A question we often grapple with when writing about the global rise in antisemitism is “Where, if anywhere is still safe for Jews?” The UK, my home country, certainly doesn’t feel like it; neither does Europe or Australia. So what’s left?
At any other point in the last 200 years, the obvious answer to this question would have been America. The United States has long embodied the promise of the New World, allowing Jews to thrive and, in turn, enrich the country.
Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this safety and security has enabled a generation of American Jews the luxury of reconsidering the Bund.
The Bund, a secular socialist movement largely based in the Pale of Settlement, was the original ideological rival to Zionism. It emerged in 1897, at the same time as the first Zionist Congress, and its members argued that the way to make the places they lived in better for Jews was assimilation. It didn’t work. The Bundists were largely destroyed in the Holocaust, and the few who survived became reluctant Zionists anyway.
