Pre-WWII Jewish socialist movements held incompatible theories of Jewish liberation

Evidence

Should Jews strive for full equality in Christian societies—voting rights, access to all industries (the position of the Social Democrats)? Or should the goal be revolutionary transformation of those societies accompanied by full Jewish assimilation into the liberated proletariat since religion would be less necessary as a source of solace (“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx wrote, a position pursued by Trotsky and Luxemburg)? Was Judaism a prison from which the revolution would offer liberation (as the Bolsheviks claimed, though many conceded that there was a need to protect the right to religious practice in private life)? Or was Jewish assimilation, even in a socialist society, a trap, eliding the need for European Jews’ distinct culture and language to be protected within a multiethnic, multinational workers’ society (the Bund’s “hereness” position)? Or was Jew-hatred simply too deep on the continent, too primal, for any of this to work, so that Jewish liberation could be found only in the working-class movements of the amnesiac Americas (the position held by many of my family members as they crossed the Atlantic)? Or was even that mere fantasy, especially under the harsh, overtly racist, and anti-Semitic immigration laws introduced by the United States and Canada in the 1920s and ’30s, making the only hope for Jewish safety a nation-state of their own, where wandering would end and socialism could become a reality (the view of the Labor Zionists)? — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 951

Categorization

• XREF: Maps the pre-WWII Jewish left debates that foreshadow the current Left’s Israel/Palestine fractures Klein examines later; connects to my work on how ideological lineages resurface in present political conflicts.
• DEFINE: Defines the Bund’s ‘hereness’ versus the Zionists’ ‘thereness’ distinction that Klein’s own family experience and the current chapter’s argument pivot on.