Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

by Molly Crabapple

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.

Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.”
In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?

Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Jewish, Religion, Judaism, Audiobook

480 pages, Hardcover

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer. She is a contributing editor for Vice and has written for the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Guardian, among other publications. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mental capacity is not all there for me to write a review that will do the book justice. I cried a lot while listening to it, it was painful to deal with so much human suffering, even before and after the WWII parts.

I absolutely loved hearing about the Jewish Bund and their organizing and caring for each other and taking care of their children. Really sad that WWII came just when they were on top politically, I feel like the world would have been different if they'd had time to do more good work in times of 'peace' (they were actually all times of horrible pogroms, ffs).

I loved Sophia Dubnova, who was doing sexual education for Bund youth and writing about it. And I loved the fact that she confessed to her grandson, a little bit before her death at 101 yrs old (spoilers, I guess, she lived!) that she was no longer a social democrat, but an anarchist. When I heard that, I made a whooping noise while walking in the city.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have some quibbles but not going to let the Zionists rate bomb this one. It's important. Longer revue to come.

[Rachel Ashera Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't even begin to say how much this book means to me. Amid our present-day context of genocide and fascism, I have been almost ashamed to talk about my Jewish identity, lest I be grouped in with the butchers of Gaza and Lebanon. This is a book that reminds us that the current of diasporic Jewish identity—one that created works of cultural brilliance and that advocated for a more humane and just world everywhere it went—is just as old and just as deeply rooted as Zionism. This is, if nothing else, a tremendous work of healing.

It's also just intricately researched—Molly Crabapple learned Yiddish to write it, and had to read massive volumes of leftist sectariana to provide what has to be the most detailed English-language account of the Bund ever written. I probably know more about the Bund than the average person, and even more than the average Jew, but it turns out there's vastly more that I didn't know, and so this is also an incredible historical account.

Oh, and it's beautifully written. And illustrated. Look, everything about it is amazing honestly.

[Harneen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Jew I can’t begin to say how much this book spoke to me. The history of Jews in Eastern Europe, the Bund, political organizing and resistance, and the power of building a multiethnic movement. I am blown away. I never expected to love this book so much and feel so connected and empowered by stories of my people. Reading about the history of antisemitism, learning more about Pogroms and connecting the left movement of the 20th century to anti-Zionism was amazing. Mostly I am in awe and so moved by the stories of these activists. The hope. The belief. ‘I was right.’

[Betsy]

Coming out in April 2026; recommended by Naomi Klein on Ezra Klein Show, 3-20-26

[Brian Saitzyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read so many books in these last few years trying to better understand Judaism and Zionism as they are today and as they had been. Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by, Amy Kaplan, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World by, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History edited by, Bashir Bashir & Amos Goldberg; to name a few. I had read bits here and there about the Bund. I’m so thankful this book came out now. Here Where We Live Is Our Country, brings to light so much history that for the most part hadn’t made it to my generation. As people continue to awaken to the material realities at the center of so much suffering, this book is an important addition that brings to life the thread tying together our history and our current struggles.

[Aditi · Rating 5 out of 5]

literally the best book I’ve read in 2026. The research and storytelling is incredible. Molly Crabapple please write more books. #freepalestine

[Ranjani Sheshadri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review pending but LIBBY, YOU CAN’T TEASE THAT I CAN EXTEND MY LOAN AND THEN TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME. I was almost done, so I’m going to count it as read and cram the last hour (3 hours at 1.75x speed) SOME OTHER WAY 😭

[Matt Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words cannot describe the beauty of this book. Both deeply personal and extremely universal, Here Where We Live Is Our Country is the most important and most masterfully crafted book of the year.

[Alex Lantsberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

reviewed for DerSpekter.org at https://www.derspekter.org/here-where...
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Buried histories rarely stay buried. Sometimes they’re unearthed by intrepid historians digging into long-forgotten archives in pursuit of a notion that only makes sense to them. At other times their excavation comes from the inspiration of ancestors calling forth investigators from the grave, urging them to learn more about the world that shaped them and their descendants. Molly Crabapple’s “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” an intimate blend of biography, memoir, and history, is the latter. Narrated through the life of Sam Rothbort, a great-grandfather she never met, the book comes at an auspicious time amid the growing rejection by Jews, young and old, of the Zionist orthodoxies of their communal institutions. It comes during their search for a way forward amidst the rubble of Gaza. It comes as what we all thought was the long-dead monster of fascism rises again, brandished by a new generation of demagogues to kill and destroy at will.

Crabapple’s book is a perfectly timed contribution to present-day Jewish discourse. It begins in 1772, when Russia, Prussia, and Austria dismantled the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and absorbed millions of Jews into their respective empires. Moving quickly though the next 115 years of history, Crabapple introduces the Bund’s precursors, responding to the brutal racism meted out by their imperial rulers with agitation and revolutionary violence, and brings us to 1897, the year of the founding of two competing approaches to “the Jewish Question”. One was the Jewish Labor Bund. Started by a handful of Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) socialists who believed Jewish liberation was bound up with the liberation of all workers and stood on the principle of hereness — doikayt in Yiddish — these Bundists held that 1,000 years of Jewish history in Eastern Europe gave them as legitimate a claim to those lands as that of any antisemitic gentile. The other, Zionism, became the Bund’s doppelganger. Born only a few weeks prior to the Bund, Zionists essentially agreed with Europe’s antisemites: their answer to the problem of Jewish unsafety in the diaspora was an embrace of the nationalist idea that Jews needed their own national territory somewhere outside of Europe, ideally in what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine. From there, the story lays bare the rivalries, disagreements, and competing visions of the Jewish activists who imagined different lives — both “here” in Eastern Europe and “there” in Palestine — through the revolutionary currents of pre-WWII Europe and the apex of the Bund’s institutional power. The largest part of the book, the nine years between the Nazis' invasion of Poland and the creation of the Jewish nation-state, is a harrowing story of perseverance amidst the hell of a genocidal war, the consequences of which are still with us today.

I am not a historian; I am a descendant of Jews from the Pale, some of whom were lost to the Nazi fascism of the last century in the Holocaust. I am a socialist, an organizer, and a unionist who knew that Eastern European Jews had helped build the American labor movement, but had never learned of their organizational precursors. I became captivated by the history of the Bund years after my rejection of Zionism and jumped feet first into supporting its revival in 2023 with the co-creation of this publication. And it's not just me: the Western world has finally started to honestly assess its relationship with Israel. By making the full and long-dormant history of the Bund readily accessible to lay readers both Jewish and not, Crabapple gives us another battering ram with which to demolish the hegemony of Zionist delusion.

