In 1937, Henryk Erlich took to the stage in a Warsaw theater to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Jewish Labor Bund. A revolutionary party that was both Marxist and proudly Jewish, the Bund had been founded in the Russian empire, where it organized strikes and armed units that defended Jews from pogroms. Driven out by the Bolsheviks, Erlich and other Bundists resettled in newly independent Poland, built both a successful political party and a powerful cultural movement that fostered Yiddish-language education, a vibrant press, and a network of workers’ institutions. All this as Polish Jews faced escalating antisemitic legislation and violence in the shadow of rising fascism.

What Erlich said that night defies much of what we think we know about Jewish life on the eve of the Holocaust. He implored his audience to “step out of the confines of your Jewish misery” and to recognize that “the Jews are not the only ones who are suffering. The overwhelming majority in the country, whether Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, or others, is suffering from the economic crisis … scarcely able to eke out a daily existence.” Expressing concern even for those groups who oppressed Jews in Poland, Erlich also extended sympathy to the Germans and Italians suffering under fascist rule. Clear-eyed about conditions at home, he warned that emigration to Palestine was no solution: Jewish displacement of the local Arab population would encourage, as he later put it, a culture of “reaction and chauvinism.” “Your liberation lies not in passivity and servility, not in empty dreams built on sand and English guns … but in the community of struggle with the working class, in the fight right here where you live, where your grandfathers and fathers had lived.”

Erlich did not deny Jewish suffering, nor did he particularize it. Instead, he understood it as the product of broader forces of class and political oppression—something that bound Jews to other populations and called for a shared fight for a different future. Such sensibilities are unsettling for contemporary narratives that reduce twentieth-century European Jewish life to a story of inexorable catastrophe. Was Erlich an odd aberration? Or a victim of naïve optimism, proven fatally wrong by the Holocaust? Two new books, Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund and Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone’s The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters, and Firebrands, argue that he was neither. Instead, his impulse for solidarity placed him within a rich Jewish tradition that has been largely forgotten—and sometimes, actively suppressed.