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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 11/09/2026

Fill up your gas tanks. Things are about to get crazy.

Alt text:
Screenshot of an X (formerly Twitter) post by TheIntelFrog (@TheIntelFrog) quote-posting Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani).
The quoted post by Ryan Rozbiani states:
"Yemen Hits Saudi Arabia's East-West Oil Pipeline for First Time
This comes as BRENT CRUDE Crosses $109"
Beneath the text is a split satellite view showing a massive plume of dark black smoke billowing across the landscape in Saudi Arabia between Medina and Ha'il.
TheIntelFrog adds:
"Might be a good idea to fill your vehicles up now.
Taking this pipeline out removes 5M barrels per day from global supply. Saudi Arabia produced just under 6.25M barrels per day in August."

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mady castigan✨ 🏳️‍⚧️ @mady.cat · 11/09/2026

im from Texas too and you have my full permission to not vote for that rat fuck Talarico. Letting transphobic dems taking over the party is a sure shot to make Paxton's dream a national nightmare for trans people. Democrats own their actions and they are the ones alienating trans voters.

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onion person @junlper.beer · 11/09/2026

its so funny how little trump cared about charlie kirk dying

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Sanho Tree @sanho.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

“FPÖ recruits have a measuring device they use to detect each other's racial purity. The pseudo-scientist examines the patient's facial features and side profile, always on the lookout for a dead-giveaway "Aryan bone," said to reside somewhere in the back of a superior man or woman's head.”

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I'm not responding to every conspiracy theorist who claims Netanyahu knowingly got hundreds of Israelis killed on Oct 7 as an excuse to attack Gaza. That's wrong for usual conspiracy theory reasons, but also gets Bibi backwards. He wanted to squeeze and ignore Gaza, and arrogantly thought he could.

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Eli Sennesh @elisennesh.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

The problem with the American Bund was not just that it was more Zionist than Crabapple's neo-Bolsheviks would like, but that it consisted chiefly of living Jews going about the business of living.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I think this book is starting to break my brain. One with the random repeating of the book's title and, we're a 3rd of the way through this and NOW! NOW! the Bund is gonna do stuff, like why'd you write 172 pages! barely about them? why didn't you just start with the Polish Bund? shoot me.

Poverty exacerbates divisions. It forces people to compete over who deserves survival on such-and-such piece of land. Yet, amidst the hunger, bigotry, and bloodshed of interwar Poland, the Bund staked their claim of Hereness—their right to exist as equals in the places where they lived. To stay was not an act of naïveté, nor of weakness. “Here where I live is my country,” the Bund wrote. They accepted all the struggle this implied. Over the next two decades, the Bund would show Jewish workers that they were a people as worthy as any other. Their methods remind me of those of America’s Black Panther Party, another group of young radicals who carried guns and started free breakfast programs and asserted their people’s beauty in a country that wanted them dead. Like the Panthers, the Bund was a Marxist party built by and for oppressed and racialized others, who created a network of communal care and cultural uplift, of schools, clinics, mutual aid centers, and youth groups, backed with weapons and branded with militant chic.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

did she just farm the writing of this book out to some hard up for cash Jewish undergrad? because like she keeps making Zionist points, in this case how unwelcome as refugees Jews ALWAYS are even in enlightened Western Europe or the Golden America

Refugees lead to reaction, as we Americans should know. These Jews were “the world’s foremost problem” in the words of Henry Ford, a mass of swarthy subversives who brought with them the whiff of hectographed manuscripts and homemade bombs. Everywhere they went, the right-wing press followed. The venerable New York Times listed the Jewish birth names of the “Former East Siders Responsible for Bolshevism.” Even if Jews fled Soviet Russia, their countries of refuge saw them as Bolsheviks, just as the world saw the Syrian refugees who fled ISIS in 2015 as terrorists. Their arrival caused a panic in the good citizens of Western Europe—one that men like the young

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I being a Jew do not believe that God or Marxist theories of history make us murderers, people choose to slide on the uniforms of secret policemen and shoot people for being the "wrong" kind of person.