Perhaps the most uncomplicated way to look at the book is as a work of biography and memoir. Crabapple treats her subject, an ancestor who she never met but whose legacy is fundamental to her life’s work as a journalist and visual artist, with a deep reverence and curiosity. As Crabapple writes, “It was not just the thousands of his paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and mosaics that filled my great-aunt’s house in Brooklyn but the very presence of Grandpa Sam himself, as if his personality had been too vivid to allow him to be rendered a ghost.” His brief but visceral experience with revolutionary Bundism in the shtetl of Volkovysk marked such a turning point in his young life that he later memorialized it in a painting called “Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows,” the discovery of which launched Crabapple into the nearly decade-long globe-spanning research project that involved digging through musty archives, interviewing old Yiddish codgers, and waking the streets of the old world that became this book.

Sam’s biography paves the road through which we travel through the history of the Bund, organizing a world far across the Atlantic, both influencing and being influenced by what Crabapple calls the “Exile Galaxy” of early 20th-century New York. Her own memoir acts as the color commentary on that journey. Crabapple tells us that Sam’s “humanist," “all men were brothers” attitude influenced her development into “an incorrigible artist with a commitment to leftist politics.” She draws out observations as true of the Bundists in 1906 as they are in her experiences as an artist, journalist and activist in the 21st century. Her descriptions of her own memories — “the floor of a police cell, the boredom of a leftist meeting, the electric charge of passing a pamphlet to a stranger, the high of believing, rightly or wrongly, that you are about to change the world” — animate the stories of the Bundists who lived much harsher and more extreme versions of those same experiences a century before.

Biography and memoir may make the Bund’s struggles relatable to us, but history defines the landscape that Crabapple navigates with great care. She frequently consults the voices of the Bund’s formidable leaders — Henryk Erlich, Viktor Alter, Vladimir Medem, and Bernard Goldstein —and the many other tuers who made up the backbone of the Bund’s base. She paints vividly a world rife with poverty, repression, and violence. Perhaps most of all, amplifies the all too familiar emotions and dilemmas organizers and activists then and now share.

Hanging over the narrative is a fact every reader knows: Europe’s Jews could not outrun the fascist monster that would devour them. It was not just because of their own shortcomings or strategic mistakes, but because they were failed by the indifference and malicious neglect of Great Britain and the United States. Historians may point out some errors and simplifications, but Crabapple does not shy away from identifying the Bund's tactical failures stemming from “the fatal impulse to value principle over power, to leave the battlefield at the very moment they most needed to stay and fight” in both 1903 and 1917.

Historical details and varying interpretations of those details are of course important, and while I look forward to reading those critiques, they are unlikely to change the thrust of Crabapple’s tale of a Jewish revolutionary cadre that built a movement inspiring enough to win the support of the majority of Poland’s Jewish population on the eve of the Nazi invasion. A movement compelling enough to bring along others outside the community to overthrow a tyrant and consequential enough to define a sociopolitical legacy that reverberates and finds new life today can only be suppressed and maligned in the community from which it sprung for so long. Crabapple makes this history accessible, riveting, and real.

Three currents running through the book are particularly illuminating of our present moment. First are the decades of sectarian infighting: with Bolsheviks before and leading up to the October Revolution, with Communists afterwards, and with Zionists always. Second is the transnational character of Bundism and how this “rooted unrootedness” conversed and impacted activities at home. Third, and related to the second, is the Bundists’ headlong dive into building institutions that survive to this day.

The years of enmity between Bundists and Bolsheviks, culminating in the Bund’s banishment from the Soviet Union and ultimately the murders of Alter and Erlich are deeply significant. For readers with minimal knowledge of this rich vein of history, Crabapple does an admirable job for surfacing those disagreements and stating her point of view clearly: that Lenin was wrong and Medem had him dead to rights as a budding authoritarian. A different book might investigate how, despite the Bund’s banishment in 1921, the specter of the Bund’s approach to national identity proved useful enough to organize the various national Soviet republics along national lines while melding with the USSR’s nominal class equality. And notwithstanding Stalin’s deep antisemitism, outlines of the now shattered Russian Bund’s goal of national cultural autonomy can be seen in his establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in 1928 as a means of blunting Zionist yearnings among the Soviet Union’s Jewish population (along with military considerations). The JAO may have ultimately failed to attract a significant number of Jews and exists today as an ersatz artifact of what never really was, a fact that should be ascribed to its inorganic origin akin to Herzl’s Uganda option.

The book also vividly shows how the Bund was a transnational — not just an Eastern European — movement that lived by its value of doikayt whether in the “old” country or in the “new.” Crabapple writes, “New York was the world capital of radical diasporas at the turn of the century...Forget Exileland. New York was Exile Galaxy.” That revolutionary movements maintain links to exiled leaders and activists is not new; Leon Trotsky, Jose Marti, Antonio Mattei Lluberas, Sun Yat-sen, and others all spent time in exile before returning “home.” What seems different about Bundist leaders, however, is that these exiles and refugees re-built lives and activist careers in their new homes to advance the same principles that originally drove them from their old ones. Many threw themselves into the American Labor movement and rose to positions of leadership — such as David Dubinsky, Sydney Hillman, Baruch Charney Vladeck, and Joseph Baskin — even if they shaved off the sharp edges of their revolutionary pasts. Some, like Sophia Dubnova, saw shadows of their own oppression in Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights, equality, and dignity, and joined new liberation movements. They were affirmatively Jewish in a world where they were no longer “prime targets for state persecution...merely discriminated against and disdained.”

Perhaps the Bund’s most consequential impact is how its organizing ethos built cultural, social, and political institutions like the Workers’ Circle and the Jewish Labor Committee. They survive to this day, even if their politics have drifted from the socialist internationalism of their roots. Similarly, the Forward, or Forverts, founded by Abe Cahan in the same year as Zionism and the Bund and later headed by Vladeck, continues to be a vital voice for the American Jewish community even as it platforms columnists conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism and obscuring Israel’s crimes in Gaza. American Jewishness of the past 60 years may be plagued by a Zionist affinity culture, but a growing number of American Jews continue to identify with Bundist pluralism rather than Zionist chauvinism. Jewish communal institutions are fighting an increasingly unsuccessful war to purge their staff of anti-Zionists as American Jewish support for Israel rapidly deteriorates. Growing interest in the Bund and Bundist philosophy gives life to the phrase, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were landmines.”

