The Bund rejected Jewish statehood in favor of universal liberation

Evidence

So the Bundists, with their tens of thousands of working-class members devoted to “hereness,” regularly debated the Zionists, mocking them for their “thereness.” The Bund held fast to the belief that Jews would be free when everyone was free, and not by building what amounted to a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land. “Your liberation can only be a by-product of the universal freeing of oppressed people,” wrote the Bundist leader Victor Alter in 1937. Besides, argued Walter Benjamin, “things will go very badly in Europe if the intellectual energies of the Jews abandon it.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 952

Categorization

• XREF: The Bund’s ‘hereness’ directly prefigures the anti-Zionist left position Klein traces into the Mirror World chapters; connects to the doubling device as it maps the abandoned left ground.
• SEED: The Bund as a forgotten ‘third way’ in Jewish politics is a usable essay angle: how a mass workers’ movement rejected both assimilation and statehood, and how its disappearance shaped the current binary.