Bundism in Britain: Then and Now
Contrary to popular belief, the Bund was not only active within the borders of European Yiddishland. Whether in Melbourne, Buenos Aires or London, the history of ‘diaspora Bundists’ can teach us about the successes and shortcomings of the movement and its continued relevance and necessity today.
The Bund came into existence in the Russian Empire, the largest Jewish community in the world in the late 19th century. While by no means ignoring the international arena (both due to the ideological belief in socialist internationalism and the pragmatic necessity of operating as a conspiratorial organisation) this Eastern European Yiddishland would remain the central point of the movements’ activities. Neither the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, nor the destruction of all opposition by the Bolsheviks changed this paradigm. Instead, in the interwar period, the Bund’s activities shifted to newly independent Poland (as well as Latvia and Romania). While Bund-aligned organisations did exist across the world, they mostly functioned as fundraising operations, assisting in the fight in the ‘old country,’ not as organisations of the Bund in their own right. This structure would continue into the Second World War, when desperate attempts to support comrades in their escape and fight continued until the bitter end.
The question as to why Bundist activities concentrated their activities on a “diasporic center,” rather than promoting an ‘international Bundism’ before 1939, is crucial to understanding the movement’s decline after the Second World War. This question can only be satisfyingly answered by a deeper dive into the early history of the movement, including the polemics of Vladimir Medem on global Jewish identity. For our purposes here, it is enough to understand that despite living in a fundamentally different world, those of us who struggle for a global revival of the Bund are confronted with a similar paradigm: a diasporism focused on “centers” of Jewish life, or one aiming to elevate all Jewish communities no matter their size.
In doing so, it’s worth looking at those Bundist organizations that did end up sprouting across the world. These include both pre-1939 outposts of the movement and groups established by Bundists scattered across the world by the war, including Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Israel, and especially Australia, where the only organization of the Bund established before 1939 is still in operation today. However, this article will serve as a brief introduction to the history of Bundism in somewhere a little closer to old Yiddishland.
Since the 1870s, London had seen a rapid growth of its Jewish population primarily due to immigration from Eastern Europe, concentrating in the poor districts of the East End. In this environment, radical Jewish thought flourished, with the establishment of newspapers, associations, and clubs by various shades of socialists and anarchists, able to express themselves more freely than in Russia. When the Bund arrived on the political scene, it fit in well into this environment. Its “founding father,” Arkadi Kremer, came to London around 1900 with his wife Pati. Originally from Vilna, they had to resettle from Switzerland following their initial exile. The printing press they established functioned alongside an association called “Der Veker,” (The Awakener) a Yiddish publication for Bundist thought.
Their work prioritized the struggle in Eastern Europe, with financial drives for anti-pogrom self-defense groups and demonstrations against the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war. In 1903, London was also the stage for the epic battle that was to be the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, resulting in the split between Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Bundists.However, while the Bundist leadership in London and Geneva, Switzerland treated their residence as a temporary exile until conditions were better suited for their return to Eastern Europe (many did return at great risk), the Jewish workers of Britain embodied a slightly more universal spirit of doikayt. A Workers’ Fund, chaired by the Bundist Berl Rosner was established in East London in these years as a vehicle to unite the local and Russian struggles, but organizing was taking place in other parts of the country as well. One leaflet published in 1905, “full of energy and sincerity,” brought the “joyful news” that “at 59 St Lukes Street in Leeds a union has been established whose aims and tactics are the same as the Jewish Labour Bund in Russia.” The city had been the site of Jewish working class struggle since the 1880s. Importantly, the group did not view its identification with the Bund as simply supporting their comrades in a faraway land, but also “to save the Jewish workers here from the torments that fill their lives!”
