 160, 164–166 CKZP, see Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKZP) CLEJ, see Club Laïque Enfant Juive Club Laïque Enfant Juive (CLEJ), 98–101, 103 COMISCO, see International Socialist Conference (COMISCO) Communism: and antisemitism, 75–76, 93; Bundist opposition to, 69, 84, 117, 118, 152, 154–155, 157–158, 163–164; impact on French Bund, 88, 92–93, 104; and Jews in Melbourne, 140, 149, 150, 161; in Poland, 15, 56, 57, 61, 62, 66, 68–74, 115, 215 Congress for Yiddish Culture, 122, 123, 181 Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France, 84 de Gaulle, Charles, 76, 94–96, 215 Demblin, Binyomin, 203–204 Denmark, 9, 76 diaspora, as organizing principle of Jewish life, 18, 147–148, 176–177, 180. See also Bund: as a transnational movement; doykayt; Israel; Palestine; Zionism doykayt: Bund as “doykayt party,” 151; challenges to, 130; French variation of, 81; ideology of, 25, 142, 144, 159, 169, 170, 190, 202; and Israel, 185, 188, 201–202, 207–208; and Jewish continuity, 142, 144, 150, 216; Polish Bund emphasis on, 62–63; as response to the Holocaust, 142, 175, 177, 210, 211, 216; and World Coordinating Committee, 28; and Zionism, 172, 174–175, 177, 179, 188 DP camps, 9–10, 37, 147, 153; Bundist activity in, 50–51, 182, 212; and employment restrictions, 53; historiography of, 47–48; as ideological battleground for overseas Bundists, 49; number of Bundists in, 48; Palestine as emigration destination, 48–50, 56, 178, 202; and sense of despair, 51–52; as transition point, 75, 80, 115, 124; US as preferred emigration destination, 50, 115; and Zionist intimidation, 52–55, 192 Eichenbaum, Yisachar, see Artuski, Yisachar emigration: debates over, 18, 58–60, 62; from DP camps, 48–51; from Israel, 190–191, 194; from Poland, 13, 15–16, 17, 57, 60–62, 73; World Coordinating Committee position on, 48 “emigrationism,” 58, 60, 62 England, see Great Britain Erlich, Henryk, 7, 66, 73, 109, 113, 140, 153 Executive of Bundist Groups in Germany, 48–50

INDEX

Feiner, Leon, 58 Fishgrund, Salo, 57–58, 66, 71 FLN, see Front Liberation Nationale (FLN) Fogel, Gershon, 59, 62, 71 Folkstsaytung, 51, 59, 64, 68, 71, 194, 198 Forverts, 107, 109, 113, 114, 123, 129, 132 France: and decolonization, 76–77, 84–94; Fifth Republic, 94–96; Fourth Republic, 10, 84–94; and historiography of Jews in the postwar period, 76–77; Nazi occupation of, 36, 79, 82; North African migration to, 101–102; postwar Jewish population, 75–76; Vichy regime, 79–80, 87, 88, 91, 191. See also Algerian War; Bund in Paris Fraye Tribune (publishing house), 52 Front Liberation Nationale (FLN), 86–87 Gezerd (Communist group), 140 Giligich, Yosef, 140 Goldlust, John, 165 Goldwasser, Kalman, 92–94 Golomb, Abraham, 130 Gorny, Yosef, 8 Great Britain, 9, 182, 183, 184; Bundists in, 76; Bundist support of socialist government, 111–112; Jewish migrants to, 75; migrants to Australia, 141; and Palestine, 177–178, 183; and Suez Crisis, 85, 88–91. See also British Labour Party Green, Nancy, 78 Grodzenski, Shloyme, 175–176 Grynszpan, Herschel, 79 Hawke, Bob, 170 Hersch, Liebman: in debate over Zionism, 186–190, 208; on reestablishment of Bund in postwar world, 21–22; visit to Palestine, 202–203; visit to South America, 40 Hertz, J. S. (Jacob Sholem), 136, 206–207 Himmelfarb, Hershl, 40, 194 Histadrut, 196 Hodes, Leyvik: involvement in Arbeter Ring, 126; opposition to establishment of world Bund body, 19; opposition to Zionism and Jewish statehood, 176–179; on role of Unzer Tsayt in International Bund, 32–33 Hoffman, Ben-Tsiyon (Tsivyon), 107, 108 Holocaust: Bundist interpretation of, 33, 127–128, 133–134, 142–143, 210; centrality of in Bundist life, 87–88, 91, 96, 113–114, 133–134, 136, 214; commemoration of, 2, 29, 113, 139, 143, 168; impact on Bund and Bundism, 12, 14, 18–20, 101, 151, 168, 175, 182, 218; and Zionism, 177–179, 185, 189 I. L. Peretz School (Melbourne), 146 immigration: in first half of the twentieth century, 15, 108; to France from North Africa, 75, 102; government policies

