Matitiahu Minc

"The Bund - Like all the Jews, With all the Jews" (review of Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, 1939-1949)

Minc favorably reviews Blatman's book as a valuable and necessary corrective to an unfortunate lacuna regarding the history of the Bund and its activities during the Holocaust. The Bund's secretiveness and suspicion of researchers contributed to this lacuna. Blatman benefited from the opening of the Bund archive in the United States and of the archive of the former Communist Party in Poland.

Minc believes that the author's distinction between Bund ideology and practice in the ghetto, and especially between the ideological shock and effective paralysis of the veteran party leadership, on the one hand, and the initiative and multi-faceted activity of the Bundist youth on the other, is his most important contribution. The book also sheds new light on the Alter-Erlich affair, as well as on the mutual relations between the Bund delegations in London and New York.
Minc disagrees with Blatman's assertion that the Bund was opposed to Jewish nationalism. Both the Bund and the Zionists were helpless in the face of the Holocaust. The Bund is gone, together with the Jews of Europe who created the Jewish national movement. The survivors no longer took refuge in the Bund's ideology, but rather in Zionism, within which, and in its realization in the Land of Israel, they found succor.