No matter how I searched, I never found another word about Berl Dzhik, though perhaps his name is hiding in archives in Minsk or Moscow. I don’t know if he died in the war, in the purges, in the Nazi invasion, or even, improbably, as an old pensioner in his bed. However it was, a secret policeman like him would have deserved it. Every secret policemen committed his share of murders, and Berl’s quotidian workday involved the imprisonment, interrogation, and torture of other human beings. Yet Berl was not foreordained to be a murderer. God and chance and the Dialectical Forces of History all had their parts to play. If events had occurred in a different sequence, Berl might have taken a boat to New York, gotten a job in a sweatshop, and joined a Workmen’s Circle branch like my great-grandfather Sam

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I can't overstate how this book has not talked about "cultural production" at all, it has no interest in Yiddish as a language or culture. The Book has briefly mentioned the other things before very quickly rushing off to talk about Goyish revolutionaries so I'm not feeling like the Bund did much

In the first twenty years of their existence, the Bund had accomplished many things in the areas of mutual aid, cultural production, and armed self-defense. But there was one thing that the Bund had neglected: the necessity of taking power.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I kinda have to wonder if she just does not *care* about a successful Jewish alternative to Zionism, and she wants to show a noble and self-sacrificing Jew who suffered and died like Christ for the ideals of solidarity and internationalism rather than giving in to the "evils" of Zionism and living.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

it was only in the 1930s, after the Arab Revolt that the mainstream Zionists embraced statehood over the more nebulous "Homeland" of the Balfour Declaration. So what the Bund wanted and what the Zionists wanted, Jewish self-rule was the same, just in different places (and in different languages)

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

oh man if only Jews had somewhere to go where they didn't have to live next to murderers and their self defense units were not overwhelmed by a sea of enemies around and among them, since clearly no ideology will protect them and make the acceptable

It didn’t matter who one was, or what one believed. Everyone killed Jews. Everyone raped Jews, burned their houses, threw them out of trains. When Jews tried to form self-defense units, they were outnumbered, and the sight of Jews with weapons only provoked their attackers more. Each pogrom aimed not just to kill but to humiliate, to prove the victims’ sub-humanity, to them and to an audience, often made up of the victims’ acquaintances. Pogromists—drunk, singing, laughing—slit open their neighbors’ bellies, burned their children’s babysitters alive, forced their classmates to dig their own graves. Pogromists rewarded themselves by filling their carts with so much loot it made their horses groan and selling it cheaply in the bazaars that sprung up around killing sites. Sometimes, they just left it in the gutter. Why not? They’d gotten it for free. Everyone claimed these massacres were justified. Poles said Jews sided with Ukrainians. Ukrainians said they sided with Russians. Russian Whites said they sided with Russian Reds. Russian Reds said they were capitalist exploiters. Jews were spies for every side, Christ killers, traitors, internationalist financiers, unscrupulous speculators, and, above all, revolutionaries. Everyone agreed they had it coming.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

oh wow 20 years of Bundist worker's solidarity has totally totally failed and Poland right left and center hates Jews with a burning genodicial loathing? again I feel like this is the narrative I've heard from every Zionist favoring history

As Medem wrote, every nation-state creates its own minorities, and this was especially true in Poland; ethnic Poles barely constituted a majority within the borders of the newborn state. This demography gave right-wing Polish nationalism an insecure, paranoid disposition, especially with regard to the Jews, who made up 13 percent of the population. Jews’ numerousness made them “the worst enemies” of Poland, according to one pamphlet published by the National Democrats, an economically conservative, Catholic, and luridly racist political party that would become the Bund’s most dangerous Polish antagonists. Co-founded by right-wing pamphleteer Roman Dmowski in 1897, the National Democrats, or Endeks, had spent the last twenty years building their Polish nationalism not upon the armed struggle for independence but upon genocidal antipathy toward the country’s Jews. In the now-independent Poland, they enjoyed terrorizing Jewish neighborhoods while nourishing grand dreams of mass ethnic cleansing. They yearned for a Poland free of Jews.

This sort of racism wasn’t confined to nationalists—it even infected members of the Polish left. Days after independence, workers’ parties formed soviets in most major Polish cities. Erlich joined the Lublin Soviet as the Bund’s delegate. At the first meeting, Polish socialist delegates announced that if they served alongside Jews, their own constituents would reject them. “The Polish proletariat still isn’t adult enough to understand that we need a united front” to fight the capitalists, Erlich shot back. The soviet kicked out the Jewish parties anyway.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

as mentioned earlier 119,000 Jews died in Ukraine in 1917-19 in massacres and pogroms committed by every single group, from Ukrainian Socialists, nationalists and the invading Bolsheviks, they all killed Jews, all of them, not that this book would tell you that

The Rada’s leaders were enlightened, humanistic men who envisioned a multicultural, socialist Ukraine. In keeping with these ideals, the Rada adopted the Law of National-Personal Autonomy, which provided government funding for Jews and other

minorities to run their own cultural institutions. They set up a ministry of Jewish affairs and proclaimed Yiddish an official language, to appear on street signs and exquisite new banknotes.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

in any case its a little disingenuous to act like Zionists came out of no where, I think in part the book is trying to avoid talking about them because they're every bit as socialist as the Bund and some times more so, its a modern leftist article of faith that Zionism is right wing

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I think the author is struggling here because the Zionists in question, who got not a big share of the vote (but bigger than the Bund) were the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party who believed largely the same as the Bund, but were open to Zionist membership too

into the electoral fray. There was a new competitor for the Jewish vote—the Zionists. This movement exploded in popularity after the Balfour Declaration, which gave the previously implausible idea of Jewish statehood the backing of an imperial power. Weeks before the election, 150,000 Jews demonstrated in front of Odesa’s British consulate in gratitude. Even though most of these celebrants had no intention of going to Palestine, they hoped a Jewish state might advocate for their rights in Russia. The Bund chose Raphael Abramovich and Esther Frumkin as candidates for the Constituent Assembly. Their first campaign stop was the impoverished Belarusian town of Vitebsk, where Jewish residents apologetically told the two candidates that they were voting Bolshevik because they wanted their sons to come home from the war.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I think it might be fair to say the author doesn't really care for the Bund's Jewish particularism, as you can tell from the airy dismissal of all the Bund's Jewish concerns, the pogroms in Ukraine would kill 119,000 Jews the largest mass death of Jews before the Holocaust... but who really cares?

“The Coup!” blared the front page of the Bundist newspaper Workers’ Voice in its first issue after the Bolshevik seizure of power. It was not a revolution, the writers said, but a crazy escapade by Lenin and Trotsky. But, for all the Bund’s diatribes, a reader who skipped the newspaper’s first two pages might not have realized that anything had changed. The issue was filled with discussions of the Bund’s usual concerns, like cultural work, pogroms in Ukraine, and the recently announced Balfour Declaration, in which Britain promised Jews a national home, whatever that meant, in Palestine. Like most observers, the Bund didn’t imagine that the Bolsheviks would stay in power.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

..... what? again I think the authors limitations as a human being are showing, Revolution as a purely personal aesthetic journey, because like... Lenin got what he wanted, and Kerensky had to linger on for 50 years a ghost watching Russia suffer Stalin and Soviet Communism and die, NYC isn't heaven

They were losers, yes, but what about the people who won? Within two decades, Kamenev would be shot by the state he helped build. Trotsky? Murdered in Mexico. And Lenin, whose indomitable will brought the Bolshevik Revolution into being, would scarcely have time to enjoy it. He was dead a few years later. His body was embalmed, against his wife’s wishes, then displayed like a wax doll in a mausoleum meant to legitimize the rule of Stalin, a man he had hated. Meanwhile, Alexander Kerensky was alive in New York City. He could see the sky, smell the subway stink, grab some borscht at B&H, then stop by the Bund’s archives, where someone from the old world was there to greet him. Who’s to say who came out worse?

