Here Where We Live Is Our Country—The story of the Jewish Bund

By Molly Crabapple 

One World—2026

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

The title of Molly Crabapple's profoundly important book underscores one of the most important themes of our times. "Here where we live is our country." Those words undercut the ideology of the political movement known as Zionism. Supporters of Zionism argue that the true home of the Jewish people isn't where we live, but in the nation of Israel formerly known as Palestine.

The history of the Jewish Labor Bund that Crabapple documented shows how most Jews actively opposed the idea of Zionism for about half of a century. There were two primary reasons for this opposition that continue to be relevant today. Zionists were in fundamental agreement with vicious anti-Semites who argued that Jews did not belong in Europe. Both left and right wing Zionists supported the brutalization and expulsion of the indigenous and majority Palestinian population. 

So, what were the politics of the Jewish Labor Bund? The Bund worked to establish alliances of Jewish and non-Jewish labor organization with the goal of establishing a workers government where Jews would have equal rights. 

Crabapple started her study of this history by looking at her family members who had been active in the Bund. In his groundbreaking book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi also related his family to the history of Palestinian resistance to colonization. 

I happen to be Jewish and one of the reasons why I find Crabapple's book fascinating is because of my background. My four grandparents were Jewish and immigrated to this country from Eastern Europe. Three of my grandparents came from the Pale Settlement of Czarist Russia where most Jews lived for about 1,000 years. My other grandparent immigrated from Hungary. 

My parents carried on some Jewish traditions, but like many Jews, they weren't religious. My parents also lived in the years of the Nazi organized Holocaust that caused the deaths of one out of every three Jews in the world. The ultimate goal of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish nationality altogether. The fact that I was born and lived for 73 years is evidence that the Nazis failed to achieve their repugnant goal. 

Given this background, my parents, as well as other Jewish parents of their generation felt it was important for their children to be exposed to Jewish culture. So, for several years I attended Hebrew School, and at the age of thirteen I was Bar Mitzvahed. 

During the years when I attended Hebrew School, my teachers gave me a completely uncritical view of the nation of Israel. In other words, my teachers indoctrinated me into the ideology of Zionism. Then, at the age of nineteen I met a Palestinian woman who began to destroy my illusions in the state of Israel. 

I was raised in the city of Newark, New Jersey and attended a high school that was overwhelmingly African American. During those years I became aware of the profound disparity between the inner city schools in Newark and the affluent public schools in the suburban communities. 

These were also the years of the movement that protested the U.S. government's war against the Vietnamese people. I began to realize that the injustices I witnessed weren't about mistakes in judgement or a lack of sensitivity. No, the problems of inequality and war were clear examples of how there was something profoundly wrong with the political economic system of capitalism. This was the atmosphere that caused me to develop a socialist consciousness and look more closely at the myth of Zionist ideology.      

The Pale Settlement

The Pale Settlement was a section of the Czarist Empire located in the area of the Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. This is where millions of Jews lived and were routinely exposed to vicious discrimination. 

In Czarist Russia the Black Hundreds were a prominent political party that also routinely organized raids that murdered thousands of Jews. The Yiddish word pogrom was invented to identify those raids. In the United States, similar raids by the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of African Americans.

Under Czarist rule, Jews were not allowed to live in the largest cities of Saint Petersburg or Moscow. There were quotas of how many Jews were drafted into the Russian armed forces. Those terms of service might extend to twenty-five years. Jews who had been drafted oftentimes divorced their wives because serving this long military sentence could mean they would never see their family again.

The 1905 Russian uprising

The Russian defeat in the war against Japan caused an economic crisis. Workers strikes became commonplace throughout the country. At that time, working people and peasants of Russia did not have basic human rights. Workers were incarcerated for merely having meetings. So, under those conditions worker's organizations came together to form Soviets, or worker's councils. These Soviets protested the victimization of their leaders. The Soviets engaged in political strikes where they demanded basic rights for workers. Political strikes were rare in the United States.

In 1905 there was a mass demonstration in Saint Petersburg that asked the Czar to listen to worker's grievances. The Czar ordered the mounted Cossacks to attack the demonstration. The Cossacks then murdered hundreds of demonstrators.

In the Pale Settlement the Jewish Labor Bund and socialist organizations organized armed uprisings that, for a while, were effective. Then with the defeat of the 1905 uprising there was a wave a pogroms throughout the Pale Settlement.

The Bund, the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks

As with any revolutionary movement, there are disagreements as to which strategy will be most effective. The Bund agreed with the Menshevik wing of the resistance movement. The Mensheviks argued for a decentralized organization where various chapters would adopt to their particular environment. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin of the Bolsheviks argued for a democratic centralized organization. This meant that there would be a democratic discussion at national meetings, but once decisions were voted on, the entire membership would be required to carry out the line of the party.

The differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks mushroomed when Lenin returned to Russia in April of 1917. At that time, a popular insurrection forced the Czar to abdicate. A provisional government ran the day to day functions of the nation. The Soviet workers councils represented workers and soldiers who deposed the Czar.

At that time, literally millions of Russian soldiers died in the First World War, and there was no chance for a Russian victory against Germany. There was famine in the cities. Peasants had few, if any rights and usually worked on land owned by affluent landowners.

Lenin argued that the people wanted peace, bread, and land. He felt that the only way for this to happen was to take power away from the provisional government and give all power to the Soviets.

The Mensheviks as well as their supporters in the Bund opposed that perspective. Molly Crabapple agreed with this perspective of the Bund. She argued that the Bund members had dedicated their lives to liberating Jews and all working people. She implied that Lenin's perspective ignored the life experience of the leaders of the Bund. 

What is a political discussion?

In order to put this disagreement into perspective I think it is useful to ask the question: What is a political discussion?

In the United States there are highly publicized events called "elections." While the news media gives a tremendous amount of publicity to Democratic and Republican Party candidates, candidates of other parties are largely ignored. 

In the last Presidential election Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed on most major issues. They both supported the Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians. They both supported mass deportations. They both had essentially no problem with the gross disparity of wealth in this country. Their one disagreement was about what to do with the demonstrators who attacked the capital on January 6, 2020. 

Donald Trump was apparently frustrated by the fact that his politics weren't essentially different from the politics of Kamala Harris. So, he made the insulting and repugnant remark that Haitians "eat cats." Kamala Harris responded, not by denouncing the statement, but by laughing because she thought this was funny. 

Harris criticized Trump for being "weak." Trump criticized his opponents for being "lightweights." In other words, elections in the United States aren't about arguing for or against issues that people care about. No, elections are mud-slinging festivals where candidates argue that one candidate isn't quite as horrendous as the other.

However, in 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued about real issues and organized rank and file workers around those issues. In his polemics, Lenin made forceful arguments, but he never questioned the integrity and commitment of those who disagreed with his perspective. 

Before the October 1917 Russian Revolution Lenin argued that, history would not forgive the Bolsheviks if they failed to take power. Today we can put those words into perspective.

Czarist Russia had the largest land mass of any nation in the world. After the Revolution, Russia became the Soviet Union and was attacked by fourteen nations on all of its borders. The Russian armed forces had just been decisively defeated by Germany in the First World War.

Leon Trotsky, who was Jewish and raised in the Ukraine became the commander of the Red Army. In a period of two and a half years, the Red Army defeated all of the invading armies. So, we can ask the hypothetical question: What would have happened if the Bolsheviks failed to take power?              

The Nazi invasion of Poland

Molly Crabapple gave a comprehensive history of the Bund before during and after the German Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland. During this entire period, that included the Holocaust, there were vicious and murderous attacks on millions of Jews. 

An inspiring aspect of Crabapple's book is her documentation of the resistance organized by the Bund during this entire period. She showed how Bernard Goldstein was the leader of an armed resistance to vicious anti-Semitic pogroms. Goldstein brought together Bund members, with gangsters, Polish socialists, and workers to do armed combat with those who attempted to murder Jews.

The Bund also organized relief for the poor, sanatoriums, summer camps for children, a newspaper, sports contests, and schools etc... The Nazis weren't even able to shut down the Bund newspaper during their occupation of Poland. 

Marek Edelman was a member of the Bund and a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He and other Bund members put aside their differences with the Zionists to do battle with the Nazi mass murderers. Edelman survived the uprising and after the war he continued to live in Poland and became a cardiologist. 

There was one persistent problem that plagued the Bund and all Polish people during the years the Nazi occupation. Rank and file Polish people did not have guns and the armed forces who had the guns refused to distribute those guns to the people. 

Because the Bolsheviks took power they were able to arm the people, and, in spike of tremendous obstacles, they succeeded in defeating the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Stalin and Trotsky

While Molly Crabapple's book is well worth reading, it has another weakness. Because Crabapple supports the Menshevik perspective of the Bund, she neglects to mention the profound difference between the politics of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. 

Trotsky argued that Stalin betrayed the essence of what the Russian Revolution was about. Stalin organized show trials that led to the murders of most of the leaders of the Revolution, including Trotsky. He made a disastrous non-aggression pact with the Nazis. Then he supported the nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek after Chiang murdered thousands of members of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927. Stalin gave arms to the Zionist terrorist organization Haganah that led to the establishment of the state of Israel. 

While the Soviet Union eventually defeated the Nazis, literally millions of Russian people died as a result of Stalin's deal with Hitler. This left the Soviet Union unprepared for the Nazi invasion. However, because the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, the people of the Soviet union were armed, and in spike of Stalin's stupidity, the Red Army defeat the fascist invasion. 

