Saturday, October 10, 2026
From Ian:
Allan Arkush: An Abusable Past
Allan Arkush: An Abusable Past
Anti-Zionism has been around almost as long as Zionism and has a respectable Jewish pedigree. When Zionists deny this and decry today’s Jewish anti-Zionists as self-hating Jews or even antisemites, those under attack can point, with some justification, to history. But usually they go further and return the insult. It is the Zionists, they say, who are tainted by antisemitism. It’s bad enough when such distortions are the stuff of sloganeering. It’s worse when they appear in books that educated people take seriously.Better the Devil You Can See By Abe Greenwald
One such book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which The New York Times’s reviewer called a “terrific . . . authoritative history.”Despite her book’s subtitle, Crabapple is almost as interested in telling a story about the nefarious history of Zionism as she is about the noble history of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Another that has just appeared and that seems destined to get a lot of attention is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a book pervaded by hatred of Zionism. Both books depict Zionism as a Jewish form of racism, not only resembling Gentile racism but in cahoots with it. Both not only use history for political purposes, but abuse it.
Molly Crabapple never met her remarkable great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, but he opened a portal to an entrancing Jewish past of which she had known very little. A post-Impressionist painter of the lost world of the shtetl, he had been a Bundist activist before he came to America. Intrigued by his reference in one of his manuscripts to an Eastern European Jewish “underground,” Crabapple discovered the Bund (officially, the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897. It was a lost Jewish world that gave her something that she never got from the synagogue or Israel. Its heroes became her heroes, whose graves (some of which are located, due to the vicissitudes of history, in and around New York) she continues to visit.
The Bund, founded in the same year as the World Zionist Organization, was the product of Jewish Marxists, who promoted not emigration but revolution as the solution to Russia’s Jewish problem. But unlike the more famous Russian Jewish communists, such as Trotsky, the Bund leaders believed that the Jews had the right and the need to take part in the revolutionary movement not as mere proletarians but as a separate (nonterritorial) national group. The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov called them seasick Zionists and tried to win them over to ideological orthodoxy.
In the eyes of the tsarist regime, the Bund was a subversive force that had to be uprooted. But it managed to survive government persecution while maintaining its independence as a distinct revolutionary movement, until the tsar fell. What the Bund couldn’t survive was the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, however, between the world wars, the Bund had its heyday, and in its later resistance to the Nazis it made an unforgettable mark, before being all but completely extinguished.
The Bundists were, as Crabapple reminds us, admirable, often heroic, idealists. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading ideologue, was born into a family of opportunistic converts and raised as a Christian, “yet turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people,” at great personal cost. Tiny Anna Lipshitz, whose older sister had been tortured to death by the police, was only twenty-two years old in 1905 but already the movement’s best orator. Dispatched to Odessa to inspire revolutionary activists there, she was nicknamed “the Fury” by local newspapers. One of the characters in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, identified by the script only as “a Bundist,” apparently represents her.
In the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bund fought for the preservation of the nascent Russian democracy but was helpless in the face of the Bolshevik onslaught in October, which one of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, described as a “monstrous calamity.” Erlich soon moved to Poland, where he became one of the leaders of the now legal Bund, which ran for elections to both the Polish Parliament (where it never won a seat), and within the country’s Jewish communities, where it sometimes did well. On the subpolitical level, the Bund set up economic cooperatives, day care centers, sanitariums, sports clubs, libraries, and schools. Crabapple writes: “In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, “[t]he Bund was your union, your education and your church.”
But it also fought for you. One of the Bundists to whom Crabapple devotes the most attention was not a political leader or a social activist but Bernard Goldstein, a leader of its battle squads, which saw action first against the Jewish communists, the Bund’s bitter enemies in peacetime, and eventually, in wartime, against the Nazis. The communists were so enraged by Goldstein’s activities that they passed a death sentence on him. After one of them tried to assassinate him outside of his apartment, “Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker.” In the Warsaw Ghetto, after he was smuggled out (because he was too hard to conceal), Goldstein’s disciple Marek Edelman led the Bundist fighters. Both men miraculously survived the war. Goldstein despaired of a decent future for anyone in a communist Poland and moved to the Bronx, where he became “an honorary grandfather to his comrades’ children,” while Edelman become a cardiologist and eventually a leader of Solidarity in Poland.
Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.Jonathan Tobin: A satire about Anne Frank explains woke antisemitism
Which is why I like when my enemies come out of hiding and make themselves known. So two days ago, I found myself strangely satisfied by Zohran Mamdani’s October 7 denunciation of Israeli “genocide,” his statement of solidarity with its victims, and his dinner at an obsessively anti-Semitic Palestinian restaurant in New York.
Critics of Mamdani’s daylong stunt suggested that he “should have read the room,” released a statement of sympathy for victims of Hamas’s massacre, and just let the Jews grieve for one day. Or if he couldn’t do that, they offered, he should just have said nothing.
Why? Why despair that an anti-Semite chose not to hide his hatred? So we can go on playing pretend with evil people, helping them accrue more and more legitimacy until they can do large-scale harm?
Does every statement of anti-Jewish incitement put Jews at risk? Yes. But if our weapon of choice is urging our enemies not to say harmful things about us, the risk will become far worse.
Had Mamdani done what media critics suggested, he alone would have benefited from the con. Instead, his act of blatant anti-Semitism woke up a bunch of fence-sitting liberals (Jews and non-Jews alike) and sent them into our camp. I’ve spoken to some such people since, and it was the first time I heard “You were right” from any of them on any topic in ages.
I know exactly how those exchanges would have gone had Mamdani instead kept up the good-guy act. Liberal friends and family would have sent me screenshots of his pacifying mush along with digs about my unhinged position on him. I’d weigh the benefits of responding obnoxiously or trying to disarm with civility, knowing that either choice would only leave them in their ignorance. But Mamdani’s choice snapped them out of it for me. And while it’s tempting to punish such former Mamdani supporters for their blindness up till now, the truth is that we need them. So, I say, welcome to the land of the real and the side of the right.
A ‘secret’ ending
The producers of the play ask that critics not reveal the ending of the show so as to ensure that audiences fully register the “shock” of some of its denouement. But the secret ending of the play isn’t comparable to the last minutes of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution,” in which the true identity of the murderer and the eponymous witness is revealed. So, I don’t feel obligated to play by their rules.
What those who have lauded the play as “clever, gleefully provocative” or even “the most important new show around” aren’t telling you is what happens in the play’s final scenes.
Margot finally speaks, only to give an oration about the need to go to Palestine to displace and oppress its indigenous Arab population once the war ends. Anne then realizes that her family shouldn’t survive and betrays them herself, leading to their deaths. But then, after the bodies fall (they are shot on the spot rather than gassed or tortured and starved in the camps), Hitler turns up and, having shed his male identity and become a trans woman, he “cancels the Holocaust’ so the Jews don’t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.
Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading “by any means necessary,” something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas’s efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.
Sure, we’re not supposed to take any of this seriously except to embrace the notion that no one is 100% correct and that all causes are suspect. But the reaction of the audience to the mention of “Palestine” and the cheers that greeted Anne’s claim that the “seven million colonizers” currently committing crimes there are the result of the six million dead Jews told you all you need to know about the impact of this play at this moment.
Despite the hopes of some who lauded the play, and believed it to be a jab at the tweet that inspired it,the audience wasn’t acknowledging that Jews don’t have “white privilege.” Rather, they were nodding along at the false claim that Jews have no right to live in Israel. And this is because Jews are now wrongly viewed as “white” oppressors.
Contrary to its press clippings, “Slam Frank” is not an equal-opportunity offender. It may be poking fun at most things, but the one thing it is deadly serious about is denying the Jews their stories, as well as the right to mourn their dead with dignity and to live in freedom in their own country without being smeared as monsters and targeted for genocide.
Would they do this to another group?
Moreover, could anyone imagine someone putting on a play today in which black or Hispanic victims of racist crimes were portrayed as Jews or any identity other than their own? Would they deny them their culture and history and use them as stand-ins for more fashionable identities? Of course not.
Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy “The Book of Mormon” by the creators of the cartoon satire “South Park,” to which “Slam Frank” has been compared, is kinder to its targets—the adherents of that faith—than Fox and Sinesky are to the objects of their scorn. But you can do this to Jews with impunity and still be applauded by liberal critics as having accomplished an act of creative genius.
This isn’t the first time the story of Anne Frank has been utilized to advance a non-Jewish agenda. The aforementioned play and movie adaptations of the Diary deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne’s father, Otto, who had little use for Judaism or Jewish identity. It also drove writer Meyer Levin, who had worked to promote the book and wanted to write a more Jewish play, nearly out of his mind.
Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne’s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, “Slam Frank” speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.
The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t since the Holocaust is that contemporary Western culture is willing to mock everything but not the lie that Jews, as both Hitler and woke ideologues alike have claimed, are “weaponizing antisemitism.”
While some Jews thought the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 against Jews by a genocidal Islamo-fascist terror group and its supporters would generate sympathy for the victims, the opposite has occurred. The shedding of their blood in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.
And though the movement to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state on the planet had been building toward this for several decades, the explosion of antisemitism shouldn’t have surprised anyone—since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.
A product of this moment in cultural history
A world in which “Slam Frank” is acclaimed as a work of comic genius is not only one in which nothing sacred to the Jews is granted even minimal respect. It’s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing “genocide,” and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.
“Slam Frank” seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn’t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.
Since Oct. 7 three years ago, it has once again become permissible to strip Jews of their past and identity and to smear them as “colonizers” and oppressors. We can only hope that this episode passes quickly, ensuring that this travesty is relegated to the trash heap of theatrical history, where it belongs.
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