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

again this is insane revisionism to blame the failure of an all socialist coalition government on those socialist groups who rejected the Bolshevik coup, rather than the Bolsheviks themselves who never ever wanted to share power and just did a coup to have all power.

After Erlich’s group of socialists left the Soviet, the rest of the delegates were in no mood to hear Martov’s call for unity. Why should the Bolsheviks form a government with a bunch of losers? To the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Bundists, Trotsky declared: “You are miserable bankrupts. Your role is played out; go where you ought to go—into the dustbin of history.” Martov stormed out. Loyally, Abramovich followed.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

ah cowardice and pathetic moral weakness, if only everyone had just folded to Lenin's coup and formed a government with him, a thing Lenin himself DID NOT WANT and you just wrote about Dzerzhinsky rejecting, and its all the fault of people who stood on principle and tried to fight

I can imagine a future in which Martov’s proposal had won, and the other socialist parties had built a government alongside the Bolsheviks, with all the compromises this implied. Their presence might have forestalled Lenin’s worst instincts, letting Russia develop into a flawed, impoverished, but somewhat functional

functional democracy. But this was not to be, because of right-wing socialists like the Bundist Mark Liber. These men would never compromise with the Bolsheviks, whom they saw as a pack of coup plotters and demagogues. The assault on the Winter Palace was only the latest proof. Some of these men were members of the provisional government while others loathed it, but all viewed it as a legitimate institution. No one had the right to overthrow the provisional government, least of all that scumbag Lenin.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

also as a more global point, The reason this book exists is to push Bundism as a authentic antizionist socialist Yiddish Jewish way of being. However Zionists barely appear, for a book that exists to refute them, it doesn't really talk about them at all.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Yiddish in general and the Zionists distaste for it is a particular hobby horse of antizionists and fans of 21st century Bundist aesthetic so its very weird this is the first time it comes up and gets made fun of

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Is this not ultimately the Zionist argument? declaring that Jews should and must be masters of their own fate? not allow history to just act on them but be actors in history? which as a tiny and despised minority in the Russian Empire they were unable to do even as "fellow Revolutionaries"?

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

the vibe I get is basically that the author feels that the Bolshevik were right, but that fully embracing them would not go over well, so its basically "The Bolsheviks were right about everything, but Lenin was a bad and cynical man, but also right"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

we'll see if she gets into it but its also worth saying that the Bolsheviks didn't rise to popularity and power as cleanly as she's making it sound, they rebelled in July and it was a total failure with the people rallying behind Kerensky to protect the Revolution

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

okay two things, 1 she's totally undermining the whole idea of the Bund as important by declaring Jewish liberation in the brief shiny moment after February 1917 the doing of the Russians and 2. again, we all know it ends Lenin and Stalin are coming for you.

"From their commandeered office on the posh Nevsky Prospect, the Bund sent a communiqué to The New York Times to celebrate legal equality. It was a document full of swagger, as befitting a party that had won. It closed with a statement of trust in Russian society that is all the more remarkable because it contradicted their foundational beliefs. In 1897, Martov wrote that Jews could not “rely solely on the Russian…proletariat,” who might sell them out for profit or under duress. Twenty years later, the Bund thought otherwise. “The liberation of the Jewish nation is in the faithful hands of the Russian nation,” they wrote. They allowed themselves to believe."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

The book is disinterested both in looking at the particular role of the Bund in the Revolution or what the Revolution looked like in heavily Jewish areas, I suspect because they would have involved research one can't do on the phone on the subway.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

"sapphic fervor." sounds like either a cocktail or a lesbian punk band any ways I'm willing to bet this is the one and only reference to Jabotinsky, and its as someone's bad boy ex-boyfriend, not like he's important at all to Jewish life and thought in Eastern Europe between the Wars...

