Fuzzytheduck

Back when I had a Tiktok I made a video cautioning people against straying too close to cultural appropriation with their "biblically accurate angel OCs" and got inundated with inanity and ignorance. A good half the comments I got were from people saying they had no idea that כרובים/cherubim, אופנים/ophanim, and שרפים/seraphim were even Jewish in origin. A further quarter insisted that since Judaism didn't originate the concept of angels, we couldn't lay claim to these depictions of angels that originated in Jewish texts written by Jews for their fellow Jews. (A few of the comments told me to just kill myself, but those you'll find anywhere and are therefore unrelated). I realized what I had stumbled into was a group of people (largely teenagers) who assumed that Judaism was ancient, dead, and therefore public domain, and not an extant culture practiced by people who, yes, still read those silly old books with their commandments and esoterica. These people had taken offense at my condemnation, because by being an inconveniently-alive Jew I was spoiling their fun by telling them that what they considered harmless and against no one was actually the opposite

(not a bundist and tagging @penrosesun, an actual bundist, for this reason)

As I understand it, the Bund's central ideological argument related to Zionism was that it didn't make sense to fuck over the safety of a vast majority of Jews (as they believed Zionism did; at the very least, they thought it wasn't the best approach) for a small minority.

For instance, here:

To be clear, I think this is wrong. Israel provides an assurance of safety. You don't want to use the fire extinguisher often, but it's important to have when you need it.

But more importantly for this, that's not true anymore. almost half of all jews live in Medinat Yisrael. Any position on the wellbeing of overall world Jewry must take into account the wellbeing of Jews in Medinat Yisrael as a somewhat primary factor.

indeed, in 1958, the bund said this (#3 was essentially a call for peace and resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict)

Indeed, as David S Slucki writes in The International Jewish Labor Bund After 1945: Toward a Global History,

and in fact that

This did not, of course, mean that it was Zionist per se, however it does indicate a lessening antipathy towards Israel.

And there are fascinating questions to be asked, about how Bundism, with its concern for global Jewish well being, should operate today, given that almost half of Jews live in Israel, and how that should function. About the role of labor organizing, another key tenet of the Bund, now that many Jews are no longer working-class, and how that reflects things.

In fact, the Melbourne Bund -- the only uninterrupted Bundist organization in the world -- is much more nuanced than Crabapple et al would have you believe.

A minor note in that the first statement is more ambiguous about Israel's right to defend itself. It's certainly the most likely reading of a statement like "We call on Israel to make maximal efforts to avoid civilian casualties whilst acknowledging the absolute imperative of freeing the captives and defending from acts of terror." (emphasis mine), but "affirmed Israel's right to defend itself" is a lot stronger terms than the Bund used.

The only thing I want to add is a bit of additional nuance to the concept that historical Zionism was “fucking over the safety of a vast majority of Jews for a small minority”, and that’s that this is a little bit conflating two distinct concerns, and coming out with a third concern, which was certainly present, but not at all the focus:

Concern #1 is that Israel could not be the ultimate solution to the problem of eg. Polish pogroms. This is entirely true and born out by history. People tend to point to Israel’s role in accepting refugees as evidence that Israel is a solution to global antisemitism, and indeed, specific incidents such as Operation Moses make a compelling case… But note that not everyone made it out of Ethiopia… or Yemen, or Egypt, or the USSR, for that matter… and it’s rank historical revisionism to claim that if Israel had existed before the Holocaust, everyone would have made it out of Germany or Poland or Lithuania. Even if Israel has a guaranteed open door for Jewish refugees, Jewish safety will always be to some degree reliant on the counties where Jews actually live, because in order to even be able to leave, you need either some rights (such as freedom of movement), or enough resources to get out anyway. A maximalist policeman-of-the-world Israel that was willing to militarily occupy any country that made noises towards disenfranchisement until every last Jew had been safely evacuated could maybe guarantee Jewish safety – but if, chas v’shalom, the United States were to turn aggressively fascist and start revoking Jewish passports and sending Jews to camps, would Israel really be able to hold off the US armed forces for long enough to Operation Moses the entire Jewish population of New York? Let’s imagine the most militarily mighty Israel possible – the Israel of the wet dreams of the hawkiest of hawks – is even that Israel really a solution to global antisemitism, or is it merely one of many harm reduction strategies? And for Zionists gearing up to say “well no one is saying that Israel can save everyone”, 1) many Zionists are, and 2) you’re moving the goalposts; if “Bundism can’t save us all” is a coherent argument against Bundism, then “Zionism can’t save us all” is an equally coherent argument against Zionism.

Concern #2 is that, setting physical safety aside for a moment, Zionism was (and I’d argue, still is) fucking over the cultural preservation of the vast majority of Jews for a minority. Ironically, this is specifically an anti-assimilationist point: the Ben-Yehuda vision of a modern Hebrew revival is a powerful one, and its success is a triumph of cultural preservation and restoration… and at the same time, it’s a vision that has no room at all for Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and that’s a problem. The Ethiopian kahen line is being forcibly broken by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as we speak – while it’s true that Israel has preserved Beta Israel lives, that culture will be just as lost in a generation as it would have been had Israel not existed to “save” it. You can’t make a Jewish unity omelet without breaking a few galut community eggs… but who gets to decide what that final omelet looks like? And which eggs are we comfortable breaking to make it happen? Should we really be trying to unify such diverse Jewish communities at all? Why not instead form a common front on political lines, and accept that the continued existence of individual Jewish communities with their own distinct cultural features is a good thing? Maybe self-determination means not just self-determination for “Jews”, but also self determination for Litvaks, and for Galitzianers, and for Italkim, and Gruzim, and Parsim, and Temanim.

These two concerns are often synthesized into the quite distinct Concern #3 which is “Zionist agitation is making things more politically dangerous for those of us with no desire to pick up our entire lives and make aliyah, stop rocking the boat.” And… I mean, to be clear, that’s also a thread of concern, and some Bundists raised it pre-WWII, and some are raising it now. But overall, this is not the primary thing that Bundists were on about. I think it’s worth remembering that the Bundist position was never “let’s sit on our ass in galut and hope the goyim come to accept us” – the Bundist position was “socialism should be achieved through an Austro-Marxist program of national-cultural autonomism”. The idea that we should work to dismantle the modern nation state completely and instead form nations which were “not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons” is hardly a “don’t rock the boat” position! Some Bundists were concerned that early Zionists weren’t getting on very well with other groups in the region, sure – but the ultimate hardcore Zionist vision was one in which a modern State of Israel was Germany’s equal, and the ultimate hardcore Bundist vision was one in which Germany did not meaningfully exist.