On August 23, 1918, a 19-year-old Jewish American named Hyman Rosansky was arrested for tossing antiwar leaflets out of a fourth-floor window of a Lower Manhattan hat factory. The flyers—printed in both Yiddish and English—denounced U.S. intervention in the Russian Revolution and called for a general strike among American workers. Rosansky belonged to a small circle of Jewish activists, all immigrants from the Russian Empire, that included Jacob Abrams, Mollie Steimer, Samuel Lipman, and Hyman Lachowsky. Each had carried revolutionary ideals across the Atlantic, though such radicalism was hardly foreign to American Jewish communities of the time.
This was, after all, the turbulent world of Jewish New York in the early twentieth century—a vibrant, unruly ecosystem of anarchist newspapers, socialist collectives, and grand union halls where the air was thick with cigarette smoke and bold new ideas. At the heart of it all was the Yiddish language, which had cemented itself as the radical Jew's tongue of choice—the medium through which thousands of working-class immigrants debated politics, poetry, and the future of humanity without tipping off Uncle Sam. In this brief window of history before Hollywood rose to prominence, New York was the stage for anyone in need of a good kvetch. Through a network of basement publications, the city itself was transformed into a smorgasbord of food for thought: there was the communist Morgen Freiheit (Morning Freedom), the socialist Forverts (The Forward), and the anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor), just to name a few.
Fraye Arbeter Shtime, in fact, was so successful that it became the longest-running anarchist newspaper in the world, agitating against capitalism, war, and oppression almost exclusively in Yiddish from 1890 all the way until 1977.
For Jewish immigrants fresh off the boat from the Pale of Settlement, these radical circles weren't just political organizations—they were communities, support networks, and the only institutions that seemed to understand their particular brand of diasporic despair. And this despair wasn't abstract either—it was forged in the brutal realities of immigrant life. Take for example the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which a couple years prior had killed 146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women.
For most Americans (who have only ever discussed this tragedy in the context of a high school civics class), it's easy to reduce the entire affair to a statistical footnote—one that inched the system closer to today's workplace safety reforms. But for the Jews living through this period—a generation of traumatized immigrants who had just escaped pogroms in the Old World—the last thing these events spawned were calls for mourning and incremental reform. These people were systemically overworked and unimaginably exhausted. They had barely escaped the hellscape of Europe, only to have the horrifying images of their wives, mothers, sisters, and friends leaping from burning buildings seared permanently into their fucking skulls. So (understandably) incremental reform didn't exactly satiate one's needs during this period. There wasn't time for penning representatives, nor was there today's tradition of providing sad testimonies in front of deaf congressional ears—the moment demanded something fucking biblical. An eye for an eye. The law of retaliation. It was time for a good old fashion revolt.
Echoing from brownstone basements and sweating
across factory floors, the Jews of this
era—alongside other fed-up immigrant
communities—harnessed this anger and began to forge
something incredible, something never before seen in
the new world or old:
a prototype for the future of the American
left—the first ever rainbow coalition, comprised
of working-class immigrants from all over the
world, united by shared struggle rather than
divided by ethnic difference.
But I digress—back to the other window, the fourth-floor one where Hyman Rosansky's pamphlets —not people—rained down.
Rosansky and his comrades were operating in a moment of intense political paranoia. The United States had just entered World War I, and the Espionage Act of 1917 had made opposition to the war effort a federal crime. When they printed and distributed their anti-war leaflets, they weren't just expressing political opinions—they were committing what the government considered sedition. The flyers accused President Woodrow Wilson of being a "hypocrite" and a "coward" for sending troops to Russia, and called on American workers to resist what they saw as an imperialist intervention against the Bolshevik Revolution.
The consequences were predictably brutal. Federal agents raided the group's printing press, arresting all six defendants. During interrogation, Abrams was beaten so severely by police that he suffered permanent injuries. Jacob Schwartz, tragically, was not so lucky. In custody he was treated so inhumanely that he died before ever seeing a day in court—becoming a martyr to the cause of free speech. The trial that followed was a spectacle of anti-immigrant and anti-radical hysteria, with the defendants' Jewishness and political beliefs treated as evidence of their disloyalty.
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court as Abrams v. United States, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—writing for the majority—upheld the convictions in what remains one of the most infamous free speech decisions in American history. Still, I'll offer Holmes a few crumbs of credit: in his dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, he articulated what would become the foundational principle of modern First Amendment legal theory—the "marketplace of ideas." He argued that "the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."
The irony was exquisite: a group of Jewish anarchists, prosecuted for their radical politics, inadvertently helped establish the very free speech protections that would later shield countless dissidents. In theory, this could have been a proud moment for America—but the fuckers still opted to uphold the original charges... So it would seem not much has tangibly changed on Capitol Hill over the past century.
All six activists were sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for the crime of putting pen to paper, though most would ultimately be deported to what had become Soviet Russia after serving just 1-2 years.
