Rooted in the old dichotomy between socialist Yiddishists and Hebrew-speaking Zionists, left Yiddish culture has offered an alternative scene for those seeking to be Jewish outside both Zionist contexts and the buttoned-down Jewish establishment.
It’s urban, rugged, and abrasive, with a raw authenticity that appeals to its admirers. To its detractors, though, it signals a defeatist impulse—a preference for life on the fringes rather than for engagement with the broader non-Jewish world.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, by Molly Crabapple, has brought this back into the limelight.
The American bestseller is meant to reignite the fire of a clearly Jewish style of politics that stood for socialism and opposed Zionist nationalism, one that embraced the idea that the Jewish home was anywhere, from New York City to Berlin.
Crabapple has been touring widely and speaking to all sorts of media, for months now. Her book even got a good review in The New York Times, a newspaper historically aligned with Israel.
However, not everyone is happy. Here Where We Live Is Our Country arrives at a time when the Zionist monopoly on Jewish politics has been weakening.
As I’ve written before, the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor, with the support of the city’s Jewish vote, has been a wake-up call for the community establishment.
Antizionist protest groups and leftist organisations in the United States, such as Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, have been ignored by the bulk of Jewish political machinery for a long time. But that’s changing.
At the reactionary Jewish magazine Tablet, Debbie Lechtman makes her antipathy clear in a piece called “Why Worshipping the Bund Is Bullshit.”
Lechtman’s frustration with Bund nostalgia is common on the Jewish right. Conservatives attack figures like Crabapple, arguing that Zionists were right to believe Jews had no future in Europe and that Bundists were deluded in thinking they could persevere.
The Nazi genocide and Stalinism are their vindication, inspiring a profound pessimism about the possibility of tolerance and survival in the Diaspora. It’s not hard to imagine the right-wing reproach. It goes something like this:
Oh, you pine for the old days? You wish things had gone differently? Yeah, so did I, pal. But instead of imagining a different past I made a better future. We rolled up our sleeves, learned to shoot, kicked a lot of ass and built a state with a feared military. Enjoy your book club, comrade.
The latter point cuts close. We’re living in a time of rising fascism in all corners of the globe. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia and anti-Blackness all seem to be creeping back into mainstream politics.
The Bund’s history is instructive. However, particularly under Trump, one can’t help but feel a sense of urgency to change the here and now very quickly, before we all find ourselves sent to the gas chambers again.
Along with her colleague Peter Beinart, Jewish Currents Editor-at-Large Arielle Angel urges the creation of new Jewish institutions:
At present, we often find ourselves cobbling together responses from the desiccated Judaism we’ve fled and the broader anti-colonial movement we’ve joined, both of them useful, but insufficient in articulating a distinctively Jewish, left politic. The ability to synthesize these streams and others into something that feels rooted and right will derive from an investment in the content of radical Jewish life. In a reality where Zionists hoard the claim on authenticity, it is an uphill battle for recognition. Which means that to credibly wield political power as Jews, we will need the confidence to assert that what we are doing now is, in fact, Judaism.
Some left Jewish groups are forming a coalition that would rival the Jewish establishment. Middle East Monitor reported in May:
A new coalition of Jewish organisations has launched under the banner of the Jewish Diaspora Movement (JDM), seeking to advance a vision of Jewish life rooted outside the framework of Israeli state power and in explicit rejection of ethno-nationalism.
The movement, launched on 18 May, brings together dozens of synagogues, prayer communities, cultural organisations and activist groups, mostly in North America, including Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbis for Ceasefire, IfNotNow, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the American Council for Judaism. Its official website says the coalition now includes 46 member organisations in its “founding minyan”.
This is a great start. However, Angel’s call to articulate “a distinctively Jewish, left politic” doesn’t necessarily need to be new or focus specifically on Jewish institutions.
Jews of all stripes can and do take part in movements for economic and racial justice, bringing their identity into those groups, as other people do.
The Jewish leftist often fights within their communities. They’re queer, disabled, immigrants, trade unionists and tenants.
Haters like Lechtman want to create a false choice, claiming that the end of the Bund means a Jew’s politics is either Jewish or leftist, and that it can’t be both.
It’s a defeatist argument rooted in the insecurity that the pro-Israel hold on Jewish politics is shakier than ever.
Let’s not overdo it, though. Zionism remains extraordinarily powerful ideologically. It just faces more Jewish competition than it used to.
Diaspora antinationalism is indeed growing.
That’s the most important thing to remember. This is why books like Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country are so successful.
In the meantime, it’s important to enjoy the controversy and to reflect on what it says about Jewish politics today. We’re dissatisfied with the status quo and want something new.
This moment is long overdue and couldn’t have come any sooner. You don’t need to speak Yiddish to understand that. But it helps to remember what it was once synonymous with.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
