https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/01/doikayt/#socialism-or-barbarism
“Molly Crabapple's
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is one of the most
important, timely and salient works of history I've ever read. It's a history
of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist, internationalist organization that once
dominated Jewish political identity:
<
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/>
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were hundreds of thousands of
Bund members, both in the Pale of Settlement (the rural regions of the Russian
empire that the Tsar confined most Jews to) and in diasporic centers like New
York City. The Bund played an important role in the Russian Revolution and in
the resistance to the rise of European fascism, and fought valiantly in the
antifascist underground guerrilla bands in Nazi-occupied territories.
Despite this faded prominence, the Bund is all but unknown today. I was only
vaguely aware of it, even though I attended seven years' worth of Yiddish
classes at the Workmen's Circle, a Bund-originated socialist fraternal
organization, and was bar-mitzvahed at a Workmen's Circle hall. It wasn't until
I read about the Bund in Naomi Klein's essential 2023 book
Doppelganger that
I first caught a glimmer of its significance:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine>
The thesis of
Doppelganger is that the world is full of "mirror world" pairs
with opposite political valences. For example, the mirror world version of the
health justice movement is MAHA. Both MAHA and health justice share many
commonalities (such as a skepticism of Big Pharma and its captured regulators),
but arrive at totally different conclusions. Health justice demands universal
access to medical care, compulsory licenses and patent reform for life-saving
medicines, and systemic interventions to address discrimination against gender
minorities, women, and racialized people. MAHA starts from the same diagnosis,
but arrives at a totally different prescription: "eating clean," buying
unregulated supplements from grifters, rejecting vaccines, attributing chronic
health problems to personal moral failings, along with a conspiratorial
rejection of life-saving medication."
Via Cass M.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