Which brings us full circle, back across the Atlantic and—slightly rewound in time—to the late 19th century Russian Empire. This was not exactly what you'd call a welcoming environment for Jews. The reason Hyman and his peers ended up in New York in the first place was pretty simple: the czar was a fucking prick. The Jewish experience in this place and time included being legally confined to the Pale of Settlement—a state-sanctioned ghetto spanning 386,000 square miles where conditions were grim. Jews couldn't own land, couldn't attend universities in meaningful numbers, had their movements constantly monitored, and were basically the Empire's favorite scapegoat whenever the peasants got restless. It was like being perpetually stuck in the world's worst game of musical chairs, except the music was anti-Semitic propaganda and the chairs were boats to America.
In this pressure cooker of oppression, where pogroms were as common as the weather was bad, something remarkable happened. In 1897, in the back room of a Vilnius apartment that probably smelled of boiled cabbage and revolutionary B.O., thirteen delegates from various Jewish socialist circles gathered in secret. They weren't just kvetching about the Tsar—they were planning to build a movement that would fundamentally challenge how Jews thought about their place in the world.
These weren't your typical shtetl Jews waiting for the messiah. They were secular, educated, and fiercely committed to the idea that Jewish liberation couldn't be achieved through prayer or emigration alone. They called themselves the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, or just "the Bund" for short. Their founding principle was breathtakingly radical for its time: Jews should organize not as a separate nation, but as workers. Crucially, many Bundists saw their approach not just as an alternative to Zionism, but as a superior ideology—one that addressed the root causes of anti-Semitism rather than "fleeing" from them.
The Bund grew like wildfire through the Pale. By 1903, they had organized the first mass Jewish self-defense groups during the Kishinev pogrom, proving that Jews wouldn't just passively accept violence anymore. They established underground printing presses that churned out Yiddish newspapers, created schools that taught secular subjects alongside Jewish culture, and organized strikes that brought entire industries to their knees.
Their biggest idea? That Jewish workers should organize not just with other Jews, but with everyone—Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians. They wanted to build a coalition—one which, had they ever witnessed a single day of good weather, might have shared its name with the aforementioned rainbow forming across the pond. The Bundists argued that anti-Semitism wasn't some eternal, immutable feature of human society, but a deliberate tool used by the ruling class to divide workers and prevent them from organizing collectively. Their solution was elegantly simple: if workers of all backgrounds united against their common oppressors, anti-Semitism would wither away like last week's challah.
The Bund wasn't just some book club for disgruntled intellectuals either. At its peak, it had around 40,000 members—which, in today's terms, is roughly equivalent to the entire population of a mid-sized American city deciding to form a revolutionary socialist organization. They had newspapers, they had schools, they had cultural programs, and most importantly, they had songs. Oh, the songs! The Bundists understood something that modern activists have largely forgotten: if your revolution doesn't have a good soundtrack, you're basically fucked.
And what a soundtrack it was! The Bund produced some absolute bangers. Decades before N.W.A., Jewish workers in the Pale were singing: "Daloy Politsey" ("Down with the Police"). A song about police brutality and state oppression with a revolutionary twang so potent that if Ice Cube spoke Yiddish, he might melt.
Daloy Politsey (Down with the Police)
Recorded version available on YouTube
Yiddish:
In ale gasn vu men geyt
Hert men zabastovkes.
Yinglekh, meydlekh, kind-un-keyt
Shmuesn fun nabovkes.
Genug shoyn brider horeven,
Genug shoyn borgn-layen,
Makht a zabastovke,
Lomir brider zikh bafrayen!
Brider un shvester,
lomir zikh gebn di hent,
Lomir Nikolaykelen
tsebrekhn di vent!
Hey, hey! doloy politsey!
Doloy samoderzhavye v Rosey!
Brider un shvester,
lomir zikh nit irtsn,
Lomir Nikolaykelen
di yorelekh farkirtsn!
Nekhtn hot er gefirt
a vegele mist,
Haynt iz er gevorn
a kapitalist!
Brider un shvester,
lomir geyn tsuzamen,
Lomir Nikolaykelen
bagrobn mit der mamen!
Kozakn, zhandarmen!
arop fun di ferd!
Der rusisher keyser
ligt shoyn in dr'erd!
English:
On every street you go
you hear rumblings.
Men, women, children, families
are talking about strikes.
Brothers, enough of your drudgery,
enough of borrowing,
We're going on strike,
Brothers, let us free ourselves!
Brothers and sisters,
let us join hands,
Let's break down
little Tsar Nikolai's walls!
Hey, hey, down with the police!
Down with the ruling class of Russia!
Brothers and sisters,
let's forget formalities,
Let's shorten
little Nikolai's years!
Yesterday he was driving
a little wagon full of trash,
Today he's become
a capitalist!
Brothers and sisters,
let's all get together,
Let's bury little Nikolai
with his mother!
Cossacks and gendarmes,
get down off your horses!
The Russian Tsar is already
dead and buried!
But "Daloy Politsey" was just the warm-up act. Their most famous tune, "Di Shvue" (The Oath), wasn't just a catchy jingle—it was a full-throated declaration of class solidarity that would make your average TikTok activist virtue signal until completion. Picture thousands of Jewish workers, arms linked, singing in Yiddish about international brotherhood while pledging themselves to the cause.
Di Shvue (The Oath)Recorded version available on YouTube
Yiddish:
Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt
Ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,
Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, di fon iz greyt,
Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt!