Trotsky also ridiculed Stalin's argument that members of social democratic parties were "social fascists." Because of this perspective the German Communist Party refused to unite with the social democrats to defeat the Nazis in the German elections of 1933. Stalin's armed forces organized to murder leaders Victor Adler and Henryk Erlich of the Bund because of his seemingly insane view that they were "social fascists."

Trotsky understood what it would mean when the Nazis came to power. He broke all relations with the Soviet government when Hitler came to power without any of the German socialist parties firing a single shot in resistance. Even the Nazis acknowledged that in their early years they could have been easily defeated had the workers parties organized to stop their advance.              

Given this history, I believe it is clear that Lenin and Trotsky's politics were the complete opposite of the politics of Joseph Stalin.

Today, the United States government is trying to overthrow the Cuban government. They use an oil blockade to starve the Cuban people and might be preparing for an invasion of the island. However, the Cuban people have an advantage that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto didn't have. The people are armed and will meet any invasion with millions of Cubans who have guns.

Palestine

The Bund sent their leader Victor Adler to Palestine to investigate and report on the Zionist movement before the establishment of the state of Israel. While Jewish immigrants worked to integrate themselves into the culture of the United States, Jewish immigrants to Palestine had a different approach. 

While Palestinians were the vast majority of the population, Zionists felt they had a right to the land and were taking as much Arab land as they could. The European Jews in no way identified with the indigenous Jews of Palestine who normally spoke Arabic. Adler had a discussion with a leading Palestinian who was critical of the Zionist drive to steal his homeland. This leader had no problem with Jewish immigration, but wanted Palestine to have equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.

Crabapple quoted the Bund leader Henryk Erlich as to why he opposed the Zionist ideology. "If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the eternal enemy (Arabs)...Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow? Indeed is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?"

After close to three years of genocide against Palestinians and 76 years of Israeli organized brutalization, this statement by Henryk Erlich rings just as true today as it did before the establishment of the state of Israel. However, there is another aspect to Zionism that is just as insidious.

The Zionist leaders actually believed the racist stereotypes used by vicious anti-Semites. These were the ideas that Jewish people didn't belong in Europe and that the Holocaust happened because Jews are inherently "weak."

Because of this perverted perspective literally all Zionist leaders changed their names to take on a new identity. Golda Meir's initial name was Goldie Mabovitch. David Ben-Gurion's initial name was David Grün. The primary language of the Jewish communities in the Pale Settlement and in the United States was Yiddish. The national language of Israel is Hebrew.  

Molly Crabapple's book gives us an inspiring chapter in the history of the worker's movement in the world. Reading her book, we can also view the seemingly insane defense of the criminal policies of the state of Israel from a different perspective. That is how for half a century most Jews rejected the Zionist perspective because it rejected the essence of who Jewish people are. So, in spite of it's limitations, I highly recommend reading Molly Crabapple's history of the Jewish Labor Bund.        

 

Out Now! — A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. against the Vietnam war

By Fred Halstead

1978, Pathfinder Press

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

For the past several months the Israeli government has been carrying out an unimaginably horrendous genocidal campaign against Palestinians. That campaign has been met with unprecedented demonstrations of protest from around the world. 

Yet the Israeli government, as well as the government in this country have been essentially indifferent to those demonstrations. As a result, the genocide continues.  So, a legitimate question to be asked is: What is the most effective way for activists around the world to build a movement that will put an end to this horror?

Fred Halstead’s book Out Now!—A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. against the Vietnam war gives a much needed background to the kind of movement we need today. Halstead and I were members of the Socialist Workers Party. 

In his analysis of the anti-war movement, he supported the politics of the SWP at that time. Halstead gave considerable evidence of how the SWP’s perspective in the anti-war movement was essential to mobilizing masses of people in demonstrating against the war.

Today the Socialist Workers Party has an entirely different political orientation. They view the Israeli organized genocide against the Palestinian people as a legitimate war against the Palestinian organization Hamas. This was the SWP perspective expressed in the February 5 issue of their newspaper The Militant:

“The Israeli government and people have little choice but to fight to eliminate Hamas.”

Because Fred Halstead felt that the politics of the SWP were essential to his perspective, I believe it is first necessary to outline the profound change that took place with respect to the politics of the Socialist Workers Party.

Part 1

The complete change in the politics of the Socialist Workers Party

Leon Trotsky was one of the central leaders of the Russian Revolution. He was also the commander of the Red Army that defeated an invasion of the Soviet Union by 14 nations.

For various reasons Joseph Stalin organized for the betrayal of the revolution. He presided over the murder of most of the Bolshevik leaders of the Revolution, including the assassination of Trotsky. He went on to support the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the Chinese ruthless government of Chiang Kai-shek, as well as the terrorist gangs that forced 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes and created the state of Israel in 1948.

James Cannon, who had been a leading member of the Communist Party in this country came across a document written by Trotsky while attending a conference in Moscow. This was the beginning of the formation of the Socialist Workers Party.

Then in 1934 SWP members became leaders of the Teamsters Strike in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That strike was one of several that led to the formation of the trade union federation known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). 