"Her husband may have been a party man, but Marxist dogmatism fit Sophia like an itchy dress. She was a socialist aware of the movement’s absurdity, and an artist who couldn’t resign herself to the injustice of the world. In youth, she crushed on the family maid with sapphic fervor. She briefly dated the right-wing Zionist journalist Vladimir Jabotinsky, who organized self-defense squads after the Kishinev pogrom, until her liberal father banned him from their house. Sharp-eyed and"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

this is basically the only way female Revolutionaries get into this book, as wives and girl friends of men, even if they're actually important in their own right they need a man to enter, its very clear the Revolution for the author is about the Revolutionary who must be a tall darkly handsome man

"In Paris, she reunited with an old flame. She’d met Henryk Erlich years before, in the microscopic Saint Petersburg Bund, which was more of a debate society than a revolutionary cell."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

I get that she means the "Go to Palestine" line as a dig at Zionism "look look the Zionists wanted the same thing as our Russian oppressor!" but uh... well yet again then Bundist dream of working class solidarity fails and working class loots the Jews houses while they're deported.

"Overnight, the government banned the Yiddish press. The military drafted four hundred thousand Jews, including many of the Bund’s best activists, while police rounded up leaders like Mark Liber in the wave of arrests that accompanied mobilization. The Pale of Settlement was now a front line, and the military viewed its five million Jewish inhabitants as potential spies. Fearing Jews would assist the advancing enemy armies, the empire’s top general ordered mass deportations east, to central Russia. Within months, over two hundred thousand people were made homeless. Often, they had as little as twelve hours to pack and could take only what they could carry. “Go to Palestine” jeered their Christian neighbors as the Jews waited at the rail stations. These neighbors then looted their homes."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

I would quickly like to note this is the first time Rosa Luxembourg has been mentioned, vs "our man" Trotsky. In general women are largely if not totally missing from this narrative (for example though we've covered non-Bundist like Trotsky, never Emma Goldman)

"Things didn’t go well for socialists who foresaw the coming catastrophe. Some antiwar intellectuals were merely kicked out of their current countries of exile. Take Leon Trotsky, who had settled in Paris after a dramatic escape from Siberian exile. After the war, the French government deported him; our man landed in the Bronx. Others, like the brilliant critic of the Bund Rosa Luxemburg, were locked in jail for pacifism. And these were the lucky ones. The famed socialist leader Jean Jaurès had sought to avert France’s entry into the conflict. He was dining at Montmartre’s Café du Croissant when a nationalist shot him in the back; a Parisian jury declared his murderer innocent of any crime."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

She's not smart enough to understand that for generations minorities have used aggressive displays of American patriotism to forcefully claim a right to America and a place in American life, Black Americans most of all, in the face of a white order that declares they don't have a right.

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Second she both wants to celebrate the Jewish American Socialist's American patriotism, as the ultimate expression of Here-ism, but also being a 21st century leftist she clearly finds it confusing and embarrassing.

"lived under the hemophiliac Romanov autocracy. In America, they could strike and vote. For the moment, this seemed sufficient. Here where they lived was their country."

