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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 books364 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 18, 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.
May 10, 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.
❤️ 🇮🇱
April 20, 2026
I have some quibbles but not going to let the Zionists rate bomb this one. It's important. Longer revue to come.
April 14, 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 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 enjoy this book so much and to 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 left me hopeful. Mostly I am in awe and moved by the stories of these activists. The hope. The belief. ‘I was right.’
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 5, 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 24, 2026
Amazing. Life changing. Love reading about Jewish ppl throughout history who have been historically leftist and have protested against capitalism, imperialism, & zionism. I haven’t been feeling very proud to be Jewish lately, given the settler colonial states decades long dispossession & violence against the Palestinian people.
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 19, 2026
This is exactly the kind of flawed book that destroys a nation! She defends the indefensible. While her research is spectacular, inevitably if she would be believed the entire Jewish Nation would be decimated again and again as it was in the period she studied.
While she when as a reporter to the Palestinian action as a Jew with the last name of Crabapple, try being there with a last name of Cohen or Goldberg! See how she would have been treated by the locals. Or try having been present on October 7th or being taken, raped repeated by the citizens holding you, when grandmothers became terrorists.
Without a homeland, or hope of a homeland, a people can not survive. Assimilation is to die out. Her own research destroys her thesis.
While she when as a reporter to the Palestinian action as a Jew with the last name of Crabapple, try being there with a last name of Cohen or Goldberg! See how she would have been treated by the locals. Or try having been present on October 7th or being taken, raped repeated by the citizens holding you, when grandmothers became terrorists.
Without a homeland, or hope of a homeland, a people can not survive. Assimilation is to die out. Her own research destroys her thesis.
June 5, 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.
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 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!!!!!!
Read
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...
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.
June 24, 2026
No.
If you want historical revisionism, and I mean this, get one of those fantasy books with Wyverns or something. At least then it's somewhat entertaining and always ends happily. You won't get either of that from this book.
This book is someone who had an agenda, and their biases and their identity created their own reality using the history without telling the actual whole story.
Here's the whole book in a quick review:
A whole bunch of Jews, having been kicked out of this Israelite nation almost 2000 years beforehand, and getting pushed further and further and further east, got stuck in the Russian Empire finally. While being picked off from time to time in pogroms, there's enough of them in one place like a school of fish to have some sort of semi autonomy and safety,... but they were never Russians, they're never Belarusians, they are never Ukrainians, they're always Jews just kind of stuck in a place for a while.
Zionism happens, and some of the Jews go to what became Israel, and 90% of them survived. Probably over 90%.
Jews of The Bund? 90% of them died. Massacred and genocided in the Holocaust, proving without question that the Jewish home is never where we are, but only in Israel, and we are transitory and we are at best guests with some sense of temporary safety until the dominant society chooses Jews are no longer to be accepted.
This book again is ahistorical, it is like taking a whole bunch of ingredients out of your fridge, insisting it's going to make a delicious dinner but really what comes out is inedible, that recipe never to be tried again.
The woman wrote this, her core competency is in her honesty, but her ability to spin a tail and be really good at public relations taking advantage of a society in this generation that has been manipulated to think that Israel is bad. That's literally the whole premise and intent of the book. She's an anti-Zionist Zeller, at best, in this book is similar to one I read that was written from the perspective of the confederates suggesting that things were great back then, and really was able to take the facts necessary to convince a stupid person of that.
No, don't buy this book. If you need to, get it from the library so you can read enough of it to understand that this review is not overwrought or incorrect, but spot on.
If you want historical revisionism, and I mean this, get one of those fantasy books with Wyverns or something. At least then it's somewhat entertaining and always ends happily. You won't get either of that from this book.
This book is someone who had an agenda, and their biases and their identity created their own reality using the history without telling the actual whole story.
Here's the whole book in a quick review:
A whole bunch of Jews, having been kicked out of this Israelite nation almost 2000 years beforehand, and getting pushed further and further and further east, got stuck in the Russian Empire finally. While being picked off from time to time in pogroms, there's enough of them in one place like a school of fish to have some sort of semi autonomy and safety,... but they were never Russians, they're never Belarusians, they are never Ukrainians, they're always Jews just kind of stuck in a place for a while.
Zionism happens, and some of the Jews go to what became Israel, and 90% of them survived. Probably over 90%.
Jews of The Bund? 90% of them died. Massacred and genocided in the Holocaust, proving without question that the Jewish home is never where we are, but only in Israel, and we are transitory and we are at best guests with some sense of temporary safety until the dominant society chooses Jews are no longer to be accepted.