The Bund built power strong enough to overthrow tyrants. It commanded a level of support from the Jewish street that modern socialists and Jewish communal organizations can only dream of. Though the Bund was not powerful enough to defeat the fascist war machine that murdered its people and laid waste to its home, its legacy should provide today’s socialist organizers — Jewish and gentile alike — with both hope and lessons for their own work.

The first lesson is commitment. The activists who resisted the Romanovs persevered despite tremendous odds. They fomented revolution against them, defended their communities from state violence, and governed territory ruled by a hostile Polish state. They committed to not just “pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt,” as shouted by Meyer London in a rally to raise funds for the 1905 revolutionaries. They held fast to it, despite the oppression of the Czar’s Okhrana, through jail and exile, and under fire from Nazis. Nothing shook from it.

The second lesson is doikayt as practice, not slogan. Attention to cultural development, education, and mutual aid made the Bund an integral social institution, not just a political project, that sustained Jews through bouts of racial terror and poverty, and even followed them through emigration when they had to flee. While Zionist critics spill fountains of ink criticizing today’s neo-Bundists for being nothing more than a practice in nostalgic sloganeering, one proves this assumption incorrect simply by looking around: across the United States and Europe, whether in formal Bund chapters or Bund-inspired groups, neo-Bundists are reanimating nearly forgotten Jewish diasporic languages, creating new diasporic culture, building mutual aid networks, and organizing alongside their neighbors in the fight for justice. Der Spekter not only uplifts those efforts, but shows how Bundist values can be applied in a multiplicity of ways and as an analytical frame in a world that is in desperate need of tools to fight the inhumanity of what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor refer to as end-times fascism.

The final lesson — which is related to both of the former — is the consistency of the Bund's political work through thick and thin. Some may dismiss as naivete Erlich’s refusal to write off the gentiles who mouthed words of support at one moment then allowed their submerged antisemitism to explode violently. Perhaps it was. But it was borne of a grounded understanding that inter-communal hate is learned and can be unlearned as shown in the example of the Polish Socialist Party. As Crabapple writes,

“The Polish Socialist Party and the Bund were comrades. They had gone to jail together, marched together, struck together, punched fascists together, and manned the barricades together during the siege of Warsaw. When the Germans occupied their country, Polish socialists forged documents for Bundists, rescued their kids, hid their fighters, even went to Auschwitz for distributing their party press. After the great deportation had ended, Polish socialists helped found Zegota, the only official council to aid Jews that would ever exist in occupied Europe. As the ghetto burned, Zegota’s Polish socialist chairman, Julian Grobelny, searched its perimeter for fugitives to help, all while weeping for his valiant friends who fought inside.”

Reggae singer Peter Tosh sang, “I’m a man of the past, living in the present, and walking in the future.” Crabapple’s history helps ground the Jewish left in a past that has been hidden from many of us and offers the raw material for a way forward. The working class Jewish culture of the Pale may no longer exist, but we continue to hear echoes of its milieu. Today’s neo-Bundists are working to rebuild it amidst a radically different landscape where Western Jews are often at least comfortably middle class, where Ashkenazim are beneficiaries of provisional whiteness, and where there exists a Jewish nation-state run by the political heirs of a “fascist clown” (Jabotinsky) whose “soldiers are nothing more than tragicomic caricature of Hitler’s SA....the same beasts [with] some muscle strength, some territory, and a political opportunity.” Neo-Bundists are doing so by learning from the victories and defeats of the past. They are building the future that we will walk in.

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molly Crabapple is loud, femme, feminist, and not above doing a little mugging for the camera. Her book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which catalogs the efforts of the Jewish Labor Bund from its inception to the end of World War Two, hit the USA Today Bestseller List and New York Times Bestseller List in its first week. It’s a timely book. The Western world’s support for Israel is declining in the wake of its widely broadcast genocide in Gaza and destruction, displacement and pogroms in the West Bank, its unilateral aggression towards surrounding states, and its supporters’ frequent racist tirades or interpersonal violence. It is useful for Jewish people and everyone else to remember that Israel is not the only form of collective organization that Jews have undertaken in the world of the gun, the train and the border.

The Jewish Labor Bund began on October 7, 1897, as a series of book clubs in Vilna, and grew to a trade-union forward party of workers which protected Jews from pogroms, educated young people, taught self-defense classes, attempted a takeover of Odessa, participated in massive strikes and two revolutions, fought against Nazis, and encouraged workers to read, make art, talk to each other, and fight for a better world. Zionists will say: the Bund failed because it trusted too much that goyische allies would express solidarity toward Jews. My answer to this is: Zionism is failing because it refuses to believe in solidarity, or in humanism, at all. If Zionism continues, it will be an increasingly murderous, hierarchical, anti-intellectual, death-centric state, and it will need to wage war on all fronts forever. Such a state, in my opinion, cannot be Jewish in a way that matters— and it also cannot survive long.

Crabapple paid two visits to my Queens-based lay-led antizionist shul in advance of the book’s release to answer questions about the Bund, which was at multiple points in its history the second-largest socialist organization in the Russian Empire (at 35k official members, it was still smaller than today’s American DSA—though its influence throughout society and its range of social priorities much wider). I also attended her talk at Brooklyn Library with Ibtisam Azem, a Palestinian author. In both locations, when I saw her, Crabapple was magnetic, dramatic, and highly animated by narrative and personal stories. In both appearances, she emphasized the toughness, coolness, steadfastness and determination of working-class Bund organizers, often women. Crabapple, a journalist, DSA booster, painter and burlesque artist, has previously illustrated Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham, as well as her own memoir, Drawing Blood, about “the years between 9/11 and the Occupy movement” in NYC.

