Radical Jewish Histories: JOOOT Reclaiming History On Our Own Terms
(Initially published June 2022)
As college students organizing for independent, self-governed, radically inclusive Jewish communities, we know the importance of countering the crafted, hegemonic narratives of Jewish-ness (history and tradition) pervasive in our communities with the truths of the expansive differentness that make up Jewish history.
In the fight for a radically just, inclusive, diverse, and, ultimately, liberatory Jewish present and future, many of us have found comfort in similar battles fought by our ancestors. However, it hasn’t been easy to gain this empowerment: though recorded, truths of radical Jewishness are not the ones compiled in the Jewish history primers/lessons of many Jewish communities, and often can be found on the internet only if one knows what to search for in the first place.
We wanted to make this resource—an online, participatory zine inspired in part by the 1 Million Experiments Project made by Project NIA (https://millionexperiments.com)— to make these histories, and thus possibilities for even wider radical, liberatory, Jewish empowerment, more accessible. The resources we have compiled are truly just the beginning — we hope they will inspire further research, discussion, contemplation, and actions towards more radical, Jewish presents and futures (ultimately, the creation of more histories) for those who read them. If you find/know of anything that you feel should be included, let us know by filling out the submission form linked at the bottom of this page!
Enjoy, and let us know your suggestions/critiques/hopes for making this project live up to our aspirations, as well as your own!
Israeli Black Panthers
The Israeli Black Panther movement came about in the early 70s in response to the systemic discrimination that Mizrahim faced throughout the Israeli state. The movement modeled itself after the American Black Panthers and sought to advance the civil rights of Mizrahi Jews. Not insulated in their struggle, they became one of the first Israeli organizations to publicly support the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They famously antagonized the Ashkenazi elite, to the extent of being referred to by then-Prime Minister Golda Meir as “not nice.” By the late-mid 70s, however, the protest movement the Black Panthers established had fizzled out and Mizrahi politics largely moved to the electoral field.
For future reading:
https://www.jta.org/2010/06/29/ny/israels-black-panthers-remembered
https://jewishcurrents.org/darkness-in-the-holy-land
Rebecca Pierce’s film
Jewish Currents Haggadah
[Photo: A Mizrahi Black Panther protest poster from the early 1970s addresses Israel’s prime minister at the time, Golda Meir: “Golda, Golda / Fly away / We’ve had enough of you.” Jaclynn Ashly]
Yiddishkayt
According to yiddishkayt.org, Yiddishkayt is, “the culture, language, art, and worldviews of Eastern European Jews, as they lived in Europe and in the places they settled.”
[Some!!] relevant articles and ideas:
“Down With the Revival, Yiddish is a Living Language” [Jennifer Young]
“Students of Yiddish know that the more you study the Yiddish language, the more you come to apprehend the immense breadth and depth of the Jewish experience—especially its religious aspects. We see examples of this every day at YIVO: newly religious Jews learn Yiddish in our classrooms to connect to their new communities, just as college students discover the Ba’al Shem Tov, the musar movement, and the proper time to daven shakhris within the stories of secular Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem and Chaim Grade. As a wider phenomenon, sociologists point to frum [religious] communities numerically strengthened by the addition of baalei teshuva (newly religious “returnees to the faith”), just as Yiddish cultural groups are strengthened by the presence of former (and sometimes current) Hasidim. This dynamic relationship speaks to the poly-lingual, multi-cultural ferment that constitutes contemporary yidishkayt.”
“Whither Queer Yiddishkayt” [Alicia Svigals]
“Feeling excluded has always been a great motivation for Yiddishism: not liking when we weren’t in on the joke, feeling sadly shut out of the Yiddish punchlines we were overhearing from our parents and grandparents and comedians. … The experience of growing up queer is suffused with exclusion too: it is an experience of missing out on the love, romance, and marriage that was all around us, in the media and in the real world.”
“Postvenacular Yiddish: Language as a Performance Art” [Jeffrey Shandler]
“Although postvernacular Yiddish culture is, to a considerable degree, a response to a common sense of cultural loss, participants in this enterprise are engaged in a variety of discrete, sometimes incompatible projects: Hasidim employ innovative means of maintaining Yiddish in order to sustain its post-Holocaust role as a marker of their particular approach to piety … Jews who are not traditionally observant are frequently attracted to Yiddish as a hallmark of Jewish laterite, the language variously significant diaspora nationalism… radicalism, matriarchy, or queerness. For some baley-tshuve … learning Yiddish is part of. A larger personal project of (re)turning to religious tradition. For some non-Jews, speaking Yiddish offers the tantalizing prospect of inhabiting a culture that is not only ‘other’ but also ‘lost.’ For Germans and Poles, in particular, learning Yiddish can be a project of cultural reparation.”
Present significance/ Ways to engage:
The organization Yiddishkayt.org is one of many working to cultivate the continued memory and knowledge of this culture in Jewish communities. Other organizations working toward similar ends include YIVO, the Yiddish Book Center, In Gvebeb, and the Workers Circle. These organizations offer classes, educational resources, and rich troves of Yiddishkayt to learn and consider the present relevance of.
