Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I NEW DYNAMICS?
- PART II REVOLUTION AND WAR (1905–1921)
- PART III IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT AND CONTINUITY
- PART IV OVERSEAS
- 8 The “Yizkor” Book of 1911: A Note on National Myths in the Second Aliya
- 9 The Bundists in America and the “Zionist Problem”
- PART V HISTORY AND THE HISTORIANS
- Index
9 - The Bundists in America and the “Zionist Problem”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I NEW DYNAMICS?
- PART II REVOLUTION AND WAR (1905–1921)
- PART III IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT AND CONTINUITY
- PART IV OVERSEAS
- 8 The “Yizkor” Book of 1911: A Note on National Myths in the Second Aliya
- 9 The Bundists in America and the “Zionist Problem”
- PART V HISTORY AND THE HISTORIANS
- Index
Summary
Within a few years of its foundation in 1897, the Bund emerged, if only for a brief moment, as the most prominent political force in the Russian Jewish world. It took the lead and set the tone during the revolutionary year of 1905. With tens of thousands of members, the Bund served as a model which other Jewish parties of the Left (autonomist, Zionist, territorialist) sought, with varying degrees of success, to imitate. In 1917, the Bund was cut off from much of its constituency by the German conquest of Poland and Lithuania. Nonetheless, it again played a significant role in both the stormy politics of Russia at large and in internal Jewish affairs. Most specifically, it took the lead in the attempt to call together a democratically elected Jewish national assembly. Bundists – Mark Lieber (the “defensist”) and Rafael Abramovich (the “internationalist”), for example – were among the most influential figures in the Petrograd Soviet between February and October 1917. Outlawed in Communist Russia in 1921, the Bund was able, despite profound inner conflicts, to reconstitute itself in independent Poland and in 1936–1939 once again, as in 1905, won for itself a leading, even dominant, position in the arena of Jewish party politics.
It may seem surprising that a party that prided itself on its allegiance to orthodox Marxism and the doctrine of class war was able (if only periodically) to gain such support from a people still largely traditionalist in its way of life and habits of thought.
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- Information
- Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews , pp. 216 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008