I am sure there will be a lot of writing about Here Where We Live Is Our Country. I found it a thrilling book to read– structured around a cast of characters like Sophia Dubnova and Henryk Erlich and Pati Kremer and Molly’s own great-grandfather Sam Rothbort, told in small chunks that guide the reader through a very complex period in European/Russian history. It’s foremost a great way of understanding the interconnected world of the late nineteenth century and the extremely enmeshed web of causality between events in Russia/Poland/Lithuania/Ukraine/Geneva and events in NYC. Rather than an academic focus on specific meetings and conferences– though there are scene-setting asides about the Second International that contrast it with early Zionist casino-resort get-togethers, and serious discussion of politics– this book’s focus is on the experiences of workers driven to revolution. There is an infectious enthusiasm about Crabapple’s writing: the adventure of jail, of exile, of teaching others to read, of sex and celebration. The Bundists, unlike the Zionists, developed a vision of the future that was about liberation for everyone, right where they were, rather than evacuation to someone else’s distant shore. As Meyer London, an American Jewish socialist put it, the Bund was looking to “free Egypt”. Enemies–the racist Slavic/Polish/Ukrainian peasantry or industrial peers, even Cossacks– could be converted to allies in a fight against a bigger enemy, and rather than resulting in the abolition of Judaism, the Bund pictured a democratic socialist worker-run state where minority ethnic groups preserved their cultural identity while also achieving education and fulfillment in secular equality. It was a humanist dream that believed in the end of racism alongside the presence of difference, prefiguring later USSR attempts at anticolonial antiracism. While most Bundists were atheists, they were enthusiastic promoters of the Yiddish press, the Yiddish theater, and Jewish life– and they physically defended synagogue-attending neighbors from pogromist attacks. Unlike other socialist tendencies toward the end of Jewish identity and assimilation, the Bund’s force of Jewish labor–confined to the Pale, attacked by cossacks and peasants alike in brutal scenes with body counts higher than American audiences can really comprehend– was committed to recognizing how much Russian/Ukrainian/Polish/British/French/etc antisemitism structured their own lives. They identified with oppressed minority populations all around the world, including Black Americans, whose lynchings at the hands of white racists were often cited as directly comparable both in Yiddish press and in Black papers in the United States. The pogroms that followed the failed 1905 revolution, which the Tsar blamed on Jews, were a wake-up call that far more racism existed than had yet been overcome. “The workers and peasants wacross the Russian Empire wh ‘broke Jewish heads, tore out children’s eyes, raped women..were doing what their fathers and brothers had done in years past…” wrote Simon Dubnov in the wake of these horrors. Some Christian socialists had died defending Jewish homes, but they were “wonderful exceptions to a miserable rule”. Enter Zionists, Jabotinsky, the first Betar– the argument to just give up, to become racist yourself, and use your strength on someone who does not yet have enough weapons to fight back. Also enter the Bolsheviks– and the argument that all petty difference would be subsumed if you had a strong enough unified state.

One thing that stands out decisively in this book is Crabapple’s anti-Lenin bent. To be fair, Lenin started it– his anti-Bundism appears early, in 1903. Lenin’s line was mainly that the Bundists were confused about their assertion of a need for independence based on ethnic specificity, which Lenin equated with their enemy Zionism and which he said obscured that “every point in the programme is common to the entire proletariat”--a point lost on some racists in Hlukhiv a couple decades later. Crabapple (I think this is fair to say) personally dislikes this Lenin a lot, but in her account she recognizes the reasons for Bolshevik success in the wake of the first World War: people were sick of fighting and dying far from home, had done the March revolution for the bread, and the Bolsheviks proposed a more dramatic social reorganization than the one initially tried out under the Provisional Government. Simultaneously, she sees Lenin and co. as coldly pragmatic/opportunistic, historically contingent bullies. They were, she contends, happy to write off the wellbeing of the most oppressed–agrarian peasants affiliated with the SRs, Jews– in order to consolidate power (and grain), and were too eager to maintain state control over Russian imperial lands that would just as soon have become independent. What was the alternative? Maybe a weaker country–maybe a series of bites taken off the edges of Russian territory leading to collapse. You see the dilemma: is it about local worker control, or wanting greater state power capable of keeping capitalists and nationalists out? Bundist critics like Henryk Erlich characterized the October Revolution, which abolished the Provisional Government, as an autocratic putsch, rather than a workers’ uprising. Erlich suggested that if autocratic tendencies continued in this vein, in a few years Bolsheviks would soon turn on each other.

Crabapple is coming at this from a certain point of view rooted in a fundamental disagreement with anything that overrides participatory democracy: her protagonists, who had been fighting against the Tsar longer than Lenin, both with and without other socialists, found themselves sometimes imprisoned and killed by the revolutionary Red Army and sometimes protected by it. To the Bolsheviks’ credit, they killed fewer Jews than Ukrainians and White Russians– only 9% of pogroms during this period were Communist-run. But it was still a disappointing turn. The Bund had tried for twenty years before the Bolshevik takeover of the Kremlin to bring about an anti-racist secular, socialist and democratic workers’ state; they sided with Mensheviks out of an impulse to preserve minority concerns rather than emphasize a single party line–which turned out to be their undoing, along with (whoops) supporting their empire of origin in the first World War alongside other non-communist socialist parties. While a late resolution switched the Bundists to pro-pacifism, it didn’t come quickly enough, and nascent fascist nationalisms quickly smeared all Jews as Bolsheviks just as Bolsheviks smeared Bundists as class traitors. Some Bundists became Bolsheviks; some of these communists were later purged, alongside unlucky SRs. I think Crabapple has a fundamental point about the flaws in the Bolshevik approach. If you alienate and persecute your left rivals rather than keeping them around to argue with, the resulting unity of thought in statecraft may be good for a few years’ industrial growth, but longterm will not be as flexible as it needs to be, and may not be able to handle future expressions of democratic dissent–or economic/military issues– without cracks or spasms. Simultaneously, Crabapple highlights the moments in 1903 and 1917 where the Bund walked away from the table and ceded power rather than make ideological compromises in order to effect a workers’ state, and the vicious fights between Bundist and Communist adherents in the streets of Kovno, Minsk, Lublin et cetera that prevented solidarity against fascists until it was too late. The USSR, on the theory of buying time, endorsed initial expansionism from Hitler before turning against it after Hitler turned on Poland. Bundism held the Nazis out of Warsaw, but could not save the people of the ghetto without much greater solidarity, refugee assistance, and direct aid from abroad. I enjoy the ability of Here Where We Live’s bird’s eye view to contextualize the individual memoirs of survival that often trickle down to us through time. Those Polish Jews who did flee into the USSR, like young Uri Shulevitz, often found themselves abandoned with no resources in places like Turkestan–and were motivated to commit crimes for Zionism later. This was the failure of international anti-fascist solidarity in the United States, Britain, France, Canada, USSR, etc, as much as it was any failure on the part of Bundists. This is a story about the failures of both Bolshevism and Bundism to build lasting coalitions with left rivals that come through in times of need– of humans capable of heroism who are undermined by the racism, factionalism or particular vendettas that turn allies against each other.