This book again is ahistorical, it is like taking a whole bunch of ingredients out of your fridge, insisting it's going to make a delicious dinner but really what comes out is inedible, that recipe never to be tried again.
The woman wrote this, her core competency is in her honesty, but her ability to spin a tail and be really good at public relations taking advantage of a society in this generation that has been manipulated to think that Israel is bad. That's literally the whole premise and intent of the book. She's an anti-Zionist Zeller, at best, in this book is similar to one I read that was written from the perspective of the confederates suggesting that things were great back then, and really was able to take the facts necessary to convince a stupid person of that.
No, don't buy this book. If you need to, get it from the library so you can read enough of it to understand that this review is not overwrought or incorrect, but spot on.
June 29, 2026
Crabapple paints a moving portrait of the Jewish Labor Bund full of inspiring ideals, unforgettable characters, and gut-wrenching betrayals. Through it all, there is an overwhelming sense of tragedy as the Bund is repressed, killed, and/or abandoned by Christians, Nazis, and Stalin’s Soviet Union alike. Their heroism in face of certain death, especially in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, stands out like a blazing star in such a dark night.
At its core, the book provides a refreshingly non-zionist history of the Jewish people fighting courageously where they lived in Eastern Europe for their own lives and a socialist future for all peoples. In the context of genocide of the Palestinians by Israel, this perspective could not be more timely or needed, and I hope it continues to shape the visions of a solidaristic future growing among Jews and people of all backgrounds today.
The freshness in that regard makes it all the more disappointing when what is in so many ways a clear-eyed and perceptive book wheels out stale Cold War tropes and unfounded narratives about the first days of the Russian Revolution and the early Bolsheviks. Anarchists have, over the years, developed fruitful and interesting critiques of Lenin and the direction of the Russian Revolution. None of those are in this book. Instead, worn out liberal critiques stand in as an attempt to distance the Bund from communism, with Crabapple’s bizarre editorializing in some cases directly contradicting the basic historical facts she lays out in the same chapters. It’s an unnecessary and unfortunate blotch on an otherwise compelling book.
In sum, though, Here Where We Are Is Our Country is lovingly-crafted, intimate journey of a heroic struggle spanning five decades. Despite my criticisms, 5 stars to counter the nasty, disingenuous Zionist review-bombing campaign against it.
At its core, the book provides a refreshingly non-zionist history of the Jewish people fighting courageously where they lived in Eastern Europe for their own lives and a socialist future for all peoples. In the context of genocide of the Palestinians by Israel, this perspective could not be more timely or needed, and I hope it continues to shape the visions of a solidaristic future growing among Jews and people of all backgrounds today.
The freshness in that regard makes it all the more disappointing when what is in so many ways a clear-eyed and perceptive book wheels out stale Cold War tropes and unfounded narratives about the first days of the Russian Revolution and the early Bolsheviks. Anarchists have, over the years, developed fruitful and interesting critiques of Lenin and the direction of the Russian Revolution. None of those are in this book. Instead, worn out liberal critiques stand in as an attempt to distance the Bund from communism, with Crabapple’s bizarre editorializing in some cases directly contradicting the basic historical facts she lays out in the same chapters. It’s an unnecessary and unfortunate blotch on an otherwise compelling book.
In sum, though, Here Where We Are Is Our Country is lovingly-crafted, intimate journey of a heroic struggle spanning five decades. Despite my criticisms, 5 stars to counter the nasty, disingenuous Zionist review-bombing campaign against it.
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.
July 3, 2026
An amazing narrative history of the Jewish Labor Bund and a sort of counter history to the destructive triumph of revisionist Zionism. Beautiful vignettes and incredible research.
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
June 22, 2026
For the Bolsheviks, stopping pogroms was a matter of self-interest as well as ethics. They had long known that the conflation of Jew and revolutionary would redound against them, and Trotsky's role as leader of the Red Army brought these slanders to a fever pitch. [...] Levin himself made a gramophone recording to convince soldiers that antisemitism was a tool of the bourgeoisie.Benjamin Hanil Song; Maricela Rueda; Autumn Hill; Savanna Batten; Zachary Evetts; Meagan Morris; Elizabeth Soto; Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez-Estrada. 100 years, 70 years, 50 years, 50 years, 50 years, 50 years, 50 years, 30 years. May you live in interesting times, they said. May you rest in power. It's no wonder I leap back to WWII in face of the many-headed juggernaut of the present, but Crabapple's thesis is no good vs evil of US blitheness nor carrying on of UK complacency. It is a testament to the solidarity that the De3mocratic party sneers at and the Republican Party excoriates as terrorists, the sort of mutual aid carved out of Jewish community and watered with the blood of pogroms. It is an argument that refuses the Hollywood definition of progress and was gassed for it, and while I would have preferred less pathos at points in my quest for rhetoric, this was never my story to tell.
