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Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund
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.
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.
480 pages, Hardcover
Published April 7, 2026
About the author
Molly Crabapple
49 books319 followersMolly 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.
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May 21, 2026This was a long and difficult read for me, partly because I knew so little about the context of the history it covers, meaning specifically the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and the Eastern European Jewish diaspora between roughly 1880-1950, which is the book's primary focus. Partly it was a difficult read because it recounts grim events that highlight the worst of human nature. I found it fascinating, important and timely, however, for the same reasons. Using her own family history as an emotional touchstone, Crabapple reconstructs the history of the Jewish Bund, a political and cultural movement that is practically forgotten now, but which for almost fifty years was a major force in Jewish life and the socialist movement in Eastern Europe, at one point being the largest and most powerful socialist party in the Russian Empire. The Bund offered an alternative vision of Jewish destiny that was stridently opposed to political Zionism. Both movements, as Crabapple notes, were born in the very same year -- 1897. The Bund “created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or Hereness, meaning Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.” This doctrine was rooted in internationalism and socialism and loathed any form of nationalism, including Jewish nationalism in Palestine.
Since this is the subject matter, and since Crabapple’s own Jewish ancestors were deeply involved in the Bund and shaped her beliefs and worldview, the book makes no secret of its anti-Zionist stance. If that’s not a viewpoint you want to hear about or know about, this is probably not a book you want to read, and this review will restate (as best I can) the views expressed in the book. For me, however, I found it all fascinating – not just how little I knew about the Bund, which was instrumental in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of World War II and many other important events of the early 20th Century, but how completely their doctrine and beliefs have been erased from the mainstream historical record, at least here in the United States where I took my degree in history. I learned none of this at university.
Some takeaways: The Zionists and Bundists were bitter enemies until well past the end of World War II, as they fought for the hearts and minds of the Jewish diaspora. Based in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, the Bundists were staunch defenders of the Yiddish language, while Zionists championed Hebrew. In fact, the survival and revival of Yiddish was largely because of the Bund’s work. Also because of their geography, the fate of the Bund was inevitably tied to the fate of Russia, Poland, and the other eastern European lands, while the Zionists were largely funded (and much better funded, Crabapple argues) by Western European powers and the United States. While Zionists believed that the Jewish people could never be safe as a minority in any country, and would never be accepted or assimilated – and of course they never had to look far to find awful evidence of this – the Bund refused to buy this argument.
An excerpt:
“We are not strangers here and not guests, even though the Russian government considers
us as such,” one local Bund committee wrote. “The richness of the land is soaked through with our blood…. We demand and fight for that which belongs to us, for human, civil and political rights.” To leave meant letting their tormenters win.
The Bund believed in a “philosophy of diasporic nationalism, in which Jews could preserve their cultures in the countries where they lived, rather than building a far-off ethnostate in Palestine.” The Zionists considered Bundists naïve at best, self-loathing race-traitors at worst. The Zionists worked hard to undercut and delegitimize the Bund (and vice versa).
As we know, Zionism “won” the argument with the creation of Israel after the decimation of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe – not just by the Nazis but by antisemites in countless other countries. As Crabapple says, “For all its notions of transnational Hereness, the Bund’s ideology grew from the twisted streets of the former Pale of Settlement. It was a movement for the Jewish masses of eastern Europe. Those masses were gone (after WWII), and the Bund was lost without them.” After the horrors of the Holocaust, the Zionist movement successfully created the narrative that Jewishness and Zionism were inseparable, almost synonymous, and they worked to make the Bundist viewpoint disappear. “The Zionists have convinced the world that survivors form one united front,” a Bundist bulletin complained after World War II. Crabapple continues: “Zionists thwarted efforts to settle Jewish refugees anywhere other than Palestine, and branded Jews as deserters if they signed up for immigration to other countries. In this atmosphere, Bundists were marginalized, intimidated, or simply erased.”
Crabapple acknowledges the Bundists probably never stood a chance of attaining their goal of Hereness in Eastern Europe. Too many well-organized and powerful forces actively opposed them staying in their homes, both Axis and Allies. But she draws a distinction between failing and losing. Failing comes from inner weakness or moral corruption. Losing comes from being beaten by a stronger opponent. The Bundists lost, yes, and were very nearly forgotten, but Crabapple sees their fight as the only moral choice, and the only fight that was/is worth fighting.
A few excerpts below I underlined, which will give you a taste of the Bundist arguments:
Erlich, Bundist founder, on Hereness: “Your liberation lies not in passivity and servility, not in empty dreams built on sand and English guns (Zionism)…but in the community of struggle with the working class, in the fight right here where you live, where your grandfathers and fathers lived…. Salvation lies here and nowhere else, in untiring struggle for freedom, hand in hand with the working masses.”
Erlich on Zionism: “Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism. Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, and the normal law of history, and on this law has based its perspectives on Jewish life. The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens.”
And again Erlich on Zionism: “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine…. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”
The Bund Bulletin 1947: “The future of the Jewish community in Palestine…cannot be built upon latent or open war against the Arab majority of the country as well as against the Arab countries surrounding Palestine. However, such a state of affairs would be the inevitable result of the creation of a Jewish state.”
Shloyme Mendelson on the creation of Israel: “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter’s methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life…. It is as if the slaughterer had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter.”
Crabapple draws direct parallels between the oppression and genocide against Jews in Europe with the oppression and genocide against Palestinians, as indeed the Bund did even before the formal creation of Israel: “Bundists saw the Nakba for what it was: the foundational crime of the Zionist endeavor. Born of another people’s violent dispossession, Israel had yoked itself into an ever-worsening cycle of repression and resistance. Its own violence would poison it, and the cancer would metastasize, until there was nothing else left.”
However, Crabapple’s narrative also holds warnings for the oppressed of today, and what methods are morally justified in attaining their freedom. “An oppressed people’s beliefs are not benign just because they lack power. Beliefs are good or bad on their own merits, because nothing stays the same. Demographics change. Empires weaken. Insurgents take charge. Without a clear set of ethics that respects human life, today’s victims transform into tomorrow’s killers. Oppressed becomes oppressor the moment the power flips.”
And as she says of Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust: “Oppression seldom breeds compassion, and a genocide is not a school for personal growth. History is full of stories of traumatized refugees who were radicalized by movements that promised them redemption through violence. That many survivors became Zionists is not exceptional. It is human and banal.”
