What Does Judaism Look Like With Bundism?

The question posed by a New York Times article, “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?”, does not arrive as a neutral inquiry into religious or cultural possibility. It is an intervention into history, unmistakably shaped by the political present. Framed through its focus on Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a study of the General Jewish Labour Bund, the piece draws on a book that cannot be separated from the moment of its emergence: the period following October 7 and the wars that followed, when large segments of the global left moved, almost reflexively, to translate a massacre of Jews into an indictment of the Jewish state.

In that atmosphere, Bundism, or what is now being called neo-Bundism, has resurfaced among parts of the American Jewish left not merely as a subject of historical curiosity, but as a moral and political resource in support of antizionism. It offers something deeply appealing: a Jewish project through which to oppose Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, along with a sense of continuity with a venerable Jewish political tradition rather than a rupture from it.

There is, to be sure, a familiar and almost consoling way of telling the Bund’s story. Founded in 1897 in the Russian Empire, it was one of the most sophisticated political movements in Jewish history. It combined Marxist analysis with a distinctly Jewish cultural program, centered on doikayt, “hereness” — the belief that Jews must fight for their rights wherever they lived, rather than seek refuge in a distant homeland. Against Zionism, it offered not indifference but a rival vision: a diasporic identity rooted in Yiddish culture, labor organizing, and socialist internationalism. Zionism, in its view, was a retreat from the real struggle, an abandonment of the Jewish masses in favor of a nationalist project that could not resolve the deeper structures of inequality and exclusion.

For decades, this vision held real power. The Bund built trade unions, schools, newspapers, and self-defense units. It commanded loyalty among Jewish workers in Poland and beyond. It did not merely argue with Zionism; it competed with it, often successfully, for the allegiance of Eastern European Jewry.

Then came the destruction. The Nazi genocide did not simply decimate European Jewry; it obliterated the social world in which Bundism had made sense: the Yiddish-speaking proletariat, the dense networks of Jewish communal life in cities like Warsaw and Łódź, and the political culture that sustained Bundist institutions. What remained survived only in fragments, scattered across continents.

This is the story told, all of it true, none of it complete. It looks toward the Nazis and their near-total destruction of European Jewry, but rarely toward the conduct of those forces the Bund regarded as its ideological kin: the internationalist left.

To say this clearly is not to collapse distinctions. The Bund were not Stalinists. They were not Bolsheviks. They were not agents of Soviet power. They maintained an independent socialist vision, one rooted in Jewish cultural autonomy and democratic organizing. They often stood in tension with Bolshevik centralism, and many Bundists resisted or were later destroyed by Stalinism. These differences matter, and any honest historical account must preserve them.

But it is equally true that the Bund placed its faith in a broader internationalist movement — a world of socialist parties, Communist resistance networks, and revolutionary solidarities — that claimed to stand against oppression in all its forms. It is here that the indictment lies. For when antisemitism reached its most extreme and genocidal form, that world did not respond as the Bundist vision required it to.

As the Nazi assault expanded beyond Germany to encompass Jews across Europe, antisemitism acquired what Saul Friedländer has called a “redemptive character.” It portrayed Jews not merely as a political problem, but as a metaphysical threat—to Europe, to the Aryan race, to humanity itself. Only through their elimination could the world be made whole. This was not a localized hatred; it was a global project of annihilation.

And yet, at precisely this moment, resistance from the broader left was circumscribed within a frame that did not make the fate of the Jews a priority. When Jews in France were being deported, the Communist Resistance remained reluctant to foreground antisemitism. No sustained propaganda effort was made to highlight what was being done specifically to Jews. Recent research has corroborated that the Communist underground press maintained “total silence … even when an antisemitic propaganda campaign was launched and even when it directly targeted the resistance,” and that “throughout the occupation, the resistance spared no effort to prove that its members had not signed up to the goal of defending the Jews.”1

This silence was not incidental. It reflected a deeper failure within the internationalist framework itself. Jewish suffering, when it did not fit neatly into class struggle or national resistance narratives, was minimized, reframed, or ignored.