A shvue, a shvue, af lebn un toyt.
Himl un erd veln undz oyshern
Eydes vet zayn di likhtike shtern
A shvue fun blut un a shvue fun trern,
Mir shvern, mir shvern, mir shvern!
Mir shvern a trayhayt on grenetsn tsum bund.
Nor er ken bafrayen di shklafn atsind.
Di fon, di royte, iz hoykh un breyt.
Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt!
A shvue, a shvue, af lebn un toyt.
English:
Brothers and sisters in toil and poverty
All who are separated and dispersed
Together, together, the flag is ready
She waves in anger, she is red with blood!
An oath, an oath, of life and death!
Heaven and earth will hear us,
The light stars will bear witness.
An oath of blood and an oath of tears,
We swear, we swear, we swear!
We swear a loyalty without borders to the Bund.
Only it can free the slaves now.
The flag, the red flag, is high and wide.
She waves in anger, she is red with blood!
An oath, an oath, of life and death!
It was beautiful, it was powerful, and it represented a vision of Jewish liberation that was about to be tested by the brutal realities of the 20th century.
The Bund's central thesis, above all else, was elegantly simple: Jewish liberation couldn't happen in isolation. They argued—somewhat correctly, I might add—that anti-Semitism was fundamentally a tool of the ruling class to divide workers and prevent them from organizing collectively. Their solution? Build bridges. Forge alliances. Create a multi-ethnic workers' movement so powerful that the Tsar would shit his royal pants.
And in the years leading up to the 1905 Russian Revolution, it looked like they might actually pull it off. The Bund organized massive strikes that paralyzed entire cities. They formed armed self-defense units that protected Jewish neighborhoods from pogroms. They even helped create the first soviets (workers' councils) in cities like Vilnius and Minsk. For a brief, shining moment, it seemed like the rainbow coalition might actually work—Jewish workers marching alongside Polish workers, Russian workers, Lithuanian workers, all united against the Tsarist regime.
The Bund's influence quickly began to extend beyond the Pale. They became founding members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party—the same organization that would later split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. At the 1903 party congress, however, their vision of ethnic solidarity faced its first major test. The Bund demanded recognition as the sole representative of Jewish workers within the party, arguing that Jewish workers faced unique forms of oppression that required specific organizational forms. When the party refused, the Bund walked out—a move that ironically helped Lenin's Bolsheviks gain a majority (the word "Bolshevik" literally means "majority"). Still, they were, in essence, the original intersectional leftists, decades before anyone had coined the term or ruined it on Reddit.
Alas, here's where the story takes a turn from inspiring to "oy gevalt." While the Bund was building its revolutionary workers' movement and seeking solidarity across ethnic lines, pogroms once again reared their ugly head throughout the Pale. The brutal reality of ethnic hatred manifested itself at the exact moment they were trying so hard to transcend it. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was particularly devastating—49 Jews murdered, hundreds injured, and thousands of homes and businesses destroyed in a city where the Bund had built one of its strongest cross-ethnic networks.
In cities like Kishinev and Odessa, the betrayal was bitter beyond words. Many of their supposed socialist allies in other ethnic groups—the very comrades they had organized strikes with, shared revolutionary literature with, sung "The Internationale" with—either stood by silently or, in some cases, actively participated in the violence. Jewish workers who had marched alongside their Polish and Russian comrades found themselves abandoned when the mobs came. Former comrades who had once shared bread and revolutionary dreams now stood among the perpetrators, their internationalist principles evaporating in the heat of ethnic rage.
The revolution of 1905 failed, and the Tsarist regime came back with a vengeance. The Bund went underground again, their newspapers banned, their leaders arrested or exiled. But they persisted, organizing in secret, maintaining their vision even after it had been brutally betrayed.
A further blow came with the rise of the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his crew had about as much patience for Jewish cultural autonomy as your average child has for the Haggadah. They saw the Bund's emphasis on Jewish identity as "bourgeois nationalism" and systematically dismantled the organization after the 1917 Revolution. Bundist leaders were arrested, their newspapers shut down, their cultural institutions liquidated. What the Tsarist regime couldn't accomplish through pogroms, the Bolsheviks achieved through bureaucracy.
But the true tragedy unfolded in the 1930s and 1940s. As the Shoah descended upon Eastern Europe, the very communities where the Bund had built its rainbow coalition became killing fields. Vilnius, Warsaw, Minsk—cities that had once echoed with "Di Shvue" and "Daloy Politsey"—became the sites of ghettos and mass executions. The Bundists who survived the initial Soviet repression often met their end in the Nazi death camps, their dream crushed by the ultimate expression of ethnic hatred.
Consider Mordechai Gebirtig, a Jewish poet, Bundist, and folksinger from Kraków with an electric smile who wrote cheerful labor songs like "Ejns, tswej, draj, fir, arbetlose senen mir! / One, two, three, four, we are the unemployed!" His songs became staples of Yiddish theatre productions wherever they were performed, lovingly sung the world over. He was shot by Germans in the Kraków Ghetto, occupied Poland, during the darkest days of the Shoah.
