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Goldstein Bernard . Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund. A Memoir of Interwar Poland. Transl. by Marvin S. Zuckerman. Preface by Victor Gilinsky. Intr. by Emanuel Sherer. [Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies.] Purdue University Press , West Lafayette (IN) 2016. xxxi, 424 pp. Ill. $59.95 (E-book $50.99)
Founded in 1897 in Vilnius, the Yidisher Arbeter Bund (Jewish Labor Bund, simply referred to as "the Bund") was a non-Zionist, socialist party active among the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe through the Holocaust years. It helped found the general Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898, and played an important role in the underground revolutionary movement against tsarist autocracy. Suppressed by the communist regime in the Soviet Union, it emerged as a true mass movement in independent Poland, where, though constantly harassed by the authorities, it led a legal existence. There, in addition to the Bund itself, allied groups such as children's and youth movements (Sotsialistisher Kinder Farband - SKIF - and Yugnt Bund-Tsukunft), a women's organization (Yidishe arbeter froy - YAF), a sports club (Morgnshtern), as well as Bund-led trade unions and secular Yiddish children's schools enrolled tens of thousands of members. The Bund's record of struggle against anti-Semitism and for social justice gave it great credibility among the Jewish masses, and paid off in tremendous election victories in city council and Jewish community council elections at the end of the 1930s. Smaller branches of the Bund operated in independent Lithuania and Latvia, as well as in Romania.
Along with Polish Jewry, the Bund was decimated by the Holocaust. The party's last heroic stand took place in its participation in the resistance to the Nazis, and especially in the uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos. After the war, the remnants of the Bund were once again suppressed by a communist regime, this time in Poland. Bundist survivors scattered - to North and South America, Australia, Western Europe, and Israel. They set up Bundist...