The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance

Presented by Sharon Rudahl, Michael Kluckner, and Paul Buhle

Click here to register for this free virtual event, co-sponsored by the Workers Circle / Arbeter Ring of Northern California and co-presented by the Cartoon Art Museum and KlezCalifornia.

Told in an engaging graphic novel format, The Bund (Between the Lines, 2023) explains the oppressive origins of Jewish resistance in Ukraine, Poland, and the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia. Jews adapted to industrialization and organized against exploitation. As they became more divided along the linguistic borders of Yiddish and Hebrew, splits emerged between those who sought a distant ancestral homeland, others who emigrated and adapted to the “new world,” and those who fought against murderous Soviet and Nazi regimes. Charismatic resistance figures including Pati Kremer and Bernard Goldstein kept secular and progressive ideas alive against impossible odds in this graphic account of a little-known story. The first of its kind, this graphic history of Jewish labor resistance offers an account of a radical past that can have strong implications for many today.

Sharon Rudahl grew up in a suburban Jewish ghetto in Maryland. She worked for anti-war underground newspapers in Madison, Wisconsin and San Francisco, and was one of the women artists establishing Wimmen’s Comix. Her books include Adventures of Crystal Night, Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson, and A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman.

Michael Kluckner is a Canadian writer and artist. His early books on the history of Canadian cities, heritage, planning issues, and art, include Vancouver The Way It Was, Vanishing Vancouver, Paving Paradise, and British Columbia in Watercolour. He has won numerous awards, including the Vancouver Book Prize and the Heritage Canada Medal of Achievement. He received the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 for the contributions made, through books and volunteer efforts, to increasing awareness of Canada’s heritage and culture.

Paul Buhle, a retired senior lecturer at Brown University, is a sixty-plus year veteran of social movements. He is the publisher of one of the first “alternative” comics in 1969 titled Radical America Komics. He has produced a number of non-fiction comics, including Wobblies! A Graphic History, and the books he has written or edited include From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture, Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, and Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land.