What little remained of Bundist Jewry after the war would be dealt a final blow soon enough. The post-war period saw Stalin finish the job with his iconic and systematic purges, leaving the Bund little more than a memory—a beautiful, tragic memory of what might have been. The organization that had once mobilized 40,000 members, that had organized armed self-defense units and mass strikes, that had created a vibrant Yiddish cultural renaissance, was systematically erased from Soviet history books.
The Bund's story is particularly poignant when compared to the undeniable successes of the Zionist movement throughout the 20th century and beyond. There were many among the Bundists who not only pitied, but loathed the Zionists. They rejected what they saw as Zionist pessimism toward immovable ethnic divisions, interpreting the desire to relocate to the ancestral homeland as a cowardly retreat from the world stage. This sentiment can be clearly observed in songs such as "Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn - Oh, You Foolish Little Zionists."
Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn
Recorded version available on YouTube
Yiddish:
Oy, ihr narishe tsionistn
Mit ayer narishn seykhl
Ihr mag dokh geyn tsu dem arbeter
Un lernen bai im seykhl!
Ihr vilt undz forn keyn Yerushalaim!
Mir zaln dortn golodayen
Mir viln beser zain in Rusnland
Mir veln zikh bafrayen!
English:
Oh you foolish little Zionists
With your utopian mentality
You'd better go down to the factory
And learn the worker's reality
You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We'd rather stay in the Diaspora
And fight for our liberation
The bitter irony is that history proved the Zionists right in the most horrific way possible. When push came to shove, the Bund's non-Jewish socialist comrades abandoned them wholesale. Its ideological foundations were systematically destroyed by pogroms, Soviet repression, and ultimately the Shoah. The dream of cross-ethnic solidarity as championed by the Bund, much like the events of Kristallnacht, lay shattered in the streets of a Europe on fire.
The tragedy of the Bund isn't that they failed—it's that they represented a beautiful, radical vision of Jewish liberation that history ultimately proved untenable for the times.
The Zionists, meanwhile, were building a state that would go on to provide refuge for millions (including former Bundists)—an achievement that all but cemented Zionism's staunch pragmatism in the minds of many Jews around the world today. The message, for most, was this: The "marketplace of ideas" coined by Holmes had spoken. The Bund had lost.
Still, the Bund's vision of a rainbow coalition hadn't fully faded into obscurity. For many, the theory wasn't wrong—it was just tragically premature. Back across the pond, the Jewish left (which had faced similar challenges leading up to and, of course, during the war) was still kicking. Sure, the horrors of the Shoah had deterred many optimists from the cause. Additionally, two subsequent world wars had all but stalled most of America's discourse around domestic policy. But most Jews hadn't given up—they were just licking their wounds and biding their time.
The vision outlined by the Bundists would, therefore, remain in slumber for some years. The post-war period of 1945-1960 would see America's hands full with a number of new international crises unfolding. The Jewish community in the states, now turning its attention to the fledgling state of Israel, had plenty on its plate as well with the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1956 Suez Crisis. But soon the dream of a rainbow coalition would resurface in a big way. By the 1960s, racial unity was becoming groovy again.
The civil rights movement gained momentum, anti-war protests rocked college campuses, and a new generation of activists was once again dreaming of building bridges across racial and ethnic lines. The 1960s saw its share of ups and downs along the path to the other side of the rainbow—from the hope of the 1963 March on Washington to the devastation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. By the end of the decade in the year 1969, the vision was not only clear, its new champions had decided enough was enough. It was once again time to act.
Enter Fred Hampton and the now officially minted "Rainbow Coalition"—the big enchilada to which I have been alluding, the Bund's vision reincarnated in the crucible of Chicago's urban struggle. If the Bund was the theoretical blueprint for cross-ethnic solidarity, the Rainbow Coalition was its practical, street-level implementation. And what an implementation it was! Picture this: Black Panthers, Appalachian "hillbillies" from the Young Patriots Organization, and Puerto Rican Young Lords all marching together under one banner. It was the kind of coalition that would have made the old Bundists weep with joy.
Fred Hampton, the charismatic 21-year-old leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, understood precisely what the Bund had argued decades prior, and delivered its gospel to the American masses with such eloquence that few could ignore it for long. He famously replaced "white man" with "capitalist" in the Panther's Ten-Point Program—a rhetorical move straight out of the Pale of Settlement, where Jews had subbed "gentile" for "capitalist" in their own liberation struggles. The Young Patriots, those "dislocated hillbillies" from Kentucky and West Virginia, weren't just tolerated by Hampton—they were embraced as comrades. They even kept their Confederate flags, arguing that they were symbols of poor white resistance, not racism. Personally, I find their argument to be a load of shit... but you gotta admit the level of restraint shown by the Black Panther Party towards such flagrant displays of ignorance—all in the pursuit of maintaining the coalition's collective bargaining power—is absolutely awe-inspiring. A level of nuance and strategic might sorely missing on today's college campuses and town squares.
