Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The instant New York Times bestseller

by Molly Crabapple, Nina Yndis (Narrator)

Bloomsbury presents Here Where We Live is Our Country by Molly Crabapple, read by Nina Yndis and Molly Crabapple

A vivid, human and radical history of one of the most powerful revolutionary movements of the twentieth century - told through the lives and in the voices of countless forgotten men and women

‘A gripping, human story of love, idealism and betrayal - and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary’ Naomi Klein

Here Where Live Is Our Country is the story of a revolutionary movement – the Jewish Bund – which played a part in nearly every major conflict in Eastern Europe from 1900-1945, but still remains an almost unknown part of twentieth-century history.

The movement’s central philosophy of “herenes” – the belief that Jews had a right to freedom and dignity in the countries where they lived – led them to fight the Tsar, reject Zionism, resist the Nazis, and ultimately help lead the Warsaw ghetto revolt. It is also a philosophy that immediately resonates with the political situation all over the world today.

In this book, Molly Crabapple tells the story of the Bund through the lives of the bold and brilliant individuals who were pivotal to carrying out the doctrine, including her own great-grandfather, through whom she first discovered the movement.


‘Crabapple, with this great work, adds to her growing legacy as a unique American genius’ Jason Stanley
‘Recounts, with a novelist’s mastery of detail, one of the most extraordinary rebellions of the human spirit in modern history’ Pankaj Mishra
‘A masterful storyteller who possesses an admirable sense of history and writes with verve and wit … Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a true tour de force’ Jon Lee Anderson

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

Audible Audio

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

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

Reviews

[Rick Riordan]

This 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.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

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

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

[Sunny Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Yalla Balagan · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.
❤️ 🇮🇱

[Rachel Ashera Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

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

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

[Harneen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!!!!!

[Betsy]

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

[Emmett Dubnoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Aditi · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Sophia]

The 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.

[Brian Saitzyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Olivia A]

This 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...

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!!!!!!

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Kristi Thielen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 2 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.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Max Epstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot stress how much of a gift this book is. After the events of October 7 and the ensuing genocide in Palestine, I had a painful reconfiguration of what it meant to be Jewish outside of Zionism, unlearning the years of indoctrination that I had grown up in. This however left an empty chasm of what it even meant to be Jewish. This book plugs that gap, highlighting a shining example of a deliberately glossed over movement, the Jewish labor bund and the principle of ‘Doikayte’ - Hereness, that stands antithetically to the destructive ethnonationalism of Zionism.

"Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives for liberty? They pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt."

Thank you Molly!

[Ranjani Sheshadri · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Matt Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Alex Lantsberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A punch in the gut. Like Eichmann in Jerusalem, I had to stop reading it and stare mindlessly many times.

In 1897, some earnest Jews in Central Europe founded the Bund. They believed that everyone, including themselves, deserved to live where they were in freedom and dignity. "Though the Bund celebrated Eastern European Jews as a people, they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the disposition of others. Bundits created the doctrine of do'ikayt, or "Hereness." Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity where it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies." (xx)

They were revolutionary, democratic, socialist, probably a little atheistical, and doomed. They were an underground movement that believed labor was entitled to what it created and that together the workers of the world could perfect the world.

They were marginalized by the Bolsheviks on one axis and Zionism, which apparently was founded the same year and came out of much the same tumult, on another. They had a large number of delegates at the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party conference in 1903 and walked out. "when the moment called for ruthlessness, the Bundists made speeches, then showily left the room. They kept their principles but frittered away their power. Lenin himself was baffled by the Bund's exit. 'They were actually masters of the situation," he later wrote." (51)

(oh my heart. if good hearted universalists had grabbed that movement instead of Lenin . . .)

They were murdered by their neighbors, the tsar, American isolationism, the nazis, and antisemitism. When they tried to flee, the nations of the world turned them away. She talks about the SS St. Louis, full of refugees who had permission to go to Cuba. 40,000 Cubans staged a rally and the president of Cuba told them to "fight the Jews until the last one is driven out." (246). FDR refused them entry to the United States. They went back to die.

Those who survived still tried to perfect the world.

This book is a cry of pain by the great granddaughter of one of the founders of the Bund, the great Molly Crabapple. She taught herself Yiddish to write this book.