"combined radical beliefs with a surprising American patriotism. Old Glory waved alongside the red flag. Street parades marked May Day and the anniversaries of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the assassination of Alexander II, as well as the Fourth of July. They sang their ballad, “Women Workers,” which implored women to emulate Hesya Helfman, the seamstress who helped to kill Tsar Alexander II, then followed up with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

trying to big up the Bund's impact in America, and in a book about Jewish socialism in general it'd be fine, but in a book about one particular group just kinda airy hand waving about the Jewish left is uh not it

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

uhhhh so Vienna was run from 1897 till his death in 1910 by Karl Lueger, who rose to power on antisemitism and Hitler would say taught him his politics. While Lueger was dead in 1912 his antisemitic political party still ran the city

"In the spring of 1912, the party sent Medem to Vienna to edit a new newspaper called Lebens-Fragen that would be published out of Warsaw. Though the Bund intended Lebens-Fragen to be a legal periodical, Warsaw police quickly arrested its entire staff. Medem didn’t think much of it at the time. He was too enraptured with the Habsburg capital. It appeared to him a cosmopolitan"

"cosmopolitan wonderland. The city’s Germans, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Bosnians, and Jews seemed to live together in idyllic harmony, the peace barely ruffled by the occasional protests held by insignificant groups of racists, who, Medem imagined, would never attain power."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

under torture I could not be induced to write in a book that my grandparents were destined to meet because a witch said my great-grandma had a nice rack

"Rose had flushed cheeks, luxuriant hair, and the round black eyes of a Scottish Fold cat. Sam looked at her breasts. He thought of an afternoon, years earlier, after he finished a mural in the office of a Lower East Side fortune teller. The man offered to tell his future. “There’s a girl for you with beautiful mamtakim”—Yiddish for sweets, money, or tits—the fortune teller pronounced."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

picking 1908 as some golden age is just really wild, since its the year Belgium finally gave into international pressure to pull the plug on the Congo Free State and Germany finished up killing 80% of the Herero, just a lot of grim stuff...

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

I mean honestly what is there even to say about this, what a confession, that being a socialist a revolutionary is just and only a means to be cool and if you could find a magical (and always imaginary tbh) time of artist cool without politics you'd throw away your ideals in a second

"last the summer. He ended up staying in Exileland for years. Hundreds of Russian radicals did the same. Why not? It was a good time for a breather. Europe had been at peace for decades. The old cosmopolitan empires held sway. In countries grown prosperous with wealth stolen from their colonies, taboos were shattered, and culture reached a dazzling refinement. The old coexisted with the new. Gustave Klimt painted golden vamps in the Habsburg capital. In Paris, Picasso and Braque violently deconstructed bodies into cubes. Their figures’ painted contortions echoed those of the dancers in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. A thousand isms bloomed. Literary. Artistic. Political. On a single street, Freud could squeeze past Trotsky. At the British Library, Aleister Crowley and Lenin might have battled for a chair. When I read memoirs of this time, life seems rich as molten chocolate. Why would anyone want to change anything, I asked myself, even if they were a revolutionary? If I were in Medem’s place, I would have sunk into those European days, like I sank into the subversive bohemias of New York, London, and Istanbul. I would have forgone all utopian aspirations for the actual paradise right there, in, say, Vienna. Fuck the dialectic. Give me fine words and coffee topped with whipped cream, radical journals spread over the bar of an underground nightclub, speeches whose primary purpose was to impress a fan dancer, not a gaggle"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I'd just like to say the Bund wasn't "pressured" by the Orthodox and Zionists, it had been discredited by the 1905 Revolution, the Goyish working class turned on the Jews and murdered them on mass, lending the Orthodox argument of turning inward and the Zionist of leaving more force

"Pushed by police repression on one side and the competition from Zionist and Orthodox Jewish parties on the other, the Bund turned away from thoughts of revolution and instead tried to organize"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

uh.... I can't over state how clearly she just put the case against the thesis of her own book and then just moved on without countering it, also like... New York is the only place Jews should leave Eastern Europe for? no where else?