However, with the United States entry into the Second World War, the Presidential Administration of Franklyn D. Roosevelt organized to charge and convict leading SWP members of violating the Smith Act. This law in fact violated the right of citizens of this country from opposing the Second World War. Those leaders served about 18 months in prison.

Then, in the year 1954 Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the teamsters strike, organized to give support to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I believe that Fred Halstead was also a part of that effort.

In the last year his life, Malcolm X he spoke at Militant Labor Forums three times. The SWP helped to publish many of the speeches of Malcolm X in Pathfinder Press. The SWP also organized to publish speeches of the revolutionary leaders Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sakhara, W.E.B. DuBois, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara.

The SWP has also been a consistent supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government ever since the Revolution in 1959.

This was the background to Fred Halstead’s participation in the movement that protested the war against Vietnam. He documented that period of his life in the book Out Now! 

We can begin to see how the politics of the SWP has completely changed with the South African government’s charge that the Israeli government is carrying out a genocidal campaign against Palestinians. South Africa brought this convincing case to the International Court of Justice. That court found the charge of genocide “plausible.”

This is how the SWP’s newspaper The Militant responded to that charge in its June 3 edition.

“Claiming that Israel is carrying out ‘genocide’ is a complete falsification.”

This same edition of The Militant argued against the idea that Israel is an apartheid-like state in the following quotation. 

“It is preposterous to say that’s (apartheid) what exists in capitalist Israel today, a country of 9.9 million people where 21% of the Israeli population are Arabs, mostly Muslims, almost all of whom are citizens with the right to vote and the right to travel anywhere they want.”        

This statement deliberately ignores the fact that at least 4.5 million Palestinians live in the occupied territories of the East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. 

Although these Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, they do not have the right to vote in Israeli elections. Their right to travel is severely restricted. Before October 7, most Palestinians who lived in the Gaza Strip, even university graduates, were unemployed. They barely had sufficient amounts of food or clean water. Most residents of Gaza had relatives, friends, or neighbors who were murdered, injured, or sent to prison because of wars carried out by Israel.

The primary reason for this shift in the politics of the of the SWP has to do with their idea that the state of Israel, as it is, should have the right to exist. They also argue that Hamas is an anti-Semitic organization that is determined to murder all Jews in Israel. The Israeli government has a similar perspective with respect to Palestinians. 

There are a few persistent problems to this argument. The Israeli government has been supporting Hamas since its inception in 1987. They had good reason for this support. The Israeli government understands that the people who live in Gaza have legitimate grievances. Clearly Israel doesn’t want to give those Palestinians equal rights in Israel. Clearly the Israeli government doesn’t want to give Palestinians the right to a sovereign nation. 

So, they need to have an organization that polices the people of Gaza and works to suppress resistance to Israeli occupation. Israel has relied on Hamas to do that job. While Hamas has been a repressive force in Gaza, they also advocated for Palestinian liberation. This is their fundamental contradiction and explains why there is opposition to Hamas in the Palestinian community today. 

This also explains why the October 7 Hamas organized raid was not supported by the masses of Palestinians. Because Hamas has been the police force for the Gaza Strip, their Palestinian support has been compromised. So, while I condemn the October 7 raid, I also believe that the Israeli government needs to share responsibility for that raid.

Ilan Pappe wrote his meticulously researched book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This book documents the systematic efforts of terrorist gangs to murder thousands of Palestinians and coerce 750,000 to leave their homes. These were the Stern Gang, the Irgun, and the Hagenah.

We might also look at the unimaginable horror inflicted on Black people 

by the Ku Klux Klan in this country. The purpose of that systematic violence was to force Black people to do the worst jobs and live in the poorest neighborhoods.

As horrendous as that terror was, the Palestinian people have been subjected to an even more vicious persecution. The Israeli government isn’t satisfied with forcing Palestinians to do the worst jobs. The current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank represents clear evidence that the Israeli government wants to remove all Palestinians from their homeland. 

David Ben Gurion organized a systematic study of about 500 Palestinian cities and towns in 1947. This was in preparation for the subjugation and removal of Palestinians in their homeland. So, when we look at the unimaginable horror Palestinians are experiencing today, we can say clearly that this started with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

When Fred Halstead and I were members of the Socialist Workers Party the SWP supported the idea of a democratic secular Palestine. Astonishingly, today this same party makes the following argument.

“defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews is a key battle for working people everywhere.”

Clearly there was a holocaust where the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Clearly systemic anti-Semitism has existed in the world for a long time.

However, there were many other holocausts in the world before and after the establishment of the state of Israel. We can mention the genocide against Native Americans. There was the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of people born in Africa and forcibly transported to the Americas. We can look at the British forced starvation of tens of millions of people in China, India, and Brazil. The Nazis used the same genocidal methods against the Jews as Germany used in the holocaust they organized in Namibia.