Tsarist crackdowns following the failure of the 1905 Revolution meant a dramatic decrease in the Bund’s strength. Only in the immediate pre-war years did the party regain some momentum. When the war did break out, a young Bundist studying in Belgium escaped across the English Channel, joined “Der Veker” and the British Socialist Party, then an affiliate of the Labour Party. In 1917, he returned to Russia following the overthrow of the Tsar. His name was Viktor Alter, and along with his colleague in the Petrograd Soviet, Henryk Ehrlich, he would become one of the leaders of the interwar Bund in Poland.
The Bund’s connection to Britain continued beyond its phase of exile. Ehrlich and other prominent members would regularly travel to Britain to visit local supporters.4 Among these as the Jewish Socialist Organisation (JSO), which organised public demonstrations against increasing antisemitism in Poland in the 1930s, while also engaging in local organising, such as founding a Yiddish secular school that numbered almost 4,000 members.
One of the recurring subjects of the Party in Poland was the question of international affiliation. The Bund was generally supportive of attempting, to the greatest extent possible, to foster unity among various socialist movements, navigating the divide between Soviet-centred Communists and Reformist Socialists. After many years of hesitation, the Bund joined the Labour and Socialist International in 1930, albeit adopting an oppositional stance to its non-revolutionary leadership. This put it in the same organisation as the British Labour Party, which contained within it a more leftist faction, confusingly called the “Independent Labour Party.” The following year, the Bund and the Independent Labour Party joined forces in calling on the German Social Democrats (SPD) to adopt fiscal stimulus policies to decrease unemployment (and growing Nazi popularity) — the SPD did not listen.
The connection between the Bund and Labour gained a particular significance during the Second World War. Sixteen days after the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet Army followed up on its non-aggression pact with the Nazis and invaded Poland from the east. As an oppositional socialist movement, Bundists were targeted by Stalin’s secret police (NKVD) with particular vengeance. Along with many others, Ehrlich and Alter were arrested and imprisoned. Released after Germany invaded the USSR, they were re-arrested in December 1941 on trumped-up charges of treason. A great international campaign for their release ensued, which included prominent Labour politicians such as Sir Stafford Cripps, but the pair were announced dead in 1943 – murdered by the Soviets.
Once again the movement’s leadership found itself fleeing abroad, notably in London, where the Polish Government-in-Exile took up residence. It included a Bund representative, Szmul Zygielbojm. Having barely escaped Warsaw with his life in October 1939 after openly calling on Jews to not go into the Ghetto, Zygielbojm maintained close connections with the underground in Nazi-occupied Poland. When he began to receive reliable reports on the mass murder of Jews, he desperately tried to use his connections to force action, including via the Labour Party, which published a resolution in 1942. It attracted the attention of the Foreign Office, but ultimately amounted to little. With the defeat of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, Zygielbojm would end up taking his own life in a final, desperate and unsuccessful appeal for action.
After the war, the Holocaust, the establishment of Stalinist nationalist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, a new red scare in America, and the success of the Zionist movement in establishing a state, the Bund was greatly weakened. It struggled to reformulate its theoretical and practical focus, with local organisations scattered across the world and often preoccupied with writing the histories of the movement, and serving a social role for its members, many of whom lost their entire families in the Holocaust. Delegates from Britain did attend the 1947 Brussels Conference that established a World Coordinating Committee of the Bund, and a new JSO did exist in the post-war years, although its strength can be gauged by the fact that it only published two editions of its periodical in the 1940s. Yet this new “Global” Bund did maintain a presence into the 1970s, and would not be completely forgotten by the Labour leadership. In a short book published for the Bund’s 60th anniversary conference in 1957, we find messages of solidarity from socialist politicians from around the world — British Labour politicians include Morgan Phillips (General Secretary of the Party and Chair of the Socialist International) Hugh Gaitskell (Party Leader) James Griffiths (Secretary of State for Wales), Fenner Brockway (Leader of the ILP) and Clement Attlee (Party Leader and Prime Minister).
