About

Our Name

Doikayt is Yiddish for "hereness." The term refers to the core concept of the Bundists — members of the General Jewish Labour Bund, a secular socialist movement active in the Russian Empire and Poland beginning around 1897.

Bundists were explicitly non- or anti-Zionist, holding that Jews should build justice and a good life wherever they live, in solidarity with other secular, multi-ethnic, working-class movements — rather than deferring collective liberation to a national homeland elsewhere.

Why This Matters Now

Judaism is increasingly perceived, by a growing number of people worldwide, as a supremacist religion — one that treats Jewish life as worth more than the lives of Palestinians. This perception has a specific source: the conduct of the Israeli state and the rhetoric of some of its officials.

None of that is Judaism. It is a political project carried out by a state, defended by some in the name of a religion that the overwhelming majority of its adherents, across history and across the world, have practiced as something very different: a tradition of argument, of obligation to the stranger, of tikkun olam — repairing the world for the collective good of all humankind — and of doikayt, the conviction that justice is built here, in the place you actually live, through the work you actually do.

We think the most effective answer to rising antisemitism is not argument alone. It's example. Every Jewish technologist who chooses to build tools that serve labor, environmental, and anti-imperialist movements instead of tools that serve extraction and control is making a quiet, durable case that Jewish values and human decency are not in tension.

See our Projects page for the tools we build and maintain.