As much as all this politicking, Molly cares about affect. Emotions like despair, desire, love, and ecstasy characterise these workers’ movements just as much as revolutionary seriousness, and the kind of party she feels nostalgic about and dreams of rematerializing in the future is one of costume balls, book clubs, communal childcare, and sex, where young people are encouraged to participate and where women as well as men lead fulfilled lives. She occasionally brings in her own experiences as a young artist in NYC alongside her great-grandfather’s, contrasting their experience of the built environment, discussing the kinds of art her grandfather made for Americans versus the kind of Expressionist daring being tried out in Berlin, and thinking about the meaning of poetry in the lives of people who also handled guns. Bernard Goldstein, a unionist bruiser with a reputation as someone who could break kneecaps if needed, also loved children and theater. Pati Kremer once dated Jabotinsky. A young woman in the Warsaw Ghetto wanted to fuck her boyfriend before they both died fighting Nazis. These human stories are tearjerkers, and I think will get a lot more people invested in socialism than stories of Great Men or Economic Machines alone. A yarn is good for something. Humans connect to humans.

One of the things I most hope this book does is provide a good argument for returning Jewish political energy to projects against Zionism. All through this text, we see a litany of elders calling forward into the future that any project that hinges on nationalism, xenophobia, land theft or massacre is not only wrong but doomed. It is wrong because you should not do to other people what you do not want done to you– and it is doomed because you make an enemy every time you strike someone down just because you see them as Other and want to extract their labor or for them to cease existing. The more enemies you make, the more you will find yourself at war, never free and never at peace. The Bund, alongside other anarchists and communists and socialists of a million micro-persuasions, saw a way to end the cycle of conflict, of struggle, of exploitation: freedom for all workers, equality between all ethnic groups and between men and women, mass education, and common ownership of the means of production. This was an impossible dream when they conceived of it in 1897; for a moment, it looked far less than impossible. And while the Nazis could kill millions and instill a belief in both Jews and Germans that living in a multicultural world was impossible, they could not kill the Bund’s dream. The Bund’s vision was composed of its thousands of members, who carried that idea into other work they did later, if they survived the Holocaust: Dubnova became a Civil Rights activist in her later years. Sam Rothbort, who played a pretty small part in the Bund’s work, all told, carried this dream to America; his belief in art, antiracism and dignity was transmitted to his acceptance of his Puerto Rican son-in-law, and Molly is now a socialist too, whose art she sees as in conversation with her ancestor.

Academics may sniff at the love/lust/drama of it all, but it’s sexy, and relatable, and it sells, and this is just how Crabapple writes about war, revolution and death. She wants revolutionary popular history to be accessible and compelling. Her earlier work on Brothers of the Gun, unlike more academic accounts of the Syrian civil war, focuses on interpersonal relationships and the motivations and emotional connections of people driven to participate in armed movements.

Marwan Hisham says of the collaborative memoir in this interview from Bomb magazine:

“I think it’s important to show the interested reader outside of Syria how wars affect people and what it means to live in a situation like that. We’re also in a kind of rhetoric war, and it’s important to shed light on things that are completely neglected, to fight stereotypes and try to show people the complicated reality. Because it’s not a normal situation, it’s an extraordinary experience and I’ve experienced many things in a very short time, I felt I was obligated to convey the story, and the written form is the best way for me. I wanted to portray people who had their own political views, their own understandings of life, and who changed over time. They were people just like other people in other countries. Their environment was probably different, but they’re still complicated people. There are no simple people.”

The conflicts of the past are not identical to the conflicts today, but the people within them–who tend toward poetry, pacifism, militant combat, education, all at once or in sequence or in tension– are human. Time connects us to past struggles, and the struggles of today are born out of the failures of past struggles. Ukrainian nationalism and neo-nazism–as well as modern Russian imperial territorial aims– directly springs from the limits and failures of Bolshevism, and the techniques of war at play today–along with the heartbreak and pain of losing loved ones to torture, massacre, or misguided chauvinism– are shared by people in the past. We relate to them through the stories of their lives, not just the records of number-dead or battles-lost-and-won. Crabapple’s own history of journalism around the Arab Spring and its Syrian aftermath–though she herself has only been to Syria once, and has been more often in Lebanon and Palestine– draws the connection for me to another book I read in tandem with Here Where We Live Is Our Country. That book is the 2022 graphic novel Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on Isis by Janet Biehl from PM Press. What struck me most about reading these texts together was the extent to which they are about a very similar impulse, a century apart. I am going to talk about that book in my next post.

[Cindy Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bund was a Jewish, Socialist political party and organization that was founded at the end of the 19th century and was active throughout Eastern Europe. Beyond its political work, the Bund was also engaged in education, sports competitions, newspaper publishing, and social events. A proponent of "Hereness," the commitment that, as the book's title states, "here where we live is our country," the Bund vehemently opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine and saw Zionists as enemies. Instead, the Bund aligned with non-Jewish socialists and stood for the rights of all the world's oppressed peoples.

This long book is an exhaustive account of the history of the Bund from its beginnings through the failed 1905 revolution, WWI and its aftermath, the successful Russian Revolution, the interwar years, WWII and the Holocaust, and the post-war years. The author begins with the story of her great grandfather, a Jewish immigrant and Bund member who left his shtetl in Poland and fled to the US after his involvement in the shooting of antisemitic police officers. While he was less politically involved in the US, he always lived the values of the Bund and had an up and down career as an artist.

The book is not especially an academically disciplined, historical account, though it is well researched with a lengthy notes section and bibliography that includes interviews with Bund family members and original archival documents. It is at times a polemic, comparing the stances and values of the Bund to current issues, like the Gaza war and the status of Israel as a Jewish nation. It is also at times less precise in, for example, calling all places where Jews were sent both before and after WWII, "concentration camps," without distinguishing these from the camps run by the Nazis.

Perhaps a more disciplined account would have been more evenhanded in its discussion of the rivalry between the Bund and Zionist organizations and leaders. Even in this book, the author does admit that at times the rigidity of the Bund's politics worked against them, including when, in the Warsaw ghetto, they refused to include their archives with those of Emanual Ringelblum's because he was a Zionist. This meant that the Bund's papers ended up being destroyed in the ghetto whereas most of Ringelblum's were recovered and form the basis for much of what we know about the ghetto and the uprising (including the fact that this author relied extensively on Ringelblum's archive).

