The purpose of this project, The Bund in Sweden 1946-1954 : a Jewish workers’ movement at the crossroads, is to illuminate how the once strong Jewish workers’ movement in Eastern and Central Europe with its concentration to Poland, tried to answer the new challenges after World War II and the Holocaust. Newly found archives show that some sections of the Bund were also established in Sweden, among refugees and transmigrants, during these first post war years. Here, they met with a social democratic labor movement in power, engaged in building its national “people’s home” in a society undamaged by the war. How did the bundists in Sweden - organized in jiddisch sections (Arbeter-Ring) affiliated to the Swedish social democratic party - handle the political and ideological challenges of socialism and nationalism during their hardships as refugees after the Holocaust? Did they take side as the international Bund split between the developing Eastern and Western block? How did they rethink Zionism and the project of Israel? Would the experience of the Swedish social democratic project influence their furtherperspectives?

Antologin med populärhistoriska artiklar från ETC Nyhetsmagasin, Internationalen, Arbetarhistoria mfl spänner över ett stort antal teman, från uppror, antimilitarism och nykterhet till rasism, idrott och spanska sjukan - det hela i förhållande till arbetarrörelsen och dess motståndare.

Myten om "judebolsjevismen” - d v s föreställningen att revolutionen i Ryssland och kommunismen varuttryck för judisk anda och strävan efter makt - utgjorde en betydelsefull faktor i mellankrigstidensideologiska och politiska liv i Östersjöområdet. Studien i vilken utsträckning - och hur - denna sammanknytning av bolsjevism och judendom ägde rum i första hand i svensk offentlighet och politik under åren efter första världskriget – samt i vilken mån och av vilka krafter den bars vidare in i det sena 1930-talet?

Ideas of nationalism, race and anti-Semitism are usually connected to right wing ideology and politics. This thesis, however, is studying them in the context of the socialist labour movement. That a radical left wing patriotism, inspired by the French revolution, developed intertwined with workers’ internationalism is well known. But this left wing nationalism has, in the Swedish case, been characterised as an “internal” tool for obtaining democratic rights and social reforms and not directed against other peoples and nations. Inspired by postcolonial studies of whiteness the thesis examines the views of development of mankind and of national difference expressed in Swedish socialist publicity since the 1850’s up to the late 1920’s. Empirical studies of magazines, brochures and books show that it is possible to distinguish a trace of socialist whiteness in the production of ideas from the labour movement, influenced by liberal radicalism. Here, by socialist whiteness is not primarily meant identities of skin colour but ideas that the working class was the true and purest part of the nation and that socialism primarily was of concern to the white races on top of the chain of development. How this whiteness could be counter-posed to peoples and races considered different or “lower placed”, such as Slavs and Jews, has been of particular interest. In opposition to import of foreign labour, “usury Jews” and Tsarist Russia, arguments of socialist whiteness could be developed. With the Russian October revolution in 1917 bolshevism could be described as an Asian threat under Jewish leadership, alien to Swedish labour. Eugenic concerns for the Swedish race also found spokespersons in the socialist milieu of the 1910’s and 20’s. When fascism in the 1920’s captured the most radical themes of socialist whiteness ideas of Jewish threat and race purity could no longer be combined with defence of democratic ideals and find a public space in social democracy.

Orphanage No. 7 in Taganrog was one of the former Soviet orphanages that came into contact with the new charity early on, in the form of summer vacation exchanges with Swedish host families. The reality Swedish visitors encountered in Taganrog and elsewhere, however, was not always of the dreaded kind — a destitute shelter for desperate children abandoned by the world — although such a description was at times apt, especially in reference to homes for the mentally disabled. What they found instead were tangible traces and elements of entirely different plans and ambitions.

Hot eller möjlighet? På 1960-talet förändrades romernas situation i Sverige dramatiskt då bofasthet och skolplikt för romska barn skulle ersätta ett nomadiserande liv utanför välfärdssamhällets växande strukturer.

Men hur genomfördes förändringen – på vems villkor och till vilket pris? Kring de frågorna samlades forskare och aktörer, både tidigare lärare och elever, till ett vittnesseminarium på Södertörns högskola tillsammans med dagens romska brobyggare.

I spänningsfältet mellan romernas kamp för lika rättigheter och myndigheternas strävan efter assimilering gjordes under vittnesseminariet erfarenheter av betydelse för den aktuella diskussionen om minoriteters rättigheter och möjligheter.

Opposition became the Bund’s condition of existence, but not opposi-tion for its own sake. The Bund was founded on the conviction that the “Jewish question” could only be resolved through the liberation of the international working class from all forms of oppression on its way to establishing a world of equality, welfare and democracy without borders – a socialist social order. There, the broad strata of the population would rule, rather than capitalist elites or communist party apparatchiks.

The Bund was one of the losers of history. The once deeply-rooted move-ment was crushed during terror and genocide, dispersed into exile, driven into its shell by overpowering political forces and undermined by assimi-lation as time wore on and the world changed. The following story is about that process at the micro-level, in a place on the edge of the world.

In this unique account Håkan Blomqvist relates a largely unknown chapter in both the historiography of the Swedish labor movement and in Swedish–Jewish history, that of the non-Zionist Jewish Arbeter Bund among refugees in Sweden during and after World War II. 

Håkan Blomqvist is associate professor in history at Södertörn University and author of several respected books on the Swedish labor movement, nationalism and antisemitism.