The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance

The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance by Sharon Rudahl, writer, Paul Buhle, editor, and Michael Kluckner, artist (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2023)

The nineteenth century ended with the founding of two distinct Jewish movements, Zionism and Bundism.  With European anti-Semitism rampant in the shadow of France’s Dreyfus Affair and pogroms in czarist Russia, Jewish intellectuals and workers sought to save their lives and culture.  Viennese lawyer Theodore Herzl counseled escape from bigotry and violence.  He urged Jews to abandon Europe and create a Jewish state in in the Biblical homeland of Palestine.  In the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement others opted to stay and foster the development of an international socialist society where Jews would reside peacefully alongside Christians and retain their culture. Their movement, The General Jewish Labor Bund of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, or “Bund,” would survive into the mid-twentieth century despite decimation by Nazism and Stalinism.  In The Bund:  A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance, Sharon Rudahl, Paul Buhle and Michael Kluckner describe its vision and struggles in words and pictures.

Founded in 1896 at Vilna, Lithuania, within the Russian Empire, the Bund was born amidst widespread persecution.  Nevertheless, its adherents “would not abandon their mother tongue,” and according to Polish Jewish writer Isaac l. Peretz, believed that “Zionism cannot be the solution for the whole Jewish people.”  Yet what followed was continued hardship aggravated by Russia’s defeat in a war with Japan in 1904-05, a failed Russian revolution in 1905, and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, accompanied by an exodus of Jews, mainly to the United States.

Though the Bund had organized a socialist political party before the Revolution, the advent of the Soviet Union and rise of fascism afterward ended that effort and brought increased anti-Semitism.  The results were disastrous, as exemplified by the Holocaust and the razing in 1943 of the Vilna Ghetto.  In its primary, graphic section, the book emphasizes these elements, forsaking more than brief reference to Zionism.  For example, there is no discussion of the founding of the State of Israel, and no attempt to provide a comprehensive history of the Bund movement, or describe its labor activism.  The book concludes with “Portraits of Influential Bundists,” such as Moishe (Michael) Lewis, Baruch Charney Vladeck, and Pesach (Paul) Novick, and an “Afterword” by Paul Buhle, which is a discussion of Bundist promotion of Yiddishkeit that included the formation of the cultural center, the Workmen’s Circle (now Workers’ Circle).  For readers interested in additional information, there is a brief bibliography.

As this book’s subtitle, A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance, suggests, it was not intended to be comprehensive. There has been significant growth in the various categories of “graphic” works, and they can be of use to different age groups.  This book should be viewed at face value and regarded as an introduction to a movement that is today often overlooked.  Accordingly, it does whet one’s appetite for additional elaboration, and does serve as a reminder of a significant Jewish attempt at cultural preservation and response to oppression.

Reviewed by Robert D. Parmet, York College of The City University of New York