Journal articles on the topic 'Jewish Labour Bund'

The main objective of this paper is to present a change in the attitudes among Bundists towards emigration in the post-war Poland. The program of the Jewish Labour Bund throughout its existence was based on three pillars: here-ness (doykayt), family-ness (mishpokhedikayt), and Jewish-ness (Yiddishkayt). After the Second World War some of them lost their significance. Many Jews, including Bundists, saw their future outside Poland. In the article I will show different attitudes of the members of the Bund towards emigration, as well as the reasons behind their choices: either to stay in Poland or to leave the country.

The formation of social democracy in the Russian Empire was another stage in the «Russian reception» of the Western models of the socialist movement, the result of certain ideological contradictions on the Russian ground. Given the semi-feudal society of the Russian Empire, the paternalism of autocratic power, the absence of deep traditions of liberal culture, the Russian social democratic movement could hardly count on obvious success without a deep revolutionary renewal of the entire socio-economic and political system of the Russian state. Since Jews were an urban ethnic group, it is not surprising that the provinces of the Jewish Pale in the late 19th century proved to be the epicentre of the revolutionary energy concentration.Thus, in the late 19th century the processes of formation and development of not the Russian, but the Jewish social-democratic movement continued on the territory of the Jewish Pale, the prominent centres of which were the Belarusian and Ukrainian cities of the Russian Empire. Despite the low level of the industrial development in the north-western part of the Russian Empire, as well as police persecution, imprisonment, and exile of many activists, the Jewish Social Democratic movement grew qualitatively and quantitatively, got loyal supporters, and spread to other cities such as Minsk, Grodno, Bialystok and Warsaw. The Bund (the Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) played a key role in organizing the Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) on March 1-3, 1898, at which the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was founded which was supposed to unite revolutionary Marxist groups of the empire, regardless of their ethnicity. The processes of formation of the organizational and personnel structure of the Russian Social-Democracy continued during the First Russian Revolution. Jews took an active part in these processes. Their role in the organization of Russian social-democratic movement and in its staffing is difficult to overestimate. In particular, S. Dikstein, H.S. Khurgin, E.A. Abramovich, I.A. Gurvich, E.A. Gurvich, O. Belakh, L. Berkovich and many other Jewish activists found themselves at the origins of Russian social-democratic movement, and such distinguished Jewish figures of Russian social democracy as P. Axelrod and Yu. Martov in the early 19th century headed the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP.The author noted that until 1917 the model for the development of the social democratic movement in the Russian Empire was the European Social Democracy, among the recognized authorities of which were also Jews (F. Lassall, E. Bernstein, V. Adler, O. Bauer). Eventually, the Jewish origin of Marx, the founder of «scientific» socialism, canonized his doctrine in the mass consciousness of the urban Jewry of the Russian Empire, which awaited a new messiah who would «bring» them out of the ghetto of the Jewish Pale.At the same time, the theory of self-liberation of the Jewish proletariat, adopted by the Jewish Social Democrats of Vilno, Minsk, and Kyiv as opposed to the seemingly utopian ideas of the Zionists from Basel, Switzerland, became the leading ideology of the Russia’s first political organization of Jewish proletarian – the Bund, which emerged in the same 1897, when the First World Congress of Zionists took place.Thus, the intensification of state anti-Semitism, the Jewish pogroms, and the escalation of the political crisis in the Russian Empire on the eve of the First Russian Revolution pushed Russian and Jewish Social-Democracy to develop a common position on the proletariat’s participation in future revolutionary events, optimized the search for overcoming the internal party crisis that arose after the withdrawal of the Bund from the RSDLP. For the first time in its history, the Jewish Social Democrats tried to ignite the fire of the Russian revolution on the «Jewish street» and prove the political significance of the powerful revolutionary potential of the Jewish masses in the Jewish Pale for the all-Russian social democratic movement.