It is largely a history of the Bund, from its founding and underground growth through its brief time as a political contender to the death of so many of its believers in unmarked graves and concentration camps. But it's also the history of Western Europe and America; of Israel and Palestine; of a world that could have been and a world that was.

Some of their grandchildren were freedom riders, trying to perfect the world here, where we live. Minneapolis rose up to protect their neighbors, many of them refugees that our president would like to deport.

If they had prevailed more than a century ago, we would have had a different world. No WWI, No WWII. No holocaust. No foundation of Israel. No Nakba.

This book ends with Israel's attack on Gaza. Crabapple firmly situates that attack within this history.

Much of it is this relentless horror. We know these hopeful revolutionaries are heading for death in camps and prisons.

But it is also so hopeful. These people imagined a better world. Maybe there would have been horrors but they would have been different ones.

She also draws a fascinating distinction between losing and failing. "Failure is what happens to hose overcome by their own faults. To lose is to succumb to a greater force." (380).

The book has provoked a great deal of hate, I suspect because of the postscript. She calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and one that was implicit in the founding of the nation. This makes me uncomfortable. I get why it would enrage those who feel Israel was the only moral response to the holocaust.

This will haunt me:

I didn't just write this book out of scholarly devotion. I had a hidden hope. By studying the Bund's story, I wanted to find out if there was some way that my people, the Jews of eastern Europe, could have saved themselves.

The more I wrote, the more I realized the wrongness of my premise. Though individuals escaped in various ways, there was no way out for European Jews as a collective. Not as long as they were fighting alone. No small minority could have rescued themselves from the horrors of the twentieth century. Despite astounding feats of heroism, cunning and creativity, they could not hold Hitler back, nor the intractable hatred of their Christian neighbors. This Bund could not change the balance of force. Neither could any other Jewish group in Eastern Europe, whether assimilationist or Zionist, capitalist or communist, Hasidic or Christian convert. Six million scattered humans can't defeat vast armies of organized killers.

The accusation of failure isn't one we should level against the Bund, or any other Jewish group of that place and time. It's for the Western world of which they were such a precarious part. It was the West, after all, that hypocritically played lip service to freedom and humanity while hewing to the crude doctrines of might. The true failures were the democracies who played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable. The failures were the British and American diplomats who hobnobbed in Bermuda while the ghetto burned.

The Western world failed the Jews of Europe when they refused to provide the basic solidarity that the historical moment demanded -- the solidarity upon which the Bund's humanism relied. This betrayal allowed Zionism to present itself as the only possible salvation. If the world came down to strong predators and weak victims, Zionism at least offered Jews the possibility of strength.

But Zionism is ethnonationalism. Like all ethnonationalisms, it required mass murder to clear the land to build its dream. On this haunted territory, oppressed became oppressors. Seventy-odd years after they stuck their state upon another people's ruin, the inheritors of Zion would liquidate their very own ghetto in Gaza beside the sea.

For ethnoationalism, this is what winning means.

So why did I write this book about the Bund -- who lost, who were failed -- and not about 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. Because I want off this samsara wheel of atrocity, and the Bund's demand of solidarity across difference is the only way to get there.

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

There is no other earth, after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to all of us, as inheritance and prison. It is Egypt and the promised land.

I return to do'ikayt -- Hereness, a doctrine created by the godless Jews of the diaspora, written with mongrel words in Hebrew letters, then spread by itinerant troublemakers carrying forged passports, whose fundamental demand was the right to stay. (380-381)

There is so much in this book I do not want to forget and do not want to read again. Sophia Dubnova. Henryk Erlich. Arthur Zygielbojm. Bernard Goldstein. Michal Klepfsz. Jacob Pat. Pati Kremer. Big damn heroes. I will try to bring myself to note some of it down as an aid to memory. If I can bear it. If I can bear it.

Going back to the beginning, Crabapple writes:

The more I dug into the Bundist past, the more I realized it was not past at all. It was, rather, a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present. Despite war, state collapse, and genocidal repression, the Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions at the ballot box. The Bundists build alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today. The Bund was a Jewish group, but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity. In the story of the Bund -- across decades and geographies, ages, and faiths -- I found the story of our own time, a blueprint for survival, a cautionary tale of death, and a philosophy that might save us. (xxi)

In the meantime, this I believe: we must love each other or die.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is in many ways a fascinating book that Crabapple writes with a journalistic and personalized style, within in the current context of the genocide in Gaza, and with her having been to Gaza more than once, and having previously coauthored a book about the Syrian civil war. It's a "people's history," if you will. But hold on to that observation about previous writing and wars she's written about. We'll get to it again.

