This Jewish movement was almost lost to the world, but has found a home in Australia

Resumen detallado

Born in the 1890s, the Jewish Labour Bund is enjoying a resurgence. A new book traces its evolution.

It’s a movement that was almost lost to the world because of the Holocaust.

But the Jewish Bund, born in Eastern Europe in the late 1890s, has its longest-standing branch in Australia. It stands for secular Jewish identity, support of Yiddish and Yiddish culture, progressive politics, cultural autonomy and workers’ rights, and has recently experienced a resurgence.

New York-based writer and artist Molly Crabapple explores the origins and evolution of the movement in her latest book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: A History of the Jewish Bund. It made its debut at No.4 on the New York Times bestseller list.

“We are confronting a wave of global fascism, of ethno-nationalism, of borders drawn in blood and of economic collapse, and the Bund’s ideas of democratic socialism and solidarity across difference are our best chance of saving ourselves.”

David (Doodie) Ringelblum is president of the Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne, many of whose members are direct descendants of the original Bundists, thanks to the large numbers of Polish Jews here who helped refugees emigrate after World War II. Melbourne is home to one of the few Yiddish schools in the world.

The Bund was a workers’ union set up in Lithuania in 1897 to protect the interests of the Jewish working class. “They worked very hard at re-creating a culturally autonomous world, so the Bund worked very hard to establish a Yiddish-focused, secular, progressive politics,” says Ringelblum.

His main criticism of Crabapple’s book is that it stops at 1948, even though the Bund has continued to exist and evolve since then. The Melbourne branch was not contacted by the author for her research.

Bundist philosophy comes from the Yiddish term doikayt, according to Ringelblum, which loosely translates to “here where we live”.

“Our focus is on cultural autonomy for all people wherever they live,” he says, likening the idea to multiculturalism, as espoused by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s.

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