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Book Review
It is commonly assumed that before World War II the general Jewish Labor Bund strongly influenced Jewish history, but that after the war it became marginal and ultimately a story not even worth telling.1Libraries and bookshelves all over the world mirror this assumption. Whereas many books controversially discuss a once mighty Jewish socialist party in Tsarist Russia and independent Poland, there is not a single study of its long postwar presence. David Slucki's book changes this, and at the same time tackles many of the assumptions that comfort modern Jewish history. Instead of reiterating the idea that, once the state of Israel had been created, anti-Zionist movements became irrelevant to the historiography, Slucki asks what happened to the Bund during and after its radical postwar transformation, and how members of the formerly strong movement dealt with its concurrent decline.
For Slucki, this history started in 1947. By then, two years after the end of World War II, the Bund had lost thousands of its followers to German mass murder as well as some of its most important leaders to Stalin's terror. With the Soviet occupation of Poland, the Bund, having been declared illegal, finally lost its territory. Simply to ensure its existence the Bund had to alter its paradigms and shift its focus from eastern Europe to a global setting. In 1947, leading Bundists met in Brussels and created the International Jewish Labor Bund, with, at its centre, the World Coordinating Committee. Its tasks were to develop a transnational organizational structure and to mediate between the many Bund groups around the world.
Slucki's description of this process and of the debates conducted in the wake of this decision not only fills a gap in the history of one the most important Jewish parties, it also captures the ruptures and doubts that were formative to this process of reorientation. In a chapter highly relevant to recent research on displaced persons, Slucki demonstrates that DP camps and many of the cities in eastern and western Europe where survivors gathered also became political battlefields. In these locations, several traditional parties tried to situate themselves in the unknown Jewish postwar world. This was accompanied by attempts to maintain their...