The Bund is presented within its own context but also, riffing on the “third way” of social democratic political parties in Europe becoming neoliberal, as the third way for Eastern European Jews versus either Zionism or assimilation. That said, though not discussed by Crabtree, long before the Holocaust dented this option, the Bund representing labor issues may have limited its appeal to bourgeoisie, who in Tsarist Russia in any case, versus Germany and the Dual Monarchy to a somewhat lesser extent, didn’t have the option of assimilation.

First, a couple of side notes. Contra the one one-star Zionist reviewer, per a reply I left her, oh, yes, some strictly observant Jewish women shave their heads. Satmar is the outstanding example of a specific group, but not the only one.

Second, on transliteration? Yiddish phonology is highly variable. See here.

Thirdly, as far as other issues? Forward loved it. That's because, contra the third Zionist reviewer, they have non-Zionist roots that still get supported today. Note that last part. That link plus my opening paragraph also refute the other of the first two one-star Zionist reviewers. Of course, when third Zionist talks about "HamAss" (remember that Israel helped create Hamas) you know where he's coming from.

Fourthly, no, not every Bundist or post-Bundist or descendant of Bundists coming out of the Holocaust became a Zionist, contra the third (as of this time) one-star Zionist reviewer. Norman Finkelstein would like a word with you, for starters.

That said, despite this person especially, and also despite the other two, the book had issues I’ll get to after the praises. Not major ones, but enough that it’s not a pure, or nearly pure, five stars. I didn’t know whether to bump it up, drop it down, or go with a starless review.

So why didn’t the Bund succeed? Beyond the Holocaust issue, and setting aside the mythos of Fiddler on the Roof, one thing might be what Crabapple notes: Only 2 percent of Tsarist Russia was Jewish (she claims), and probably three-quarters of that population was in what became independent Poland and Lithuania after World War I. Half the rest was probably in the portions of northwest Ukraine that had been part of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania at its peak. Yes, kids, re a certain current war, 400 years ago, Kyiv was in Poland (even as Poland was putting a puppet tsar on the throne in Moscow).

Another reason, per Crabapple, is that the Bund didn’t have Lenin’s ruthlessness, as shown at the 1902 conference where Lenin labeled his group the majority — the Bolsheviks. This is the same reason the Left Social Revolutionaries failed in Russia in 1918, as well — speeches, not actions. (Well, they assassinated the German ambassador for stupid reasons, but wouldn’t act directly against the Bolsheviks.)

Next, Crabapple notes one leading Bundist stopping at the second Zionist International in Basel. She makes two good background points. The first is that Theodor Herzl rejected assimilation because of the Dreyfus trial. The second is, from the start, he saw Palestinian Arabs as “wogs” who needed to be chased off their land. And, Zionists who talk about “their land” — some will be open about this today; others will wave it off. It’s still true, as non-Zionist non-ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel like Ilan Pappe and Shlomo Sand have written.

Finally, it didn’t “fail,” but per Crabapple, it “lost.” Because of the outside world.

That said, we have a number of minor issues and errors, and one larger but tangential one.

One is that the estate of Frantz Fanon eventually removed Sartre’s introduction to “The Wretched of the Earth” because …
He supported Israel in the Six-Day War. She doesn’t mention that.

Worse? On page 105, Crabapple, in discussing Sarajevo, has a two-word sentence.
“Three shots.”

Uh, flat wrong. Gavrilo Princip fired two.

At that point, I thought, am I missing other things, since I don’t have a detailed knowledge of the Bund myself?

Page 208, claims that in 1932, in Germany, the SPD proposed to German communists that they form a coalition. I have NEVER heard this before. Officially in four-star territory, I think, or at least 4/5 borderline. Weirdly, she semi-corrects this later in the same paragraph.

A couple of pages later? KPD leader Ernst Thälmann’s name has an umlaut, which she doesn’t give him. Maybe the one Zionist critic is not totally wrong on transliterations?

