The key sentence in this New York Times piece about the Bund is: “Today, the Bund is largely forgotten.” There is a reason for that. As I write in the concluding chapter of Be a Refusenik: “In the long arc of Jewish history, the Bundists, whom today’s antizionists look to for inspiration, have lost decisively and irrevocably. Zionists outpaced the Bund by far in their appeal to Russian Jewry. They drove their point home when they fully implemented their political vision of building a Jewish state and rescuing the remains of Eastern European Jewry that the Bund had insisted must stay in Poland and Ukraine. Long after the Bund perished in the bloodlands of Europe, Zionists kept proving their point. They did it every time they saved more Jews — Moroccan, Tunisian, Libyan, Yemeni, Iraqi, Iranian, Ethiopian — and brought them to Israel. In the Soviet Union, their most resounding vindication came through the refuseniks, who reversed the destruction wrought by the Yevsektsia— the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party, staffed in part by former Bundists — and resurrected Judaism, Hebrew, Zionism, and the rich Jewish identity that Soviet policy had tried so hard to erase.” And that, in a nutshell, is why the Bund is now thoroughly forgotten, while Zionism continues to thrive and be a vital part of Jewish identity. No matter how hard Jewish antizionists like Crabapple try to invoke the ghosts of a movement whose vision proved to be so decisively and tragically wrong, they will not bring it back — and they certainly will not make it relevant for Jews again. So irrelevant is the Bund today, in fact, that it didn’t even make it into the title of the piece about it. What is in the title instead? Zionism. Q.E.D.