The Bundists opposed nationalism dictating Jewish identity. The same battles are being fought today

As Israel’s bombs rained down on Gaza in November 2023, I went to a protest in Melbourne. Among the Palestinian flags, I saw a placard quoting Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.”

Edelman belonged to the Jewish Labour Bund, a mass Jewish socialist movement founded in Eastern Europe in 1897. Its members fought antisemitism and fascism, built unions and schools, and fiercely opposed Zionism.

A few months later, I founded the Jewish Council of Australia with seven friends. We wanted to organise against Israel’s destruction of Gaza and insist that our Jewish identities belonged to us, not to Israel or its defenders. At our gatherings, young Jews sing the Bund’s Yiddish songs and chant its slogans. Around the world, Jews are reaching back to the revolutionaries of Eastern Europe, searching for a political tradition that speaks to the struggles of our time.

Why? Because more than a century later, the political questions that animated the Bund are once again at the centre of Jewish life. We too live in an age of ascendant nationalism and racist demagogues. Jews are once again being told our survival depends on separating ourselves from others. The Bundists imagined another way to live as Jews.

In her new nonfiction book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the American artist and writer Molly Crabapple brings the Bund’s history vividly to life.

In October 1897, 13 young Jewish revolutionaries gathered secretly in an attic in Vilna to establish the Bund. They represented workers in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews faced tsarist restrictions, poverty and periodic murderous violence. Within years, the Bund would become the largest revolutionary party in Russia, and later the largest Jewish organisation in pre-war Poland.

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The Bund and political Zionism were born in the same year, confronting the same persecution but imagining radically different futures. Zionists sought Jewish national liberation in Palestine. Bundists insisted that Jews should fight for freedom and equality where they lived. They called this doykayt, or hereness.

Their objection to Zionism was not simply that Jews should remain in Europe. For Bundists, Jews had every right to live in Palestine, but no right to rule over Palestinians. In 1929, as Zionist settlement displaced Palestinian farmers, the Bund declared: “Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of [Palestinians], who constitute the oppressed majority.”

But the Bund’s opposition to Zionism was never a rejection of Jewish collective life. They built Yiddish schools, newspapers, youth movements, clinics and unions. Their answer to antisemitism was neither assimilation nor nationalism. They understood antisemitism not as an inexplicable hatred existing outside politics, but as something cultivated and used. In pre-war Poland, as violent antisemitism was fuelled by church and state, they distributed a million pamphlets explaining how the wealthy used racism to divide workers.

Reading this history in Victoria, on the eve of a state election, it is difficult not to recognise familiar political forces at play. Politicians call for a return to “monoculture”, cast Muslims and racial minorities as threats to Australian identity, and exploit economic fears. Some profess concern for Jewish safety while promoting the very racism on which antisemitism thrives. The Bundists understood how readily racism could be used to turn workers against one another, and the danger of Jews imagining that our freedom could be separated from that of others.

Yet the Bund’s history offers no easy answers. The Bundists built precisely the kind of movement so many of us aspire to: organising workers, creating institutions and forging alliances across national and religious divisions. None of it was enough to save them. In 1938, as European Jews desperately sought refuge from Nazi persecution, representatives of 32 countries gathered at Évian to discuss the refugee crisis. Australia’s delegate declared our country had “no real racial problem” and was not desirous of importing one.

When the Nazis occupied Poland, the Bund was driven underground, but its members remained committed to solidarity. One Bundist publication from the Warsaw Ghetto bore the headline “For Your Freedom and Ours”. Yet, when the Jews rose against the Nazis, their allies could not deliver the wider uprising they had hoped for.

In London, the Bund’s representative Artur Zygielbojm pleaded for Allied intervention. After the ghetto’s destruction in 1943, he died by suicide, hoping his death might overcome “the indifference of those who are able and should act”.

Many would read the destruction of European Jewry as proof that the Bund’s politics had failed. Their homes had become killing fields while much of the world refused them refuge. Zionism’s promise of a Jewish state must have held an almost irresistible appeal to many survivors.

But nearly 80 years later, what has become of that promise?

Generations of occupation, dispossession and recurring war have not brought lasting Jewish security. Israel has become a place where Jewish life is bound to an apparently endless cycle of militarisation and violence. As the global far right surges, a state founded to protect Jews now makes common cause with political movements that trade in the very racism and nationalism that have historically threatened Jewish lives.

The Bundists also understood the danger of allowing a nationalist project to claim a monopoly on Jewish identity. When revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky came to Vilna urging Jews to leave Europe, Bundists picketed his appearance, stating they would “not permit charlatans to speak in our name!” Zionist newspapers demanded the Bund’s exclusion from “the table of the Jewish community”.

The same battles over who gets to speak for Jews are being fought today. Institutions claiming to represent all Jews treat support for Israel as a condition of belonging. Mirroring language used against the Bund, communal leaders in Australia denounce Jews who oppose Zionism as “unJews” and “plagues”, and call for our expulsion.

What has been lost in the process? A tradition of fierce arguments about religion, politics and Jewish emancipation has been increasingly reduced to a single political loyalty. Almost every day I speak to Jews who are frightened to express their political convictions for fear of losing friends, family and their sense of belonging. Silence about Palestine has seeped into our communities, impoverishing our relationships with one another and hindering honest political and moral debate.

The Bundists could not have imagined our world, and their destruction makes it impossible to claim that their politics guarantees safety. But they understood that Jewish freedom could not be secured through the oppression of Palestinians, nor could Jewish life flourish if its horizons were confined to defending a state.

Perhaps that is why Jews in Australia are singing the Bund’s songs again. We are reclaiming a Jewish political tradition that insisted our freedom was bound to that of the people around us. In our time, in the places we call home, we are trying to build something of what the Bundists imagined: a Jewish political life rooted in solidarity, capable of confronting antisemitism without surrendering our identities to nationalism. One that understands Palestinian freedom as inseparable from our own.