Once more, the Rainbow Coalition (like the Bund before it) wasn't about holding hands and singing "Kumbaya." That was for the '69 attendees of Woodstock next door in upstate New York—the ones who would become bankers and executives, not label themselves enemies of the state. The Rainbow Coalition organized free breakfast programs for children, health clinics for the uninsured, and legal services for the oppressed. They marched on police stations to protest brutality and organized against gentrification. In other words, they did the actual work of building community power while everyone else was arguing about theory. At its peak, the coalition included not just the Panthers, Patriots, and Lords, but also Rising Up Angry, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and the Red Guard Party. It was a beautiful, chaotic, multi-ethnic mess of radical organizing that actually worked.
American Jews, of course, were there all along, fighting beside Panthers, Patriots, and Lords (oh my). Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement was substantial and often overlooked—from the two Jewish activists (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner) murdered alongside James Chaney in Mississippi, to the countless Jewish lawyers who provided legal defense for civil rights workers, to the disproportionate number of Jewish students who participated in Freedom Summer.
And speaking of Jewish students, let's talk about a bright young socialist from Brooklyn who was just beginning to cut his political teeth during this period. A certain Bernie Sanders made his first appearance on the stage of political theater in 1963, when he was arrested by Chicago police while protesting school segregation alongside members of what would later become the Rainbow Coalition. The arrest wasn't just a youthful indiscretion—it was a formative experience that would shape his entire political career. Here was a Jewish activist, inspired by the same cross-racial solidarity that had animated the Bund, getting his hands dirty in what would become a life-long struggle for justice.
And then, of course, the state crushed Fred Hampton like so many before him. Because that's what states do to rainbow coalitions and charismatic butterflies. The FBI under COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) saw Hampton's ability to unite people across racial lines as the ultimate threat. An informant named William O'Neal infiltrated the Panthers, drugged Hampton, and provided the floor plan for the December 4, 1969 predawn raid that left Hampton and Mark Clark dead in a hail of police bullets. The message was clear: cross-racial solidarity would not be tolerated.
The movement had taken a significant blow, one which would send it back to the underground for the next decade, but the vision for a rainbow coalition didn't die with Hampton either.
Enter Jesse Jackson, the charismatic Baptist minister who saw the power of the rainbow coalition concept and decided to mainstream it in the 1980s. Jackson's Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and later the National Rainbow Coalition represented a more moderate, electoral version of Hampton's radical vision. Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns brought the concept of a "rainbow coalition" into mainstream American politics, arguing that progressive change required building bridges between Black, Brown, White, Latino, Asian, Native, Jewish, and all other (willing) progressive voters.
For American Jews watching Jackson's campaign unfold, it was a familiar and warmly welcomed tune. As if the clock had struck midnight once more, the rainbow was peeking out from the clouds. There was that particular resonance again—the Bund was getting back together. Many Jewish activists, particularly those who had grown up with stories of the Bund from their grandparents, saw in Jackson's coalition a chance to revive that old vision. They flocked to his campaigns, donating money, organizing support, and believing that maybe, just maybe, this time it would work.
And then came Hymietown.
In 1984, during his first presidential campaign, Jackson was overheard by a Washington Post reporter disparagingly referring to New York City as "Hymietown" in a conversation with a Black journalist. For those unfamiliar with the term, "Hymie" is a derogatory slur for Jewish people—a diminutive of the Hebrew name Hyman, the same name borne by Hyman Rosansky and Hyman Lachowsky, two of the Jewish anarchists whose story opened this very post. The comment exploded into a national scandal, revealing the fragility of the very rainbow coalition Jackson was trying to build.
For so many Jews, the rainbow coalition up until now had been stitching the still fresh wounds left by the annihilation of the Bund decades prior. In a single, awful moment, Reverend Jackson had nipped the arteries of an entire generation of bleeding hearts. The Hymietown incident exposed a deep-seated anti-Semitism lurking beneath the surface of his coalition, forcing a painful reckoning about the persistence of age-old prejudice even within the most progressive of movements. Jewish support for Jackson plummeted, and while he would continue his political career, the dream of a truly inclusive rainbow coalition had been dealt a serious blow.
And so the cycle continued: the Bund's timeless vision of cross-ethnic solidarity rose, inspired hope, and promptly got crushed by external forces or internal contradictions. From Vilnius to Chicago, from 1897 to 1969 to 1984, the dream persisted even as the obstacles remained formidable. The question wasn't whether the vision was beautiful—it was. The question was whether we had learned enough from past failures to make it work this time around.
Which brings us to my turn in this long story. I was born in 1997, the spawn of a bleeding heart progressive in a long line of Jewish voices. At age 8, with a tamagotchi in hand and absolutely no understanding of what a presidential election actually meant, my parents had me knocking on doors in a red state (Arizona) campaigning for Barack Obama. This wasn't just political indoctrination—it was the continuation of a family tradition, the latest chapter in the Bund's unfinished story. In middle school, I attended my share of Occupy protests, watching as my generation rediscovered the language of class struggle that the Bund had spoken so fluently. In high school, I sat in local Green Party chapters discussing climate change response, watching the environmental movement grapple with the same questions of cross-class, cross-racial solidarity that had animated the Bundists a century earlier.
