Jewish Socialist Federation

Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb on March 13, 1881, which ushered in a wave of official and popular antisemitic violence known as pogroms in which individuals were killed, cultural institutions sacked, and property destroyed.

The reaction raged at its most extreme in the years 1881 and 1882, during which there were scores of violent events throughout the southern and western regions of the Russian empire in which Jews were permitted to dwell.

[5] In addition to their Eastern European focus, centered around the raising and transmission of funds to the Russian revolutionary movement, these American Bund groups advocated Jewish cultural and political autonomy rather than assimilation into the domestic orientation of the anglophonic Socialist Party of America (SPA).

[5] From 1905 many local Yiddish-language organization were loosely coordinated by a group called the Jewish Socialist Agitation Bureau, founded by a tailor from Rochester, New York named Max Kaufman.

[6] Kaufman's Agitation Bureau was envisioned as a mechanism for bringing prominent Yiddish-language socialists from New York City to address Jewish communities in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, and elsewhere in the Northeast.

[7] The Socialist Agitation Bureau met in convention annually,[8] with the established network of Bundist clubs playing a key role in the organization's expansion.