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on, 108, 140–141, 153, 191–192; after the Holocaust, 75, 139, 197. See also emigration; “emigrationism” In One Voice festival, 170 International Jewish Labor Bund, see Bund: as a transnational movement; Nowogrodski, Emanuel; Scherer, Emanuel; Unzer Tsayt; world conferences; World Coordinating Committee of Bund Organizations International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 114 International Socialist Conference (COMISCO), 25, 28, 69 Israel: Bundists’ visits to, 202–205; Bund’s debate over establishment of, 179–187; and conflict with Palestinians; and Arab refugees, 191–192; Knesset elections, 174, 200–201; militaristic culture, 191; as refugee destination, 46, 48–50, 56, 60; UN Partition Plan, 179–182. See also Bund Organization in Israel; Zionism Jacobs, Jack, 6, 202 Jaszunski, Grisha, 22, 60, 66–68 Jewish Daily Forward, see Forverts Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, 26, 35–36, 58, 73, 191, 192 Jewish Labor Committee, 22, 23, 51, 97, 106, 110, 122, 123, 137, 160, 198 Jewish National Library Kadimah, see Kadimah Jewish Socialist Federation, 15, 107–108 Jewish Socialist Union of France, see Bund in Paris Jewish Socialist Verband, 108–109, 122, 127–128, 131, 214 Jewish Welfare Society, 142, 145, 146, 148, 154, 168 Kadimah, 140, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 154, 170, 212 Kahan, Arcadius, 40–41, 156 Kahn, Yitzkhak, 39 Katzetler Farband, 121, 122 Kazdan, Khayim Shloyme, 123, 124, 130, 186 Khavershaft (New York), 134 Kielce pogrom, 48, 56–57, 61–62, 72 Klepfisz, Irena, 113–114, 132 Kligsberg, Moyshe, 124, 130, 186 Leber, Sylvie, 167 Lebns-Fragn, 30, 38, 192, 204; circulation, 193; editors, 201; establishment of, 198 Levin-Shatskes, Yitzhak, 118, 128 Libeskind, Daniel, 132, 133 Luden, Yitzhkak, 201, 256n84 Marxism, debates over role within postwar Bund, 16–18, 35, 163, 165–168 Mendelson, Shloyme, 17–18, 110, 180 Menes, Abraham, 18

264

INDEX

Menzies, Robert, 157, 158 Mexico, 2, 9, 10, 13, 23, 32, 37, 38, 130, 142, 182, 204, 212, 213, 214 Michels, Tony, 107 Minc, Alexander, 80 Minczeles, Henri, 78, 98, 99, 103 Mollet, Guy, 86–88, 91, 96, 102 NAC, see New Australian Council (NAC) Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 85, 89–91, 102 national-cultural autonomy, 5, 108, 181, 216 New Australian Council (NAC), 154–157 Newman, Margie, 133 Nowogrodski, Emanuel, 26, 121; in Arbeter Ring, 126; arrival in US, 110; on Bundist anti-Zionism, 175–176; on civil rights, 121; desire for socialist unity in the US, 116; on dissolution of American Representation and establishment of New York Bund, 111; as emissary, 39–40; on establishment of global Bund organization, 20–21, 22; on impact of World Coordinating Committee on Bundists worldwide, 25; on prospects of Bundism in US, 111–112, 116, 118 Nusbaum, Henry, 171 Oler, Leon, 19, 124, 130, 186 Orbach, Y., 151 Palestine: British in, 112, 125, 178, 181; Bundists in, 193–195; Bundists visit, 188, 202–203; as emigration destination, 46, 48–50, 56, 60, 177–178; and establishment of Jewish state, 60, 177, 179–187; Jews in, 60, 173, 175, 177, 182, 187–188, 202–205; and UN Partition Plan, 179–181. See also Bund Organization in Israel; DP camps; emigration; Israel; Zionism Pat, Yankev, 110; opposition to establishment of global Bund organization, 22–24; support for Jewish statehood, 184–185, 186; visit to Melbourne, 159–160 Patt, Emmanuel, 23, 52, 204 PKWN, see Polish Committee of National Liberation Poland: advent of Communism in, 70–73, 215; and antisemitism, 58, 60–62; Bundists return to, 48, 49, 57; Jewish emigration from, 58–59, 75–76, 115, 213; Jewish life of transplanted to immigrant communities, 113–114, 133, 142–143, 145, 146, 159, 162; Jews in, 13, 20, 46, 57, 63; liberation by Red Army, 57–58; Soviet domination, 58, 70, 110. See also Bund in Poland; Kielce pogrom; Tsukunft (Poland) Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), 59 Polish Government-in-Exile, 7, 16, 19, 20, 59

Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), 63, 70–71 PPR, see Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) Ravitch, Melech, 129 Richter, Esther, 79, 97 Ringelblum, Pinye, 159 Rogoff, Hillel, 129, 130 Rozen, Ber I., 144, 145, 149 Rutland, Suzanne, 141 Ryba, Dina: criticism of French Bund, 91–93, 99, 217; on formation of CLEJ, 99; on future of Bund in US, 137; suspension from French Bund, 93–94, 217 Ryba, Raphal: critique of World Coordinating Committee and US Bundists, 217; and decline of French Bund, 93; on formation of CLEJ, 99; and Fraye Bundishe Tribune, 91; on North African immigration to France, 102; suspension from French Bund, 93–94, 217 Salutsky, Yankev, see Salutsky-Hardman, J. B. Salutsky-Hardman, J. B., 15, 60 Samter, Y., see Artuski, Yisachar Scherer, Emanuel: on Algerian War, 90; and American Representation of Polish Bund, 110; in Arbeter Ring, 124, 126; on British Labour Party, 111–112, 118; and Bundist continuity, 27, 33–34; on cooperation with Jewish Left, 127, 130–131; and emissaries, 38, 40–41; on establishment of Bund in the US, 112; as representative in Polish Government-in-Exile, 7, 16, 19, 20; and socialism in the US, 116–118, 137– 138; and Unzer Tsayt, 31; and world Bund organization, 19, 20–21, 24–25, 27–28, 41–42; on Zionism, 180–181, 183, 185–188, 206, 207–208 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), 84, 85, 87, 96, 101 SFIO, see Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière Shachnowski, Nathan, 79 Sholem Aleichem School (Melbourne), 146, 168–170 Shtern, Leon, 89–90, 93, 95 Shuldenfray, Michal, 57, 66, 68–69, 72 Shvartz, Pinchas, 181–182, 183, 185, 187, 191, 206, 208 SKIF, see Sotzyalistisher Kinder Farband (SKIF) socialism: British Labour Party as example of, 111, 118; Bundist involvement with local socialist groups, 2, 7, 21, 78–79, 118–122, 151–159, 195–196; decline of, 3, 4, 8, 9, 44–45, 104, 130, 137, 165–167, 217; and French government, 20, 84–91, 94, 96, 101, 102; Jewish socialism, 4–5, 30, 67, 127–128, 130, 184; and Jews in the US before 1945, 105–110; and localized circumstances, 22, 67–68, 116–122, 144, 175–176, 185, 189, 204, 215;