The subject of this article is the views of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Bund) on the use of terrorist methods in the political struggle. An analysis of the evolution of party’s views on this issue is carried out on the basis of personal testimonies from members of the Bund, as well as documents of the Police Department. Chronologically, the article covers the period from the creation of the Bund to the end of the revolution of 1905. During this period, the revival of terrorism in the Russian political arena was taking place: the escalation of socio-economic and ethnic conflicts under the conditions of an autocratic monarchy had an inevitable consequence the surge of violence. The Bund, on the one hand, the Social-Democratic Party, and on the other — the leading political force 64 ISSN 2524-0757 Київські історичні студії: науковий журнал • № 2 (7), 2018 р. of nationality discriminated against in the empire, faced on difficult choice. Official party resolutions condemned terrorism, since this method left the masses passive. The struggle against the existing regime in this case was conducted only by individual heroes. At the same time, attempts by the government to maintain the authority of the autocratic monarchy among the society were completed by the search for enemies, convenient to see in the Jews, especially given their low integration into the imperial society. Therefore, a situation need self-defense: at the initiative of the Bund the paramilitary formations are founded. In 1905 this formations played a role in ending of the pogrom wave, that rocked by the cities and towns of the West and South-West provinces of the Russian Empire.

SummaryThe “transnational turn” is one of the most discussed topics in historiography, yet it has inspired more theoretical tension than empirically saturated studies. This article combines both aspects by examining the transnational network formation of one of the most important social movements in late imperial Russia, the Jewish Labour Bund. It furthermore introduces into historiography one of the most fruitful theories in recent social sciences, “actor-network theory”. This opens the view on the steady recreation of a social movement and reveals how closely the history of the Bund in eastern Europe was interwoven with large socialist organizations in the New World. Based on a large number of sources, this contribution to migration and movement history captures the creation and the limits of global socialist networks. As a result, it shows that globalization did not only create economic or political networks but that it impacted the everyday lives of authors and journalists as well as those of tailors and shoemakers.

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, March 2016 (Volume 67, Number 10)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-10-2016-03/">buy this issue</a></div>Ellen Meiksins Wood, who died on January 14, was coeditor of <em>Monthly Review</em> with Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy from 1997 to 2000, and a major contributor to historical materialist thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her parents were socialist refugees, members of the Jewish Labor Bund who came to the United States in 1941, after fleeing Latvia in the 1930s, when indigenous fascists came to power. Her mother worked for the Jewish Labor Committee in New York and her father for the United Nations. Ellen obtained her B.A. in Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to do graduate studies in political science at Berkeley, where she met and married Neal Wood, a professor in the department. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, she taught political theory in the political science department at York University in Toronto.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-10" title="Vol. 67, No. 10: March 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

This article examines the views of Vladimir Medem (1879-1923) —a major leader and theorist of the Jewish Labour Bund in Tsarist Russia and, after 1918, in independent Poland— on the ‘national question’, as he presented them in internal discussions within the Bund and in his theoretical works. It demonstrates that Medem’s goal was not just to outline a political program for the Bund but to establish the foundations for a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the nation from a social democratic perspective. Strongly opposed to nationalism in all its manifestations, Medem put forward, as an alternative to the nation-state (demanded by all nationalist movements), a model of a ‘state of nationalities’ in which citizenship would be nationally neutral and granted equally to the members of all nationalities. At the same time, Medem proposed that the state must take an active role in protecting national minorities by granting each of them a national-cultural autonomy with a limited jurisdiction over cultural matters (and only those matters). Medem’s analysis of the national question and the Bund’s program of national-cultural autonomy (like the similar views formulated by Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer) deserve special attention, I argue; as a form of ‘multiculturalism avant la lettre’, they may offer insights relevant to today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural societies.

Prezentowany reportaż Jankiewa Pata jest poświęcony działalności Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, dokumentującej zagładę polskich Żydów – wtedy pod kierownictwem Filipa Friedmana. Autor, przed wojną działacz Centralnej Żydowskiej Organizacji Szkolnej i Bundu, był uzdolnionym literacko dziennikarzem, odbywającym liczne podróże służbowe. W 1938 r. znalazł się w Stanach Zjednoczonych, by zabiegać o pomoc materialną na rzecz szkolnictwa w jidysz w Polsce. Ponieważ nie udało mu się opuścić USA przed wybuchem wojny, związał się z antynazistowskim Żydowskim Komitetem Robotniczym (Jewish Labor Committee). Działał tam także po wojnie. Jako przedstawiciel Komitetu przybył do Polski w 1946 r., by zebrać informacje o stanie żydostwa polskiego oraz udzielić wsparcia finansowego ocalałym i reprezentującym ich instytucjom