By the time I was 18 and eligible to vote, there it was again—the rainbow peeking out from the clouds. Bernie Sanders hit the American mainstream like a bowl of ice cream to the Jewish gut. It was a time of my life where I had just graduated high school (2015), dropped out of my first stint with college (2016), and moved to New York City. I had, at this time, absolutely no clue what I was doing—in life, in work, spiritually, or otherwise. The only thing I knew was that Bernie Sanders was it, and I wanted in. I attended rallies, knocked on doors, corralled my peers, and did all that I could in '16 to fight for the vision I would later come to acknowledge as originally the Bund's.
From a historical lens, this time felt incredibly different. I mean Christ, America had just achieved the impossible and elected a two-term Black president. A socialist Jew seemed like a natural next step! The coalition Bernie was building—young people, working-class voters across racial lines, progressive activists—felt like the Bund's vision updated for the digital age. Here was a Jewish candidate who understood that class solidarity could bridge racial divides, who spoke about healthcare and education as universal rights rather than privileges, who argued that the real division in America wasn't between races but between the billionaire class and everyone else.
He lost, of course. Trump won. Darkness prevailed. But the left showed America something it hadn't seen before: establishment panic not behind closed CIA doors but out in the open. Corporate panic was on every television channel and sprawled all over the internet. The Democratic National Committee's manipulation of the primary process, the media's relentless attacks on Bernie's "unelectability," the sudden discovery of "superdelegates" by millions of young voters who had never heard the term before—all of it revealed that the system wasn't just biased, it was terrified. Terrified of what might happen if a rainbow coalition actually won.
The first Trump term whipped the progressive movement into a fervor unlike anything ever before. I need not recap the four years of unimaginable bullshit we all endured, but suffice to say the left emerged from it knowing exactly what it had to do: come out fucking swinging.
2020 was immensely different from 2016. We weren't holding any punches. When the primaries hit, Bernie took off running. He hit Iowa like a tornado, spread across New Hampshire like a wildfire, and sent the talking heads spinning in Nevada. The energy was electric, the organization was tighter, and the coalition was broader than ever before.
I, of course, was there doing my part. I spent the night of the Nevada primary at a vegan taco shop in Vegas surrounded by fellow canvassers, watching the results come in on a grainy projector while we celebrated what felt like unstoppable momentum. Earlier that day we had been trespassing on casino floors, radicalizing workers with knowledge and solidarity. Vegas, to its credit, has a law requiring that casinos allow their workers ample time (and pay) to vote while on the job. The promise of a free afternoon's pay away from kitchen fryers and geriatric Karens certainly won our team some votes. We were building the rainbow coalition right there in the belly of the capitalist beast—hotel workers, kitchen staff, dealers, and cleaners, coming together across racial lines to demand something better.
Then, of course, Super Tuesday hit us all like a bag of bricks. The establishment had also learned from 2016. They weren't going to let another outsider threaten their grip on power. In a stunningly coordinated display of political theater, every moderate candidate except Biden dropped out within days of each other, consolidating the anti-Bernie vote into a single, unified front. The media, which had been breathlessly covering Bernie's momentum just weeks earlier, suddenly pivoted to declaring his campaign effectively over. The message was clear: the Democratic Party would rather squeak by with an establishment candidate than win big with a socialist.
You know the rest. Biden won, but barely. Four years later (this time without a primary at all) he shit himself on stage and America found itself freefalling back into the dark ages.
Now, as a far more seasoned progressive and Jew, I find myself fighting an all too familiar battle. Had I possessed then the wisdom I have now, this turn of events would have been less shocking and hurtful to endure. I've come to understand two things with painful clarity: what the Bundists must have felt watching their dream crumble under the Czar's boot (and later the Soviets'), and—more recently—the nauseating sting of internal betrayal. Like so many others who thread the labels of "progressive" and "Jew," I've lost an immense amount of faith these past several years. It's a wound that, if I'm being honest, might never fully heal.
What haunts me are the visceral parallels between the Bund's story and our current moment. I never could have imagined, on that night in Vegas celebrating what felt like unstoppable momentum, that the deepest wounds to be inflicted on my bleeding heart wouldn't come from the MAGA hive-mind (our modern-day Czarist-bootlickers) but from the tired faces within the rainbow coalition itself—now aimed, out of despair, ignorance, prejudice, or some combination of all three, directly at its Jewish ranks. History's a fucking boomerang, and sooner or later we all get hit.
I don't have time in this post to explain the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I certainly don't have time to dispel all the misconceptions Americans have about Zionism. I have written about many of them in this post if you wish to educate yourself. Suffice it to say, it's hard not to see the writing on the wall.
Since October 7th, I have watched former leftist "friends" ration out empathy to Jews as if it were water in the desert. Many have had nothing to spare at all. Progressive peers of mine in America and beyond have instead chained themselves to the myopic dogma of an Islamist fundamentalist death cult masquerading as a legitimate government—one that holds its own people hostage to further its draconian ideals, values which represent the antithesis of everything truly progressive.
Algorithmically astroturfed by an army of young propagandists speeding along the information highway in vehicles of hate, gassed up with black Qatari gold, ignorance of the complex realities of the Middle East has boiled over to an all-time high. I'm not talking about average people who, upon witnessing the horrors of war, have extended unwavering empathy to the Palestinian people—for that is 100% admirable. I am referring to those (disproportionately found in leftist echo chambers) who not only view Palestinian liberation and Israeli self-determination (i.e., Zionism) as antithetical to one another, but who salivate over a tragedy as if it were a team sport.
