This post-Zionist Millennial singer promotes a defunct socialist Jewish movement

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Had you happened to find yourself on a Thursday early in 2018 at the Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) in Vienna – site of the balcony from which, in March of 1938, Adolf Hitler announced the Anschluss annexing Austria to Germany – you would have encountered a recurrent scene there. Masses of demonstrators protesting against the extreme right coalition established in the final days of the previous year.

Facing the demonstrators, you might have seen a young woman singing a song from the days of the 1905 Revolution in Czarist Russia, adapted to the place and circumstances. And had you strained your ears, you would have discerned that the song was being performed in a rare linguistic meld, to say the least – German and Yiddish.

“The audience already knew the song and joined in with me, and that was a magical moment,” recalls that activist singer, Isabel Frey. “Out of the protest a political movement was born of which I am a part, and the song became the movement anthem.”

Isabel Frey is a daughter of “one of those Viennese families” of the well-off bourgeoisie. She didn’t grow up on Yiddish, revolutionary ideology or political activism. Nevertheless, it seems that she is succeeding in blending all of those into a complete and meaningful message.

She was active in the weekly “Thursday Protests” against the Austrian right-wing coalition government, and is now a member of a new Viennese political party called Left and ran for the Vienna City Council on its ticket in the historically Jewish Leopoldstadt neighborhood. At the same time, she is pursuing a musical career, and released an album last year of revolutionary Yiddish songs called “Millenial Bundist.” For Frey, the move away from Zionism has become revolutionary, leftist, socialist and very artistic neo-Bundism.

Millennial Bundist? Define Millennial, define Bundist.

“Millennial? I was born in 1994 and grew up into the new millennium. One of the things that characterizes the people of my generation is a less optimistic outlook on the world, at least on the economic side, relative to our parents’ generation.

The 1947 symbol of the Bund in Poland.

“‘Bundist’ is of course something much older. The Bund – the Federation – was a Jewish socialist and autonomist political party founded in the Russian Empire in 1897. The Bundist ideology called for economic and social justice and equality, along with political rights for Jews as individuals and as a Yiddish-speaking national minority. Traditionally, this is the ideology that is between assimilationist and universalist Communism and Hebrew-speaking separatist, nationalist Zionism in Palestine.

“Neo-Bundism today is a revival of the idea of a non-nationalist Diaspora Jewish identity. It is common among young Jews and its origin is the identity crisis that is prevalent today in Jewish communities around the world — a crisis of the legitimacy of existence. In the small Viennese Jewish community, I am one of the few who belong to the Neo-Bundists, but we are everywhere.”

That’s the political and cultural environment. Who are you within that?

Isabel Frey. ‘I came to Israel to live on a kibbutz. I really believed that this was a viable socialist utopia.’
Michele Pauty

“My father is Jewish and my mother wasn’t born Jewish, but she had a lot of connections with Israel because my uncle married an Israeli woman, and her nephews were Israelis and she visited Israel a lot. She also survived a terror attack at the El Al ticket counter in Vienna, and therefore her conversion had precedence and also prevented my brother and me from feeling confused about our Jewish identity.

“I had a childhood that was half Jewish and half non-Jewish; Austrian public school during the week, and on weekends, activity in the Hashomer Hatzair movement,” – the left-wing labor Zionist movement associated with what is now the Meretz party in Israel – “the only one that was available to someone who didn’t come from a religious background. So Zionism and identification with Israel really filled a void that had been left by religion. But today I am no longer oriented towards Israel, but rather the Diaspora in Europe and the United States.”

And what’s wrong with ordinary Jewish life?

“It is full of contradictions. The Jewish establishment is rightist without understanding Judaism in a broader context. When they say that they are fighting antisemitism, it’s very often fighting Muslim minorities and refugees. And they paradoxically are the ones who are spreading Islamophobia.

“In my opinion, this is morally unacceptable and blatantly anti-Jewish. We have to be in solidarity with all the people who are discriminated against and the refugees even when this isn’t comfortable. And it’s a fundamental and strategic mistake that the establishment is making. The same applies to Israel. They think everything has been resolved because we have strength. But it doesn’t resolve conflicts, it just perpetuates and exacerbates them.”

If so, what is your Judaism?

“Practically everything that I am has to do with Jewish identity. Growing up as a Jew in Europe in these times is an unusual experience, particularly in contemporary Vienna. There is an assumption of normality and acceptance of Jews, but we are not fully integrated. Because we are never really fully integrated, there is always a ‘something else’ factor in a country that has a Christian hegemony.

