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13 1 A New World Order The Bund’s Postwar Transformation The first world conference of the International Jewish Labor Bund in Brussels in May 1947 and the subsequent establishment of the World Coordinating Committee of Bund Organizations marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Bund. The conference—the first of eight over the ensuing forty-five years—oversaw the formal establishment of Bund organizations in more than a dozen countries around the world, including the United States, Australia, Israel, France, Belgium, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and South Africa. By this stage, Bundists had become all too aware that not only had their prewar Jewish society been devastated, but also their social, political, and cultural milieu had been forever altered. It was not solely that Jewish Poland no longer existed as they had known it, but also that the ideals around which they had built their lives and the movement that for so many was like a family, now lay in tatters. Scattered around all parts of the globe, Bundists tried to comprehend the magnitude of their loss and to find a new way forward. They could not rely on formulae from the past. The postwar reality was too different. With the tiny remaining Jewish population in Poland rapidly dwindling due to mass emigration and ongoing antisemitism, Bundists needed to adapt to new homes, which, in most cases, required a radical social, cultural, and political readjustment. After the Holocaust, the Bund’s leadership, primarily based in New York, established new structures in an attempt to stave off the organization ’s demise. Debates surrounding the decision to reorganize, debates that unfolded among the party’s leading intellectuals between 1945 and 1947, culminated in the first world conference, in 1947; these debates highlight the panic and anxiety that plagued the Bundists in the postwar period as they sought to justify their ongoing existence and appeal to a broader base of 14 T HE INT ER NAT IONA L JE W ISH L A BOR BUND Jews around the world. The Bund’s leaders implemented structures to try to maximize the scarce resources at the Bund’s disposal, and the Bund’s newly formed World Coordinating Committee worked closely with local Bundist communities around the world; most significant was the committee’s role in producing and distributing journals and newspapers, and in sending emissaries to raise money and bolster local organizations. A crucial issue, examined in this chapter, is how the movement’s leadership dealt with the new circumstances as it sought a synthesis between its prewar ideology and postwar reality. These discussions within the movement were a somewhat tragic aside to the broader, parallel debates in the Jewish world over the prospect of Jewish statehood. While the Zionist movement was gaining traction in the wake of the Holocaust, the Bund was deciding how best to simply survive as a movement. The debates within the Bund in these immediate postwar years reveal a great deal of uncertainty and torment about prospects for continuity; this concern would become a theme in the subsequent five decades in Bund communities everywhere as Bundists tried to navigate their way. Toward a World Bund? Although the Bund had largely been a one-country party through the first half of the twentieth century, Bundists had lived outside of that nation’s major centers (the Russian Empire and then, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, independent Poland) virtually from the establishment of the organization , in Vilna in 1897. 1 The spread of Bundists around the world was a reality in Jewish life before the Holocaust. During the Russian period of the Bund’s existence (1897–1917), there were two major tendencies in Bundist proliferation outside the Russian empire. The first was as a network of Bundist support groups scattered around such Western European cities as Bern, Berlin, Paris and London, support groups dedicated to assisting the Bund in Russia proper; these groups included both students and workers. Although there were proposals to turn such groups into formal party organizations, it was broadly understood that real party activity could only take place within Russia , among the Jewish masses, and that those Bundists outside Russia were to be considered outside the party structure.2 With the closing of the American borders, and the subsequent acceleration of Eastern European Jewish migration to France, Paris became a more important center of Bundist activity.3 From 1933 until 1940, the Bund’s extensive archives were housed in Paris.4...

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