The challenge isn’t to give one people a homeland by organizing a genocide or ethnic cleansing of another people. The challenge is to fight against all forms in discrimination in the world. The Israeli government happens to be an arms supplier to some of the most vicious governments in the world. 

Finally, we need to say that the formation and continued existence of the state of Israel has been totally dependent on support from Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. These nations have given massive support to Israel because it is located in the middle of the region that produces oil for the world. All corporations are totally dependent on a continuous flow of oil.  

So, when we read Fred Halstead’s book Out Now, his references to the Socialist Workers Party and their youth group the Young Socialist Alliance represented an entirely different political orientation than the SWP is about today.

Part 2—Out Now!

When we look at the Vietnamese resistance to the armed forces of the United States, as well as the anti-war movement around the world, this was a truly inspiring chapter in human history. 

Towards the end of Fred Halstead’s 974-page book he gave a summary of the costs of the war. While we don’t know the exact numbers, millions of Vietnamese lost their lives during those years. Close to 60,000 soldiers in the armed forces of the United States also lost their lives, many because of the so-called “friendly fire.” In the following passage Halstead contrasted the money the United States spent on the war versus the annual per capita income of the Vietnamese.

“The direct dollar cost to the U.S. in South Vietnam alone was $141 billion. This was more than $7,000 for each of the area’s 20 million inhabitants, whose per capita income was only $157 per year.”

We might also consider that the United States government began their support of French colonization of Vietnam with the Presidential Administration of Harry S. Truman. It ended with the Presidential Administration of Gerald Ford.

During the election campaign of Lyndon Bains Johnson, he promised to keep U.S. soldiers out of Vietnam. A few months after he won the election, he greatly increased the number of U.S. soldiers in the war. He did this by drafting soldiers into the military. 

During President Nixon’s election campaign, he promised to wind down the war. After he won the election, Nixon escalated the bombing campaign against Southeast Asia. While Johnson labelled his bombing campaign Rolling Thunder, Nixon called his mass murdering bombing campaign Linebacker I and Linebacker II.  

The Vietnamese National Liberation Front only had a tiny percentage of the military resources the U.S. armed forces had at their disposal. That support came from the Soviet Union and China. Their strength consisted of the massive support they had with the Vietnamese people.

The anti-war movement in the United States emerged in the years after the anti-communist repression of McCarthyism. At one time the Communist Party in this country might have had 100,000 members and many more supporters. A common misconception is that the CP lost its influence because of the repressive actions of Joseph McCarthy’s in the 1950s. Fred Halstead disagreed with that perspective.

At that time the Communist Party had been following the political orientation of Joseph Stalin who headed the government of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev took power after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev spent four hours and 40,000 words where he documented many of the crimes of Stalin in what was called the Khrushchev Revelations. That, along with the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, caused most members to abandon the Communist Party.   

As a result, most people who were active in the peace movement at that time had a conservative perspective. They centered their activities around the Ban the (atomic) Bomb campaign. Initially many people who were apart of this movement supported the war against Vietnam.

Then, there was a new organization called the Students for A Democratic Society or SDS. SDS opposed U.S. participation in the war against Vietnam. They called for a demonstration protesting the war on April 17, 1965. SDS organizers only expected about 2,000 people to participate in the action. 

However, President Johnson reversed his campaign pledge to keep the United States out of the war. He also drafted young men into the armed forces to support his war drive. As people began to see the unimaginable horrors of this war, 20,000 people participated in the 1965 SDS organized demonstration. 

At this point in the history, divisions developed that argued for contrasting strategies on how to advance the goals of the movement. One strategy called for spectacular actions where relatively small groups of people would violate the law, get arrested, and win publicity for the movement. This strategy also argued for a multi-issue campaign that would protest against many of the injustices we continue to face. 

Fred Halstead argued for the orientation of the Socialist Workers Party. This perspective advanced the idea of a single-issue anti-war movement centered on the demand of total, immediate, and unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia. This was summarized in the demand Out Now! That strategy also called for a perspective that worked to organize the largest possible legal demonstrations. Supporters of these two perspectives would debate their contrasting points of view throughout the history of the anti-war movement.

A.J. Muste

A.J. Muste was born in the Netherlands in 1885. He immigrated to the United States as a young child. His family attended church regularly. He studied religion and became an ordained minister. However, he felt the need to participate in the movement protesting the grinding inequality that surrounded him.

In the year 1919, when he was 34 years old, Muste gave his full support to the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Workers on strike regularly toiled for 54 hours per week for twenty cents per hour. They demanded a 48-hour work week with no cut in pay.

The police responded to Muste’s actions by mercilessly clubbing him. They kept Muste behind bars for one week. The charge against him of disturbing the peace was later dismissed.

Muste went on to lead a 1934 strike of auto workers in Toledo, Ohio. In that strike, the workers deliberately violated a court ordered injunction and won union recognition. This strike also led to the formation of the union federation called the C.I.O.

