The Bund
The Bund competed, on the one hand, with non-Marxist Jewish socialist groups that were influenced by Russian populism and, on the other, with the emerging Jewish Zionist movement. The Bund rejected Jewish national separatism and eventually came out against the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The Bund stressed that the struggle for Jewish emancipation in the Russian empire must be linked with the struggle of the Russian proletariat, and for that reason sought close relations with Russian Social-Democracy. Nevertheless, the Bund insisted on the cultural autonomy of the empire's Jews and, accordingly, the organisational autonomy of the Bund within a federal Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In internal debates within the Bund, younger Bundists like Liber placed greater emphasis on Jewish cultural identity than their more assimilationist elders (such as the Bund's founder, Arkadi Kremer), and on the need for propaganda in Yiddish aimed specifically at Jewish workers. In relation to the RSDLP, they argued for a looser, federal form of organisation, rather than a unitary centralised one.