In 1903, Black activists drew immediate parallels between lynch mobs and Russian pogromists.Of all the local libraries I patronize, the county system is the one I admittedly expect the least from when it comes to feeding my personal inclinations. So the fact that this system was the first and, thus far, only local branch to source a copy of this shocked me so much out of my self-assured complacency that I immediately checked it out in hopes of further motivating that unknown and likely much beleaguered collection developer. For what I sought was the record of petty cleavings and reckless idealism, a sum total rejection of oppression olympics in favor of spotlights on the Japanese, the British, the German, the Israeli colonialism, imperialism, domination, genocide. It took The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and dove into the kodoku of the Warsaw ghetto and then went back to the beginnings of Trotsky and Lenin and Marx and, far more importantly, those invisible workers that washed the floors and radicalized the sex workers and laid down the working part of the working class enough for the vaunted to force themselves into ivory tower and royally fuck the rest. It is a tale where the words ring true but are marketable to neither past preservation nor future politicking, and there's a high chance that this work joins the ranks of all those yearly high riders of NYT Best of and TikTok trends, useful for list completions during their one specific year of fame and dead in the ground otherwise. However, the Black Panther Party, the Haitian Revolution, the American Indian Movement, every colonized country that threw off the yoke of empire, every subjugated people that set the land beneath their feet free, their home was where they stood, and one must ponder how much world the would be without so much militant faith, so much communal glory.
But these efforts were no match for a well-funded hate campaign that was supported by the government, ignored by the police, and backed by the Catholic Church.A few days ago, there were reports of my country's government turning from war and towards housing. It's since fallen through to little surprise, for politics will politics, and pointing out the evil of necessary evil is usually far less effective than proving the necessary isn't bringing home the bacon. Crabapple's familial interweavings is neither objective nor comprehensive, but it does capture a human facet that is more often chewed up and spat out into the oblivion of death and eviction and the archives no one can make a living on valuing and studies forgone for putting food on the table. From a personal perspective, trans rights is the fraught equivocation du jour, and housing for workers is far less interesting than housing for tourists to my city's council. However, I continue to lay claim to this here my home with all its indigenous territories and negotiated migrations, for it is the workers that pave the way towards a better tomorrow, and neither prison nor burial ground can contain us all.
So why did I write this book about the Bund—who lost, who were failed—and not about the victorious killers?
Because I am sick of monsters—whether they belong to my group or any other. Because I know that we all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall.
August 4, 2026
A triumph. Wonderful contribution to history by some real comrades that went through a lot during tumultuous times.
The stories, the research, the writing, all fantastic. The author inserts her voice often and it’s not hard to understand who she is sympathetic to and who she isn’t. That’s fine to me, this approach is honest. So even when I disagree with her, about this or that opinion, it isn’t like she’s trying to pull one over on us like those historian mfers that take an objective (impossible) approach.
Another thing this author does is tie in perspectives from the past with contemporary issues. She points out shared values between Bundists from a hundred+ years ago and people in the BPP for example. She also isn’t the first to point out the parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and its resulting liquidation by the Nazis and Oct 7th and resulting liquidation of Gaza by the IDF. She tells this parallel through narrative and it’s moving. And fucking awful.
My one complaint with the author is she seems to not fully understand the philosophy of the people she so thoroughly researched. Explaining their Marxism she asserts that they followed historical and dialectical materialism as their method of analysis. Cool! But then she defines dialectical materialism as Fichte’s goofy dialectical model (you know the one - thesis/antithesis lol) with a positivist push towards communism. But like *magically*??? Then every time she mentions “dialectical forces” throughout the book later on it is stated almost as a mystical concept.
Its frustrating. Like how much did you read about these people, their beliefs, their histories, their struggles, their predictions. She praises them so many times for accurately predicting the future of hitler, of lenin, of germany, of poland, of zionism, of israel, of the ussr of this of that… then she equates the framework they uses, the lynchpin of it all, as a mysticism. Bundist soothsayers at their crystal ball!
She could have just studied one more thing. Philosophy.
Anyways still 5 meows! I’m annoying but not that annoying.
_______________
Edit: Let me add that I mean no disrespect here to any mysticism. I aim to point out that the author, to me at least, seems to be (basically) conflating astronomy with astrology. I happen to like both those things for vastly different reasons.
The stories, the research, the writing, all fantastic. The author inserts her voice often and it’s not hard to understand who she is sympathetic to and who she isn’t. That’s fine to me, this approach is honest. So even when I disagree with her, about this or that opinion, it isn’t like she’s trying to pull one over on us like those historian mfers that take an objective (impossible) approach.
Another thing this author does is tie in perspectives from the past with contemporary issues. She points out shared values between Bundists from a hundred+ years ago and people in the BPP for example. She also isn’t the first to point out the parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and its resulting liquidation by the Nazis and Oct 7th and resulting liquidation of Gaza by the IDF. She tells this parallel through narrative and it’s moving. And fucking awful.
My one complaint with the author is she seems to not fully understand the philosophy of the people she so thoroughly researched. Explaining their Marxism she asserts that they followed historical and dialectical materialism as their method of analysis. Cool! But then she defines dialectical materialism as Fichte’s goofy dialectical model (you know the one - thesis/antithesis lol) with a positivist push towards communism. But like *magically*??? Then every time she mentions “dialectical forces” throughout the book later on it is stated almost as a mystical concept.
Its frustrating. Like how much did you read about these people, their beliefs, their histories, their struggles, their predictions. She praises them so many times for accurately predicting the future of hitler, of lenin, of germany, of poland, of zionism, of israel, of the ussr of this of that… then she equates the framework they uses, the lynchpin of it all, as a mysticism. Bundist soothsayers at their crystal ball!
She could have just studied one more thing. Philosophy.
Anyways still 5 meows! I’m annoying but not that annoying.
_______________
Edit: Let me add that I mean no disrespect here to any mysticism. I aim to point out that the author, to me at least, seems to be (basically) conflating astronomy with astrology. I happen to like both those things for vastly different reasons.
May 28, 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.
May 26, 2026
It seems that this book has been discussed (and rated) mostly on its politics (and the politics of its subjects) and less on its merits as a work. I have to say that though I do share its politics, I did not really like the book, although I really really wanted to. I did learn a lot about the Bund, and I found the last chunk really thought-provoking, but I struggled with the style. Is it a memoir about her great-grandfather? Is it a work of history? Is it a somewhat disjointed following of a few too many characters?
Admittedly, this is a complex subject with a lot of players, but I did feel that it was made more confusing than it had to be, with many asides into the lives and imagined thoughts of "side characters" who sort of blended together. I was also reading this on a train, which is not the author's fault. However, I also sometimes rolled my eyes at the author's seeming mistrust in the audience's ability to make their own connections between the past and the present, and her constant references to her own life. Having her own family story act as a vehicle for the larger history didn't work for me here, especially since her great-grandfather left Europe by the start of the 1900s. Also, while I happen to share most of the author's biases, they're featured in the text to an extent that is almost distracting. There are also a few repeated sentences that could have used some editing.
On the other hand, I feel that the book has been unfairly bashed by people who didn't even bother to read it, and I think she deals cogently with the issue of what we can take from the Bund today. And Sam seems like the kind of guy I'd love to know.
Admittedly, this is a complex subject with a lot of players, but I did feel that it was made more confusing than it had to be, with many asides into the lives and imagined thoughts of "side characters" who sort of blended together. I was also reading this on a train, which is not the author's fault. However, I also sometimes rolled my eyes at the author's seeming mistrust in the audience's ability to make their own connections between the past and the present, and her constant references to her own life. Having her own family story act as a vehicle for the larger history didn't work for me here, especially since her great-grandfather left Europe by the start of the 1900s. Also, while I happen to share most of the author's biases, they're featured in the text to an extent that is almost distracting. There are also a few repeated sentences that could have used some editing.
On the other hand, I feel that the book has been unfairly bashed by people who didn't even bother to read it, and I think she deals cogently with the issue of what we can take from the Bund today. And Sam seems like the kind of guy I'd love to know.
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.
May 1, 2026
If you're hoping for a history of the Bund, or a window into their ideology you'll be deeply disappointed, you'll get a good window into the author's hang ups, her need to be seen as cool, arty, rebelliously fun and still young. If you're looking for a long failure to use solidarity to change Eastern Europe and an an accidental case for Zionism I guess this book is for you, if you can put up with digressions into the author's first NYC apartment and comments about girl's legs and tops.
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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.
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