The Bund Milieu: The Polish-Jewish Left-Wing Diaspora, from Łódź and Białystok to Paterson, N.J.
The Bund Milieu: The Polish-Jewish Left-Wing Diaspora, from Łódź and Białystok to Paterson, N.J.

Summary/Abstract: Polish-Jewish Bund activists in the burgeoning industrial cities of Łódź and Bialystok mounted sustained protest in 1905-07 against voracious textile factory owners and Russian czarist repression. Impoverished, and confronted by anti-Semitic mobs and police repression, they fled to textile centers in the Paterson-Passaic area of northern New Jersey. Two extended family networks — the Lubertofsky-Walkowitz and Stone families — illustrate the rich political and cultural legacy of the Bund in the American Jewish-Polish diaspora. Over three generations,the children of the Bundists formed a supportive familial network used song, poetry, theater and political organizations to build a socialist world. In the post-WWI era they split into socialist and communist groups, and by the 1930s some even embraced conservative anti-communist trade unionism. Many second, third and even fourth generation descendants continued to draw on the Bundist legacy in Yiddishkeit cultural activities and trade unionism from a broad range of views although predominantly from a left-liberal world view that resonated with Bundism.

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