The New York Times is running a glowing review today of Molly Crabapple's new history of the Jewish Labor Bund, framed around a seductive question: what does Judaism look like without Zionism?
The answer the book implicitly offers — and the review enthusiastically endorses — is the Bund: secular, socialist, diasporist, proudly Jewish in culture while rejecting both religion and nationalism. It is seen as a left-wing dream team from history, conveniently available for appropriation in 2026.
But the review lets slip a detail that answers the titular question: "At a Bundist gathering, the pastries might be fried in pig fat, just to prove a point."
The reviewer calls this "proudly secular." No, it isn't. That's active hostility to Judaism performed as identity. There's a meaningful difference between not keeping kosher and deliberately serving treif to make a point: it is the difference between being irreligious and being anti-religious.
This is what Judaism looks like without Zionism. It is indistinguishable from garden variety Communism - anti-religious and antisemitic in the sense of being opposed to everything that makes Jews Jewish. The Bund broke with the Bolsheviks over organizational questions, not over the basic project of replacing Jewish religious life with revolutionary politics.
During Passover 100 years ago, in 1926, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote:
The Charkoff Yiddish communist paper "Der Stern" complained that while the government appeals to the population for economy, the Jews were spending many millions for matzos, rendered fat and wine.
This is not "proudly secular." Proud secularists don't feel the need to impose their secularity on those who do not share it. That is what most religions do, not secularists.
The Jewish Communists weren't "proudly secular" but but actively antisemitic.
While the book review says that the Bund "fought antisemites head-on," they did not defend religious Jews at all. On the contrary, they considered yeshiva students to be "parasites."
The idea of hijacking the Passover Seder came not from JVP or IfNotNow but from the Bund, whose version of "Echad Mi Yodeya" in a 1919 "Haggadah" included:
Who knows two? I know two: Humanity is split in two parts: poor and rich.
Who knows eight? I know eight: Already from the eighth day, a young boy suffers from religion.
Who knows ten? I know ten: Ten commandments became 613.
Who knows eleven? I know eleven: Only rabbis and lazybones can liken eleven brother-sellers to eleven stars.
The review quotes Bundist leader Henryk Erlich calling Zionism "a Siamese twin of antisemitism." Yet Judaism survives today largely because of Israel. It is within the "progressive" wing that there is hostility towards Judaism itself.
The Bund lost, as the review acknowledges — to the Nazis, to Stalin, and ultimately to history. What's worth noting is that the Jews who survived, and who built something afterward, mostly did so through the nationalism the Bund despised. The "hereness" the Bund preached turned out to matter most in a land Jews could actually defend.
Crabapple's book may be excellent history. But the Times framing it as a usable past for Jews who want an alternative to Zionism requires ignoring what the Bund actually thought about the Judaism it claimed to represent.
Judaism without Zionism is not Judaism, but worship of bagels and lox and dusty socialist Yiddish newspapers.