Those who don’t feel represented by mainstream synagogues and Jewish organizations have created their own home for the past two years in the DMV Jewish Labor Bund.

Until recently, one might have only seen the phrase in an early 20th-century newspaper. The Jewish Labor Bund was a socialist group founded in the Russian Empire to fight for Jewish emancipation before its ranks were largely destroyed during the Holocaust.

Now, the Bund is back, with chapters cropping up in cities across the United States and Europe. It also gained popularity in the Jewish world with the April release of Molly Crabapple’s book, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund.”

D.C. resident Max Ewart first learned about the history of the Jewish Labor Bund through a podcast in 2024. Interested, he took the reins of an existing local group that had been active in the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

The DMV Jewish Labor Bund began programming that summer, offering Yiddish movie nights, Yiddish singing circles — zingeray, potluck dinners and political teach-ins in the D.C. area and Prince George’s County.

“This is my main kind of Jewish home that I’ve found, especially [with] the Yiddishkeit and Jewishness events,” said Eli Craveiro Frankel, an organizer with the DMV Jewish Labor Bund.

“The Bund is a really special place because we focus so heavily on the cultural and the community aspect, which I think is very important to us,” said Eva, a member from Silver Spring who asked to be identified only by their first name.

The History

The DMV Jewish Labor Bund didn’t spring up overnight.

The historic Bund came about as an underground response to state violence in the Pale of Settlement and Eastern Europe, and a rise in nationalism in Europe, Ewart explained.

“I think that is a political philosophy that existed in a time where Jewish people were not as safe as they are now,” he said.

The big question was how to keep Jewish people safe amid the rampant antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“[Bundists’] philosophy was that in order to keep Jewish people safe, we have to build solidarity with other working people in the places that we live,” Ewart said. “Bringing that into the modern era, I think it’s kind of a political philosophy that has really rung true with a lot of Jewish people who have not really had that connection with the State of Israel, who see what the State of Israel is doing to the Palestinians as something they disagree with.”

One of the Bund’s three guiding pillars is doikayt, Yiddish for “hereness.” It’s a principle that states that Jews have a right to live and organize wherever they reside, and that they should focus on the issues at home.

The idea was popularized by the General Jewish Labor Bund in 1897. Instead of pursuing a Jewish homeland, early Bundists believed Jews should build autonomous, culturally rich lives in their local diaspora communities. They saw moving to Israel as “giving up” rather than standing their ground in Eastern Europe.

The act of building a Jewish labor bund may mean different things to different people, Ewart said, “but broadly, we are building Jewish spaces that are not centered on Zionism, on the State of Israel, but doing so in a way that is rooted a lot in our individual cultures.”

For Ewart, who had a falling out with his D.C. synagogue over its response to the Israel-Hamas war, being part of the DMV Jewish Labor Bund is the “closest [he’s] felt to [his] Jewish identity.” (The D.C. resident is now a member of New Synagogue Project, an independent, inclusive Jewish community in the nation’s capital.)

“[The Bund] has really filled a lot of that space of feeling of a lack of Jewish community in recent years,” said Craveiro Frankel, who is not affiliated with a synagogue.

A Cultural Revival

Many of the cultural events focus on the Yiddish language, singing and film.

The group connected with Miriam Isaacs, a retired Yiddish professor from the University of Maryland, who lends her DVDs of old Yiddish movies.

This year, the Bund has screened the comedy-drama “Green Fields” (1937), the melodrama “Motl the Operator” (1940) and “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” (2011). Members watched the supernatural horror film “The Dybbuk” last Halloween.

“It’s really exciting to see these films and see the really rich Yiddish theater and cinema culture that existed and hear it,” said Craveiro Frankel, who doesn’t speak Yiddish but is learning the language through Duolingo.

The films vary in quality — as some are nearing 90 years old — but provide a launchpad for discussion: “What was life like then? How does this connect to us today?”

Yiddish movies are also a way to connect to members’ Jewish heritage.

“[For] our relatives just two generations ago, one generation ago, that was the language they spoke,” Craveiro Frankel said. “They didn’t speak Hebrew. They spoke Yiddish, and that’s been a really validating experience for me, and my own personal identity journey is reconnecting with something I know my great-grandparents would have been speaking.”

Eva said their great-grandmother, a poor Jew living in the shtetls of Poland and Russia, wasn’t allowed to attend yeshiva or secular schools, and thus couldn’t speak Hebrew or learn Russian or Polish.

“Yiddish is what we had, so that’s very important to us,” Eva said.

Wanting to get more in touch with her Jewish identity, Malke, a member of the DMV Jewish Labor Bund, was told to learn Hebrew. It was in a Hebrew class where the Silver Spring resident learned that most modern spoken Hebrew is based largely on a Sephardic pronunciation system.

She was “irritated”: “So I’m not even speaking the Hebrew my family did.”

Malke said she had always found the Yiddish language fun.

“Finding a Yiddish cultural revival is so meaningful to me because my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they all spoke nothing but Yiddish,” she said. “And then, just in a single generation, [it’s] been lost.”

Malke knew her ancestors had been run out of their central Polish town during the Russian Revolution. She’d always assumed her family story followed the Zionist narrative: antisemitic Europeans displaced Jewish residents, who sought refuge in the Palestinian territories.

After joining the DMV Jewish Labor Bund, she discovered that her ancestors were Bundists and were run out by the Cossacks because of that.

“There’s this whole radical legacy I didn’t even know I was heir to,” Malke said.

“The reason a lot of us don’t know about this history is that it was taken from us,” Eva added. “It was taken from us as part of this broader narrative. That’s why the Bund has been erased from history, even though, at the time, in the early 20th century, it was just as big of a movement as Zionism, and before that, it was even bigger.”

The group resonates with many anti-Zionist Jews who have struggled to find a home within mainstream synagogues and Jewish organizations.

“There are Jewish people all over the world who have not felt like they could be their authentic Jewish self because of the narrow scope that Jewishness has been shoved into over the past 80 years,” Ewart said.

“A lot of us have had to navigate spaces that are normatively Zionist, and sometimes we don’t agree with that 100%. But in order to access Jewish culture, we’ve had to be in those spaces,” Craveiro Frankel said. “What we are trying to create in our cultural spaces are spaces that are open to a diaspora’s culture, a variety of Jewish experiences and they’re going to be normatively anti-Zionist.”

Chapters of the Bund also currently exist in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicagoland, New England, California, Montana, and Vienna, Austria. Organizing committees — made up of at least three Bundists — exist in more locations in the U.S. and some parts of Europe.

“Broadly … I’d love to see more chapters pop up all over the world and other folks being able to find their Jewish home who have not been able to,” Ewart said.

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the Bund has a chapter operating in Vienna, Austria, not Vienna, Virginia.