The Mirage of Neo-Bundism: A Zionist Rebuttal

Neo-Bundism is not a revival—it is a resurrection of a ghost. It evokes the ashes of a failed ideology, one buried beneath the weight of historical catastrophe and revived only by those willing to forget why it died in the first place – the Shoah.

In a 2025 statement, Jewish Voice for Peace Director Stefanie Fox declared: “I connect to the land of my ancestors in Eastern Europe, and the tradition there of the Jewish socialist anti-Zionist labor Bund. Bundists lived a deep commitment to resistance, to struggle, to staying put, to fighting for justice, equality, and freedom alongside their neighbors. They encapsulated this commitment in the Yiddish term doikayt, or ‘hereness.'”

Fox’s invocation of Eastern Europe as ancestral homeland overlooks a brutal historical reality: the non-Jewish ethno-national majorities of those very lands emphatically rejected their Jewish neighbors as truly belonging. In Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Hungary, Jews were not regarded as kin but as perpetual outsiders. All too often, the very people with whom the Bund sought to build alliances turned out to be willing collaborators with the Einsatzgruppen death squads. To call these places a homeland, in light of that legacy, is to ignore the deep-seated antisemitism that ultimately sought to erase Jewish life entirely from the European landscape.

While the sentiment of rooted, local struggle carries a certain ethical resonance, it is also emblematic of the glaring flaws in the neo-Bundist revival among contemporary Jewish anti-Zionists. These flaws are not merely political but historical, cultural, and even moral. Neo-Bundism today is a movement of historical amnesia and cultural myopia—one that resuscitates an ideology extinguished not only by the murderous force of Nazism but also by the cold calculation of Stalinism. Its selective nostalgia obscures the very real failure of the Bund to protect Jewish life and identity, and worse, perpetuates a Eurocentric “Ashkenormative” narrative that marginalizes and erases the lived experiences of non-European Jews.

Historical Failure and Dangerous Alliances

Founded in 1897, the Bund represented the Jewish proletariat of Eastern Europe and advocated for cultural autonomy, Yiddish socialism, and resistance to both Zionism and assimilation. But history was not kind to this vision. It was annihilated along with the millions it claimed to represent. The very working-class solidarity the Bund envisioned collapsed under the weight of genocidal antisemitism. Its fatal flaw was believing that Jewish safety could be secured through goodwill and cultural affinity rather than sovereignty.

Disturbingly, this pattern of perilous idealism is echoed in the alliances some contemporary neo-Bundist groups (such as Fox’s JVP) have formed with movements that celebrated the October 7 massacre and have a record of overt antisemitism. Much like their historical counterparts who mistook ideological proximity for genuine solidarity, today’s neo-Bundists overlook the violent rhetoric and actions of their chosen allies.

In their zeal to oppose Zionism, they have aligned themselves with forces that do not merely critique Israeli policy, but deny the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination altogether. This is not resistance rooted in ethics—it is political self-delusion masquerading as principle, and it repeats the Bund’s most catastrophic mistake: trusting those who would sooner see Jews erased than empowered.

Ashkenormativity and Cultural Erasure

One of the more telling ironies of the neo-Bundist paean to Yiddish is the glaring demographic disconnect between the language it romanticizes and the lived reality of Jewish life today. Yiddish, while a cultural treasure, is spoken fluently today almost exclusively by enclaves of Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim. The vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews are illiterate in Yiddish.

In stark contrast, modern Hebrew—revived from ancient roots and shaped in the crucible of Jewish sovereignty—is the living language of nearly 7.5 million Jews and serves as the cultural engine of the world’s largest Jewish community. Neo-Bundism’s fixation on Yiddish as the authentic Jewish tongue exemplifies its Ashkenormative tunnel vision: a nostalgic elevation of one narrow thread of Jewish experience at the expense of a vibrant and diverse global Jewish tapestry. To present Yiddish as a viable alternative to modern Hebrew is not cultural affirmation—it is ideological cosplay, mistaking memory for relevance.

At the time of the original Bund’s prominence, the majority of the world’s Jews lived not only in Eastern Europe but also across the Middle East and North Africa. These Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews had flourishing communities in Baghdad, Aleppo, Fez, Cairo, and beyond. They spoke Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Farsi, Ladino—not Yiddish. Their experiences, languages, and traditions are utterly invisible in the neo-Bundist imagination.

That invisibility is not a neutral oversight—it is a form of cultural racism. To valorize Yiddish as the premier language of Jewish resistance while ignoring the voices, tongues, and histories of Middle Eastern Jews who were uprooted from their homes by the twin forces of pan-Arabism and Islamism is to suggest that their experiences are irrelevant. Most of these Jews found refuge not in Europe but in nearby Israel. To ignore this is to erase a massive portion of global Jewry.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine was minuscule. Today, Israel is home to the world’s largest Jewish population, comprising nearly half the world’s Jews (and growing). In contrast, the once-thriving Eastern European Diaspora communities the Bund championed have all but vanished and the Arab world’s Jewish communities have been emptied. Neo-Bundism, in choosing to romanticize the past, effectively turns its back on the living center of Jewish life today.

It is not Zionism that is out of touch with Jewish reality—it is neo-Bundism. Its politics are those of ghosts and ruins, not of living communities or future generations. Many Israelis acknowledge Israel’s flaws—not to delegitimize their state, but to hold it to the moral standards foundational to its existence. They recognize that no democracy is immune from error, especially one navigating existential threats and deep internal divisions.

But criticism of specific policies must be grounded in a commitment to the Jewish state’s survival and improvement, not its dissolution. This self-critical stance is a hallmark of democracy and of Zionism itself.

Neo-Bundism presents itself as a moral alternative to Zionism, but in truth, it is a historical fantasy. It clings to a vision that failed to protect Jews when they needed it most.

Zionism, for all its internal debates and contradictions, at least begins from a place of historical honesty. It recognizes that Jewish survival cannot rest on the goodwill of others. It embraces a future grounded not in nostalgia, but in the hard-won lessons of history and the vibrant diversity of the Jewish people as they exist today.