Yidisher sotsializm: The origin and contexts of the Jewish Labor Bund's national program.

This dissertation examines the Jewish Labor Bund's debates and programmatic statements regarding the 'national question', analyzes the relation between the Bund's national program and European social democracy, and considers how the Bund put its national program into practice in a range of political, cultural and recreational activities in interwar Poland. The Bund's national program was an attempt to reconceptualize national relations, especially within the state, according to socialist (but non-Bolshevik) principles. This program openly challenged nationalism and the nation state and championed the rights of the different nationalities (not only Jews) within each state. Its main tenet was that the Jews of Russia, and later Poland, as well as the other national minorities, must be granted a limited 'national-cultural autonomy'. It also stressed that the solution to the Jews' problems must be found in the places where they already lived and not through emigration (doykayt). Whereas the existing historiography often presents a simplified version of Bundism or stresses the Bund's failure to achieve its aims, this dissertation attempts to understand the Bund's aspirations and activities in their own terms. The first chapters discuss the internal debates that led the Bund to adopt its national program and reconstruct the intellectual background that resulted in the Bund's particular synthesis and views. I give particular attention to the work of key theorists that had an impact on the development of the Bund's program, among them the 'founding fathers' of Marxism (Marx, Engels and Kautsky), Austro-Marxist theorists (Karl Renner and Otto Bauer), Bundist theorists (such as Vladimir Medem and Beynish Mikhalevitsh), and ideological rivals within the Marxist movement with whom the Bund maintained fierce debates in the process of developing its national and political identity (Rosa Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks Lenin and Stalin). In the later chapters I explore the extent to which the Polish Bund in the interwar period endeavored to apply its national program and unique synthesis of socialism, internationalism, and Jewish identity in the development of a complex subculture of working-class, secular Yiddishist institutions, and I show how this network constituted an impressive 'national-cultural autonomy in the making'.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2005.School code: 0146