"If this was eastern Europe, no wonder so many of us had decided to leave. Only a fool would try to free Egypt, many Jews reckoned. It was, after all, filled with drunken, violent Egyptians. New York beckoned from across the sea. One hundred twenty-five thousand Jews from the Russian Empire arrived in America in 1906. They filled the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, then overflowed east, turning Brownsville into a boomtown. In muddy Brooklyn lots, real estate hustlers threw up shacks to house these refugees. The next year, official efforts to restrict Jewish immigration began."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

oh you're so close to getting it, its ironic that a whole book who's main point is that socialist solidarity is the truth and the way for Jews keeps walking into the brick walls of truths that lead post-Holocaust Jewry to overwhelming endorse Zionism

"struck, demonstrated, and died together in 1905. They draped their friends’ coffins in red flags and marched to the cemetery together, where they gave speeches together about the international brotherhood of working men. Then the pogroms began, and the Christian workers vanished or joined in. Historian Simon Dubnov described a sense of betrayal that the Bund’s ideologues barely dared articulate. The workers and peasants across the Russian Empire who “broke Jewish heads, tore out children’s eyes, raped women and cut them to pieces, were doing what their fathers and brothers did in years past and will do again in favorable circumstances.” As for the Christian radicals who died defending Jewish neighborhoods? They were, Dubnov wrote, merely “wonderful exceptions to the miserable rule.” I saw a glimpse of this when I walked around Lodz on a frigid Easter in 2022. The city was shut as tightly as it would have been for a general strike. When I turned down Revolution of 1905 Street, named for the moment when the Bund came closest to reaching its dreams, I noticed the buildings had been graffitied with dozens of six-pointed stars. I saw more stars in Baluty, the old Jewish workers’ district, and over the streets that had once been the Bundist birzhes. The stars had been scrawled over Polish words I didn’t understand, in such density and profusion that I soon lost count. Google told me what was going on. Before the war, Lodz’s two football teams, Widzew and LKS, both had Jewish players. The Jews are gone now, but their memory remains, and each team’s fans calls the others’ fans “Jews” as an insult."

"When they see their rivals’ graffiti, they paint a Jewish star over it. Sometimes the fans just spray-paint the star all by itself and write the Polish word for fuck next to it. Fuck [Jewish Star]. Fuck [Jewish Star]. The city does not bother to paint them over."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

we're really getting into delusion of grandeur here, comparing Occupy Wall Street, a short term camp out in a tiny park that listlessly hung out with no clear goals till an annoyed city brushed them off, to Jewish Revolutionaries running a whole city is wild talk (and insulting)

"Vilna’s old city functioned as a temporary autonomous zone, and those of us who have known such zones can still feel their magic at the distance of a century. In 2011, the anticapitalist protesters of Occupy Wall Street set up camp in downtown Manhattan, a block from my apartment. They turned a sterile concrete square into a mini city, complete with a gourmet kitchen, a library, even a table to get free hand-rolled cigarettes. Occupy’s wild generosity was meant to prefigure a different world. For fifty-nine days, the square evolved into a stage for art projects, theoretical experiments, lunatic feuds, moments of failure and grace, until police batons drove us out. After the mayor destroyed the Occupy encampment, the city scrubbed off every trace of us, as if soaping out the mouth of a defiant child. It wasn’t just our ideas, which were a mixed bag at best. They hated us because we had claimed the streets as ours. The anarchists who founded Occupy hobbled it with a cumbersome form of direct democracy in which anyone could veto"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

as I've mentioned this book is embarrassed of its subjects and keeps glazing non-Bundists, here we see Leon Trotsky getting the Tiger Beat treatment, and again Trotsky's vision is for the Jews to stop being Jews... read into his fangirl treatment how you will

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I just don't get how like you can read the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, particularly from the 1880s to the end and not understand it was not viable? that Jew hate was not some funny little thing that socialism is gonna wash away?