Crabapple’s narrative is notable for the way it personalizes and humanizes its historical subjects. She brings these people to life in all their complex, flawed humanity. There are no saints, and there are very few heroes on any side. There are, however, many people who believe strongly in doing what they think is right, and in serving their community, even if their means and motives are radically different.
The main takeaway, for me, is that Jewishness, like all identities, is not a monolith, meaning specifically on the question of the moral justifiability of Zionism, and that there have always been stridently anti-Zionist Jewish voices in the mix, even if the Zionist worldview would prefer to have them forgotten, dismissed, or drowned out.
Since this is the subject matter, and since Crabapple’s own Jewish ancestors were deeply involved in the Bund and shaped her beliefs and worldview, the book makes no secret of its anti-Zionist stance. If that’s not a viewpoint you want to hear about or know about, this is probably not a book you want to read, and this review will restate (as best I can) the views expressed in the book. For me, however, I found it all fascinating – not just how little I knew about the Bund, which was instrumental in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of World War II and many other important events of the early 20th Century, but how completely their doctrine and beliefs have been erased from the mainstream historical record, at least here in the United States where I took my degree in history. I learned none of this at university.
Some takeaways: The Zionists and Bundists were bitter enemies until well past the end of World War II, as they fought for the hearts and minds of the Jewish diaspora. Based in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, the Bundists were staunch defenders of the Yiddish language, while Zionists championed Hebrew. In fact, the survival and revival of Yiddish was largely because of the Bund’s work. Also because of their geography, the fate of the Bund was inevitably tied to the fate of Russia, Poland, and the other eastern European lands, while the Zionists were largely funded (and much better funded, Crabapple argues) by Western European powers and the United States. While Zionists believed that the Jewish people could never be safe as a minority in any country, and would never be accepted or assimilated – and of course they never had to look far to find awful evidence of this – the Bund refused to buy this argument.
An excerpt:
“We are not strangers here and not guests, even though the Russian government considers
us as such,” one local Bund committee wrote. “The richness of the land is soaked through with our blood…. We demand and fight for that which belongs to us, for human, civil and political rights.” To leave meant letting their tormenters win.
The Bund believed in a “philosophy of diasporic nationalism, in which Jews could preserve their cultures in the countries where they lived, rather than building a far-off ethnostate in Palestine.” The Zionists considered Bundists naïve at best, self-loathing race-traitors at worst. The Zionists worked hard to undercut and delegitimize the Bund (and vice versa).
As we know, Zionism “won” the argument with the creation of Israel after the decimation of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe – not just by the Nazis but by antisemites in countless other countries. As Crabapple says, “For all its notions of transnational Hereness, the Bund’s ideology grew from the twisted streets of the former Pale of Settlement. It was a movement for the Jewish masses of eastern Europe. Those masses were gone (after WWII), and the Bund was lost without them.” After the horrors of the Holocaust, the Zionist movement successfully created the narrative that Jewishness and Zionism were inseparable, almost synonymous, and they worked to make the Bundist viewpoint disappear. “The Zionists have convinced the world that survivors form one united front,” a Bundist bulletin complained after World War II. Crabapple continues: “Zionists thwarted efforts to settle Jewish refugees anywhere other than Palestine, and branded Jews as deserters if they signed up for immigration to other countries. In this atmosphere, Bundists were marginalized, intimidated, or simply erased.”
Crabapple acknowledges the Bundists probably never stood a chance of attaining their goal of Hereness in Eastern Europe. Too many well-organized and powerful forces actively opposed them staying in their homes, both Axis and Allies. But she draws a distinction between failing and losing. Failing comes from inner weakness or moral corruption. Losing comes from being beaten by a stronger opponent. The Bundists lost, yes, and were very nearly forgotten, but Crabapple sees their fight as the only moral choice, and the only fight that was/is worth fighting.
A few excerpts below I underlined, which will give you a taste of the Bundist arguments:
Erlich, Bundist founder, on Hereness: “Your liberation lies not in passivity and servility, not in empty dreams built on sand and English guns (Zionism)…but in the community of struggle with the working class, in the fight right here where you live, where your grandfathers and fathers lived…. Salvation lies here and nowhere else, in untiring struggle for freedom, hand in hand with the working masses.”
Erlich on Zionism: “Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism. Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, and the normal law of history, and on this law has based its perspectives on Jewish life. The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens.”
And again Erlich on Zionism: “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine…. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”
The Bund Bulletin 1947: “The future of the Jewish community in Palestine…cannot be built upon latent or open war against the Arab majority of the country as well as against the Arab countries surrounding Palestine. However, such a state of affairs would be the inevitable result of the creation of a Jewish state.”
Shloyme Mendelson on the creation of Israel: “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter’s methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life…. It is as if the slaughterer had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter.”
Crabapple draws direct parallels between the oppression and genocide against Jews in Europe with the oppression and genocide against Palestinians, as indeed the Bund did even before the formal creation of Israel: “Bundists saw the Nakba for what it was: the foundational crime of the Zionist endeavor. Born of another people’s violent dispossession, Israel had yoked itself into an ever-worsening cycle of repression and resistance. Its own violence would poison it, and the cancer would metastasize, until there was nothing else left.”
However, Crabapple’s narrative also holds warnings for the oppressed of today, and what methods are morally justified in attaining their freedom. “An oppressed people’s beliefs are not benign just because they lack power. Beliefs are good or bad on their own merits, because nothing stays the same. Demographics change. Empires weaken. Insurgents take charge. Without a clear set of ethics that respects human life, today’s victims transform into tomorrow’s killers. Oppressed becomes oppressor the moment the power flips.”
And as she says of Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust: “Oppression seldom breeds compassion, and a genocide is not a school for personal growth. History is full of stories of traumatized refugees who were radicalized by movements that promised them redemption through violence. That many survivors became Zionists is not exceptional. It is human and banal.”
Crabapple’s narrative is notable for the way it personalizes and humanizes its historical subjects. She brings these people to life in all their complex, flawed humanity. There are no saints, and there are very few heroes on any side. There are, however, many people who believe strongly in doing what they think is right, and in serving their community, even if their means and motives are radically different.
The main takeaway, for me, is that Jewishness, like all identities, is not a monolith, meaning specifically on the question of the moral justifiability of Zionism, and that there have always been stridently anti-Zionist Jewish voices in the mix, even if the Zionist worldview would prefer to have them forgotten, dismissed, or drowned out.