I have seen women who "start by believing" deny the rape and assault of Israeli women on October 7th. I have seen sworn pacifists actively cheer for the slaying of civilians at a music festival for peace. I have seen fellow queer people excuse Hamas's executions of gay Palestinians with half-assed slogans like "resistance isn't always perfect." The same crowd who, prior to October 7th, wore masks to get away with punching Nazis now hide behind keffiyehs to get away with assaulting Jews .
They erase Jewish history, repeat blatant lies such as claiming all Jews come from Poland or hold dual citizenship, defend violence against the innocent by labeling all Israelis valid targets, and foam at the mouth over an infinitely complex conflict that, truthfully, they know fuck-all about.
I have been cornered and asked to denounce Zionism at threat of excommunication—good riddance. I have been labeled a "colonizer" for supporting Israel's right to exist, even within the framework of a two-state solution, ironically by people standing on stolen American land. I have been accused of "doing hasbara" for believing victims of sexual assault. I have been forced to watch in horror as friends I have known since high school look into a camera and state with deadpan seriousness that "Jews, through organizations such as AIPAC, secretly control America and are silencing our universities"— lest they be bothered to perform a single fucking Google search . I have been told I am hallucinating antisemitism while antisemitic incidents in the U.S. skyrocketed by 361%— a statistic that, apparently, requires citation. I have made the active decision to hide my Jewishness in real life—an experience that has become, overnight, nearly universal for American Jews on all ends of the spectrum of piety.
But most of all, I have watched the coalition which Jews have timelessly helped build become once again corrupted from within—not by the MAGA bogeyman we were all trained to fear, but by charlatans and bigots masquerading as revolutionaries.
The Bund built a rainbow coalition and saw it betrayed by socialist comrades who marched beside them one day and stood silent during pogroms the next.
Fred Hampton underestimated what the people were up against. Instead of forging durable mutual aid networks that could survive state repression, he built a movement around his own charisma—his voice, his presence, his ability to hold the room. When the state came for Hampton—and come they did, with informants and bullets and floor plans—they didn't just kill a man. They killed the entire organizational structure.
Jesse Jackson tried to institutionalize the vision, to make it electable and palatable for television. Then came the hot mic— "Hymietown"—revealing the contempt always lurking beneath the liberation theology, the willingness to mock others when cameras weren't rolling.
Each time: the promise of cross-ethnic solidarity, the elevation of a charismatic leader, the dismissal of Jewish fears as paranoia or "weaponization," and finally—the betrayal. The coalition either turns on its Jews or consumes itself. There is no third outcome in the historical record.
Which brings us to the present moment. I am referring, of course, to the mayoral election currently unfolding in good ol' New York. The latest heir to the rainbow coalition: Zohran Mamdani.
I do not write this expecting to convince anyone. This is not persuasion; it is catharsis. A desperate attempt to maintain my own sanity by naming the pattern as it repeats. You have already decided what you believe. The evidence has been everywhere for months, for those with eyes to see it.
This includes his
embrace
and
leveraging of
controversial figures like Hasan Piker—a Twitch
streamer who uses “Zionist” as an antisemitic dog
whistle so frequently that
Twitch had to enact a site-wide ban on its
misuse. Piker has also
referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred”,
hosted an actual Houthi terrorist on stream, and has repeatedly denied or defended the use of
rape by Hamas during the October 7th attacks:
My analysis: even if there was multiple rapes
that took place on October 7th, this does not
change anything for me in this dynamic.
[0:50]
Bro, what rapes did fucking Hamas do? What are
you talking about? [1:00]
Oh yeah, the stop antisemitism account that
considered me to be antisemite of the week has
also been hallucinating rapes once again. Doing
rape fantasies one again. Because they're
fucking mentally ill. [1:04].
Much like Hasan Piker, Mamdani is highly skilled in the art of cringeposting. Well before Piker's rise to fame, Mamdani harbored his own aspirations for digital notoriety. This was exemplified when, under the moniker "Young Cardamom" in 2017, he released a bizarre track on Soundcloud—a song that included a shoutout of "love" to the "Holy Land Five," a group of men convicted of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas.
There is also his cheerful meeting with Imam Siraj Wahhaj—cited by Mamdani in a proud tweet as "one of the nation's foremost Muslim leaders." A man whose beliefs are perhaps best encapsulated by his own Wikipedia page:
Wahhaj has made statements in support of Islamic laws over liberal democracy. He also supports capital punishments such as stoning for adultery and cutting off of hands for thievery. He has said: "Islam is better than democracy. Allah will cause his deen [Islam as a complete way of life], Islam to prevail over every kind of system, and you know what? It will happen."[11] He has also said: "If Allah says 100 strikes, 100 strikes it is. If Allah says cut off their hand, you cut off their hand. If Allah says stone them to death, through the Prophet Muhammad, then you stone them to death, because it’s the obedience of Allah and his messenger—nothing personal.
NOTE: The citations for this section have been defaced—a clear sign of Wikipedia being at ideological war with itself. These passages originate from an interview with Wahhaj for the book American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion. Earlier revisions of the page included this source, which is now conspicuously marked as [citation needed].
