We may not revert to Yiddish, but maybe we can make good use of their ideas An account of a gathering in Bund House, Tel Aviv.
Judaism has long been monopolised by the religiously observant. This, together with its ugly adoption by the Right (as in “Bibi is good for the Jews”) has forced others to take action. A new wave of Israelis who are refusing to discard the Judaism component of their self-identification has come out of the closet.
Zionism has, strangely enough, both combined and separated the two notions of Judaism as a nationality and Judaism as a religion. It has also befuddled the boundaries between national-self identification and nationalism. In response to these notions, some Israeli Leftists have been examining an alternative. At a gathering this month in Bund House in Tel Aviv, they tried to sort out the mess of the concepts of Leftism, Jewishness, Israeliness and socialism.
The Bund was a socialist labourers’ (actually workers’) movement that was active in pre-revolutionary Poland and Russia. Yitzhak Luden, who together with a few of his comrades has been keeping the flame burning, spoke at the gathering and simply but clearly sketched out the combined message of the Bund’s banner: A socialist Jewish movement. When workers are being discriminated against, he said, the Bund struggles alongside them. If Jews are in danger in any country, the Bund joins their struggle.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between Zionism and Bundism: not all Jews are expected to pack their belongings and make Aliya to Israel. On the contrary, says Luden: A Jew’s homeland is his or her country of residence. If the concept seems difficult to comprehend, then think of Woody Allen. No one would imagine Allen packing his bags in order to “return home” to Israel. Those excellent movies of his, mostly set in New York, leave no room for doubt. He is a New York Jew who belongs to both collectives.
If this point of view is adopted then it is impossible not to notice that contrary to expectations, the one place where Jews suffer from lack of freedom is actually Israel. With the orthodox religious establishment in charge of so much, restrictions are imposed on secular Jews and members of other religions. Consequently, says Luden, Israel is the very state where there is a need to struggle against restrictions on Jews, which had they occurred in any other country would have been regarded as symptomatic of antisemitism. The right of self-determination, which we keep on talking about in the Palestinian context, vanishes from our consciousness when we deal with collectives within the Jewish entity. It is as if the minute you do not demand your own state, you give up your other rights as well. What about some rights for secular people or socialist Bundists? Summing up, Luden suggested the words socialism, national identity, Judaism and internationalism ought to be inscribed on our banners.
Perhaps this is the right place for some reassurance. No, no-one has any intention of reverting to Yiddish as Israel’s lingua franca. Nor does anyone envisage us travelling from village to village recreating old Bund practices. But as Plato explained , the human imagination can only create an imaginary figure by using existing and known components (such as five horns, two wings and a tail). Therefore the aim of this gathering was to investigate whether somewhere in the annals of this important chapter in the history of the Jewish left there is something that would help the Israeli Left extricate itself from the dead end street in which it is stuck.
The gathering was more than an ideas talkfest. The event was opened with a worn–out, antiquated, old movie with a Yiddish soundtrack. The film portrayed the suffocating, decaying poverty that was the norm in Eastern Europe. The poverty too had the feel of antiquity about it, the kind of poverty you don’t see in a news clip of an empty fridge in a development town.
The evening was also sealed with Yiddish: the Saleh-Manke troupe appeared with a selection of Avrom Sutzkever and other poets’ songs. Their use of contemporary artistic methods emphasised the differences between the pain of yesteryear and the new, current pain. But they bridged the two to render an all-encompassing, pervading pain.
During the evening someone asked me whether I still had my grandmother’s Bund membership card from Ciechanow. I wondered if they burnt the cards as well, and then remembered the branch of my father’s family that managed to escape from Poland to the US. With others, they formed a support group within the Jewish Labour Organisation. The group’s members bought a plot of land outside New York, built huts with their own hands and even dug a lake into which they diverted water from a nearby river. Later on, a family member had the honour of casting the first stone aimed at Senator McCarthy’s reign of terror..
Perhaps this was one of the messages of the gathering: a group of people that has accumulated noble ideas during decades of horrifying experiences wishes to pass the flame on to youngsters who are looking for a better way.
[Translated by Sol Salbe from Maarav (ambush) – an arts, culture and media internet magazine.]