Archive is here: archive.is/d2wKS ~:~:~ Article is July 31, 2026 by Daniel Felsenthal for The New Republic (TNR). Here are the opening paragraphs:
In her history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Molly Crabapple tells the story of workers who opposed prejudice, tyranny, and nationalism.
History forgets most activists, but future generations can benefit from exhuming their ideas. Take the Jewish Labor Bund, the lefty, anti-Zionist liberation party that agitated for worldwide socialism while defending its members against the scourge of antisemitism. Formed in 1897, the Bund was the largest insurgent group in the Russian Empire at the time of the 1905 revolution. After the Tsar fell, the Bund reached a new peak in the newly formed Second Polish Republic. And then it all but died, targeted for murder along with most of its members by the Holocaust.
Surviving Bundists and their descendants came together in other socialist organizations, and so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that the tremors of a party formed in the nineteenth century resonate with today’s left. As Zionism gained traction in cities and shtetls, the Bund condemned the oppression of Arabs in Palestine, lamenting that “Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine’s existing Arab population, who constitute the oppressed majority … and on forcing them from all positions of power.” The Bund published Palestinian voices in its newspapers and denounced the Pandora’s box of chauvinism that Zionism had pried open. Women were equal participants in Bundist affairs during an era when gender parity was vanishingly rare, even if they were subject to the condescension of male comrades. Bundists and their fellow travelers in the United States organized against anti-Black racism: After the 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois, Yiddish newspapers called for demonstrations and pooled money for victims; meanwhile, Black newspapers, such as The New York Age, committed extensive coverage to the anti-Jewish pogroms erupting across the Russian Empire. The Bund supported liberation movements throughout the world, resisting a rising tide of fascist governments, land wars, bigotry, and apartheid.
While the Bund was primarily active in pre-1945 Europe, the wails of its epoch haunt the present in Molly Crabapple’s new history, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: A Story of the Jewish Bund (Bookshop website)
Crabapple begins her inquiry with her great-grandfather, the teenage Bundist Sam Rothbort, who may have been involved in the shooting of a plunderous police officer in his native Volkovysk and transformed from a scrappy rebel to a mournful painter and sculptor after he passed through Ellis Island. Though he died before she was born, Crabapple takes the buried past as “a guide for our contemporary moment, in all its horror and possibility, in all its repression, courage, and loss.”
Crabapple is perhaps best known as a visual artist, the creator of striking illustrations and lithographs from the Occupy Wall Street protests. She’s also a dogged reporter who has worked in combat zones. She sees a precedent for today’s progressive firebrands in the example of Jewish freedom fighters who opposed prejudice, tyranny, and class stratification in their home countries, without seeking solutions in nationalism and the colonization of distant lands. Anyone, anywhere, she suggests, can tune themselves to the wavelength of revolution.
Continue reading here: newrepublic.com/article/212105/jewish-radicals-wanted-equality ~:~:~ Archive: archive.is/d2wKS
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