April 28, 2026
I have some quibbles but not going to let the Zionists rate bomb this one. It's important. Longer revue to come.
April 15, 2026
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.
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.
May 11, 2026
In 1897, in a Vilna attic on Yom Kippur, a handful of Jewish socialists with rap sheets longer than their resumes founded a party called the Bund. Tannery boy Sam Rothbort of Volkovysk joined them a year later, when atheist apprentices struck for the radical right to sleep on tho holy Sabbath Saturdays.
The founding couple, the imperious Arkady Kremer and his indefatigable wife Pati, had spent years teaching Marx to leatherworkers and dodging the Okhrana with fake toothaches and forged passports. Their pamphlet On Agitation reached a young agitator named Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, who praised it warmly before stealing its ideas and disposing of its authors.
By the time the Bund reached its peak in interwar Poland, it had built a civilization: schools, libraries, sports clubs, a women's movement. Leaders Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter charmed Warsaw and alarmed everyone else. Germany then invaded from the west and the Soviets from the east, and the Bund's ideological commitments ran headlong into industrial-scale murder.
Stalin arrested Erlich and Alter and eventually had them killed, helpfully converting two of the Bund's most compelling figures into martyrs. Inside the Warsaw Ghetto, couriers, bomb-makers, doctors, and schoolteachers joined the Jewish Combat Organization and fought the SS in 1943, with Edelman as second commander. After the revolt, survivors scattered to displaced persons camps and, now sobered, became ardent Zionists.
The Bund's answer to every catastrophe had been solidarity, Hereness, and faith in a multiethnic socialist future; Europe's answer was six million lynched Jews, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Molly Crabapple writes with genuine verve, and her poor great-grandfather Sam Rothbort is a charming thread through a century of catastrophe. The problem is the loom. Here Where We Live Is Our Country wants to resurrect the Bund as a usable past, a socialist alternative to Zionism whose ideas are fresh and vital today. What it actually documents, with unintentional precision, is a movement that was catastrophically, mortally wrong about the most consequential question Jews have ever faced. The Bundists were Marxists. They did not oppose Zionism, they opposed all borders and all nationalities. They believed in a proletariat planet. Good luck with that utopia. The book rejects Zionism but supports HamAss national aspirations? Whaaat? Hold up Uncle Tom, Why? What would gramps say?
The Bund's central wager was do'ikayt, Hereness: Jews belonged where they stood, and the brotherhood of workers would protect them. Tsars, pogroms, Cossacks, the entire nineteenth century of beatings and expulsions did nothing to shake this conviction. The Bund fought the tsar, organized strikes, built schools, trained bomb-makers, and produced extraordinary people. It also kept insisting, with the stubbornness of a theology, that eastern Europe was home. The tsar disagreed. Hitler disagreed with considerably more firepower.
Dishonest and disrespectful to the sacrifice of her ancestors, smug Manhattan Crabapple, colonizing native American land, frames Zionism as ethnonationalism's ugly twin, but the Bund's story is its own refutation. EVERY Bundist who survived the Holocaust either fled to America, emigrated to Israel, or died in a Polish ditch after liberation, sometimes all three. Each and EVERY one became a Zionist.
The Bund failed to survive because antisemitism is a chronic disease for which Hereness is an innocent placebo. Zionism was the correct diagnosis, and Israel was the only prescription with any actual medicine in it. A homeland is the one argument that antisemites, from tsars to stormtroopers, could understand. They had their countries. Jews now have theirs again.
❤️ 🇮🇱
The founding couple, the imperious Arkady Kremer and his indefatigable wife Pati, had spent years teaching Marx to leatherworkers and dodging the Okhrana with fake toothaches and forged passports. Their pamphlet On Agitation reached a young agitator named Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, who praised it warmly before stealing its ideas and disposing of its authors.
By the time the Bund reached its peak in interwar Poland, it had built a civilization: schools, libraries, sports clubs, a women's movement. Leaders Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter charmed Warsaw and alarmed everyone else. Germany then invaded from the west and the Soviets from the east, and the Bund's ideological commitments ran headlong into industrial-scale murder.
Stalin arrested Erlich and Alter and eventually had them killed, helpfully converting two of the Bund's most compelling figures into martyrs. Inside the Warsaw Ghetto, couriers, bomb-makers, doctors, and schoolteachers joined the Jewish Combat Organization and fought the SS in 1943, with Edelman as second commander. After the revolt, survivors scattered to displaced persons camps and, now sobered, became ardent Zionists.
The Bund's answer to every catastrophe had been solidarity, Hereness, and faith in a multiethnic socialist future; Europe's answer was six million lynched Jews, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Molly Crabapple writes with genuine verve, and her poor great-grandfather Sam Rothbort is a charming thread through a century of catastrophe. The problem is the loom. Here Where We Live Is Our Country wants to resurrect the Bund as a usable past, a socialist alternative to Zionism whose ideas are fresh and vital today. What it actually documents, with unintentional precision, is a movement that was catastrophically, mortally wrong about the most consequential question Jews have ever faced. The Bundists were Marxists. They did not oppose Zionism, they opposed all borders and all nationalities. They believed in a proletariat planet. Good luck with that utopia. The book rejects Zionism but supports HamAss national aspirations? Whaaat? Hold up Uncle Tom, Why? What would gramps say?
The Bund's central wager was do'ikayt, Hereness: Jews belonged where they stood, and the brotherhood of workers would protect them. Tsars, pogroms, Cossacks, the entire nineteenth century of beatings and expulsions did nothing to shake this conviction. The Bund fought the tsar, organized strikes, built schools, trained bomb-makers, and produced extraordinary people. It also kept insisting, with the stubbornness of a theology, that eastern Europe was home. The tsar disagreed. Hitler disagreed with considerably more firepower.
Dishonest and disrespectful to the sacrifice of her ancestors, smug Manhattan Crabapple, colonizing native American land, frames Zionism as ethnonationalism's ugly twin, but the Bund's story is its own refutation. EVERY Bundist who survived the Holocaust either fled to America, emigrated to Israel, or died in a Polish ditch after liberation, sometimes all three. Each and EVERY one became a Zionist.
The Bund failed to survive because antisemitism is a chronic disease for which Hereness is an innocent placebo. Zionism was the correct diagnosis, and Israel was the only prescription with any actual medicine in it. A homeland is the one argument that antisemites, from tsars to stormtroopers, could understand. They had their countries. Jews now have theirs again.
