Resurrecting the Bund

In 2018, the New York Review of Books published an essay on the Jewish Labor Bund, a largely forgotten but fascinating part of the early-twentieth-century European political landscape. I was interested in the essay because my paternal grandparents were major figures in the Bund, a social-ist party formed initially under the Russian Empire. The essay's author, Molly Crabapple—whose drawings have appeared on Dissent covers—has a similar familial connection to the Bund. Her great-grandfather Samuel Rothbort, one of about 5 million Jews who lived in the western Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, had been active in the Bund as a young man in Volkovysk. He emi-grated to the United States in 1904, after his apparent involvement in the death of a policeman the previous year. His life in New York as a countercultural artist with a commitment to Bundist ideals inspired Crabapple to write Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund.