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[Live on Zoom] Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt. A geshikhte fun 'bund.'
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Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Jack Jacobs | Delivered in Yiddish.
View the Program & Bibliography
The Jewish Workers’ Bund, founded in Vilna in 1897, was the most important Jewish socialist party in Europe, and the most powerful Jewish political party in a number of Poland’s major cities in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. This talk will explore the history of the Bund, and its ideological development, and will attempt to explain both the reasons for the Bund’s success, and the party’s limitations. Why was a party rooted in Marxism, led by secularists, and advocating anti-Zionist ideas, so attractive to a significant proportion of Polish Jewry in the 1930s?
About the Speaker
Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2015), and is the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001) and of Jews and Leftist Politics (2017). Professor Jacobs was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996-1997, and a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009. He served as the Louis and Helen Padnos Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in 2016, as the Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar at the YIVO Institute in 2017, and, in 2018, as a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Pears institute for the study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London.