The "doykeit" that resulted in mass murders in 1946 has become fashionable today ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, July 16, 2026

The "doykeit" that resulted in mass murders in 1946 has become fashionable today

In 1946, an eight-year-old boy named Henryk Błaszczyk missed his old playmates enough that he hitched a ride 25km outside his Kielce home to see them, spent a few days picking cherries and visiting relatives, and came home. Afraid of his parents' anger, he invented a story about being kidnapped by Jews and locked in a basement. His father marched him to the militia station; the boy pointed to 7 Planty Street, where roughly 150 Holocaust survivors lived — many of them, presumably, meaning to stay in Poland for good. Within hours a mob of soldiers, policemen, and civilians had dragged those survivors into the street and beaten, stoned, and shot at least forty of them to death.

The building had no basement.

Keith Lowe tells the story in Engelsberg Ideas. He explains that Kielce was not an isolated spasm. Rzeszów had its own blood-libel riot weeks earlier. Kraków had a pogrom in August 1945 over a rumor that a Christian child had been murdered in a synagogue. Hungary saw anti-Jewish violence in a dozen towns in 1946, driven by a rumor that returning Jews were killing children to make sausages.

The Jews who returned to Kielce and Kraków and the Hungarian towns were not naive. Many were death-camp survivors who had every reason to distrust their neighbors and returned anyway, because home was still home and the people who lived there were still, in theory, their countrymen.

This is doykeit, "hereness," in its purest and most literal form: people getting off trains and walking back into the towns where their families had lived for generations, believing that shared citizenship and a shared catastrophe had finally settled the question of whether they belonged. The facts proved them wrong. Within a year, somewhere between 90,000 and 95,000 of them fled eastern Europe in three months alone, and roughly 300,000 total fled in the five years after the war. The verdict on doykeit was delivered by the people staking their lives on it, and they delivered it with their feet.

When I've criticized doykeit and the book that made it fashionable again, Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country, I've concentrated on the simple fact that the Bund that pushed that idea disappeared because the Holocaust destroyed it, while the Zionism that the Bund and Crabapple despises provides a home for half of the world's Jews where they can live, freely, "here."

But the best argument against doykeit comes not from the Holocaust but from what happened in the immediate aftermath, in places like Kielce and Kraków and Rzeszów where Jews had lived for generations. They chose to stay "here." Their neighbors made it clear that they were not wanted.

A movement that wants Jews to abandon the one form of self-defense that has demonstrably worked has an obvious interest in reviving the one doctrine that failed, dressing it in the aesthetics of Yiddish socialism and interwar radicalism so that the failure reads as romance rather than warning. The Bund's doykeit was not a hypothetical. It was tried, by people with every reason to want it to succeed, at the exact moment history handed it the best possible conditions for success — and it collapsed within a year. The assumption that Jews can fight alone for their rights to live wherever they want (except Israel, of course) was demonstratively proven wrong by the very Jews who literally tried it.

The most complete real-world test of doykeit ended in a mass grave and hundreds of thousands of refugees who had wanted to stay being forced out. Its most enthusiastic revival is happening now, marketed to people who will never have to test it themselves. Jewish lives have become less important than the socialist concepts that have consistently failed to protect them.

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