The General Jewish Labour Bund was established in Vilna in 1897 as a secular, socialist, Jewish party dedicated to fighting for a better world and against anti-Semitism. We seek to re-establish the Bund today for the same reasons and with the same guiding principle: doikayt, and the same rejection of ethnonationalism in favor of working toward a fairer world on a local level.
The Bund's philosophy is centered on the Yiddish term doikayt (דאָיקײט), which translates to "hereness" in English.
In contrast to the Zionist vision of withrawing to an enclave and becoming not only a single nation, but a nation-state, Bundism understands the Jewish experience as inseparable from the Diaspora, and works to better conditions for all—wherever we live in the world. Zionism and Bundism were both founded in the same year, and the predictions of Bundists who opposed Zionism have come to pass in the intervening century-and-a-quarter.
The Bund's idea of doikayt is our understanding of how Jews have flourished in the Diaspora. We say:
Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same thing, and they are not substitutable for each other. We are anti-Zionist Jews because we maintain the original, internal, steadfast, Jewish opposition to the precepts of Zionism, and to the actions of the resulting ethnocentric state.
Zionism is a political movement which, exactly like the Bund, formally began in 1897 in Europe. Originally a movement within the larger Jewish world, the Zionist dream sprung into a durable reality after cementing an alliance with the British Empire, at the expense of the local Palestinian population. But Zionism is neither identical with Judaism nor with Jewishness; as a people we have spent more time outside of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel than we did in those formative years before the Common Era.
You may accuse both movements of being utopian. But Bundists recognized that the Zionist idea of utopia was dystopian, with its demand that land and homes be taken by force from our cousins who had been living there, continuously, since before the Kingdom of David. Rather than being a safe haven, Israel became a perpetual war zone, with compulsory tours of duty and mandatory shell shock. The ascent to nation-statehood took on responsibility for the descent into an ethnic cleansing, which we justified by pointing to the Holocaust—as if our suffering entitled us to pay it forward.
Ethnic supremacy, whether German, Palestinian, or Israeli, is an unacceptable response to the horrors of World War II, then as now. As Rabbi Hillel said, do not unto others what is hateful to you. Jewish activism for civil rights in the diaspora has always been connected to working with other minority groups toward full recognition of our common human rights. In Israel such alliances are taboo; even interreligious marriage is forbidden by Israeli civil law.
There is talk in Israel of a "demographic bomb," of the unsustainability of occupation, of an ultimate choice which faces Zionism: ethnic supremacy or democracy? There can only be one moral choice, and we stand against any who would choose bigotry over lasting justice as a means of establishing peace. We ask the same question of every government on earth, everywhere we live.
As the living survivors of the Holocaust dwindle, as revisionism and anti-Semitism rise, we cannot rely on mainstream Jewish institutions' moral authority to protect the Jews of the Disapora as partners of a Jewish supremacist Israeli state. A generation is rising who recognize Israel as oppressor and the Palestinian people as the victims of Zionism's bloody utopian vision. Today's Jewish institutions have nothing to offer a Jew of conscience—who hears the echo of our ancestors' cries as the ghetto walls collapsed onto them—when they see the devastation of Gaza brought about by our own family members in the IDF. No amount of messaging or public relations theory can erase a foundational injustice.
Never again means to anyone else, not only to Jews, and we bear a special responsibility to prevent this type of devastation.
We cannot build anything solely out of negation. That is why the Jews of the 21st century need the Bund. We are faced with existential crises as a globe, and the world must take them on together, and face them joyously, with a positive vision of a common, shared prosperity. We fight for our lives by building lives worth fighting for, by building families and creating art and pursuing justice—both civil and economic.
Fortunately, there is a rich Jewish history in every corner of the globe wherever we find our home. Our history tells us that the only way we have persevered as a people is by facing these threats together, as a community that shared its wealth and cared for the poor and the sick out of duty and without thought of recompense.
Jews have voted with their feet: more of us live outside of Israel than inside. We practice doikayt every day. Let us face the challenges of the world with diversity as our strength and justice and dignity as our highest pursuit.
We believe the future belongs to a 21st-century socialism, not a 19th-century nationalism. We cannot convince swords to become ploughshares; they must be beaten by our own hands. Peace is harder than war, and a sustainable, just peace is only winnable through our collective labor.