Between The Lines
Many of today’s progressive activists, especially those who are young and Jewish, are struggling to find an identity and a solid footing in the recent history of American social protest. Torn between their righteous anger at Israel’s genocidal policies and actions in Gaza and the West Bank and their often strong familial ties to Israel, they sometimes feel deeply conflicted even as they march in legitimate solidarity with their Palestinian friends and cohorts in schools, universities, workplaces, and elsewhere.
I’ve seen these conflicts frequently in conversations with my UCLA students, many of whom are Jewish. I’m impressed with these students’ energy, zeal, and commitment to social justice, while always reminding them of the inexcusable Hamas attack on October 7. I do my best to impress on them that their criticism of Israeli aggression and apartheid is far from synonymous with antisemitism.
Having these discussions requires a certain level of historical knowledge and consciousness. That is all too often a missing ingredient among my students who are protesting and, from my observations, among students in other protests throughout the country.
The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance
Text by Sharon Rudahl, art by Michael Kluckner, edited by Paul Buhle
Between The Lines, 144 pages
Release date: September 2023
I’ve always thought that history is the bedrock of effective resistance. American social protest has long had a powerful Jewish presence, particularly in labor, civil rights, gender equality, LGBTQ+ struggles, environmentalism, and just about every other progressive cause since the inception of this nation. It’s no secret that Jews have played an outsized role in the American left. Yet, in my experience, young people in particular scarcely know and appreciate that long legacy of struggle and activism. Much of this reflects the deep inadequacies of U.S. education from elementary school through much of graduate school, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
For many decades, Paul Buhle and his talented associates have sought to remedy this problem through a series of engaging graphic novels that recapture a radical past in a highly readable form that appeals to multiple audiences. The latest, The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labor History, includes a strong narrative written by his longtime collaborator and graphic artist and illustrator Sharon Rudahl, with engaging artwork by veteran Canadian artist Michael Kluckner, and an afterword by Buhle himself.
The book recaptures a largely hidden history of political resistance, the story of Jewish resistance against various forms of oppression and tyranny in the Pale of Settlement region of Czarist Russia, where Jews were largely confined and had to be authorized to live and work. The Jewish population was prohibited from living beyond those borders and regularly suffered murderous attacks by Cossacks. This is personal; my own maternal grandparents, who came to the United States in the wave of Russian and Eastern European Jewish emigration in the early twentieth century, recalled vividly the pogroms under Czarist rule. Their stories left an indelible impression that has helped throughout my life to fuel my own activism.
Buhle’s work highlights the beginning of the Bund—which means a federation or union in Yiddish—in Vilna, Lithuania, then a part of the greater Russian Empire that included Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. These were the pioneers, the creative troublemakers, the men and women who sought to unite all Jewish workers into a democratic socialist society. They united with other social democratic groups and movements in the region and they committed themselves to the Yiddish language. They organized literacy campaigns, distributed Marxist and socialist literature in Yiddish, and established a small underground press, among other radical efforts.
As Buhle reveals, they faced fierce resistance from the authorities. Members regularly wound up in prison and saw their publications banned and their presses destroyed. Illustrations of key Bund leaders grace the early pages of The Bund, providing a powerful visual introduction to the predecessors of so much Jewish and non-Jewish social radicalism in the United States and elsewhere.
The early Bundists included middle class intellectuals and working class activists. They promoted literacy and the study of Marxism. Politically, they split between moderate social democrats and more revolutionary Bolsheviks headed by V.I. Lenin.
One of the most enduring features of early Bund activity was its promotion of a vibrant culture, including Yiddish literature, performance, and poetry. This has remained a powerful legacy and is preserved admirably in the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and in the Workers Circle educational nonprofit.
The book also chronicles the Bundists’ response to increasing Zionism and the Jewish diaspora in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immigration to the United States advanced Yiddish culture, especially in theatrical and early film presentations, particularly in New York. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe and in Russia, the Bund attracted thousands of members, but violence increased and its members organized self-defense units to resist. The pogroms intensified, forcing millions like my grandparents to flee to the United States on the infamous ships where they suffered in the lowest decks under insufferable conditions.
Knowledge of The Bund enables people to link their own activities to a proud heritage of struggle and helps situate them in a tradition of uncompromising dissent.
The 1905 Revolution in Russia promised freedom and liberation for Bundists, but it was short-lived. Like the Weimar Republic in Germany, it soon collapsed. Bundist support of the defeated Mensheviks following Lenin’s 1917 Bolshevik triumph marked the end of the Bund as a political party in the new Soviet Union.
Throughout Eastern Europe, however, Bund members resisted growing antisemitism and the specter of Nazism in Germany. Bund cultural, social, and political activities proliferated until Germany overran the nations of the region. The Bund was one of the key resistance organizations, including during the efforts to save lives in the Warsaw Ghetto by smuggling food and medicine. Not many Jews managed to escape, but among them were a few remaining Bund fighters. Throughout the occupied regions, Nazis exterminated millions of people, including Jews, Romani, Slavs, political dissidents, gay people, and many others. Bund members were part of the grisly Holocaust statistics.
The Bund influenced cultural and political life on many continents, especially by those who managed to escape Nazi persecution and extermination. Near the end of the book, Sharon Rudahl provides some outstanding capsule portraits and accounts of some prominent influential Bundists in Canada and the United States. Paul Buhle’s afterword places everything into an especially useful perspective––one with particular relevance to the tumultuous world we confront at the start of 2024.
As Buhle observes, “[t]he Bund exists in a particular framework of history and also outside that history.” Members of the Bund in the United States have been deeply involved in the “Arbeter Ring” (formerly the Workmen’s Circle, now the Workers Circle) since its inception. A fraternal, social welfare, political, and cultural organization, it has always been deeply devoted to social justice activities with a strong socialist and Yiddish flavor.
A knowledge of radical history helps sustain people in realizing a fuller sense of selfhood as lifetime fighters for justice, a vision that necessarily transcends any particular struggle or cause. Knowledge of The Bund, like knowledge of many other radical predecessors, enables people to link their own activities to a proud heritage of struggle and helps situate them in a tradition of uncompromising dissent.
Paul Buhle and his creative artistic and literary collaborators have presented The Bund to augment so many of his other comic efforts that highlight American radical political and cultural history. Among many others are works on the Wobblies, the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), the Beats, Yiddishkeit, among others, and on such extraordinary radical individuals including Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene V. Debs, C. L. R. James, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Robeson, and others. These efforts are remarkably readable and accessible to audiences of all ages, perhaps especially to younger audiences attuned to social media and other forms of swift media imagery. There no doubt will be more to come.
William Faulkner was right when he wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”