Eventually Muste developed pacifist views. He worked with Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and James Lawson to develop a strategy of non-violent civil disobedience. That strategy was effective in forcing the government to do away with its Jim Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights.

Muste also worked with David McReynolds, who was also a pacifist and served time in prison for opposing U.S. participation in the Second World War. 

Teach-ins at Madison and Berkley

Every time the United States goes to war, the government and the press become obsessed with promoting a war drive. There is a reason for this obsession with promoting war. Workers are normally averse to sending young people around the world to murder poor people. 

So, those who have power argue persistently that young people need to risk their lives to prevent poor people from having their own government. While this argument appears to be totally absurd and nonsensical, in the early years of the war most people went along with the U.S. government’s war drive.

So, the anti-war movement challenged the government to a debate where arguments would be presented for and against the war. The government was so confident in their absurd argument that they agreed to the debate.

Halstead quoted Barry Sheppard’s reaction to the teams the government sent to university campuses arguing for support of the war.

“there apparently is nothing like these direct confrontations with the administration’s spokesmen to further expose the lies and hypocrisy of the government and build up the university opposition to the Vietnam war.”

In Madison, Wisconsin and Berkley, California the movement organized teach-ins where people learned the facts about the war. These events were crucial in demystifying the reality of the horrors of the war against Vietnam.

Isaac Deutscher, who was a Marxist biographer of Leon Trotsky spoke at a Vietnam Day event in Berkley in 1965. Deutscher had impeccable credentials and spoke for eighty minutes at the event. The fact that people listened to this Marxist for that length of time in 1965 was significant. This is quotation is from his speech.

“I still believe that class struggle is the motive force in history, but in this last period, class struggle has all too often sunk into a bloody morass of power politics. On both sides of this great divide, a few ruthless and half-witted oligarchies—capitalist oligarchies here, bureaucratic oligarchies there—hold all the power and make all the decisions, obfuscate the minds and throttle the wills of nations.”

Deutscher was raised in a Jewish religious family in Poland but became an atheist. Deutscher escaped the Holocaust shortly before the campaign of mass murder by the Nazis. However, the Nazis murdered his entire family. That didn’t stop Deutscher from being critical of the repressive policies of the state of Israel. This is how he explained his position. 

“We should not allow even invocations of Auschwitz to blackmail us into supporting the wrong cause.”

He went on to criticize Israel’s apparent military victory in the 1967 war. In that war Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and West Bank.  In this quotation he predicted the unmitigated disastrous crime Israel is inflicting on Palestinians today. 

“Israel’s security, let me repeat, was not enhanced by the wars of 1956 and 1967; it was undermined and compromised by them. The ‘friends of Israel’ have in fact abetted Israel in a ruinous course.”

We see this ruinous course unfolding today.

Contrasting strategies of the anti-war movement

James Bevel, who was a central leader of the civil rights movement, also became a leader of the anti-war movement. At a demonstration in 1967, Bevel called for a national demonstration later that year. In that same year there were about 470,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. General William C. Westmoreland, who was in charge of the forces in Vietnam requested an additional 200,000 troops.

An antiwar conference was held in the University of Chicago organized by the Student Mobilization Committee. 600 people representing 90 colleges and 24 high schools attended.

Howard Petrick had been drafted into the military and was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance. He expressed his antiwar views as a soldier in the military. The military confiscated his antiwar literature and threatened him with court-martial. Petrick sent this message to the antiwar conference. 

“I appeal for support from all Americans who agree that GIs are citizens, who are entitled to the right of free speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Although I have never disobeyed an order and have fulfilled my duty as a soldier, my constitutional rights are now being threatened.” 

One of the reasons why the government didn’t court martial Petrick was because of the growing antiwar movement. The Chicago conference called for a national anti-war demonstration for October 21.

Eventually one of the reasons for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was because of the mass opposition to the war by rank-and-file soldiers. Towards the end of the war U.S. military officers were afraid to give soldiers commands that few were willing to carry out.

At this point, there was a division with respect to the tactics used for the October 21 action. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and David Dellinger all favored a march on the Pentagon. This is how they viewed their vision for this action at a press conference.

Abbie Hoffman argued that “We’re going to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet in the air.”

Jerry Rubin argued, “We’re now in the business of wholesale disruption and widespread resistance and dislocation of the American society.”

David Dellinger continued in that vein arguing, “There will be no government building left unattacked,”. 

Brad Little was working on logistics for the October 21 action. Back in 1965 he was concerned that given the inflammatory language of some of the organizers that the demonstration would be attacked by the police or right-wing groups. 

Fred Halstead responded in the following quotation. “I told him I couldn’t make any promises about the police and ultra-right groups who might attack the march, but that I and everyone else organizing the October 1965 event agreed on a nonviolent tactic for the occasion and we were doing everything we could to make it go that way.” This attitude continued in 1967.

