What if there was a Jewish political movement that fought for liberation without seeking a state? What if diaspora wasn't exile but home?

This course explores the Bund (short for the General Jewish Labour Bund), a remarkable political movement that few people have heard of, though it was once one of the most important forces in Jewish life.

Founded in 1897 in Vilna (in what was then the Russian Empire), the Bund reached its height in Poland between the two World Wars. It was a sometimes-clandestine political party built on humane, socialist, and secular principles, and it was defiantly, proudly Jewish.

Bundists fought against the Tsarist regime, organised resistance to violent pogroms, championed the Yiddish language as a vehicle of Jewish culture and dignity, and built vast networks of schools, theaters, newspapers, sports clubs, and mutual aid societies. They believed that Jews could and should fight for liberation exactly where they were, not by establishing a distant homeland, but by struggling for justice alongside their neighbours.

The Bund raised generations of young people on radical ideals of working-class solidarity and what they called do'ikayt - "hereness." This principle held that Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever they stood, and that they should never seek to solve their problems through the dispossession of others. Many of these Bundist youth would go on to help lead the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis in 1943.

Though the Bund was largely destroyed by Nazi Germany and suppressed by the Soviet Union, its absence from contemporary consciousness has another cause: the movement's principled opposition to Zionism. Because Bundists rejected the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, their story has been largely written out of mainstream Jewish history.

In this course, we'll recover that lost history. We'll explore:

The Bund's origins and ideology
Their cultural achievements and institution-building
The doctrine of do'ikayt and what it meant in practice
The Bund's relationship to Zionism and why they opposed it
The movement's role in resistance during World War II
What the Bundist vision might offer us today

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