Bundism

Like they were always involved and aware.

I'd say probably most of my politics came from my grandmother, who was the daughter of a Bundist activist person back in, they were in Minsk, came here after one of the Russian revolutions in like 1905. very involved in New York City socialist politics.

And it's been...

Learning about that history, well, I guess I didn't really know about that history until more recently when I started trying to make sense of it.

He's very explicit on this, which I think is fascinating.

And then he writes this very good piece on the national question.

And it is not by coincidence that he writes this piece as a polemic simultaneously against Austro-Marxists and against the Bundists.

So these two kind of come together in the perception of the Bolsheviks as the deviation.

And that brings us really to what then becomes the essence for the others, which is this idea of self-determination.

His kind of brand of socialism, he's closer in Bulgaria to the so-called broad socialist than the people around Dmitry Blagojev.

And that's because he focuses on the peasantry.

So on the national question, he is kind of similar to Austro-Marxists and Bundists, and he was very familiar with their ideas.

The head of the NKVD in Ukraine in 37 and 38 is a man named Israel Leplevsky.

who was a former Bundist, a Jewish nationalist before he became a Bolshevik.

The Bund was absorbed into what becomes the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

And he specifically asked the head of the NKVD, Yezhov, who was not Jewish, although his number two man, Belsky, whose original name is Abraham Levin, was Jewish during the first part during the second part of the nationality operations.

...

Stalin's eye in Jewish affairs and a former fanatical Bundist and later a fanatical Chekist, became its executive secretary.

Among others, its members were authors David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Leib Vitko, and Dernister, scientists Lena Stern and Frumkin, a member of the academy.

Poet Itzik Feffer became the vice president.

Nice.

We also, because we named our son after this guy, Marek Edelman, who's a, a Bundist, a, a Jewish democratic socialist in Poland, uh, and one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Um, I recently read Molly Crabapple's book about the Jewish Labor Bund, Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

You could learn more about Marek Edelman and some other amazing Bundists in that book.

And that spirit, like we're gonna fight where we are against oppression we're facing and against oppression and injustice everybody else is facing, just an extraordinary inheritance that we have that I think a lot of people, you know, weren't as aware of.

Uh, so I'm glad the Bund has gotten a lot more attention this year.

But the Jewish labor Bund were specifically anti-Zionist in that way.

And during the Russian Revolution, some Bundists joined or cooperated with the communists, but most of them opposed Bolshevik rule.

But the Soviet regime eventually absorbed slash suppressed most of the bund within the Soviet territory.

So it kind of died out.

And he was saying that, uh, he was, he was trying to strengthen and revive the Catholic tradition of care for a-a-and sanctity of this realm, right? So these really interesting Battles are going on.

Um, and we, um, build on the Jewish Bundist notion of doikayt, of hereness, um, of committing to here in response to Zionism, thereness, the idea of paradise being, um, be- be- the, of solving the crisis of anti-Semitism in Europe by going to Palestine.

Uh, the Bundists, as our friend Molly Crabapple has written this wonderful book, um, showing, we're saying, "No, our safety is in multiracial solidarity here in Europe, and making here better." So it's not to say that here doesn't need to be improved, but, you know, we talk about Mo- the Mamdani campaign as an a- a- amazing example of that spirit, um, here in N- in New York, um, of committing to the city, of saying, "We wanna stay.

We don't wanna be forced out." And then you have the billionaires going, "We're leaving if you tax us by, you know-

Right

Well, in my Yiddishland mix, DJ mix...

I open it with Irena Kleffitz, who's an amazing sort of anti-Zionist or non-Zionist thinker and poet and hereditary Bundist, amazing.

And she's saying Yiddishkeit creates a space that's away from Zionism.

But then I pair it with this other interview from a very Zionist woman who says...