INDEX

as means to resolve antisemitism and ensure Jewish continuity, 21, 29–30, 61, 175; and postwar Bundism, 16–17, 20, 24–25, 29–30, 33, 36, 182, 213; and postwar Poland, 59, 61, 63, 65–66, 69–71, 73; prospects for in postwar US, 66, 111–112, 115, 116–122, 126, 132; and youth education, 83, 97, 99–100, 133, 125, 159–162; and Zionism, 175–176, 184–185, 207. See also Communism; doykayt, International Socialist Conference (COMISCO); Section Française Internationale Ouvrieres (SFIO); Socialist Party of America Socialist Party of America, 108, 109, 118, 121, 215 Sotzyalistisher Kinder Farband (SKIF): in Melbourne, 142, 159–161, 166, 170–171; in New York, 134–136; in Paris, 83, 84, 96–98, 159; in Poland, 65, 159 Steinberg, Isaac Nachman, 130–131 Steingart, Tsirl, 137 Sweden, 9, 74, 75, 76, 115, 132, 153 Szmajer, Pinchas, 78 Tabatchinsky, Binyomin, 23, 40, 50–51, 110, 130 Thomas, Norman, 115, 118, 119, 121 Tripovich, Jack, 156–157 Trunk, Yechiel Yeshayahu (Y. Y.), 52; on postwar Bundism, 16–17, 18, 22; on Zionism, 187–189 Tsalevich, Bentzl, 193, 194, 196, 201 Tsivyon, see Hoffman, Ben-Tsiyon (Tsivyon) Tsukunft (Poland): activities, 64–66; opposition to Bund’s unity with PZPR, 66, 72; support for establishment of world Bund organization, 66 Tsukunft (Melbourne), 142, 159, 161–164, 166, 170–171; attitude toward Vietnam War, 163–164; influence of New Left on, 163; relationship with Bund committee, 163–164 United States: as global center of Bund, 111; and Holocaust survivors; Jewish immigration to, 108 Unzer Gedank (Argentina), 30 Unzer Gedank (Melbourne), 38, 146, 147, 157, 165, 167, 168 Unzer Shtime: coverage of Algerian War, 84, 86, 92; coverage of DP camps, 52, 81; coverage of Suez Crisis, 89–90, 92; as means of connections Bundists around the world, 30, 31, 36–38; opposition to de Gaulle, 94–95; reestablishment after the war, 78, 80–81, 103; role within the French Bund, 80–82; twentieth anniversary edition, 37–38, 160, 195, 203–204 Unzer Tsayt, 113, 136; anniversary editions, 31; circulation, 31; and debate over Zionism, 153, 176–177, 180, 183, 186, 190,

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206; decline of, 32, 35; establishment of, 32; as organ of International Jewish Labor Bund, 32–33; and postwar reorganization of Bund, 16, 18, 20, 22–24; role in connecting Bundists globally, 29, 32–33, 37 Uruguay, 1, 4, 9, 13, 29, 32, 182 Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies, see Board of Deputies Vladeck, Baruch Charney, 15, 106, 107, 108–109, 110 Vladeck Preventorium (Brunoy), 83, 98 Waks, Jacob, 37–38, 141, 148–149, 153, 154, 168, 187 Wald, Pinie, 202 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 7, 33, 72, 81, 159, 160, 168 Weinberg, David, 75 Wiener, Bono, 150, 152, 154–157, 158, 161, 168 Winkler, Yosl, 150 World Coordinating Committee of Bund Organizations: debate over establishment of, 13–14, 19–24, 142; decline of, 43–45; emissaries, 38–43; relationship to Polish Bund, 32, 67–70, 72–73; resolutions on Zionism/Israel, 182; role in connecting Bundists worldwide, 25–30; on Suez Crisis, 92; support for local Bundist groups, 51, 84 world conferences, 19, 28, 33, 212; first (Brussels, 1947), 7, 13, 21–22, 35, 57, 67–68, 111, 112, 179; second (New York, 1948), 25–27, 32, 179, 183, 186–187, 202, 205; third (Montreal, 1955), 128, 129, 130, 173, 187, 205–208; fourth (New York, 1964), 31, 33–34, 38; fifth (New York, 1972); eighth (New York, 1992), 34, 43 Workmen’s Circle, see Arbeter Ring Yiddish: and Bundist “svive” in New York, 113; and Bund’s decline, 8, 37–38; declining use in Melbourne, 164–165, 167, 171–172; in France, 101–103; in Israel, 174, 178, 180, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195–196, 197, 198, 200, 204, 206, 207; as part of postwar Bundist program, 24, 27, 29, 33–35, 37, 67; in the US, 43, 107–108, 132. See also doykayt; Folkstsaytung; Unzer Gedank (Melbourne); Unzer Shtime; Unzer Tsayt Yugnt-Veker (Warsaw), 65–66 Zable, Arnold, 135, 161, 163–164, 168 Zachariasz, Szymon, 68, 70–71 Zelmanowicz, Motl, 29, 34, 43–44 Zionism: Bundist opposition to, 7, 10, 85, 92, 112, 120, 124, 124–125, 130, 144, 147–148, 167, 173–210; and DP camps, 47–49, 52–56; postwar growth of, 1, 14, 35, 44, 111, 137 Zipper, Yaakov, 130

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAV ID SLUCK I is a Teaching and Research Fellow in the Australian Centre

for Jewish Civilisation and the School of Historical, Philosophical, and International Studies at Monash University. He has published articles in journals in Europe, the United States, and Australia, and has worked as a museum curator in the field of Australian Aboriginal history.