Dr. Benjamin Spock was a pediatrician who wrote a widely popular book titled The common sense book of baby and child care. Spock was a consistent supporter of the anti-war movement. 

Before the October 21 demonstration he called Fred Halstead and said he would only endorse the action is there was a clear separation between the legal action and the civil disobedience. Spock wanted mothers to feel safe bringing their children to the demonstration. He understood that this would be an important aspect to the demonstration. Halstead assured him that there would be a separation between the two actions and Spock was satisfied by this.

At the time Dr. Spock always wore a Brooks Brothers suit with a tie. His wife Mary only convinced him to wear blue jeans when he was 75 years old. This is what Dr. Spock had to say at the October 21 demonstration. 

“We do not consider the Vietnamese north or south the enemy… They have only defended their country. Against the unjust onslaught of the United States… The enemy, we believe in all sincerity, is Lyndon Johnson.”

100,000 people attended the demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands marched to the Pentagon. A few hundred attempted to break the line of soldiers and enter the Pentagon. 

In all, about 675 demonstrators were arrested. Another 200 were arrested but not booked.  Some of the demonstrators stayed close to the Pentagon all evening but were chased away by the police in the morning.

Then in 1968 the National Mobilization Committee organized to demonstrate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The mobilization was aimed at support of a nomination of Eugene McCarthy for President. About 15,000 people showed up for that demonstration. However, a minority of those who came to Chicago were determined to break the law. This is how Jerry Rubin explained his point of view.

“Repression turns demonstration protests into wars. Actors into heroes. Masses of individuals into community. Repression eliminates the bystander, the neutral observer, the theorist. It forces everyone to pick a side. A movement can not grow without repression.”

So, when a minority of protesters challenged the National Guard and the police 660 people were arrested, 1,000 injured, and there was one fatality. 

Protesting this repression anti-war organizations called for another legal demonstration in Chicago. Twenty-five thousand people attended the action. While the press gave considerable coverage to the repression by the police, there was little press coverage given to this larger legal demonstration. 

Black liberation

During the same years as the U.S. government was at war against Vietnam, they also carried out a hot war against the African American community. In the mid 1960s the government buckled to pressure from the Civil Rights movement and did away with the Jim Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights.

However, institutionalized racist discrimination continued to be a fact of life. The issue that pushed the Black community into action was routine and systematic police brutality. Elizabeth Hinton wrote a powerful book titled America on Fire that documented all the rebellions in this country that continued until the 1980s.

The government responded to rebellions in Watts, Detroit, and Newark by murdering 180 people. Responding to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 cities across the country erupted in rebellion.

One year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King gave a speech where he opposed the war against Vietnam. In that speech King argued that the United States was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He went on to argue that the United States armed forces might appear to be “strange liberators” to the Vietnamese.

Malcolm X didn’t just oppose the U.S. war against Vietnam. He was inspired by the Vietnamese resistance to imperialism. Speaking about the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, this is what Malcolm had to say. 

“The French were deeply entrenched in Vietnam for a hundred years or so. They had the best weapons of warfare, a highly mechanized army, everything that you would need. And the guerrillas come out of the rice paddies, with nothing more than sneakers on, and a rifle, and a bowl of rice. And you know what they did in Dien Bien Phu. They ran the French out of there. And if the French were deeply entrenched and couldn’t stay there, then how do you think someone else is going to stay there, who isn’t even there yet?”

  

Mohammed Ali was influenced by Malcolm X and refused to be inducted into the military. He argued that “No Vietnamese ever called me n—word.” Although Ali faced a possible prison sentence for his refusal to be inducted, the Supreme Court looked at his case and needed to take a few things under consideration. 

They understood that Ali might have been the most popular person in the country at that time.  They understood that the Black community and the anti-war movement would erupt if he went to jail. So, in 1971 the Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision and respected Ali’s right not to serve because of his religious convictions.

In that same year, there was a revolt at the Attica prison in New York. The prisoners demanded that they be treated as human beings. Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the armed forces to crush that rebellion. This resulted in the murder of several inmates.   

Women’s liberation

Nancy Rosenstock wrote an important book titled Inside the second wave of feminism—Boston female liberation, 1968-1972, An account by participants. We might consider that before this movement, women were routinely prohibited from wearing pants at work. They were not allowed to have a credit card. Doctors routinely refused to give single women prescriptions for birth control. Most women worked jobs as secretaries or housekeepers. Only a tiny percentage of doctors were women. Abortion was illegal.

The combined movements of women’s liberation, civil rights, and anti-war all created a political climate where women began to gain rights they never had before. One of those rights was the right to decide if and when women become mothers. Today the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has compromised that right. As a result of the political atmosphere of those days, many of the leaders of the anti-war movement were women.

The invasion of Cambodia and the war against anti-war protesters

Richard Nixon became President in 1969. On April 15, 1969, massive anti-war demonstrations erupted in cities across the country. President Nixon saw the massive anti-war sentiment and started withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. However, he also escalated the bombing of Vietnam in his Linebacker I and Linebacker II bombing campaigns. 