“I’m not systematically discriminated against, but I am also not entirely integrated. And that is the same experience of all of my Jewish friends, who have a background similar to my own. We go to school and go skiing just like everyone else, yet we are still looking for something, although we don’t know what it is. And I for one cannot suffice with ‘Israel is the common denominator.’ That is shallow and that is artificial. The way through which I arrived at Yiddish culture was through a realization that national symbols do not provide the response that I need.”

A response to what?

“The old narratives of the Jewish establishment, in the State of Israel and everywhere else, no longer speak to us. It is the legitimacy crisis of Zionism in the 21st century. The Zionism of today has turned into a brutal but also banal expression of national identity, of nationalism. Flag, falafel, Tel Aviv’s promenade, and nothing more. Which is why increasingly more Jewish young people who were raised on these symbols are beginning to ask themselves questions once they confront other historical narratives. It happens at university and wherever else you interact with the outside world, particularly with other minorities.”

Fateful trip to Israel

For Frey, this disillusionment happened in Israel itself. She arrived there after high school with fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair, 18 participants from Europe and the United States, all of them from liberal Zionist backgrounds. They spent a year here, and all of them, she says, left the country at the end of that year with a crisis of identity that continues to this day.

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“Some of us simply walked away from everything. How is it possible, in this reality, to continue to speak of our never-ending sacrifice and about the fact that we are always facing existential danger? These are the dangers of the 1970s, not of today. But in the Jewish institutions and in the Israeli policies of today – even the more liberal ones – the clock has stopped. They are still stuck in the cliches, and they want me and other members of my generation to continue, to clone them to the next generation. That isn’t going to happen.”

Could you elaborate? What did you see and experience that caused you to respond in this way?

“One of my most difficult moments was a visit to Hebron in the West Bank. All of a sudden, I understood that I had been living in an illusion that the occupation was at a much more preliminary stage, and that it could change. In the course of this on-site visit it became clear that the settlers had won. It filled me with a sense of historical dissonance. I understood that I hadn’t been told the whole story.

“I came to Israel to live on a kibbutz. I really believed that this was a viable socialist utopia. And to put it mildly, I was surprised. Privatization, exploited guest workers from Thailand, socialist word and a thoroughly globalized reality. When I met young Israelis, nearly all of them would ask: What are you doing here? And when I answered that I belonged to a socialist youth movement, they could not understand it. A lot of them said: I want to move to Berlin, I am dreaming of getting European citizenship. When I asked them about getting involved politically to fight against the injustices of the occupation, their response was: You don’t have the right to do so – you weren’t in the army. It was a jarring experience.”

After spending that year in Israel, Frey became more politically involved. She lived in Amsterdam, where she attended university and became a political activist against racism and for socialism and social responsibility. Throughout her years in Amsterdam, she was completely detached from the city’s Jewish community. Conversely, she came up against criticism of Israel and expressions of solidarity with Palestine of a sort she had never known before. Her crisis of identity only intensified.

“I felt that that was the challenge, how to be both Jewish and humanist/leftist/liberal at the same time,” she said. “Until then, the only Jewish identity that I knew was committed to solidarity with Zionism in Israel, and suddenly I was facing a double identity crisis.”

Why double?

“From the inside, it was everything that I had encountered in Israel and the disappointments that derived from that, and from the outside, the confrontation with alternate narratives about which I had not known.”

A demonstration in Vienna against the far-right coalition in Austria, in 2018.
Ronald Zak / AP

From Marley and Pink Floyd to Yiddish

Frey has always sung. She learned her first song at synagogue, as part of the classic Jewish-Israeli anthology. She also learned how to play the flute, and during the year she lived in Israel she taught herself to play guitar. The combination of singing and accompanying herself became second nature to her, at first with a lot of Bob Marley and Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, she initially did not think of studying music and instead took up political science, sociology and anthropology.

Only when she began appearing at protest rallies as part of her political activism did she understand that this was the direction she would take. She returned to Vienna and studied music therapy. It took her another year and a half to realize that she loved to learn, but did not want to be a music therapist. She wanted to be a musician.

“I very quickly understood that to be a musician means to travel the world and to act like a musician. I arranged a concert of workers’ songs in Yiddish, I set up a website for myself, and then this blended career of music, politics and protest began taking off.”

With Yiddish being the link between all of them.