❤️ 🇮🇱
May 27, 2026
A history every socialist communist anarchist etc should read and a book I want to give to all of my anti zionist Jewish friends
Certain sentences put me off but the writing in general was so dramatic and majestic, propulsive and harrowing, moving and cinematic. Thoroughly researched and impassioned
4.5
Certain sentences put me off but the writing in general was so dramatic and majestic, propulsive and harrowing, moving and cinematic. Thoroughly researched and impassioned
4.5
May 2, 2026
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.
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.
April 23, 2026
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.’
May 20, 2026
this might be the most important book i have read in my quarter century of a life.
reading this felt how i imagine it feels to discover a secret ancestry you didn’t know was yours, but had always felt inexplicably a part of. a work of archival genius, unimaginable labor, and love. genuinely mystifyingly riveting prose. i cried, i laughed, i read parts twice and then three times, and i could not put it down for a second. i am speechless. this book is a REVOLUTION, come and hear!!!!!
reading this felt how i imagine it feels to discover a secret ancestry you didn’t know was yours, but had always felt inexplicably a part of. a work of archival genius, unimaginable labor, and love. genuinely mystifyingly riveting prose. i cried, i laughed, i read parts twice and then three times, and i could not put it down for a second. i am speechless. this book is a REVOLUTION, come and hear!!!!!
June 8, 2026
I can’t remember the last time I cried this much while reading. It’s a testament to both the excellent writing and the story of the Bund, as well as the individual characters who made up the Bund and are so vivid and impossible not to fall in love with as comrades. Then there’s the timing of the book. Almost 3 years into the Gaza genocide, this book is both a guide to how we got here (Zionism’s birth/as well as the anatomy of genocide generally) and also somehow manages to overturn everything that Zionism claims through the story of those who fought for international solidarity all the way to the end of the world. We must never forget that Zionism flourished on the back of this world ending. This book lets you live in that world, the Bund’s world, for a while. I never wanted to leave it. Even though I knew it would end, I kept hoping for some other outcome. My sincere gratitude for Crabapple’s heroic efforts to find those still living who can tell this story and locate archives that were lovingly hidden and tended to by Bundists facing down an industrialized killing machine. They knew that even though they would die, someday we might need their story. They were right.
Read
March 23, 2026Coming out in April 2026; recommended by Naomi Klein on Ezra Klein Show, 3-20-26
April 18, 2026
literally the best book I’ve read in 2026. The research and storytelling is incredible. Molly Crabapple please write more books. #freepalestine
May 28, 2026
3.5 ⭐️ My feelings about this book are complicated. Firstly I should say I’m super glad this book exists. My great great grandmother Rose Abel was a Bundist who worked for The Forward, was a member of The Workmen’s Circle, and hosted literary salons with I. B. Singer. I’m so proud to carry on her legacy every day in my own politics and work. I’m also glad that the stories of the causes she fought for are a finally being platformed in accessible literature such as this. And I think the overall goal of this book is totally something I can get behind. My issues with it are more in its structure and analysis. The story, especially the first half, seems to sugarcoat and romanticize a complex revolutionary movement by making it seem both far more widespread but also far more unique than it was. Especially regarding the use of Yiddish it seems to ignore the fact that so many of these intellectual scholars and leaders in the community lived in cities separate from the shtetls they were trying to appeal to. Yiddish would not have been their first language so to me I’d not an inherently revolutionary language in the way this book suggests. There’s certainly a class element in who had the intellectual resources to take up such ideals and I don’t believe the movement was as ground up as the book makes it out to be. I also didn’t appreciate the consistent comparisons to other more modern revolutionary movements (namely the Black Panthers). This is just a pet peeve of mine when non historians try to make historical comparisons to get their audience to appreciate or find meaning in a historical event as if the history itself isn’t meaningful enough. Overall I think the second half of the book was much better than the first. Crabapple is at her best when engaging in the anti-Zionist elements of the story. I honestly wished there was more time spent on that and less spent on the play by play and who’s who of the origins of the movement. Having read other reviews that are more critical I honestly see where some of their arguments are coming from and though I don’t agree I don’t think Crabapple challenges them forcefully enough. Overall glad the book exists but kinda wish it was written by a trained historian and/or had a few more drafts.
May 29, 2026
Cannot recommend enough.
This took me a while but well worth it. Sometimes you celebrate that a book on the history of the Jewish left has reached bestseller status to realize a third of it is based in your family’s memoirs, so that was absurd and deeply emotional for me.
There is a lot of brilliance here. And a lot of history that I simply did not know, such as the sheer force of the Jewish contingent in early socialist Eastern European movements. I appreciate the staunch antizionism that is never contested. I cried many many times over the dead bundists and the betrayals by the Ukrainian and Lithuanian goyim.
This is not to say I agreed with every point in this book. I do think more critique of the staunch anti religious (distinct from secular, the bund had no allowance for people to keep kosher or practice the religion in any sense) could have been utilized especially when applying this to today. There are a few other minor critiques, but I overall do think that everyone can learn from this book and think from this book.
This took me a while but well worth it. Sometimes you celebrate that a book on the history of the Jewish left has reached bestseller status to realize a third of it is based in your family’s memoirs, so that was absurd and deeply emotional for me.
There is a lot of brilliance here. And a lot of history that I simply did not know, such as the sheer force of the Jewish contingent in early socialist Eastern European movements. I appreciate the staunch antizionism that is never contested. I cried many many times over the dead bundists and the betrayals by the Ukrainian and Lithuanian goyim.
This is not to say I agreed with every point in this book. I do think more critique of the staunch anti religious (distinct from secular, the bund had no allowance for people to keep kosher or practice the religion in any sense) could have been utilized especially when applying this to today. There are a few other minor critiques, but I overall do think that everyone can learn from this book and think from this book.
June 3, 2026
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a good book, a fun read and I’m really glad it exists. Crabapple is a very good prose stylist whose writing has exposed the Bunds history to a much wider audience. I’m very sympathetic to the texts mission and its politics are very similar to my own, however there are a lot of small critiques I have of the text that add up and keep it from being great.
The book is less a history of the Jewish Labor Bund and more the story of several highlighted Bundists. This is a strength when it comes to readability for a mass audience but I think the Bund as an institution could’ve been focused on more. Similarly the Bunds place within the larger political landscape of Eastern Europe isn’t explored very well, the Bunds place within the Mensheviks or alliance with the Polish Socialists is never really fleshed out beyond small asides.
