The Jewish Workers' Bund

The Bund was the first modern Jewish political party in Eastern Europe, and, arguably, the strongest Jewish party in Poland on the eve of World War Two. One hundred and twenty years after it was established, the Bund continues to be of abiding interest. In this course we will examine the Bund’s history and the development of its program. We are likely to focus particular attention on the process by which the Bund came to endorse national cultural autonomy for Russian Jewry, on its activities during the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, on the significance of the constellation of organizations which surrounded the Bund in interwar Poland (including the Bundist youth movement, women’s movement, and movement for physical education), on the fates of Bundists in the era of the Third Reich, and on the Bund’s approaches to Israel and other important matters in the post-Holocaust  era. We will, in other words, discuss the reasons which underlie both the Bund’s rise and its decline, and will also debate the extent to which the Bund’s attitudes towards socialism, Zionism, and secular Yiddish culture do (or do not) have contemporary resonance.​

Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2015), and is the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001). He recently completed editing Jews and Leftist Politics, which was published by Cambridge University Press earlier this year.  Professor Jacobs was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996-1997, a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009, and was the Louis and Helen Padnos Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan during the Fall 2016 semester. He was YIVO’s 2017 Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History.

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