The page also conveniently omits his views on homosexuality:
Wahhaj has denounced homosexuality and lesbianism as "diseases," advised followers to "make them [gay people] feel uncomfortable," and cited Islamic scripture stating that if a man is found with another man, "the Prophet Mohammad said the one who does it and the one whom it is done to, kill them both."
This is who Mamdani chooses not only to platform but to applaud—a revealing testament to the coalition he is building. The stark irony of this alliance appears lost on the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City, which has endorsed Mamdani's campaign despite being an organization named in tribute to the 1969 Stonewall Riots, a foundational uprising against homophobic persecution.
At a 2023 Democratic Socialists of America panel, Mamdani attributed police brutality in New York City to the Israeli army. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
Zohran Mamdani is, of course, a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America's New York City chapter (NYC-DSA). He has worked alongside the organization since 2017, first as a state assemblymember and now as a mayoral candidate. At the aforementioned 2023 DSA convention, he was the keynote speaker. His candidacy received heavy backing from NYC-DSA, which naturally provided extensive, volunteer-driven organizing for his campaign. Following his primary victory, DSA membership has nearly doubled. It is not an exaggeration to state that, after the organization's falling out with AOC, Mamdani has become the face of the DSA—both in New York and nationally.
So what of the DSA and NYC-DSA's stance on antisemitism?
On October 8th, 2023, less than 24 hours after Hamas killed 1,219 human beings, they hosted a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square where several hundred demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and chanted "Resistance is justified," "Globalize the intifada," and "Smash the settler Zionist state." On October 9, 2023, the DSA San Francisco chapter put out a statement endorsing the October 7 massacre: "Violent oppression inevitably produces resistance... This weekend's events are no different. Decolonization is the only path towards peace."
As I mentioned previously, the DSA also has a bad habbit of eating their own. Choosing to severe ties with AOC over (among other nitpicks) her sponsorship of an event with Jewish leaders focused on combating antisemitism, calling it a "deep betrayal." The DSA have repeatedly condemned a ceasefire in Gaza. Zohran Mamdani's endorsed candidate to the NY State Assembly, DSA member Aber Kawas, wore a Hamas-branded headband to a pro-terror rally she organized. Another elected DSA National Political Committee member, Amy Whilem, has publicly celebrated October 7th and compared it to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The DSA's youth and student wing, YDSA, has over 100 chapters across the country and has been a key co-organizer of anti-Israel protests and university encampments nationwide. At its July 2024 convention, the group passed a resolution endorsing the "Student Intifada" — an organizing movement whose participants have engaged in harassment, targeted protests, and vandalism in an effort to pressure universities to divest from Israeli companies and organizations, companies that do business in Israel, and increasingly to call for the complete shunning of "Zionist" organizations from campus. According to Hillel International, the world's largest Jewish campus organization, there have been over 2,334 reports of antisemitic incidents on campuses during the 2024-2025 academic year alone— the most since Hillel began tracking in 2019.
I could continue citing examples of both Mamdani's and the DSA's direct involvement in fanning antisemitism endlessly, but instead I'll leave the task to the experts who had to resort to creating a "Mamdani Monitor" for this exact purpose.
To be completely honest, there is an undeniably delicious amount of irony at play here. A so-called rainbow coalition consisting of radical queers and fundamentalist Islamists, united by their thinly veiled hatred of Jews.
Then there's Mamdani's fascination with Technion—Israel's MIT, a research university with no concrete military ties to Israel beyond being founded by Jews in the Jewish state. Mamdani has promised to assess shutting down its New York campus.
And then. The Hymietown moment for the streaming age.
Asked to condemn "Globalize the Intifada," he refuses—claiming it's not his role to police speech. The contradiction is the point. Free speech for calls to worldwide violence against Jews; silence for Jewish universities. Watch him refuse. Watch him hide behind procedural fog. This is not governance. This is the logic of the purge.
The examples I have provided above only scratch the surface of this shameful campaign of hate. Let me be clear: these aren't paranoid ravings. Over 1,000 rabbis signed a joint statement condemning Mamdani and the NYC DSA for their pattern of heinous antisemitism. That's the collective alarm bell of a community that has seen this movie before.
Governance is hard. Enacting progressive policy—in a city with hostile federal government, neoliberal governor, broken council—requires a real rainbow coalition. Mass enough to transform rather than merely react. History shows what happens without one: the movement eats its own and then dies. Finds enemies within because it cannot defeat enemies without. Sacrifices the vulnerable to maintain ideological purity.
Mamdani's coalition ain't a rainbow—it's a monochromatic shit-stain straight out of the history books. We have seen this movie before. We know how it ends.
I will be the least surprised person on Earth when he fails to enact a single economic policy—no childcare, no rent freeze, no public bank—instead blaming "Zionists" or "AIPAC" for his noble failures.
History's a fucking boomerang. Try again next time.
Update, Day 1: As predicted. Mamdani has revoked the IHRA definition of antisemitism—the international standard adopted by dozens of nations. The Jewish community's definition of hatred against ourselves is not welcome in our own city. We have seen this movie before.
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