Despite my concerns about the author's efforts to tie the history of the Bund to current anti-Zionism activism and anti-Israel politics (both of which, of course, were part of the Bund's own politics), this book is a valuable account of one of the most important Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders and activists of the 20th century. I was particularly impressed with the chapters focused on the 1917 Russian Revolution, the interwar years, and the account of the Warsaw ghetto and the ghetto uprising.

I was provided an ARC by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Elena Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple is a hybrid narrative that merges personal inquiry with political history, using the story of the Bund not just as subject matter, but as a lens for examining unresolved ideological tensions that persist today.

What stands out immediately is the dual structure. The book operates simultaneously as historical reconstruction and personal investigation. The discovery of Sam Rothman’s letters and artwork is not treated as archival detail alone. It becomes the entry point into a broader ideological exploration, where lineage and belief intersect.

The portrayal of the Bund itself is one of the book’s strongest elements. It is not simplified into a singular political identity. Instead, it is presented as a movement shaped by contradiction. Deeply rooted in Jewish experience while simultaneously committed to internationalist Marxism, the Bund exists in tension with both nationalist and assimilationist frameworks. This complexity is maintained rather than resolved, which gives the narrative intellectual weight.

Another strength is how the book handles historical progression. The Bund���s involvement in labor movements, revolutionary activity, and resistance is not presented as a linear rise and fall. Each phase introduces new pressures, from internal ideological conflicts to external forces like emerging nationalism and authoritarian regimes. The eventual marginalization of the Bund is framed not as inevitability but as the result of competing historical trajectories.

The connection to larger historical events is also carefully integrated. The Russian Revolution, the rise of Nazism, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are not treated as background context but as moments that directly test the viability of the Bund’s ideals. These intersections reinforce the central question of whether the movement failed on its own terms or was overtaken by forces beyond its control.

Crabapple’s personal involvement adds urgency to the narrative. Her own experiences within activist spaces create a parallel between past and present, allowing the book to move beyond historical documentation into contemporary relevance. The question of multiracial solidarity versus rising tribalism is not abstract. It is positioned as ongoing and unresolved.

The narrative ultimately resists definitive conclusions. Instead, it maintains focus on the central tension whether the Bund’s vision was flawed, or whether the world was incapable of sustaining it. This refusal to resolve the question is what gives the book its lasting impact.

At 480 pages, Here Where We Live Is Our Country offers a dense and intellectually engaging reading experience that will resonate strongly with readers interested in political history, ideological movements, and the intersection of personal narrative with broader historical inquiry.

[Andrew Sternick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molly Crabapple has written an intensely personal treatment of a part of Jewish culture and Eastern European history which might be inhumed by the Nazi holocaust, soviet communist dissolution, and the migration of a great part of the remaining Jews of the region to the new nation of Israel, as well as the United States. The author makes no bones about her editorial position; she is a narrator as hostile to nationalism as was the Bund itself. Her writing can be at moments brash, but it is always engaging. I found Here Where We Live Is Our Country hard to put down. Any reader with a deep knowledge of European history from the late 1800s through WWII and its aftermath will likely feel the same. The story she tells weaves through a wider history exhaustively documented, but she introduces organizations, characters, and events that will be unfamiliar to most readers. Of particular interest was a bit of untold (to me at least) history of Vladimir Lenin, who was known to, and reviled by, the Bundists as a figure unique among idealistic activists of the early 1900s international left for his authoritarian tendencies, evident long before the Russian revolution delivered a continent-spanning empire into his hands.

The book is in small part a memoir drawn from the author's ancestral connection to the Bund, as well as interviews with members’ descendants. Yet the bibliography is vast, a credit to years of exhaustive research. The few illustrations are her own, and add much to a lush and engaging style. Her prose is a pleasure to read, and I found myself wondering what might have been left on the editing room floor as it were. I could have read hundreds more pages of this.

This book is also an enormous achievement of popular history; Crabapple shows shades of Barbara Tuchman. Before I started at page one, I had opened Here Where We Live Is Our Country a few times to random pages, and was instantly drawn in; it took a bit of discipline not to read the book from one of those pages clear through to the end without first turning back to page one. Crabapple manages to write at both the grandest scale, offering the reader history in its ideological and global scope, and also gives us a collection of relatable personal stories, the raw material from which all history is made. I came away, in spite of a lifetime of reading on the broader period and region, with a vivid picture of a history I knew little of, which lives on in the contradictions of the present day. One cannot truly understand the rise of international communism or the triumph of Zionism without also knowing the history of an organization that in many ways an opposite, and yet twin to both; Jewish, yet universalist; possessing of an urgent need to transform the world, yet humane in its methods.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved Molly Crabapple's "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: the Story of the Jewish Bund." It is a deeply researched history with personal anecdotes woven through in ways that feel organic -- not to mention the clear family connections (her great-grandfather, the artist Samuel Rothbort, was an active member of the Bund).

The Jewish Bund was the revolutionary Jewish socialist party in Eastern Europe (mainly Poland, Russia, and Lithuania) that was active in the late 19th and early 20th century. 20th century Jewish history will often tell narratives that lead to the creation of Israel; 20th century socialist history will often focus on the USSR. However, these Jewish socialists were anti-Zionists and also anti-Bolshevik: they viewed their Jewish identities and socialist identities as intertwined. They played a critical role in helping an oppressed minority group organize community protection and mutual aid, but with an attitude that extended solidarity beyond just in-group comrades. They were committed anti-Zionists because they believed they had every right to call where they lived home as anyone else, and could not see the colonization of Palestine as anything other than replicating the same systems of oppression to which they were subjugated. The organizers and rank-and-file of the Bund were clever, networked, and idealistic, and they were active in fighting for democracy and basic rights--and a leading force in the 1905 Russian Revolution.

World War II and the Holocaust were a massive blow to the sense of "hereness" of the Bund. Crabapple talks about the impressive organizing in the face of adversity in the Warsaw Ghetto and the networks the Bund maintained, but it's not lost on her how people who showed their neighbors solidarity so rarely received that in return -- and the hatred and greed that was always easily deployed against them.

