Faith Hillis on the Jewish Labor Bund

So, Faith, how did you first come across the Bund and why do you think more people aren't aware of it and its history?

To be quite honest, I don't remember the first time I came across The Boond.

I think I probably saw it mentioned in General Histories of the Russian Revolution.

I began learning about it in earnest when I was writing Utopia's Discontents, which is a book about the Russian radical diaspora.

And one of the shocking discoveries I made in that book was that, well, A, how fascinating boondism is, and B, the huge role that it played in just creating Russian radical culture in general.

So what I discovered was that a huge portion of this Russian radical diaspora in the late 19th, early 20th century was actually Jewish and was explicitly Bundist.

And a lot of what the book ended up being about was about how when working class Russian Jews went into immigration, many of them were just fleeing pogroms or fleeing economic crisis situations.

no particular political interest how many of them became radicalized overseas and so I began working with Bunda's sources in earnest and really getting into the archives and the memoirs and realizing that this party had actually really fascinating contemporary um then I should say when I say contemporary this is already like 10 to 15 years ago I was discovering the Bunda as it were but then it had uh fascinating contemporary overtones in the sense that um It was propagating a kind of intersectional politics that revolved around Jewish identity, but was also universalist and interested in connecting with other minority groups.

And again, like I said, just was really, really important in the Russian revolution and the Russian sort of radical imagination.

In terms of why it has eluded attention, I think it has eluded attention both for academics and for the general public.

So I think for academics, there's a pretty sharp divide, actually, in the concerns of academic Jewish history, Jewish studies, and Russian or Slavic or East European studies.

So those two topics are not really viewed equally.

in tandem very often, and we tend to ask our own questions.

So it tends to be the Russianists who are interested in the questions of revolution and revolutionary parties, and they tend not to read Yiddish, so they just don't look at the Bund, aren't interested in the Bund, and don't access it.

There's also, I think, very obvious political reasons why the Bund has eluded interest.

So this is discussed in detail in the two books I reviewed, but that the Bund and sort of anti-Zionist Jewish radicalism.

is not a force that has been hailed in sort of mainstream Jewish life, Jewish history, and to some extent has actually been actively repressed in the memory of how people write 20th century and 19th century history.

So I think it's the conjunction of just discovering this totally fascinating party that's dealing with really contemporary issues.

And then this political question of why it's been overlooked in the context of growing disenchantment with Israel, campaigns against Gaza, so on and so forth, and Jews in America, but also around the world looking for new ways of being Jewish again.

connecting to their Jewish identity and connecting to the Jewish past.

And I think that this explains why this topic that's been sort of silenced, forgotten for so long, is now coming into the mainstream in full force.