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

so we've spent pages now about the glorious multiethnic revolutionary solidarity, time and again about Russians and Jews side by side, but of course the reality she can't hide is this

"Pogrom is a vague word, so let’s describe specifics. In less than two weeks, in nearly seven hundred places, humans—formerly complex individuals, but now uninhibited members of a mob—invaded the homes of their Jewish neighbors, ignored their appeals to sentiment or shared history, and gleefully beat them to death. They cut open the bellies of old men and stuffed them with the feathers from their goose-down comforters. Swollen with booze, righteous with reactionary politics, they raped teenage girls, then threw them out windows. When Jewish families offered them bribes in exchange for their lives, they laughed, took the money, and killed them anyway. Police only encouraged the attackers. Jews who survived pogroms seldom did so unscathed. They lost legs, eyes, life savings, parents, sweethearts, sanity, and above all, the belief that the towns where their families had lived for centuries had ever been their homes."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

this book is endlessly embarrassed of its topic, which is to say she keeps shying away from the Bund itself to talk about non-Jewish revolutionaries or Jews working for non-Jewish orgs, and when dragged back to the Bund stressing its work with non-Jews as if we don't know the ending

"Though they liked their guns, the Bundists believed that solidarity was their greatest weapon. If they liberated Egypt alongside the Egyptians, they wouldn’t need to flee across the sea. Bundists raised strike funds for Christian workers and loaned them their printing presses. In the Grodno, they led strikes amongst Christian brick workers. In Riga, they organized draft riots. In Ukraine, they created parallel organizations. In the tsarist empire’s rural Belarusian borderlands, they worked with local peasant groups to publish pamphlets that described how the peasants’ true enemies, “the military, the rich, and the uncaring regime,” used Jews as their scapegoat."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

ooooh boy, oh boy, oh wow, okay so 1. the George Floyd *Protests* were not uh anything like the Russian Revolution of 1905 and like... as white girl it is a choice to declare the George Floyd Protests your revolutionary experience... choices.....

"Here, I want to put myself into a protester’s skin. The closest I’ve known to 1905 is the summer of 2020, after the police murdered George Floyd, when the sickly silence of lockdown New York was shattered by a mass uprising. Still, the past is a foreign"

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

again the desperate need for American Jews to be white and not face any antisemitism, I'm frankly dreading how Leo Frank is gonna get covered, or if he'll get covered

"The Lower East Side was home to 290,000 Jews, enough to constitute their own cohesive world. Jewish landlords fought Jewish tenants, and Jewish sweatshop bosses fought Jewish workers. Everyone kept their grudges against Christians for old times’ sake. Italian guys hassled Jewish girls, and Jewish guys beat Italians for their effrontery. It was rough, but it was nothing like the pogroms back home. For white immigrants across New York, street violence was a game of equals, and Jews gave as good as they got."

"Afterward, they were court-martialed. There were plenty of antisemites in America, but in 1904 there was little in the way of state antisemitism. Sure, Christians attacked Jews, but those Christians might go to jail. Local newspapers gave significant space to the persecution of Jews in tsarist Russia, even as they justified or glossed over the persecution of Black people at home."

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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

there's a deep and overwhelming need some American Jews have to downplay and even frankly dismiss any discrimination they might face in America, and this comes from across the political spectrum

"Like most of these immigrants, Sam didn’t know it, but when he came to America, he had entered an even more vicious human hierarchy—and radically improved his place. In Russia, Jews had been the prime targets for state persecution. In America, they were merely discriminated against and disdained. Sam would soon learn he had other identities here, and that, like all countries, America was built on someone’s blood. At the turn of the century, New York was home to tens of thousands of African Americans. Most were internal refugees from Southern lynch mobs and Jim Crow–inflicted poverty. The city was less of a refuge than they had hoped. 1900 was the year of the so-called New York City Race Riot, when, for five days, Irish mobs attacked Black neighborhoods, furious because a Black man named Arthur Harris had defended his wife from an undercover cop. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek—no matter who an immigrant was back home, once he got here, he was better off than Black Americans. Sam had left Russia as a hated Yid. At Ellis Island, the immigration officer listed his nationality as “Hebrew.” In 1917, on his naturalization papers, the official merely described him as “white.”"

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