Converging Alternatives: The Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement, 1897–1985 (review)

As a prolific and esteemed scholar of Jewish politics in general and Labor Zionism in particular, Yosef Gorny is one of only a select number of historians capable of writing a comparative study of two of the most significant Jewish political forces of the modern era—the Zionist Labor Movement and the Bund. Drawing upon an impressive mastery of archival material, protocols and reports, manifestos, journals, and newspapers published in pre-State Palestine, Israel, the Russian Empire, the Republic of Poland, and elsewhere in the Diaspora, his work focuses on the concept of Klal Yisrael in both movements. Gorny’s book offers a fascinating glimpse into a world of passionate commitment, fierce polemic, and utopian ideology, but as we shall see, it is hampered by several serious shortcomings.

The author is primarily interested in how the Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement grappled with notions of national unity, embodied in the phrase Klal Yisrael. He traces the subtle, at times opaque, ideological ebb and flow of each movement over the course of almost a century, and demonstrates how their most important political and intellectual leaders struggled to reconcile competing and at times contradictory ideologies in order to maintain their respective movement’s relevance in the face of changing conditions and radically new realities. Both the Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement were forced to confront tensions between the elitist politics they practiced and the mass politics they preached, and between the universalist aspirations of Socialism and the particular national fate of the Jewish people. While not doing justice to his detailed description of the diverse and complex principles that guided each movement and of how those principles changed over time, it is fair to say that at the center of Gorny’s narrative is a depiction of a halting, erratic, but nonetheless discernible shift away from the narrow constituencies and particular ideological obsessions of each movement toward a commitment to the greater good of Klal Yisrael. He argues that the Bund moved (very gradually and begrudgingly) from a class-based notion of “proletarian Klal” to the national unity of Klal Yisrael, while the Zionist Labor Movement moved (more hastily and less begrudgingly) from “halutsic Klal” to a broader Zionist Klal, and then finally to a commitment to Klal Yisrael. In the author’s view, the Bund was prevented from devoting itself to the needs of “the Jewish people at large” because it viewed “class differentiation and struggle as the last word in all affairs” (p. 2). In comparison, the Zionist Labor Movement had to overcome its embrace of “negation of Diaspora,” that is, its exclusive allegiance to a small pioneering elite in the Land of Israel, before it could successfully direct its energies toward Klal Yisrael and eventually, win majority support among “the Jewish people at large.”

Gorny’s book is evenly divided into four chapters on the Bund and four on Labor Zionism. The equal allocation of chapters and time divisions should not be confused for equal treatment, however; Gorny’s own predilections lean decisively toward the Labor Zionism, evident in the analytic framework which he has constructed for his comparative study. Gorny begins from the premise that commitment to Klal Yisrael is positive while commitment to a particular class of Jewish workers and their interests is negative, stigmatized by Gorny as “sectarian” and “isolationist” (similarly, forging class-based alliances with non-Jewish socialist parties is naive or illusory); pragmatism is positive while utopianism is negative, repeatedly vilified as “dogmatic,” “blind,” “fanatic,” and “inflexible.” These dichotomies form the lens through which the author views his subject, and it is clear from the outset which side will emerge less favorably from his comparative study. Rather than judge the thoughts and actions of Bundists on their own terms, he has weighted the scales against them by imposing his own values of pragmatism and “klalist” unity on the story he tells, and by forcing...