Haviv Rettig Gur@havivrettiggur
The Bund rejected Zionism. The Bund were all killed by Nazis and communists. For the vast majority of the Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere, the only survival and freedom they could find -- after trying every other imaginable option -- was Zionism.
Zionism is big and diverse and complex and beautiful. Zionism is also the product of a vast, unspeakable tragedy.
The Bund *should* have been able to build an interesting and flourishing Jewish world all its own, in the "hereness" of Eastern Europe. And in a better world, the Bund would have. But this isn't that world.
In this world, the Nazi war on the millenia-old European Jewish civilization was successful, the Jews of Europe were wiped out -- and old ideas that once animated Nazis and Stalinists in their murder of Bundists have now returned into fashion on left and right and gone looking once more for the Jews.
Is there a word that describes a Jew so pitiably afraid of the current whirlwind of hatred that they choose to build a fake past to live in, just so they can pretend that Jews ever had an alternative to Zionism?
The Bund's story, like Molly Crabapple's ahistorical polemics, is merely one more data point demonstrating that Zionism's case is actually -- tragically, in fact -- impregnable. That it is a story of the transformation of catastrophic annihilation into triumphant freedom and survival.