The strategic responses of Communist parties were, moreover, not autonomous. They were shaped and directed from the Soviet Union. And here the betrayal becomes even more explicit.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, facilitated after Stalin replaced his Jewish foreign minister Maxim Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov—was, in effect, an agreement with the most powerful antisemite in the world. Its secret protocols consigned Eastern Europe, the heartland of world Jewry, to devastation. At the Zionist World Congress, Chaim Weizmannunderstood the implications immediately, closing with the stark words: “Friends, I have only one wish: that we all remain alive.”

When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and began the mass shootings of Jews, the Soviet authorities maintained a systematic silence. Reports were diluted; Jewish victims were subsumed into broader categories. The massacre at Babi Yar — where 52,000 Jews were murdered — was officially reduced to 1,000. The war was framed not as a struggle against the annihilation of the Jews, but as the “Great Patriotic War” for the salvation of the Soviet homeland. As one military leader, citing Stalin, declared: “some comrades of Jewish descent believe that this war is being fought to save the Jewish nation. These Jews are mistaken.”2

The consequence was not abstract. Jews, as Jews, were left to fend for themselves.

Even after the defeat of Nazism, this pattern persisted. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, established to publicize Nazi crimes, was dismantled. Its major work, The Black Book, was suppressed and destroyed for emphasizing Jewish suffering. Its leading figure, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. Other members were arrested, tortured, and executed. Charges of “Zionism” and “cosmopolitanism” converged into a single accusation: disloyalty, foreignness, an unacceptable attachment to Jewish identity.

Nor was antisemitic violence confined to state policy. As Brendon McGeever has shown, the Red Army itself was responsible for a significant portion of pogroms in Ukraine, with soldiers shouting slogans such as “smash the bourgeoisie, smash the Yids.” Efforts to restrain this violence were often led not by Communist leadership, but by former Bundists and left-Zionists; many of whom were later murdered in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

The failure did not end with the war. In its aftermath, much of the left displayed an unwillingness — or inability — to confront genocidal antisemitism as a distinct phenomenon. Ernest Mandel, for example, acknowledged the Holocaust only to equate it with the postwar expulsion of Germans, suggesting that “the massacre of the Jews is borne equally with Nazism … by all of imperialism.” This flattening of moral categories was not unique. Influential intellectual movements such as Socialisme ou Barbarie largely ignored the Holocaust. The radical left of 1968, including Maoist groups like Gauche Prolétarienne, went further, equating Israel with Nazism — an early instance of a rhetorical pattern that has since become commonplace. In Germany, this logic culminated in acts of violence, including the planting of a bomb in a Jewish community center on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1969.

It is here that the reflection of Isaac Deutscher, written in 1954, becomes unavoidable:

“I have… long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement… which that society and civilisation have not justified. If… I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were to be extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers… the Jewish state has become an historic necessity. It is also a living reality.”

Deutscher was not a Bundist, he was a Trotskyist, but his conclusion speaks directly to the assumptions that underpinned Bundism — and to the assumptions being revived today. It is the recognition that the faith placed in European society, in its capacity to absorb and protect Jewish life, was not merely disappointed. It was catastrophically betrayed.

The neo-Bundist narrative depends on obscuring this point. It preserves the moral purity of internationalism by erasing or downplaying the failures of those who claimed to embody it. It presents the Bund as a victim solely of fascism, rather than confronting the collapse of its central premise: that Jews could rely on the solidarity of the societies and movements around them.

To say this is not to deny the dignity or courage of Bundists, nor to conflate them with Stalinists or Bolsheviks. It is to insist that their vision cannot be separated from the world in which it sought to operate — and from the behavior of those who claimed to share its universalist commitments.

We are asked to imagine a Judaism without Zionism as though this were an open, unrealized possibility. But history has already supplied an answer. In the 1951 Israeli legislative election, a Bund list ran for the Knesset. The result was correspondingly modest: just over a thousand votes, far below the threshold required for parliamentary representation. And yet, the movement that had built its identity around the rejection of Jewish statehood, that had insisted the future of the Jews lay in the diaspora, found its political expression within the State of Israel.

What then does Judaism look like without Zionism? We do not need to speculate.