“Yes. The Yiddish and the identity are developing in a very specific way for me. It always relates to my political beliefs. I am an activist. We organize public spaces, expressing solidarity against the deportation of refugees. That is part of my blended Yiddishist life. I sing politics, and politics is reflected in my singing. And I learn a tremendous amount on my own, because there is no such thing as a conservatory of Yiddish music. I do a great deal of lessons with singers and composers, I take part in international workshops, I have a duo and also trio, with other Yiddish musicians. There are regular Yiddish music festivals at which young musicians are able to learn with people who have devoted their lives to this unique music. That is how I got into the dynamic international Yiddish scene in Canada, in New York, in Berlin and even in Vienna. And it is not very connected with Israel.”

In Israel, Yiddish is first and foremost linked with one singer – Chava Alberstein.

“I am closest to Chava Alberstein. I think that she always had a strong influence on me. Her records were the first ones that I ever heard. Her guitar and her songs. Only recently did I get to know her personal story. How courageous it was of her to sing in Yiddish, to adopt a Diaspora approach in Israel, which is so focused on Hebrew culture. For her, it also became political expression. She has a deep relationship with the Yiddish repertoire -not as if it were something in a museum, but as a living culture.”

Who else has influenced you?

“I’m very influenced by early 20th century Vienna , the Vienna of literature and of coffee houses. I spend a lot of time in these cafes, immersed in their compositions. This was also an expression of a Jewish secular culture in the Diaspora, although not in Yiddish, but in German. Stefan Zweig’s ‘The World of Yesterday’ is part of the present in which I live. The rest is composed of the influences of the protest culture and the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger. And a whole lot of Beatles.”

Austrians demonstrate against the far-right coalition, in Vienna in 2018.
Ronald Zak / AP

You are nostalgic.

“Yes. Not for settlements and occupations; yes for counterculture and the protests of the workers’ movement. From the Jewish Bund to Joan Baez. Identity and religion are important to me, even though I do not call myself religious. I’m the only woman in my family who has done it all, including reading the Torah at my bat mitzvah through an egalitarian, liberal synagogue. And that is a big part of my current political personality. From it stems the understanding that you have to preserve the tradition and at the same time wage the struggle for change, for equality.

“I’m trying to live the tradition and also the progressiveness. It is the ‘Galut’ (exile) Jewish experience. I find it thrilling. It makes life exciting and beautiful. It gives me something to lean upon. It is what makes me what I am. Profound involvement in one place and also somewhere else, at the same time. And I am not the only person doing so. I have a group of ‘Diasporist’ Jewish comrades with whom I regularly meet and organize with in Vienna, and there are several other such groups even in the German-speaking world.”

I see you and those in your generation facing four crises: Zionist. European. Bourgeois. And Socialist. So how is this album the answer to all of the crises?

“The album is a synthesis of a great deal of things without which it would have been impossible to synchronize. Yiddish folk culture, leftism, Diasporism, protest music mixed with protest movements and being Viennese. The wonderful and delicate relations between Yiddish and German, the Eastern European Jewish identity and the assimilation of Western European Jewry into German culture.”

So you are basically still inside the Jewish ghetto?

“Some of the songs on the album are very Jewish, but some are really not. The soundtrack of the album is from that demonstration. I’m not an artist of the studio and the concert hall, but of street protests.”

On what basis did you choose the songs of the album?

“It was an evolving process. When I started singing in Yiddish, I did not know the language and I had access to a limited playlist. Which is why the first song was the very familiar ‘Dona Dona.’ Expanding my knowledge of Yiddish and its culture enabled me to broaden my search for quality Yiddish music. And I am always seeking the opportunity to add a real-time political dimension to it. So even those songs that do not have any political significance I am imbuing with interpretation and meaning through my lead-ins to the songs.”

For instance?

“Take the poem ‘Margaritkelekh’ [‘Little Daisies’] by the poet and author Zalman Shneour. At first glance, it is a love song between ‘Little Chava who walks dreamily’ and the tall young man, “with eyes as black as coal.’ But in the greater context, as Yiddish singer Daniel Kahn once told me, this song is a Rorschach test for the listeners. Is it a love song or is it forbidden sexual harassment? Repression and exploitation? Did you ever listen to the words? ‘Tell me if I can embrace you, if I can caress you, if I can kiss you, if I can hmm-hmm.’ ‘ My mother says I can’t, my mother says I can’t, my mother is old and mean.’ ‘What mother? Where’s mother? There are only trees around here, only trees, tra la la.’ I chose this song in order to speak about #MeToo and about the whole world of discrimination and sexual exploitation of women. The fact that this is not completely evident when hearing the song only proves how normalized sexual harassment has become.

