MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The alternative to zionism
Given the dehumanising vision propagated by Israel, how vital it is to highlight the radical, humane and beautiful world of the Bund, says HENRY BELL
IN THE BEGINNING: The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland and Russia - the Bund, was founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, in October 1897 by a group of Jews who were profoundly influenced by Marxism - their goal was to attract East European Jews to the emergent Russian revolutionary movement
[Sharon Rudahl and Michael Kluckner] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Bund
Sharon Rudahl and Michael Kluckner
Between the Lines, £22.50
THE late Scottish Marxist Neil Davidson described the political division in Jewish Europe as one between two different responses to the brutality of anti-semitism.
One was to see that the oppression and persecution of Jews necessitated a new society in a Jewish majority state: this was zionism and ended in the catastrophe we see today. The other response was to view the oppression and persecution of Jews as inherent and brutal aspects of capitalist oppression that necessitated a new society for everyone: a society free from capitalism, and from the state. This was socialism, communism, Bundism, and its many lives and legacies continue to exist today, though they are often erased or suppressed.
One such legacy is the beautiful new graphic novel The Bund by Sharon Rudahl and Michael Kluckner.
More from this author
HENRY BELL notes the curious confluence of belief, rebuilding and cheap materials that gave rise to an extraordinary number of modernist churches in post-war Scotland
HENRY BELL takes issue with the assertion that basic income is a remedy for poverty when it doesn’t address the inbuilt inequality of capitalism
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
HENRY BELL is moved by the account of scientists under seige in Leningrad who preferred to starve rather than sacrifice their life-saving work