The text also is a bit of a Hagiography, the Bund seldom makes mistakes. They are failed by others, and seldom failed. In pre 1905 Russia, they were the real doers of socialism and the factions of the RSDLP are described as cynical bookworms. In 1917 the Bund was the only group who could see the impending crisis and anticipated the Bolshevik monopolization of power. Only the Bund identified the threat of Fascism every other socialist party was blind. I find this portrayal to be facile and it robs the Bund of the complexities and contradictions that make it fascinating and worth studying. Bundist opposition to Zionism is portrayed as prophetic, as if they knew what Israel would become. There is truth in this portrayal but its limiting as a historical lens by which to understand Bundism.
Where We Live Is Our Country is kind of like a young adult version of Jakarta Method, and I hope it will expose many new people to 20th century labor/social history.
The book is less a history of the Jewish Labor Bund and more the story of several highlighted Bundists. This is a strength when it comes to readability for a mass audience but I think the Bund as an institution could’ve been focused on more. Similarly the Bunds place within the larger political landscape of Eastern Europe isn’t explored very well, the Bunds place within the Mensheviks or alliance with the Polish Socialists is never really fleshed out beyond small asides.
The text also is a bit of a Hagiography, the Bund seldom makes mistakes. They are failed by others, and seldom failed. In pre 1905 Russia, they were the real doers of socialism and the factions of the RSDLP are described as cynical bookworms. In 1917 the Bund was the only group who could see the impending crisis and anticipated the Bolshevik monopolization of power. Only the Bund identified the threat of Fascism every other socialist party was blind. I find this portrayal to be facile and it robs the Bund of the complexities and contradictions that make it fascinating and worth studying. Bundist opposition to Zionism is portrayed as prophetic, as if they knew what Israel would become. There is truth in this portrayal but its limiting as a historical lens by which to understand Bundism.
Where We Live Is Our Country is kind of like a young adult version of Jakarta Method, and I hope it will expose many new people to 20th century labor/social history.
June 17, 2026
Straight-up forgot to log that I finished this because I was so devastated at the end of it. This is an incredible book, and it hit me in all the places I knew it would and then some.
The thing that struck me most upon reading was that this book felt like the first time I've seen someone successfully tell a history from the perspective of people. It doesn't fall for the trappings of a history where the decisive moments have already been delineated. In such a telling, all that remains to do is for the author to fit her specific subject into the grander narrative. Instead, the rhythm of this story is determined by its subjects, and not by the historical narrative.
I'm now upon a quest to get all my friends to read this book.
The thing that struck me most upon reading was that this book felt like the first time I've seen someone successfully tell a history from the perspective of people. It doesn't fall for the trappings of a history where the decisive moments have already been delineated. In such a telling, all that remains to do is for the author to fit her specific subject into the grander narrative. Instead, the rhythm of this story is determined by its subjects, and not by the historical narrative.
I'm now upon a quest to get all my friends to read this book.
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May 22, 2026This is more a hagiography than a historically rigorous book. I'll start by saying that, as a committed anti-Zionist raised in the Yiddishkeit left tradition, I think that Crabapple's contradictory logic actually undermines her argument on that front - more on that in a moment. Others here have pointed out some of the strange stylistic choices (contrived edginess) and there are moments when it seems like she's taking some liberties with the thoughts and motivations of the subjects. Hard to tell, in the latter case, with few quotations and imprecise citations. There are also a number of specious claims (the Vilna group were the first to describe intersectional oppression, Trotsky used a pen name to hide his Jewish heritage) and sweeping generalizations (“Jews fetishized books”, “Russian revolutionaries didn’t think about Jewish workers”), not to mention some outright falsehoods. Rokhl Kafrissen addresses some of these in her response to Crabapple’s initial 2018 article on Sam Rothbort and the Bund*, as does Mikhail Krutikov in the Forward** (much as I take issue with Krutikov’s ideological stance).
All of the people the author disdains are "sneering" (so much sneering), arrogant, single-minded, anti-intellectuals (e.g., Medem’s speech is “too complicated for his audience”) The Bundists are unfailingly noble, borderline clairvoyant and tragically ignored – except when they're leftist f***boys relying on long-suffering women. In one chapter, she commends the Bundists for violent adventurism, then in another she condemns the Bolsheviks' rash seizure of power. There’s little to no critical analysis of WHY things went wrong for the Bund, or where the larger political trends came from.
My primary gripe, however, stems from Crabapple's tribalistic attitudes, which she herself acknowledges on page 363. For all that she critiques the ethnonationalism upon which Zionism is based, she continually seems to advance a Jewish Particularist viewpoint wherein internationalist solidarity is a nice ideal but a stretch in practice. Kafrissen also points out Crabapple’s unwillingness to address the Bundists who strayed, whether to communism or Zionism, and the ways in which they complicate her narrative. The lack of nuance – we don’t really get a sense of why the Bund’s sometime allies behave the way they do – leads to the implication here that only Jews will protect Jews, taking us back towards the very ethnonationalism Crabapple condemns (see also: Plekhanov calling the Bund seasick Zionists). The book reads as an exercise in self-exoneration, an attempt to rehabilitate Jewry that falls into the trap of trying to prove the legitimacy of anti-Zionist Judaism, as if the accusations leveraged by Zionists hold any water in the first place. Is now the time to be litigating this? Maybe taking for granted that the conflation of Judaism and Zionism is BS and moving on to centering the Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians living through the ongoing genocide would be a better tribute to the Bund.
* https://medium.com/@rokhlk/my-great-g...
** https://forward.com/yiddish-world/825...
All of the people the author disdains are "sneering" (so much sneering), arrogant, single-minded, anti-intellectuals (e.g., Medem’s speech is “too complicated for his audience”) The Bundists are unfailingly noble, borderline clairvoyant and tragically ignored – except when they're leftist f***boys relying on long-suffering women. In one chapter, she commends the Bundists for violent adventurism, then in another she condemns the Bolsheviks' rash seizure of power. There’s little to no critical analysis of WHY things went wrong for the Bund, or where the larger political trends came from.