A new momentum came in the late 1970s with the Jewish Socialist Group (JSG). Though originally founded primarily by communists in 1974, several new members introduced the mostly unknown history of the Bund to the wider organization. The JSG established local chapters, fought the fascist National Front, built coalitions with activists from other ethnic minorities, and organised some of the first British Jewish protests against Israeli aggression in the Middle East during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. With a grant from the Labour-led Greater London Council, it organized the Jewish Cultural Anti-Racist Project (JCARP), which organized Yiddish language courses and historical lectures. Two JSG members, David Rosenberg and Barry Smerin (the author’s father), attended the 90th anniversary celebration of the Bund in New York. Its connection to the Bund was reinforced by the presence and activism of a composer and old member of the Bund, Majer Bogdański. Active in his local chapter in Piotrków in the 1930s, he served in the Polish army in the west and settled in Britain after the war. He stayed dedicated to his politics, not only through the JSG but also his local Labour Party chapter, dying in 2005.
Bundism survives institutionally in Britain through the JSG, which attends demonstrations and continues to publish the Jewish Socialist and other literature (most recently on the 125th anniversary of the Bund). Jewdas, the now mostly dormant collective that attracted media attention after their 2018 Passover Seder, have also been described as “Neo-Bundist” and use Bundist symbolism in their materials, which is aesthetically popular among many on the Jewish left.
Curiously, appeals to the legacy of the Bund come from very different ideological thinkers, too. Maurice Glasman, founder of “Blue Labour” (the colour of the Conservative Party) also claims inspiration. Without investigating that claim further now, it does raise the question of whether a political platform designed for a marginalized minority can be adapted for a general population. In the case of the Bund and British politics, Glasman was preceded by several decades by David Lewis. Born David Losz in Belarus in 1909, he emigrated to Canada as a teenager, arriving in Oxford in 1932 on a Rhodes scholarship. Having found the Labour student club to be nothing more than a sleepy reading society, he left it larger, more organized, and more radical, even as he became President of the Oxford Union. Michael Foot, contemporary Oxonian and future founder and editor of Tribune — Britain’s oldest democratic socialist publication — stated that he became a socialist partially thanks to Lewis’s rhetorical abilities.
While Lewis’s organizing was largely not specific to his Jewish identity, it was infused with Bundist principles, inherited from his father, who was a local activist in the Bund. Specifically, Lewis opposed the authoritarianism of Marxism-Leninism and left-wing purity-testing, criticizing such tendencies as leading to“self-indulgent facility and recklessness,” for, he believed, “the objectives of democratic socialism can only be achieved by a united mass party.”
Had Lewis not returned to Canada, where he would later become the first leader of the New Democratic Party, he would have likely been better remembered in Britain. He rejected a safe parliamentary seat offer in the 1935 election while developing relationships with many leading Labour politicians, including Gaitskell, Cripps, Barbara Castle (First Secretary of State), and Nye Bevan (architect of the National Health Service). Cripps, in particular, was keen to take Lewis under his wing as a future minister.
Lewis’s beliefs remain relevant in general socialist organizing today –- but so do Bundist prescriptions about Jewish liberation. Yes, the conditions of the 2020s are vastly different to those of the 1890s or the 1930s. Yet many principles as were understood by the movement then can be satisfyingly adapted to our present conditions. Not only can the re-introduction of Jewish organizing principles around areas of politics pertaining to culture, education, workplaces, urban landscapes, housing, communal institutions or self-defence present a positive alternative against the miserable status quo. The exploration of historical Bundist organising in areas outside the “old country” such as Britain (but also for example France, Argentina, or the ideologically similar Sephardic movement in Thessaloniki, Greece) can help us build a diasporism today that is not only concentrated on large Jewish metropolitan centres, but on thriving Jewish communities, wherever they are.
Zach Smerin is a Polish writer and researcher on the Bund's past and present, and a member of the International Jewish Labor Bund's Provisional Steering Committee. Listen to and follow his podcast, the Jewish Diasporist, on Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts.
