Are We LARPers?

 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" thing, and since then it's a "real" thing, but the problems with an ethnostate were well understood even then, and even when we were in the ghettos the bundists understood very well that even if we Jews left where we were and went to Palestine, the problems that caused us to think that was the solution were still present.

So doikayt: we believe that wherever we are that's our home.

Yiddishkayt: We're jews, even the ones we don't like.

Socialism: This is probably the broadest one, and where the original bund also shined. We can't be Jews in Palestine if we can't be Jews anywhere. And we can't be Jews anywhere if people aren't free to be whoever they are everywhere.

And what about "Landback"? What does that have to do with anything? Here in Southern California we live on occupied land, and in many cases the original peoples have been nearly completely erased. But at the same time many of us were born here, we grew up here, we live here now. So "giving the land back" is really just a strawman the detractors of this like to throw around, but really a lot of it is dismantling the current system which requires that people who were colonized are somehow "less than" the colonizers. We see this in Palestine too, of course. What would happen to Israel if Palestinians had equal rights? Obviously, well, probably they'd have equal rights. There'd be no retribution, no reverse colonization, nothing along those lines at all.

instead, the State of Israel would just be a place where Jews can live with Palestinians, much like here it would be a place where the descendants of the Indigenous people could live with us, and we could live with them. 

And this is part of Socialism, very much so. And that's one of the pillars of the Bund.