Then Nixon ordered the military to escalate the war by invading Cambodia. The Student Mobilization Committee responded by calling for immediate demonstrations to protest this escalation of the war.

One of the places where demonstrations took place was at Kent State University. National Guardsmen responded to a May 4 antiwar demonstration by informing the protesters that the gathering was illegal. The Guard ordered them to leave. When this didn’t happen, the Guard fired tear gas into the crowd. When that didn’t fully disburse the demonstration, the National Guard fired live ammunition murdering four students and injuring many more.

Universities throughout the country began to go on strike protesting the murder of the Kent State students as well as the war. The student Mobilization Committee issued a statement saying:

“On a growing number of campuses, the strike has advanced from ‘shut it down’ to ‘open it up’ as an antiwar university.”

On May 9, in Augusta Georgia a sixteen-year-old Black youth was beaten to death in a country jail. The police fired on about 1,000 people who protested the police murder. 

Governor Lester Maddox labelled the demonstration “a Communist plot” and ordered in the National Guard. The guard proceeded in murdering six people in the Black community. No police or guardsmen were wounded.

Then on May 13, at Jackson State College in Mississippi 300 students held an antiwar demonstration. The mayor called out the National Guard. The Guard fired live ammunition at students who were merely congregating on campus. They murdered two students. The Guard fired on a women’s dormitory and several of the women who lived there were injured.

The Chicano community of the Southwest organized their own antiwar group called The National Chicano Moratorium. On August 29, 25,000 mostly Chicano people demonstrated against the war in Los Angeles, California. One of the reasons for this action was because of the disproportionate number of Chicanos who were dying in the war.

The sheriff’s deputies mobilized and attacked the demonstration. When the protesters disbursed, the deputies chased them.

One of the protesters was Ruben Salazar, who was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and was the news director of the Spanish-language television station KMEX. Salazar was a leader of the Chicano community and documented the systematic racist discrimination in Los Angeles. 

Retreating from the sheriff’s attack, Salazar went to a bar to have a drink. A Sheriff’s deputy fired a teargas projectile into the bar that took Salazar’s life. The Sheriff’s deputies took the lives of two other Chicanos on that day. 

When we think of the loss of all those lives, we also might think of the fact that the United States was forced to take the military out of Vietnam. We also might consider how the U.S. government used lethal force against peaceful antiwar actions. We also might think of how the movement that protested the war against Vietnam also continued the struggle for the right of people in this country to engage in peaceful protest. These were real conquests of the antiwar movement.      

Conclusion

Today we can only speculate as to how Fred Halstead would view the current movement protesting the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians. Clearly there are several differences in the antiwar movements of yesterday and today.

For the most part, U.S. soldiers are not directly involved in this genocide. However, the IDF would not have been able to murder 37,000 Palestinians without abundant U.S. financial and military support.

There are about seven million Jews who live in this country. Many have the mistaken idea that Israel needs to engage in this genocide to defend itself. The idea that Palestinians living in the occupied territories need to have equal rights with Jewish Israelis is not even mentioned in the so-called news media.

Some of the most ardent supporters of Israel understand that criticism of Israel is not analogous to anti-Semitism. Saying that, statements critical of all Jewish people are anti-Semitic. The antiwar movement needs to distance itself from those statements. Today the primary cause of anti-Semitism is the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians. 

The National Liberation Front of Vietnam had considerably less resources than the United States invading forces. However, it is clear that the NLF decisively defeated the U.S. invaders. The antiwar movement in this country and around the world aided in that effort. Today the world is a better place because of those actions.

In my opinion, the only way to bring peace to the Middle East is to give all Palestinians equal rights with Jewish Israeli citizens. Clearly the current genocide isn’t moving to achieve that goal. However, the Israeli government has never been more isolated in the world.

Mass actions didn’t just aid in the defeat of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Mass actions forced the government to do away with Jim Crow segregation. Mass actions forced the South African government to do away with apartheid. This history is clearly relevant to the antiwar movement today.

The book Out Now! by Fred Halstead offers many lessons as well as a rich perspective that is relevant to antiwar activists today. Halstead never ruled out the use of nonviolent civil disobedience. 

However, he believed that the most effective strategy was to attract the largest number of people in mass actions. This perspective required teach ins and educationals aimed at cutting through the nonsense promoted by the so-called news media every day.

Clearly there have been huge demonstrations protesting the Israeli organized genocide all over the world. My opinion is that the book Out Now! argues that this movement needs to grow even larger. 

Today the majority of the population of this country supports the demand of Ceasefire Now. The challenge is to get large numbers of people who already support that demand to join protests in the streets. This is a challenge for the antiwar movement today. Fred Halstead’s book Out Now! gives us invaluable lessons as to how this was done in the past.