But Crabapple's book offers a counter-narrative to ones that can only see Jewish strength through the state of Israel, whose actions in recent years (and for many decades before) offend any basic sense of morality or justice. There was strength in solidarity, in organizing, and in networks and in the legacies those built. The revolutionary socialist who did not resort to the totalitarianism of the Bolsheviks is a great figure for that--someone who wanted to build a better world for all.

And to critics of the Bund -- one wonders, to what extent is becoming your oppressor of 100+ years ago a form of success? It is among the worst forms of failure.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Although not well known today, the Jewish Bund was a fascinating organisation at the intersection of Jewish identity and Socialist ideology. They proudly stood up for their Jewish identity instead of subsuming it into larger socialist groups and clashed with Zionists who argued Jews could never be at home in Europe. As the title says, Russia and Poland was their home, not Israel. This book gives a good insight into this often forgotten part of Eastern European history.

It's worth noting that the author is a journalist, not a historian, so this is reflected in the style of the book. This is more of a collection of profiles of major figures in the Bund rather than a historical analysis. This has the advantage of bringing the characters to life and avoids the pitfalls of many dry academic texts, but the disadvantage is the lack of wider historical context. I felt I learned more about certain individuals than I did about the Bund as an organisation.

The author also frequently referenced their own family history but at times I found this excessive. Again some people might like how this puts a human face on a member of the Bund, but stories about family relatives are always much more interesting to members of the family than to everyone else.

The writing was a little clunky at times and the author used a lot of modern Americanisms which felt out of place (police were "cops", sex was "fucking"). One person's collar is described as "white as cocaine." (!?) The book was weak on explaining the context of the time, for example the book mentions the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet war but forgets to tell readers when the war began. There is a discussion about trying to get onto the Warsaw kehillah without explaining what a kehillah is. There are some historical errors like claiming Kerensky was involved in Kornilov's coup (he was the one who crushed it) or that 1931 Germany was a time of inflation (it was a time of deflation) but not mentioning it was a time of unemployment.

[The Horror The Horror · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crabapple has done us a great service by creating a well-researched page-turner that explodes the myth conflating Judaism and Zionism. Nothing doing, according to the historical record.

As a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, I've been out there for a year, protesting the genocide in Gaza and appalled by the use of my name to justify this horror. After reading "Here Where We Live is Our Country," I learned that hostility toward Zionism is nothing new among Jews, who have opposed all forms of anti-democratic ethno-nationalism from the very beginning.

These Bundist socialists believed in making wherever you lived better: fighting the Russian communists, the antisemitic pogroms, and the Zionists. They mocked Zionist ideology from the very beginning: going somewhere else and kicking out the native population made no sense, nor did sucking up to antisemitic German and British imperialists, eager to rid themselves of the "Jewish problem" by packing them off to Palestine. Instead of following this line, despite tremendous odds, the Bundists created a powerful socialist party, building schools, running soup kitchens, teaching feminism, and leading the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Few of these Bundist heroes survived the German slaughter. Remarkably, its leader, Marek Edelman, escaped through the Warsaw sewers, covered in shit, from the ghetto, and joined his Polish socialist allies, who risked their lives for Jews. When Israel tried to make Edelman its poster boy after the war, Edelman refused, insisting that Poland was his homeland. That's why Israel erased him from the Holocaust memorials.

Dramatic, insightful, funny at times, and tragic in others, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in unraveling a false narrative spun by Israel and its Western allies.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country is an ambitious work that tells the detailed story of the Jewish Labour Bund, a once-powerful socialist movement in Eastern Europe, At its core, the book is about a political philosophy that held the belief that Jewish people should fight for dignity and equality wherever they live, rather than seeking a separate homeland. Crabapple reconstructs this world through a tapestry of lives - workers, poets, revolutionaries, and ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times - bringing to life a movement that played a role in events from tsarist repression to the Russian Revolution and ultimately the devastation of the Holocaust. Crabapple interweaves rigorous research with personal narrative, tracing her own family’s connection to the Bund. This gives the book an emotional charge that many academic histories lack. The Bund is not treated as an abstract ideology but as a lived experience. The writing is clear, engaging and accessible. At times, however, the use of modern language felt anachronistic and out of place and I didn’t feel added anything to the narrative. The breadth of material, spanning decades, countries, characters and ideological debates, can occasionally feel overwhelming and the book requires some commitment from the reader, but overall I found it fascinating and thought-provoking, giving as it does such a comprehensive account of the Bund and its legacy. A remarkable achievement by any standards.

[Susan Scribner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and heartbreaking history of the Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party that primarily operated in Poland in the first half of the 20th century. The Bundists promoted solidarity and mutual aid, but weren't averse to violence when rights were denied. They weren't communists and they certainly weren't Zionists; they were morally opposed to the idea of making a new home for Jews at the expense of the Palestinians who already lived there. They had a few brief moments of glory in between the World Wars, but were decimated with the rest of Poland's Jews in the Holocaust.

Crabapple's great-grandfather was a founding member of the Bund, and that kinship fortifies her identification with a non-Zionist, progressive Judaism. Her diligent research (she learned Yiddish to translate numerous primary sources) and focus on key Bundists make this a page-turner, even during the horrific depictions of the Holocaust.

But there are so many examples of Jews being scapegoated, betrayed, and murdered by everyone around them that it's hard to understand the Bundists' insistence on "hereness" - the determination to live in peace and dignity wherever they were located. I've been in emotional and mental turmoil ever since October 2023, abhorring both Israel's actions and the rising anti-semitism that supports the need for a safe Jewish homeland. This book didn't alleviate my uneasiness, but it helped me better understand it.

[Rachael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here Where We Live examines the Jewish Bund, a revolutionary Jewish socialist organization that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Its activism was shaped by socialist ideals, a strong commitment to working-class politics, and a principled opposition to Zionism.

I came to this nonfiction work as a layperson with a general sense of the period but little specific knowledge of the Bund. Reading from that perspective, the author’s journalistic background makes the book really approachable and readable. The inclusion of a character list and glossary was really welcomed, especially considering there are so many names mentioned. I also appreciated the inclusion of the wonderful illustrations from the author's great-grandfather, whose own experience with the Bund is peppered throughout.