“Or take, for example Mordechai Gebirtig, the greatest writer of Yiddish songs of the 20th century. It is impossible to sing Gebirtig in Austria or in Germany without the context of the Holocaust. But it is also impossible to reduce him only to the Holocaust. He is not the soundtrack of the destruction, he is much more than that. So I am seeking to make him present in the here and now. In the song ‘Kinder Yorn’ [‘Childhood Years’], he describes the years leading up to the destruction: ‘The years of our youth, the years of childhood and of purity/ That glorious time is forever preserved in my heart.’

“These words can be read as an expression of yearning and of nostalgia for the beautiful days before the hell. And because it is difficult in Austria and Germany to leave the theater of memory, I, as a Yiddish musician, may not be compelled to speak about the Holocaust, but it is always in the background.”

But you are a young woman, an activist, a dynamic person – who is singing in a dead language. Can anyone even understand you?

“It isn’t a dead language! It may be a language whose cultural context no longer exists, but Yiddish songs are not only the words themselves, but a revival of an entire culture. No one wants to revive the shtetl, but there is renewed interest. As a singer, I know the significance, and I am attempting to make it accessible. Most of the people who hear my singing do not understand; therefore, the meaning is not in the verbal interpretation of the words, but rather in their symbolization. Yiddish is no longer a living everyday language of a secular Jewish culture. But it carries symbolic significance for Jewish culture as a whole.And what is it symbolic of?

“It isn’t one single thing. These are symbols that depend on the context. The Yiddish that I symbolize, the radical, socialist, non-religious, Jewish leftism, is only one of many facets of Yiddish culture.”

Itzhak Luden, the last of Israel’s Bundists, addressing a conference of the group, in 1972.

Which brings us back to your political career.

“Austria may be a good welfare state in relation to other countries, but there are a lot of defects in it. And there is still a lot to do to bring about a better society. The [municipal] party that I represent, a Viennese left-wing party, in conjunction with the Communist Party of Austria, wants to revert to ‘Red Vienna’ [a nickname for the city during the years in which the socialist left was in power, from 1918 to 1934], and in elections held last October we won in several districts of the city. I myself was elected on a list in the district in which I ran, but opted to continue in my academic studies toward my Ph.D. on Yiddish music. In any case, I am continuing to engage with the public through my combination of political activism and music.”

So there is the album, and the performances at protests. What else is there in this combination?

“In politics you have to touch people. The right understood that and it is drawing in the people in exactly these sensitive places. But in the politics of the left, the emotional and affective dimension of politics is sometimes lacking. Music enables me to do precisely that – to reach people in a different way. And I do it in a language that has a profound symbolic meaning. Through the music, I am trying to touch people. I sing workers’ songs, I sing about the suffering of women and the social struggle for a better world.

“You don’t have to be Jewish or be a Yiddish speaker to identify with these things. One of my best concerts was in Linz, in Upper Austria. I was invited to perform for the Association of Christian Trade Unions and I was worried it would be uncomfortable to be seen as ‘exotic’ because I am a Jewish musician singing in Yiddish. But it was simply wonderful. They understood my music so much, even though they weren’t Jews, but because they were union workers. I realized they had a greater connection with the songs than I did. Because I have a bourgeois background, whereas they instinctively absorbed the profound meaning of the workers’ rights and their troubles.

“You can do it with music, not with speeches. It’s the same with protests. At demonstrations you have to stir up the emotions of the participants. And music has the power to do so. In particular those songs that were written especially for the streets of the last century.”

What’s next?

“I am working on a new album with a collaborator, of feminist folk songs in Yiddish sung arranged a capella in duets, and I hope that it will come out early next year. I was supposed to get to Israel this September, at the invitation of the Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem, but due to COVID my visit was postponed. I was in Israel last July for a month to study Yiddish, and I also got in touch with a lot of activists, traveled to the West Bank and also performed at the Willy-Brandt Center. And I am hoping to reach Israeli audiences with my music, both the oldsters and the young folks. I am also interested in visiting the Palestinian Authority and meeting with young artists of my age. To learn, to share.”

You do know what is happening to Yiddish in Israel, yes?

