This talk by Joshua Meyers will explore the Jewish Labor Bund, a party that holds a particular mystique in the imagination of Jewish leftists, even decades after the Bund in Poland was dissolved. It is remembered as a potent symbol of Diaspora Socialism, anti-Zionism, and Yiddish activism. However, the Bund was more than a symbol. The Bund was a potent movement in the Jewish communities of Russia and Poland, shaping Jewish economic, political, and cultural life across Eastern Europe for half a century and continuing in the diaspora worldwide. This talk will examine the history of the Bund from its origins through World War II, when the party served as the standard bearer of Diaspora Socialism in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It will delve into the evolving relationships between the Bund and other major political movements—Zionists, Communists, and others—that it existed alongside and frame these relationships within their historical reality. It will explore the factors that made the Bund so attractive to Jews in the Russian Empire and interwar Polish Republic, as well as the limits to that attraction against the political, cultural, and social realities it lived in. Ultimately, it will offer a narrative of the Bund rooted not in our world or imaginations, but in the reality of the Bund’s own members, while exploring its legacy and that of Diaspora Socialism in the 21st century.
Manhattan, New York, NY