My primary gripe, however, stems from Crabapple's tribalistic attitudes, which she herself acknowledges on page 363. For all that she critiques the ethnonationalism upon which Zionism is based, she continually seems to advance a Jewish Particularist viewpoint wherein internationalist solidarity is a nice ideal but a stretch in practice. Kafrissen also points out Crabapple’s unwillingness to address the Bundists who strayed, whether to communism or Zionism, and the ways in which they complicate her narrative. The lack of nuance – we don’t really get a sense of why the Bund’s sometime allies behave the way they do – leads to the implication here that only Jews will protect Jews, taking us back towards the very ethnonationalism Crabapple condemns (see also: Plekhanov calling the Bund seasick Zionists). The book reads as an exercise in self-exoneration, an attempt to rehabilitate Jewry that falls into the trap of trying to prove the legitimacy of anti-Zionist Judaism, as if the accusations leveraged by Zionists hold any water in the first place. Is now the time to be litigating this? Maybe taking for granted that the conflation of Judaism and Zionism is BS and moving on to centering the Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians living through the ongoing genocide would be a better tribute to the Bund.
* https://medium.com/@rokhlk/my-great-g...
** https://forward.com/yiddish-world/825...
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May 8, 2026The author put a lot of thought, research, and love into this book. This book functions well as a historical overview - there are a lot of events, people, and places, and Molly Crabapple helps you keep them all straight. Some of the political context necessarily gets glossed over/elided because we cover so much. The more theoretical discussions felt like they lacked synthesis. For example, she constantly mentions that the Bund was secular, but we don't really delve into why beyond vague references to Orthodox life being stifling. In her defense, this is an movement that spanned eastern and central Europe, and changed a lot - getting into their philosophy in depth would have made this a much longer and more academic book. I think this is a great popular history, and the things I wanted more of are things I could find in academic books on the Bund, if or when I read further on this topic. I'm glad this book exists and I don't want to nitpick it too much, because it's going to teach so many people about this anti-Zionist Jewish movement during a time when we need that more than ever.
The last 100 pages were so emotional and beautifully written. I struggled to read them - the whole book is hurtling toward the Holocaust, but that doesn't make it any easier read.
The last 100 pages were so emotional and beautifully written. I struggled to read them - the whole book is hurtling toward the Holocaust, but that doesn't make it any easier read.
April 17, 2026
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.
May 22, 2026
"To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors." -Marek Edelman
Only someone with personal ties to the Bund could have written their story with such loving, excruciating detail. Molly Crabapple carefully lifted the stories of these fierce characters from diaries, official reports, and dusty, perhaps forgotten documents, weaving them together into a rich, fascinating narrative that pulls no ideological or philosophical punches. As Molly shares this narrative with her readers, she exposes the ideological complexities of the early Zionist movement, of Russian revolutionaries, of Jewish Warsaw, of the Bundists themselves, and of 20th century Europe as a whole.
Here's one excerpt that particularly struck me, about what sometimes seems like the illusion of choice & free will, the moment making the man instead of the other way around:
"No matter how I searched, I never found another word about [Bundist] Berl Dzhik, though perhaps his name is hiding in archives in Minsk or Moscow. I don't know if he died in the war, in the purges, in the Nazi invasion, or even, improbably, as an old pensioner in his bed. However it was, a secret policeman like him would have deserved it. Every secret policemen committed his share of murders, and Berl's quotidian workday involved the imprisonment, interrogation, and torture of other human beings. Yet Berl was not foreordained to be a murderer. God and chance and the Dialectical Forces of History all had their parts to play. If events had occurred in a different sequence, Berl might have taken a boat to New York, gotten a job in a sweatshop, and joined a Workmen's Circle branch like my great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. He could have taken Sam's path, and if Sam had stayed in Volkovysk, who's to say he would not have taken Berl's?"
Brain wrinkled.
I wasn't surprised when I heard that this conversational, yet academic book took Molly 7 years to write. I wanted to digest it quickly for a book club meeting, but I couldn't, because it's not a meal, it's a feast. Required reading for anyone who already thinks they understand Zionism or, indeed, the Palestinian liberation movement.
Only someone with personal ties to the Bund could have written their story with such loving, excruciating detail. Molly Crabapple carefully lifted the stories of these fierce characters from diaries, official reports, and dusty, perhaps forgotten documents, weaving them together into a rich, fascinating narrative that pulls no ideological or philosophical punches. As Molly shares this narrative with her readers, she exposes the ideological complexities of the early Zionist movement, of Russian revolutionaries, of Jewish Warsaw, of the Bundists themselves, and of 20th century Europe as a whole.
Here's one excerpt that particularly struck me, about what sometimes seems like the illusion of choice & free will, the moment making the man instead of the other way around:
"No matter how I searched, I never found another word about [Bundist] Berl Dzhik, though perhaps his name is hiding in archives in Minsk or Moscow. I don't know if he died in the war, in the purges, in the Nazi invasion, or even, improbably, as an old pensioner in his bed. However it was, a secret policeman like him would have deserved it. Every secret policemen committed his share of murders, and Berl's quotidian workday involved the imprisonment, interrogation, and torture of other human beings. Yet Berl was not foreordained to be a murderer. God and chance and the Dialectical Forces of History all had their parts to play. If events had occurred in a different sequence, Berl might have taken a boat to New York, gotten a job in a sweatshop, and joined a Workmen's Circle branch like my great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. He could have taken Sam's path, and if Sam had stayed in Volkovysk, who's to say he would not have taken Berl's?"
Brain wrinkled.
I wasn't surprised when I heard that this conversational, yet academic book took Molly 7 years to write. I wanted to digest it quickly for a book club meeting, but I couldn't, because it's not a meal, it's a feast. Required reading for anyone who already thinks they understand Zionism or, indeed, the Palestinian liberation movement.
June 20, 2026
A love letter to an essential alternative vision of Jewish people hood and a plea for the modern world to embrace the solidarity, with the knowledge that what might have saved Europe’s ghettoized Jews could today save the poor souls in Gaza. Molly Crabapple threads a difficult needle, portraying 50 years of world history as told through the eyes of the party but illuminating captivating characters along the way. May we all take inspiration from their courage.
June 9, 2026
I learned a lot, but if you're looking for an objective account of the Bund and its place in history, this isn't it. It's more of a sentimental hagiography. It lacks context -you get no picture of the other major groups on the left, including their mass followers, among whom were many Jews as well. As a Jewish long-time left person growing up and active during the 1960s and beyond, I experienced some of the ridiculous sectarianism that the author rightly criticizes. But she engages in it herself, presenting Bundists' opinions about other groups and people as fact - for example sprinkling her narrative with derisive, dismissive comments about figures such as Lenin - who whatever his shortcomings did lead the movement that overthrew the tsar and established a first attempt at an actual socialist state, whatever its shortcomings. I looked at the footnotes and noted that she drew almost exclusively from memoirs of old Bundist figures generally written decades later. So I have to assume that some of the characterizations and anecdotes she recounts are maybe not historically accurate.