Though the use of Yiddish as the language of choice in secular and less-observant Jewish communities has declined greatly post-Holocaust and since the increased focus on learning/teaching Hebrew in American Jewish life (a movement adjacent to the founding of the state of Israel), Yiddish continues be the ‘everyday language’ of about 700,000 Hasidic Jews globally. (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/research-projects/contemporary-hasidic-yiddish)
There is SO much interesting Yiddish cultural production going on today: podcasts, chapbooks/zines, theatre, dance, music — the list goes on. It’s worthwhile to just hunt around a little on the internet, if you’re interested in any of this.
[Photo: An 1890 cover page of the Fraye Arbeiter Shtime — an anarchist Yiddish paper published in New York until 1977. Ahrne Thorne, the last editor of the paper, famously claimed, “Yiddish is my homeland.”]
The Jewish Labor BUND
The Jewish Labor Bund was an explicitly socialist party, organized to represent the interests of the “doubly-oppressed” Jewish workers in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe, though its political descendants have spanned in location from Argentina to Australia. It was originally founded in 1897 — the same year as the first World Zionist Congress. As an internationalist organization, the Bund intentionally distanced itself from and re-interpreted traditional religious narratives which contrasted socialist ideals, specifically those which postulated the Jews as a ‘chosen people’. Instead, they toed the line of universalism and particularism, advocating Jewish national autonomism in the larger communities in which Jews lived (doikayt or “hereness”) rather than independent state-seeking Zionism. Beyond its party activities the Bund also advocated and built a distinct, completely secular cultural practice for the Yiddish speaking Jews who made up it’s ranks: veltlekhe kulturele yidishkayt (secular Jewish cultural identity). The party later gained support from Jews beyond the Jewish working class (Zionists, communists, and Orthodox), as it organized some of the most effective Jewish zelbst-shuts (self-defense) units in Eastern Europe.
[Some!!] relevant articles and ideas:
“The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Labor Bund: Nazism and Stalinism Delivered Blows; Ideology Did the Rest” [Phillip Mendes] [A summary of Bundist history — READ THE WHOLE THING IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN THE BUND AT ALL!] … “The Bund's fate [of basic dissolution post-World War II] also arguably confirmed the limitations of applying political ideals to only one specific state or territory. The Bund was never an internationalist movement of Jewish workers, but an organization tied closely to the specific language and political culture of Russia and Poland. Bundist organizations elsemwhere served primarily as emigre groups offering a base of support for the movement in the ‘home’ countries. In simple terms, this meant that the death of the Jewish working class and the associated Yiddish cultural infrastructure in land inevitably signaled the end of the Bund as a significant political actor. In principle, the Bund could have reinvented itself as a world Jewish socialist body addressing specific Jewish living conditions and class issues in each country. A reformed Bund could have provided significant representation for working-class and other progressive Jewish who did not conform to the new Jewihs political consensus in favor of capitalist and Zionist values. This revision did not happen, however, in the post-war period — for the same reason that it did not happen after the earlier dissolution of the Russian Bund in 1920. It would have required a radical change in Bundist ideology from universal to nationalist, and a perspective of solidarity with Jewish everywhere, including the large Jewish population living in Palestine and later Israel.”
If you’re able to access it, check out Mir Kumen On, a documentary made in 1936 which focused on the Bundist-run Medem Children’s Sanatorium.
Bernard Goldstein’s memoirs regarding his time with the Bund- Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund and The Stars Bear Witness
Check out this short book written about the history and values of the Bund, published in 1958 by the Bund itself in New York.
Explore the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, which holds the stories of many Bundists and their descendants.
Present significance/ Ways to engage:
“Activist Strategies: Reaching towards the Jewish Labour Bund’s strategies for cultural organizing” [Shelby Handler] “I have inevitably discovered that a reaching towards the Bund is also a grieving of what it never got to be. Where might the Bund have gone with their base-building? How might have their constellation of countercultural institutions have grown? We can never know. But we cannot forget their existence, as a highly successful, broad-based Jewish anti-Zionist Socialist movement, as a movement roote din solidarity. We cannot let the historical narrative be taht their strategy of doykeit lost, but rather taht they somehow left it behind for us to find, and re-plant inside a here-ness they never could have imagined.”
The most active remaining chapter of the Bund is in Melbourne, Australia, though its legacy persists elsewhere.
Check out the Doykeit Zine series cultivated by JB Brager, who describes the Zines as, “a submission-based zine that collects mostly writing (but also art) on the topic of queer Jewish identity in relation to anti-Zionist and Palestinian solidarity politics. I called the zine Doykeit because it reflected the commitment and orientation of the zine towards diasporic Jewish identity.” Learn more about them here, and purchase copies here.
