Bundism

Bundism was a secular Jewish socialist movement, whose organizational manifestation was the General Jewish Labour Bund, more correctly known as the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, founded in the Russian Empire in 1897. The Jewish Labour Bund was an important component of the social democratic movement in the Russian empire until the Russian Revolution of 1917; the Bundists initially opposed the October Revolution, but ended up supporting it due to the anti-Jewish pogroms by the White Army during the Russian Civil War. Split along communist and social democratic lines throughout the Civil War, a faction supported the Bolsheviks, and eventually was absorbed by the Communist Party. The socialist, anti-Communist Bundist movement continued to exist as a political party in independent Poland prior to the Holocaust (the Polish Bund), becoming a major, if not the major, political force within Polish Jewry. Bundists were active in the anti-Nazi struggle, and many of its members were killed during the Second World War. After the War, the International Jewish Labor Bund, more properly the World Coordinating Council of the Jewish Labor Bund, was founded, based in New York, with affiliated groups in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Israel, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries. Individuals associated with the Jewish Labour Bund played important roles in Western social democratic movements, such as Canada's New Democratic Party.