Jewish Labor Bund

JEWISH LABOR BUND (General Union of Jewish Workers in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania). In a secret meeting in 1897 in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, several groups of Jewish revolutionaries sent delegates to found the General Jewish Labor Bund. To resist the violent and humiliating repression of minority cultures by the Czarist regime, opposition political parties, Jewish intellectuals, and labor activists joined forces to support striking workers and defend Jewish peasants from attack. A year later, the philosopher Chaim Zhitlowsky joined the Bund and persuaded the group to adopt Yiddish Socialism, or Yiddishism, a form of ethnic national cultural autonomy, as the guiding principle for revolutionary Judaism. The Bund stood in stark contrast to the World Zionist Organization that had formed around the same time with the objective of establishing a European-style Jewish state somewhere. Similar groups formed among the more than 100 ethnic minority groups in the Russian Empire. After the Kishinev (Moldova) Pogrom in 1903 and the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, in which Bundists took a prominent role, many Bundist activists and sympathizers were impelled to emigrate.

Within a few years, more than 3,000 Bundists founded fifty-two clubs in the United States, which affiliated with the Central Union of Bundist Organizations to support the activities of their comrades left behind. Leaders and intellectuals, such as Zhitlowsky, A.S. Zaks (Saks) and Ben-Tsien Hufman, who settled in New York, continued to call for a Yiddish cultural renaissance to educate and elevate the Jewish masses. With their more militant and culturally-focused worldview than that of Jews who arrived a decade or more earlier, Bundists began to invigorate the Jewish organizations that served the immigrant community. They formed Yiddish-speaking branches of the Socialist Party and joined the staff of the Forverts (Forward) Yiddish daily newspaper, managed by B. Charney Vladeck. Unskilled and semi-skilled women garment workers, fresh from revolutionary struggle in Russia, muscled their way into the skilled and male domain of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). In 1908, Bundists voted to join the Arbiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), transforming their clubs into branches of the fraternal order. Membership of the order jumped 60 percent to more than 30,000 members that year.

The Bundists’ impact on the Workmen’s Circle was profound. In 1910, the order founded their own Yiddish language newspaper, the Fraynd (Friend), built a sanitarium in Liberty, New York to care for victims of tuberculosis ravaging the tenements and sweatshops of the Jewish Lower East Side, and created several English-speaking socialist Sunday schools. By 1915, Bundists and other Yiddishists in the Workmen’s Circle founded the Folksbeine (The People’s Stage) Yiddish Theatre, among the most prominent of the Yiddish cultural institutions in the world. The following year, Bundists succeeded in transforming the Workmen’s Circle Sunday school curriculum into a Yiddish program. Bundists also joined the Socialist Party of America, establishing the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF) in 1912.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 energized the Bundist movement in Russia, but the Jewish party decided against joining the Communist International in an effort to maintain autonomy. In response, the Soviet government crushed the Bund, resulting in the shift of the center of Jewish revolutionary activism to Poland where the Party thrived as a legal entity. As a result of the split of the Socialist Party in the United States, Bundists opposed to the Bolsheviks left the JSF and joined the Jewish Socialist Verband in the early 1920s. By the late 1930s, the Bund in Poland counted more than 9,000 members and thousands more in closely allied organizations. In 1939, the Bund scored victories in Polish municipal elections in every district with a Jewish majority.

By the mid 1930s, former Bundists David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman were leading the two major garment unions in the United States, the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) with a combined membership of more than 400,000 workers. Spurred on by intrepid and visionary women such as Fannia Cohn and Rose Pesotta, the ILGWU in particular applied tenets of Yiddish Socialism and national cultural autonomy through educational programs to hold onto a significant Italian minority in the union as well as thousands of Black and Spanish-speaking members. With support from kindred militants throughout the Jewish labor and socialist movements, the ILGWU built structures for workers and their families to explore their ethnic-racial identities in a militant union context. The ILGWU successfully built power by founding schools, choruses, orchestras, theater and dance troupes, athletic leagues, and retreats that all celebrated cultural differences that employers tried to exploit to divide workers.

Most Polish Bundists were killed during World War II, though some leaders managed to escape in advance. Yankev Pat, Binyomin Tabachinski, and Emanuel Nowogrodski, the head of the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, all escaped to New York. After the war, a small number of Bundists survived to make their way to the United States and New York City, especially, where the archives of the Bund had already been transferred to YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research). In 1947, the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB) was founded in Brussels, establishing its headquarters, the World Coordinating Committee, in New York City with chapters around the world. Nowogrodski, became its General Secretary. The Bund was expressly opposed to Zionism and worked to involve members in local labor movements and socialist parties around the world. The United States, distinct from most countries with Bundist chapters, had no independent labor party and a weak socialist movement. With perhaps as few as 5,000 members worldwide, in New York Bundists were marginalized among much larger groups of Jewish socialists, liberals, and Zionists, who were growing in popularity in the wake of the Holocaust and the founding of Israel in 1948.

The ILGB held eight world conferences from the 1940s to the 1990s. They published journals, books, pamphlets, and newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1950s and 1960s, they cooperated with the Socialist Party in supporting the Civil Rights movement, and they opposed the Vietnam War. Many Bundists lived in the cooperative housing development built by the ACWA in the Bronx, helping to sustain a Yiddish cultural and socialist community for decades. They operated a Bundist Yiddish language children’s camp in the Catskills, Hemshek (Continuity), until 1979, and they produced a radio show on WEVD in New York, called Amol Un Haynt (Past and Present). By the 1970s, the International Jewish Labor Bund was publishing only their journal, Unzer Tsayt (Our Times), which ceased publication in 2006 when the World Coordinating Committee disbanded.

Katz, Daniel. Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Michels, Tony. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Slucki, David. The International Jewish Labor Bund After 1945: Toward a Global History. New Brunswick, 2012.

Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, 1947-1953. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/index.htm