Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

Notes

105 Notes Introduction 1. The Bund has received a fair amount of attention from the scholarly world. There have been any number of studies devoted to the Bund’s development in Russia and a somewhat more modest number of academic works focused on the Bund in interwar Poland. Particularly notable academic books dealing with the Bund in the Czarist Empire include Ezra Mendelsohn , Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970); Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1972); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); Moshe Mishkinsky, Reshit tenuat ha-poalim ha-yehudit be-rusyah: megamot yesod (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibutz Ha-meuchad, 1981); Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Joshua D. Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality : The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914 (Madison, Wis.: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004), and Claudie Weill, Les cosmopolites: Socialisme et judéité en Russie (1897–1917) (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2004). Books that discuss the Bund in the era of the Bolshevik Revolution include Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972) and Arye Gelbard, Der jüdische Arbeiter-Bund Russlands im Revolutionsjahr 1917, Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Materialen zur Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 26 (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1982). Books focusing on the Bund in interwar Poland include Bernard K. Johnpoll , The Politics of Futility: The General Jewish Workers Bund of Poland, 1917–1943 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967); Zvi Barzilai, Tenuat ha-bund be-polin ben shete milhamot ha-olam (Jerusalem: Carmel, 1994); and Gertrud Pickhan, “Gegen den Strom”: Der Allgemeine Jüdische Arbeiterbund “Bund” in Polen 1918–1939, Schriften des Simon-Dubnow Instituts Leipzig, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001). Two edited volumes—Jack Jacobs, ed., Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (New York: New York Univ. Press, in 106 | Notes to Pages 1–2 association with the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, 2001), and Zvi Gitelman, ed., The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2003)—contain chapters on both the Russian and the Polish periods of the Bund’s history, as do Henri Minczeles ’s Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire juif (Paris: Denol, 1999) and Yosef Gorny’s Converging Alternatives: The Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement, 1897–1985 (Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York [SUNY] Press, 2006). 2. Pickhan, “Gegen den Strom,” 206. 3. See, for example, Antony Polonsky, “The Bund in Polish Political Life, 1935–1939,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Peter Halban, 1988), 571–72; and Antony Polonsky, “The New Jewish Politics and its Discontents,” in Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, ed. Gitelman, 36–37. 4. In the elections of 1919, in which Bundist candidates won precisely 16,366 votes in Congress Poland, candidates of the Temporary Jewish National Council (which was dominated by General Zionists) received around 180,000 votes, candidates running on an Orthodox list won 97,000 votes, Folkist candidates received 59,000, and those of the Poalei Zion, 27,000 (Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981], 108–9). Though schisms within the Folkist and Poalei Zion parties eventually sapped their electoral strength, both the General Zionist movement and Agudes Yisroel (representing an Orthodox constituency) won seats in other specific Sejm elections as well. See M. Balberyszki, “Volkism and the Volksparty,” in Struggle for Tomorrow: Modern Political Ideologies of the Jewish People, ed. Basil J. Vlavianos and Feliks Gross (New York: Arts, Inc., 1954), 241–42; Mark W. Kiel, “The Ideology of the Folks-Partey,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 5, no. 2 (1975): 76; Isaac Lewin, The Jewish Community in Poland: Historical Essays (New York: Philosophical Library, 1985), 200–214; Gershon C. Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn , Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk (Hanover, N.H...