The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History

Introduction

1 Introduction In 1966, Noyekh Cukerman, Bund leader in Montevideo, penned a letter to his counterparts in Melbourne. Expressing his regard for his comrades across the Pacific, Cukerman noted he was impressed with reports of the Melbourne Bund’s youth movements. “It goes without saying,” he wrote, “that we are very jealous of our dear comrades in Melbourne. It is also not superfluous to say that we have a lot to learn from you.” The Melbourne Bund, he wrote, was “the only one that [was] reminiscent of the pre-war Polish Bund.”1 This correspondence raises some interesting issues surrounding the development of the Bund in the postwar period. For one, the letter was sent to Australia from Uruguay. It bypassed the major centers of Jewish life in North America, Europe, and Israel. It was an exchange between two communities in the global South. Most important, perhaps, it was penned more than two decades after the Jews’ liberation from the Nazi death camps of Europe, attesting to the Bund’s survival in some form after the Holocaust despite losing a majority of its members in the death camps and ghettos. Whereas previously it had been bound to the soil of Eastern Europe, from 1945 onward what remained of the Bund stretched across five continents. Many questions arise as to what the goals of the Bund were after the Holocaust. Was its aim to resemble the Polish Bund, as Cukerman claimed the Melbourne chapter did? Or was it simply to cope as best its members could with the radical upheaval that followed the war? Given that a Jewish state had been established and Zionism had seemingly prevailed in the Jewish world, rebuilding the Bund may seem to the contemporary reader to have been a strange task. Readers may also wonder why, in 1966, the Bund in Melbourne, a city with only thirty thousand Jews, was more reminiscent of the Polish Bund than were its sibling organizations in the much larger Jewish 2 T HE INT ER NAT IONA L JE W ISH L A BOR BUND communities of New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, or Buenos Aires. The development of the Bund in these locations can tell us much about the communities in which it operated and, indeed, about the surrounding societies. Author Abraham Brumberg may or may not have been right when he wrote in 1999 that the Bund groups in these locations “remained, fundamentally, émigré organizations,” unable to come to terms with their new circumstances. Even so, their attempts to reorganize still teach something about postwar Jewish life. Much more scholarly work needs to be undertaken to begin answering these questions; this study is only a beginning. These are some of the issues that this book addresses. It examines the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish Labor Bund and brings into focus the Bund’s reorganization as a transnational movement. It argues that by examining the history of the Bund during this period, contemporary scholars can gain deeper insight into the development of Jewish communities and into the national settings in which Bundists settled. The postwar Bund, comprising local organizations in over a dozen countries, was tiny, with only a few thousand members, yet in many places its output was measurably significant. The six decades after Europe’s liberation saw the publication of long-lasting Bundist journals and newspapers in Melbourne, New York, Paris, Mexico City, Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires. These organizations were represented on local Jewish communal umbrella bodies, and Bundists were active in cultural institutions, welfare bodies, and mutual aid societies . Bundists also collaborated closely with the local socialist movement, in most locations. Bundist calendars were crowded with lectures, meetings , discussions, cultural undertakings, fundraisers, commemorations, and anniversary celebrations. Bund organizations in a few locations tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to foster youth movements. In terms of numbers, the postwar Bund never rose to great heights: at most, it numbered several thousand members, compared to its predecessor in Poland, which claimed around nine thousand members as well as thousands more involved in the party’s auxiliary organizations. Exploring the layers that made up the Bund after 1945, this study looks at the organization’s ideological development; taking place largely in the upper echelons of the movement, this development can be viewed in the context of membership, size, and influence, and in the sphere of Jewish political thought. The work also examines the Bund’s ability—or rather, its inability—to attract members and supporters. Finally, it considers...