The SoCal Bund

This material comes largely from Against Japanism and The Minyan podcast crossover episodes. I'm mostly repeating it from memory, and from digging around myself. Please let me know about errors or misrepresentations. Rigid Social Hierarchy Fascism requires "Haves" and "Have-nots". These strata can even be layered and interleaved (see Intersectionality for more on this), but the principle that there's "a natural order" to society. It also requires the use of pseudoscience to justify this (see Eugenics, how language families were expanded to be races, "filthy immigrants", "model minorities", etc). And of course since it's Fascism, it's incumbent on the people to use violence to enforce perceived inversions of this hierarchy. They shot MLK Jr. in the face, and dismantled the Black Panthers, for example. Palestine and the Jews Yes, I'm using the term "Jews". I'm Jewish. Israel is overwhelmingly Jewish becau...

 Hello everyone, this year Erev Hanukah is also the same day as Christmas, the 25th. So, I'm just taking a moment to reflect on Palestine, Christianity, Zionism, and the current genocide. I think it's important to remember that despite the cliche, we were strangers in a strange land too. In fact, we still are. Even ignoring the first kingdom, which is hardly attested in archaeology, there was obviously some collective organization of tribes that came together before the second kingdom. And if you study torah, you notice that there are many traditions that have been spun together, without regard for contradictions. From this it becomes clear that Jews have always lived "in diaspora". In fact by the second kingdom Judea wasn't even the center of Jewish life. It was just one of many. Babylon could probably be seen as it's actual place. But we were already scattered by then anyway, and it was through a network of writings and trade routes that Judaism continued. W...

According to Jewish Currents , large donors are quietly dropping funding for organizations unrelated to Palestine or Jews in general. In October 2023, the Access Reproductive Care fund published a letter about the genocide in Palestine. Their overhead is covered primarily by small donors, but 1/3 of actual services have been provided by a large grant from Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, this foundation allocated $1 million over 3 years, through 2024. After the ARC published their letter against the genocide, though, this foundation notified ARC the final payment would be made through a third party, and that it was the end of the grant. No more would be forthcoming. So, Zionism is channeling resources not only away from Jewish communities, but from the communities we live in as well, out of pure spite. If people working for an organization funded by money controlled by Zionists step out of line, just the association with...

In the original bund the governing committee was the Coordinating Committee. Here I envision the same sort of organization. We're not going to overshadow other Jewish groups here, and honestly that would defeat the purpose of the bund anyway. It would go against the Doikayt grain, because these groups are already "here", and we can support them. Rather, we're more of an outreach and education group. We want to help Jews here in the Diaspora, specifically Southern California, to find the Jewish organizations that work for them, and to provide a broader sense of Jewishness shared between all Jews. The focus can be taken off of a mythical land we possibly once resided in, and put back on where we are now. And besides, if you look at Jewish history, we've been in diaspora since the beginning, even when the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed, even when Palestine was called Judea. And in our writings you see all the different traditions that were knitted together over...

 This is an interesting question. Historically the original bund was destroyed in the Holocaust. But before that, many bundists had made it out of Europe, and even now in Australia there's an active Bund chapter. We're also talking to them, trying to do the right thing in picking up the Bund Banner and carrying the movement forward. But are we playing at being the bund? By reapplying words like "Doikayt", "Yiddishkayt", and "Socialism" are we just taking on a bundist style? Or are we actually Bundists? I think we're actually Bundists. It's not just that "words can mean anything if you reframe them", because, well, that's obvious and superficial. I think we're actually finding the meanings of these words, and looking at how the Bund worked and what Bundists believed, and understanding that their objections to the Zionist state and ours are more alike than not. And maybe prior to 1948 it was just a "potential" thin...

  From the campaign page : A brazen antisemitic arson attack on our Shul (Synagogue) has left the Adass Israel Congregation and the broader Melbourne and global community shaken.  The Shul and its mission to create a Jewish place of worship and community will not be deterred.  While most of us have been distracted by the genocide, actual anti-semitism has been on the rise, and Australia is no exception. Maybe zionists don't admit we're "real" jews, but we accept them as Jews, because, well, they'll be in the same camps we are in the end.