Socialism in Yiddish : The Jewish Labor Bund in Sweden

Opposition became the Bund’s condition of existence, but not opposi-tion for its own sake. The Bund was founded on the conviction that the “Jewish question” could only be resolved through the liberation of the international working class from all forms of oppression on its way to establishing a world of equality, welfare and democracy without borders – a socialist social order. There, the broad strata of the population would rule, rather than capitalist elites or communist party apparatchiks.

The Bund was one of the losers of history. The once deeply-rooted move-ment was crushed during terror and genocide, dispersed into exile, driven into its shell by overpowering political forces and undermined by assimi-lation as time wore on and the world changed. The following story is about that process at the micro-level, in a place on the edge of the world.

In this unique account Håkan Blomqvist relates a largely unknown chapter in both the historiography of the Swedish labor movement and in Swedish–Jewish history, that of the non-Zionist Jewish Arbeter Bund among refugees in Sweden during and after World War II.

Håkan Blomqvist is associate professor in history at Södertörn University and author of several respected books on the Swedish labor movement, nationalism and antisemitism.