I think it's a well-meaning book, and I agree with the author's criticism of Zionism's role, and that of Israel's far-right. And it makes an important contribution by showing that not all Jews were or are Zionists and that non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews played an important role in late 19th and 20th century history and continue to do so now. But it's a little heavy handed, and some of the comparisons with recent movements are awkward and even silly. Again, it's not really a history book, more of a sentimental journey.
I think it's a well-meaning book, and I agree with the author's criticism of Zionism's role, and that of Israel's far-right. And it makes an important contribution by showing that not all Jews were or are Zionists and that non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews played an important role in late 19th and 20th century history and continue to do so now. But it's a little heavy handed, and some of the comparisons with recent movements are awkward and even silly. Again, it's not really a history book, more of a sentimental journey.
June 2, 2026
Wow. Holy shit. Wowowowowow. I had to keep putting this down to catch my breath. I didn't want to do anything else but read it! I stayed up way past my bedtime because how can you fall asleep during the Warsaw ghetto uprising???? I want a Bernard Goldstein biopic. I want a Complete Works of Sophia Dubnov Erlich reissue. I want the world and I want solidarity with everyone forever!!!!!!
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June 14, 2026Not sure what to rate this ... Crabapple clearly did a lot of research and wrote an informative book about the history of the Jewish Bund. However, her writing lacked synthesis and a throughline and her heavy-handed insertion of her own politics did a disservice to conveying this very important piece of history.
May 28, 2026
Did not finish. Had to stop very quickly, the craft was so poor. I long for a better source on subject matter I find fascinating and vital. Non-zionist Jews need this history, but this book does a grave disservice by presenting it with some of the poorest writing I've ever come across. It's at times clumsy to the point of reading like gibberish:
"Why must you cut off pieces of yourself in an attempt to squash your soul, like an ugly stepsister's foot, into a glass slipper that was not cast for you?"
Has the syntax of a sentence ever, in the history of the written word, been less intelligible than this? Is this Language Poetry?A line from The Bald Soprano?
It's left me feeling very sad. I hope another writer, someone who is a serious historian that also has an editor of even the most modest skill set, does greater justice to this history.
"Why must you cut off pieces of yourself in an attempt to squash your soul, like an ugly stepsister's foot, into a glass slipper that was not cast for you?"
Has the syntax of a sentence ever, in the history of the written word, been less intelligible than this? Is this Language Poetry?A line from The Bald Soprano?
It's left me feeling very sad. I hope another writer, someone who is a serious historian that also has an editor of even the most modest skill set, does greater justice to this history.
June 1, 2026
Oh, what might have been. What should have been. The Jewish Bund was a secular, socialist organization of the early 20th century that fervently believed Jews should be able to make a life and a world for themselves, in the countries in which they lived: not in a far-off “homeland” which had to be taken from that land’s original inhabitants. As such, the Bund was anti-Zionist.
Through the turbulence of the Russian revolution and then the Holocaust, Bundists struggled to maintain their beliefs, preserve their lives and encourage Jewish people to embrace Yiddish and their REAL homeland – where they lived.
The Zionist movement was stridently against Bundist philosophy and engaged in distasteful and dishonest behavior, talk and relationships, to pursue their belief that a Jewish homeland should be created in what was Palestine. Well, they triumphed. And to what end? An endless war with the people who they had displaced? A violation of basic Jewish principles?
Crabapple details the lives and struggles of the many remarkable women and men who lived and died for the Bund, in eastern Europe – and especially Poland – during the most turbulent time of the 20th century. One of these was her great grandfather, whose paintings inspired here research and this book.
The Bundists sometimes made mistakes, often refusing to yield on ideologies that destroyed them. Still, their ideas remain shining ones that, if they had succeeded, might have transformed the lives of Jews everywhere – as well as Palestinians.
Through the turbulence of the Russian revolution and then the Holocaust, Bundists struggled to maintain their beliefs, preserve their lives and encourage Jewish people to embrace Yiddish and their REAL homeland – where they lived.
The Zionist movement was stridently against Bundist philosophy and engaged in distasteful and dishonest behavior, talk and relationships, to pursue their belief that a Jewish homeland should be created in what was Palestine. Well, they triumphed. And to what end? An endless war with the people who they had displaced? A violation of basic Jewish principles?
Crabapple details the lives and struggles of the many remarkable women and men who lived and died for the Bund, in eastern Europe – and especially Poland – during the most turbulent time of the 20th century. One of these was her great grandfather, whose paintings inspired here research and this book.
The Bundists sometimes made mistakes, often refusing to yield on ideologies that destroyed them. Still, their ideas remain shining ones that, if they had succeeded, might have transformed the lives of Jews everywhere – as well as Palestinians.
June 20, 2026
This was a painful and important read. Like most readers going into this, I had never heard of the Bund. I knew conceptually that Zionism was not universally supported by the Jewish Diaspora. I did not know about this type of organized and at times powerful political resistance to it. As a gentile outsider, I have made the unoriginal observation that Zionists and antisemites share the same fundamental belief that Jews don’t belong with everyone else. The Bund understood that, so it was no surprise to them to see Zionists collaborating with European antisemitic leaders to achieve their shared goal of a Europe free of Judaism. While Zionists would prefer to erase this history, the Bund’s legacy lived on through their literal, intellectual and spiritual descendants, of which Molly Crabapple is all three.
Molly is an artist and it shows in her writing for better or worse. Maybe I’ll change my opinion on a second or third read. But this first time I found it a little jarring to bounce back and forth between history as good as any academic could do, and more artistic narrative choices like getting into the thoughts of real historical figures, or using crude language. If an historian ever publishes a more academic version of the history of the Bund I’ll be very interested to read it.
On a final note, I really hope Molly records new audiobook where she is the sole narrator. I was trying to figure out what accent the narrator had, but when she pronounced “Haitians” as “Ha-ee-tee-ans,” I realized the answer is pretentious and contrived.
Molly is an artist and it shows in her writing for better or worse. Maybe I’ll change my opinion on a second or third read. But this first time I found it a little jarring to bounce back and forth between history as good as any academic could do, and more artistic narrative choices like getting into the thoughts of real historical figures, or using crude language. If an historian ever publishes a more academic version of the history of the Bund I’ll be very interested to read it.