Bring Bundist songs into your revolutions! Find out more in this article, “The Bund and Yiddish Revolutionary Songs”
Treyf (an excellent podcasting duo who have unfortunately not posted in too long) have a few episodes on the Bund:
Irena Klepfisz: “Irena is a writer, a poet, an activist, a lesbian feminist, a teacher, a researcher, and a movement elder. We spoke about her experience being born to Bundist parents in the Warsaw Ghetto, her role in founding the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation, her years of work in the lesbian feminist movement in NYC, and her thoughts on the ways Jewish history is being taught today.”
The General jewish Labor Bund Part 1 (early Russian period), Part 2 (militarism in Poland), and Part 3 (post-war)
[Photo: 1917 An election poster of the General Jewish Labour Bund hung in Kiev, 1917. Heading: "Where we live, there is our country!" Inside frame: "Vote List 9, Bund". Bottom: "A democratic republic! Full national and political rights for Jews!"]
Contemporary Diasporic Jewish Palestinian Solidarity Work
Since the establishment of the modern state of Israel and the expulsion of Indigenous Palestinians in the Nakba, there have been currents of Jewish politics in solidarity with Palestinians, both from Israeli and Diasporic communities. In Diaspora, centers and hubs for Jewish Palestinian solidarity have typically been centered around North America, where there are heavy ties between governments and the Israeli state, but communal organizations in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere are common. In the United States, organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, founded in 1996 and since 2019 openly anti-Zionist, and IfNotNow, founded in 2014 after Israel’s assault on Gaza that year, have openly advocated for communal changes in attitude towards Israel and supported Palestinian resistance to colonial occupation. Independent Jewish Voices in the United Kingdom, as well as Na’amod, have held similar stances and attempted to advocate against the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism while the UK’s Jewdas creates community and satire in favor of “neo-Bundist” diaspora politics. In Canada and Australia, organizations under the title Independent Jewish Voices operate as well, and internationally, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network enlists Jews globally to “Oppose Zionism and the State of Israel.”
Further Reading:
Treyf podcast
https://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/collapse-israel-consensus/
Jewishvoiceforpeace.org
Ijvcanada.org
Jewdas.org
Left-wing Jewish publications such as Protocols, Jewish Currents, +972
photo description: Jewish Voice for Peace Members protest with a sign stating “Jews Say: Free Palestine!”
Israeli Jewish Palestinian Solidarity Work
Although the Israeli left, particularly in its mainstream iterations such as the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz, largely capitulates to the status quo of Palestinian subjugation and is part of the Zionist movement, some Israeli Jewish communities are actively attempting to dismantle Israeli occupation of Palestine. Among political parties, Hadash is the primary source of resistance to the status quo from Israeli-Jewish communities. Its name is an acronym for The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality and it is made up of the Israeli Communist Party and other left-wing parties and runs its candidates as part of the Joint List, of which it is the only Israeli party (although it also has a significant Palestinian membership). One other notable Israeli group is B’tselem, which documents Israeli human rights abuses in occupied Palestine and was one of the first Israeli groups to declare Israel’s legal system as constituting apartheid. Another awareness-centered Israeli group is Zochrot, which works to promote recognition of the Nakba and the Israeli displacement of Palestinians. In addition, Akevot Institute uses archival footage to promote knowledge and acknowledgment of the Israeli persecution of Palestinians. Activist groups in solidarity with Palestinians are crucial to this political ecosystem, as well. Anarchists Against the Wall, for example, commit direct-action demonstrations in order to resist the Israeli construction and maintenance of barriers along Gaza and the West Bank. With regard to the BDS Movement, Boycott from Within, a group of Israelis in support of the BDS movement, works to pressure the international community to uphold the tenets of the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions by Palestinian civil society.
To Read More
Jointlist.org.il
Btselem.org
Zochrot.org
Anarchists Against the Wall, edited by Uri Gordon and Ohal Greitzer, available from AK Press
Sephardic Leftists
Ladino-speaking communist sephardic Jews formed the first jewish mutual aid society in the so-called United States according to Dr. Devin Naar. The histories of the multitude of sephardic leftist movements across the globe have been largely forgotten.
[Some!!] further reading:
https://jewishcurrents.org/are-we-post-sepharadim
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/196758fe-c3bf-4f08-90f7-91dc2e6d3f4c/episodes/a3edde55-9858-4d6e-9684-c3b2b9ac7d15/then-now-are-jews-white-a-conversation-on-race-erasure-and-sephardic-history-with-devin-naar
https://www.zamancollective.com/
Present significance/ways to engage:
Sephardic and Mizrahi jews are building alternative leftist movements, in places including but not limited to New York, Boston, Israel, and the international digital landscape — Special shoutout to the Sephardi Mizrahi Q Network.
Why this was important to the submitter:
To foster pride and a sense of belonging among sephardic leftists who may not always feel we fit in to the mainstream ideas of who is a real Jew, what Jewish leftism looks like, or who is a good sephardic Jew, and to honor our ancestors and link our movements with theirs.