Because obviously we hear a lot today from Israel’s defenders that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are, if not the same thing, at least very closely related. That criticism of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is the denial of the Jewish right to self-determination. But one of the things that’s interesting about the Bund is that they have a very different conception of what it means to have Jewish self-determination, and it isn’t the establishment of an apartheid state in Palestine, but it is nevertheless still proudly grounded in Jewish culture and identity. So tell us a little more about the Bund’s vision for how you could live as a proudly Jewish community without committing yourself to the Zionist project.

The Bund comes out of the Tzarist Empire, which was probably the most wretched and miserable place to be Jewish in the world in 1897, the year that the Bund is born. It’s a place where being Jewish is not just a matter of private belief. You are a racialized minority; it’s on your passport. It determines where you can live, what jobs you can do, how long your term of military conscription is, and whether you can go to university. There’s a whole straitjacket of laws that are meant to smother your life if you’re Jewish. And in addition, it’s a place where your fellow subjects of the Tzar, your Russian or Polish citizens, there’s a lot of racism against you. You are viewed not just as someone who happens to have different religious beliefs, but as a fundamentally different and alien ethnic group that doesn’t belong there.

And so the young Jewish Marxists that formed the Bund had three things that they wanted: they wanted to overthrow the Tzar—get rid of the hemophiliac autocracy; they wanted democratic socialism; and they also wanted their own specific liberation as Jews—their right to live dignified, proud lives in the land where they had lived for a thousand years, and their right to do that in their native language, which was Yiddish.