On a final note, I really hope Molly records new audiobook where she is the sole narrator. I was trying to figure out what accent the narrator had, but when she pronounced “Haitians” as “Ha-ee-tee-ans,” I realized the answer is pretentious and contrived.
May 27, 2026
Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund is a book I am thoroughly enjoying. I knew next to nothing about The Bund. I am listening to the book as it is narrated by Crabapple herself alongside actor and voice artist Nina Yndis. The Bund began in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) on October 7, 1897, during a secret convention attended by 13 delegates. It was originally named the General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland and emerged as the first Marxist mass organization in the Russian Empire. It began during the time of my grandmother's life in a shtetl outside of Kiev and my grandfather's life in Romania as he fled czarist Russia to avoid conscription during WWI. I did not know the Bundists were anti-Zionists because they did not support the idea of displacing one people to create a homeland for another, and as the title communicates so well. The book covers the beginning of the Bund and up through WWII in Poland, Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe up until 1949 and beyond. Crabapple's great grandfather and artist Samuel Rothbart (who was a part of "the underground" in Russia) is one of the many threads of the book, as he made it to NYC in 1904; my grandmother arrived around 1906 or 1907. The book is not without its critics, as other Jewish authors have taken issue with Crabapple's claims regarding zionism and the historical stories of The Bund. I found a belief aligned with mine in that I never understood how Jews would support displacing a people just as they had been displaced by others throughout history and I understood why I am not a Zionist.
May 16, 2026
In Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund is Molly Crabapple’s descriptive account of the the Democratic Socialist Jews’ experiences of the horrors of the 20th century in Eastern Europe. Crabapple describes the rise of the Bund (aka the Democratic Socialist Jews) alongside other anti-Tsarist factions in the October revolution in Russia, the struggles against Bolshevik ran government and resistance against the Nazis in Poland. We also see how the Eastern European Jews were abandoned to the horrors of the holocaust from the Western powers and then later not allowed immigration to these same countries. Finally, Crabapple describes the Bund’s feud with Zionist Jews and their establishment of Israel.
The depiction of death and torture in this book is very graphic but I felt was necessary to definably express the struggles and terror that this group faced in the last 120 years. Sad but a relevant reminder to never forget the events, suffering and eventual triumph against the holocaust and genocide in general.
The depiction of death and torture in this book is very graphic but I felt was necessary to definably express the struggles and terror that this group faced in the last 120 years. Sad but a relevant reminder to never forget the events, suffering and eventual triumph against the holocaust and genocide in general.
May 24, 2026
"Man has never made a border that would not be crossed."
Definitely worth a read -- a narrated, compiled history of the Bund, bringing light to the Jewish personalities and communities that were tirelessly advocating for a better world for everyone. It's heartening to read a historical narrative that emphasizes the individuality of each person; their passions, habits, and flaws. Above all I found solace in Molly Crabapple's distinction between failing and losing, in the context of the Bund, the Holocaust, and the rise of Zionism. "Failure is what happens to those overcome by their own faults and errors. To lose is to succumb to a greater force."
I appreciated Crabapple's very Bundist commitment to setting the Bund's experiences in the context of contemporary struggles for justice, such as drawing parallels between the sisterhood of "women who love imprisoned men" visiting their jailed Bundist lovers with the sisterhood of the women visiting Rikers Island; every fight for justice is intrinsically connected.
Crabapple seems sometimes to participate in the anti-religious sentiment held by the Bund, which although was often justified in the time of the Bund, does not contribute to building true pluralistic Jewish solidarity today. She narrates an episode in 1922 in which the Bund party "decided to publish a Saturday edition of Folkstsaytung, deliberately flouting rules that forbade work on the Sabbath and infuriating religious Jews" with an attitude that seems to praise aggressive secularism. When she describes the Medem Sanatorium, Crabapple emphasizes that the children didn't keep kosher or pray, and says, "the Yeshiva boy, prissy little Zalman, shed his long Orthodox coat to play." Although it's important to narrate and understand why the Bund held the anti-religious sentiments that they did, it doesn't seem productive to treat it as an example for the modern day, as it leads to alienating our own people. In addition to secular Jewish communities that hold to the values of the Bund, we need to be building communities that are religiously Jewish, leftist, and fighting for solidarity alongside others.
Definitely worth a read -- a narrated, compiled history of the Bund, bringing light to the Jewish personalities and communities that were tirelessly advocating for a better world for everyone. It's heartening to read a historical narrative that emphasizes the individuality of each person; their passions, habits, and flaws. Above all I found solace in Molly Crabapple's distinction between failing and losing, in the context of the Bund, the Holocaust, and the rise of Zionism. "Failure is what happens to those overcome by their own faults and errors. To lose is to succumb to a greater force."
I appreciated Crabapple's very Bundist commitment to setting the Bund's experiences in the context of contemporary struggles for justice, such as drawing parallels between the sisterhood of "women who love imprisoned men" visiting their jailed Bundist lovers with the sisterhood of the women visiting Rikers Island; every fight for justice is intrinsically connected.
Crabapple seems sometimes to participate in the anti-religious sentiment held by the Bund, which although was often justified in the time of the Bund, does not contribute to building true pluralistic Jewish solidarity today. She narrates an episode in 1922 in which the Bund party "decided to publish a Saturday edition of Folkstsaytung, deliberately flouting rules that forbade work on the Sabbath and infuriating religious Jews" with an attitude that seems to praise aggressive secularism. When she describes the Medem Sanatorium, Crabapple emphasizes that the children didn't keep kosher or pray, and says, "the Yeshiva boy, prissy little Zalman, shed his long Orthodox coat to play." Although it's important to narrate and understand why the Bund held the anti-religious sentiments that they did, it doesn't seem productive to treat it as an example for the modern day, as it leads to alienating our own people. In addition to secular Jewish communities that hold to the values of the Bund, we need to be building communities that are religiously Jewish, leftist, and fighting for solidarity alongside others.
June 15, 2026
4.75 stars! ⭐️ “What does this [(The Holocaust, Zionism)] say about the ideologies of other oppressed people today? Maybe it’s this: an oppressed people’s beliefs are not benign just because they lack power. Beliefs are good or bad on their own merits because nothing stays the same… without a clear set of ethics that respects human life, today’s victims transform into tomorrow’s killers… oppressed becomes oppressor the moment the power flips.”
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