“I know that the Yiddishists there are a small and marginal community. But I think that the Diaspora dimension and its associated memories are something that in spite of its distance from the mainstream is something that still exists among many people. It has the potential to develop into a new cultural thing, one that is different from the nationalist narrative. I know that it is naive, but I nevertheless believe in it. I am struggling, and am not willing to give in to the pessimism of the generation and of the times we are living in.”

An elections poster of the Bund hung in Kiev, 1917. The heading reads: ‘Where we live, there is our country!’

Children of the Bund

By Anshel Pfeffer

A secular Jew living in the Diaspora who does not feel him or herself to be part of the Zionist project of the State of Israel, but who is nevertheless seeking to actualize his Jewish identity, does not have an abundance of frameworks into which he or she can fit. A majority of Jewish activities and organizations around the world revolve around religious ritual and around Israel. Even the small groups of anti-Zionist Jewish activists are focused on Israel, albeit in negative terms. In the communal structure of the Jewish people living outside of Israel, there are barely any frameworks or organizations that are either not religious or are not dependent on Israel to define their identity. The academic research does address the concept of Diasporism – viewing Jewish existence and culture in the Diaspora as a central value in its own right. But in the practical world outside of academia, it is very difficult to live as a Jew with an awareness of Jewish identity that is detached from both religion and Israel.

Nevertheless, in recent years there has been increased interest in an ethical Jewish identity that is focused on the Diaspora. This is particularly so among young secular men and women who feel an increasingly growing alienation from the state of Israel due to the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian people and what they see as the sanctification of Israeli capitalism. This inclination has led to renewed interest in the ideas of the Bund, or even in what has now been described as neo-Bundism.

The Bund, or as it is known in full, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia was a political failure. It may have offered an exciting ideology that called for Yiddish-speaking secular Jewish culture, socialism, struggle for workers’ rights, unity, solidarity and a proud minority community whose members live as equal citizens in their homelands, but it did not survive the test of time. A majority of the branches and members of the movement were annihilated in the Holocaust, and those leaders who did manage to flee to the Soviet region were executed by the Stalinist regime.

Members of the Bund who survived in the West or who arrived in Israel following its establishment were unable to preserve the movement. Capitalism and Zionism were overly powerful rivals. Ironically, the last place in which the Bund, which declared itself to be a non-Zionist movement, ran as a political party was Israel. In the elections to the Fourth Knesset in 1959, the party ran but failed to receive the minimum number of votes for entry, amassing only 1,322 votes.

The World Zionist Organization and the Bund were founded only two months apart from one another, in 1897. In their initial years, they were considered to be ideological competitors of equal weight, with the Zionists declaring that the full realization of Jewish nationhood could only occur in the biblical homeland of the Land of Israel, whereas the Bundists insisted that there was no contradiction between full Jewish identity and commitment to the Jewish centers of life in eastern Europe. The differences between the two movements were reflected in the language that they adopted. Zionism joined the campaign to revive the ancient Hebrew tongue, while the Bund exalted the grand Yiddish culture, along with its writers and poets. Among the founding principles of the Bund was “Da-keit” (in English, “Hereism,” from the Yiddish word for “here”); in the local and national elections in which it ran as a Jewish workers’ party, its Yiddish-language slogan was “Wherever we live, that is where our country is.”

Almost nothing is left of the Bund of those years, aside from a few archives in France and the United States, and a secular Jewish kindergarten in Melbourne, Australia, in which the spoken language is Yiddish.

But in the 21st century, at a time when everyone is struggling with identity crises, there is renewed demand for a secular and non-Israeli Judaism, and various groups of young Jews are raising on high the Bundist slogans and images. These groups are divided into two streams: anti-Zionist Jews, in organizations such as the American “If Not Now” and the British “Jewdas,” which champion neo-Bundist values (even though a sizable percentage of the leaders and members of the Bund did not explicitly rule out the establishment of the Jewish state; they merely preferred another alternative to Jewish existence); and groups of artists – writers, translators, playwrights and musicians – who are trying to stir up a renewal of Yiddish culture as the basis for a secular Jewish culture.

There is a certain overlap between the two groups, primarily at the level of individuals who belong to both, but there is also an intrinsic tension. Anyone who considers political ideology to be a fundamental principle will not be able to tolerate collaboration with Zionists, while anyone whose primary interest is the blossoming of a nearly lost culture will wish to expand the ranks. Given the current state of affairs, the Bund will apparently remain a nostalgic footnote, or perhaps an inspiration to some. As a mass Jewish movement, it is difficult to see it resurrecting its fleeting days of glory of a century ago.