For me, the book truly came alive in the chapters focused on life inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Earlier sections often read like a series of individual profiles, moving back and forth chronologically among key figures in the organization. By contrast, the ghetto chapters shift toward a more collective perspective, capturing the shared experience of Bund members and the broader community. This change in focus makes these sections especially compelling, turning them into some of the most engaging and page-turning parts of the book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book felt like coming home. To start on a very personal note, Here Where We Live Is Our Country genuinely brought me the missing piece of my soul that I feel like I've been searching for my entire life. And gave it a name, faces, and a story. Thank you, Molly, I finally found my people. I will be forever grateful to the Bund for fighting so fiercely and with such astonishing bravery to do the right thing and for giving me actions and institutions to emulate here, where I live. These are the Jewish heroes I will be sharing with my children. May their memories be a blessing.
--
But in general, this book is for everyone. The author's well researched combination of biography, history, and personal context makes it both extremely engaging and all the more devastating as the years creep forward towards the horrific climax you know is coming. I'm not a big cryer, but good god I went through some tissues.

It is valuable to anyone who wants a better understanding of the first half of the 20th Century--particularly in regard to the Bund and Jewish socialist movements in the Pale (importantly showing an internationalist Jewish alternative to Zionism), the complex chessboard of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Jewish resistance to Nazism in Poland and beyond.

[Corinne · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredibly researched, well told story of the little-known history of Jewish resistance to both fascism and Zionism. As a political, secular Jew, this is a history I was eager to learn more about—especially in this particular moment. (It's no secret that the larger Jewish diaspora is having a massive reckoning with the impacts of Zionism on both Palestinians and also on Jews across the globe who are less safe because of the action of the Israeli government.) I hope this book finds its audience.

Crabapple writes in a compelling, engaging way. Her own experiences reporting on conflicts and revolutionary movements over the last two decades weave and bob through her family's history, serving to demystify what resistance looks and feels like over time. This is the kind of book people might be intimidated to crack open—it's about a big topic that can feel almost academic. But Crabapple's writing is approachable, even humorous when appropriate.

I've followed Molly Crabapple's career for many years now, and I was excited to see her turn toward her own history. (I have a framed print of her May Day artwork from Occupy hanging on my living room wall. I am... a fan.)

Many, many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[KATIE MEYERS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a powerful and deeply engaging exploration of history, identity, and revolutionary ideals. Molly Crabapple brings the story of the Jewish Bund to life with remarkable energy, blending personal narrative with broader political and cultural history in a way that feels both intimate and expansive.

What makes this book especially compelling is the connection between past and present. Through the story of her grandfather, the author offers a vivid and human entry point into a movement that was filled with artists, thinkers, and activists striving for a radically different world. The personal lens adds emotional weight and makes the history feel immediate and alive.

The book also raises important and challenging questions about solidarity, identity, and the fate of revolutionary ideas. Its exploration of whether the Bund’s vision was flawed or simply ahead of its time gives the narrative a thoughtful and lingering depth.

An insightful and moving read for anyone interested in history, politics, and the enduring struggle for a more just and inclusive world

[Cindi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the author, publisher and Net Galley for providing an ALC.

This non fiction was offered to me by the publisher, and I don't think I'd ever heard of the Jewish Bund before this book. I am not Jewish, so I can't comment on historical accuracy of the story, but this story written from the perspective of the author's journalism background helps this book feel readable. Including the character list and glossary was helpful, as there were so many names mentioned. It would be great to read in a printed version rather than the e-book I have.
This book comes alive in the chapters dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto. The beginning of the book is more individual accounts, where as the ghetto portions are more of a collective.

Not a light read! But an important story to tell in a chapter of history.

[giovi · Rating 4 out of 5]

more like a 4.5, purely because of some of the historical inaccuracies that are sporadically littered through out. hard not to nitpick as a marxist and it does matter. some of her conclusions i disagreed with as well and the style doesnt lend itself to reader interpretation.

that being said this book was a beautiful shock to my system. i read so much of it with tears in my eyes. she has really beautifully rendered the personalities of the communist anti-zionist jewish resistance. highly recommend getting a copy for your shelf!

"Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us."

" "I was right," said the man as he went to the gallows. Sometimes, with the distance of years, he looks less like a fool. Instead, he resembles a prophet. "

[Barbara Lipkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only got about 40 pages into this before I decided I really didn't want to read any further. In those first pages, I encountered quite a few errors in Yiddish transliteration, Hebrew usage and a complete lack of understanding of life in the shtetl of the Pale. For example, observant Jewish women do not and never have shaved their heads. When they are married, women are supposed to cover their hair, and so either wear a wig or a head scarf. The writer's bias comes through instantly - it's very anti-Zionist, without explaining or understanding what either Zionism or the Labor Bundt were about. She got her dates right, but otherwise, not worth pursuing. It makes me wonder how any editor published this book without verifying the facts, and why this book gets pretty good reviews overall, despite its many flaws.

[Steven Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 out of 5 stars.

The stories we tell about ourselves (where we came from and how we got to where we are today) as a people, determine the bounds of where we can go next and what world we can imagine co-creating.

This is a book about understanding about past stories that have been forgotten. Stories about people who kept their humanity, even through defeat.

Since we as a people are coming to a crossroads, where we will need to choose between barbarism (the law of the jungle, where only the strong dominate), or humanity. The latter path will require new stories, a new vision, a new way of seeing ourselves. This book beautifully tells us about some of them.

[Jordy Rosenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book combines a big, bursting history—not only of anti-Zionist Jewish socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but its significant intersections with and influence on broader socialist and communist movements and world history—with an incredibly focused and fine-grained parsing of the political stakes of these histories then and now. We need this book. It is meticulously researched and passionately written. It has commitments, it is urgent, and it is, needless to say, beautifully illustrated.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannot say enough about how much I love this book. Molly Crabapple has brought Eastern Europe's Jewish Labor Bund to life in vivid color through the stories of its members, their struggles, heartbreaks, petty disagreements and visionary writings — from their founding in 1897 until 1948. The Bund were fierce opponents of Zionism, which is why their story has been mostly left out of Jewish history. Every page vibrates with urgent and profound insights, bringing the past into critical conversation with our current moment. This book is a true gift to Jewish and leftist history.

[Spencer Ackerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute tour de force. History exhumed from the carnage of Zionism to reveal an alternative course to guide global Jewry back to its ethical roots. As well, this is not the dry and rigid history that the academy trains. This is the sort of history told between friends, comrades, lovers, people united in struggle: vivid, blemished, and engaged. There will be review-bombs by Zionists who can’t tolerate the truths that Molly Crabapple presents. All of them are frightened attempts at deceiving you. Laugh at them, and learn the truth. The Jewish book of the year.