Bundism

Bundism (Yiddish: בונדיזם, romanized: Bundizm) is a Jewish socialist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century that aimed to promote working-class politics and secularism and to foster Jewish political and cultural autonomy. As a part of the wider movement for Jewish Autonomism, it also sought to advocate Yiddishism—the promotion and vitalisation of the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture—and doikayt (Yiddish for 'hereness'): the concept that Jews have a right to live and organise where they already reside. The first organizational manifestation was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, founded in the Russian Empire in 1897. Even with the dissolution of the first Bund in the 1920s, other Bundist organisations had already been established and continued to exist. Largest among them was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland in interwar Poland, which became a major political force within Polish-Jewish communities. It had enjoyed much popularity among Eastern European Jewry; however, the Bundist movement was heavily damaged by the Second World War and by Nazism; more specifically, many Bundists were murdered during the Holocaust. Many Bundists were active in the struggle against Nazism. After the war, the International Jewish Labor Bund, more properly the "World Coordinating Council of the Jewish Labor Bund," was founded in New York, with affiliated groups in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries. Despite a decline through the late 20th century, the Bundist movement and its ideology have been undergoing a revival among some Jewish subpopulations in the late 2010s and early 2020s, according to Andrew Silverstein for The Forward.