Like how Raphael Abramovich’s full name was Raphael Abramovich Rein, according to Wiki (although the actual entry is just with the first two names)? Wiki notes his son Mark Rein, by that name. (Crabapple doesn’t mention what Wiki does, that Marwk befriended Willy Brandt during the Spanish Civil War before Stalin had him killed.)

Finally, a couple of numbers are off. The 1900 population of Russia was actually 4 percent or a bit more, not the 2 percent Crabapple mentions. That’s per its 1897 census. And, the Jewish population of post-WWI Poland was 10 percent around 1930, per 1931 census, not 13 percent. It was lower yet in 1921, though that census is a bit problematic.

The real problem is something tangential, but yet not, and she refers to it, indirectly, more than once in making this book a people’s history not just of the Bund but for today.

The rounding down is due to something at the edges of the book, or should I say the “Borderlands,” per the often semi-odious Timothy Snyder.

Ukraine.

It’s clear where Crabapple has pitched her tent. And, per the likes of Norman Finkelstein, it’s clear that non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews are nowhere near agreement.

I wouldn’t agree with Finkelstein and call Putin’s invasion “justified,” but I don’t call it “unjustified” either. And, while I don’t believe everything he says about de-Nazification of Ukraine being part of the reason for the invasion, the shadow of NATO, badgering, as Pope Francis said, is there and is real. Ask Ivan Katchanovski or Marta Havryshko, if you don’t believe me. I KNOW Crabapple knows that first name and presumably the second. (If I'm wrong on saying that she does know Katchanovski, then ignore her on Ukraine issues in general.)

And, the rise of neo-Nazi organizations in Ukraine is there and real, too, even if Zelensky is Jewish. People like Moss Robeson cover this in detail. Yes, Prigozhin, also of partly Jewish background (despite Zionist handwaving denials), had some “orcs” in Wagner, but not like this by number. (Not all orcs are antisemitic goys, by the way.)

I suspect that remaining Jews in Ukraine will probably lose, too, the more this war drags on, and like the Bund, because of the outside world. No, not more intervention by NATO, but rather, Boris Johnson blocking an early end to the war.

Ukraine, by percentages, has a larger Jewish population today than Russia. But, post-breakup of the USSR, the percentage of population that’s Jewish has declined faster in Ukraine.

And with that, my decision is that I’ll give it the 4-star rating rather than a starless unrated review. I just can’t do 5.

Update, May 26: Oh, look, Molly. Here's Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky giving a state funeral to an actual Nazi.

I've given people plenty of links so that Zionist reviewers can't lead them astray.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have listened to this book in the Audible format. The majority of commentary on this page will be the creation of Claude AI and not my own. My own award of four stars is suggestive of my appreciation for this work. My only reason for withholding five stars is that I am not personally attracted to the earlier portion of the book which delves into fairly ancient history in the 1700s. The book gets better and better. And the very last segment of the book which is something of an afterword is moving and evocative. Possibly my biggest personal take away from this book is that from the many horror stories regarding the treatment of particularly the Eastern European Jewish population gives me some new understanding if not appreciation for the evident demented actions of the current population of Israel, which may be partially a result of the horrendous treatment that they have historically received up until even the present day. The author of this book is Jewish and among the increasing number of people who see the current action of Israel against the Palestinians as genocide.

Synopsis

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026) is Molly Crabapple’s first full-length work of popular history. It tells 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 first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates an extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. 

The book is also partly personal. Crabapple’s great-grandfather was the post-impressionist painter and former revolutionary Samuel Rothbort, and without him this book would never have existed — her mother, who taught her to paint, learned from Sam.  As narrator, Crabapple also relates her own experiences protesting at Occupy Wall Street, canvassing housing projects with the DSA, and reporting from the West Bank, Gaza, and war-torn Ukraine — reminding readers that this is not a dispassionate history. 

The Bund’s rise and fall raises a vital question: what can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?  Crabapple’s answer echoes through the book: “history keeps moving. No victory is final. Neither is any defeat.” 

Review

The book landed on the New York Times bestseller list and has drawn wide critical praise. The New York Times Book Review called it “thrillingly energetic… delightful… vivid,” while The Guardian noted that in 380 “lush, high-tempo, strikingly poignant pages,” Crabapple documents the Bund’s extraordinary rise and fall, and that “the relevance of her material for our present moment is impossible to ignore.” 

Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi writes that “with the brilliance of a scholar and the creativity of an artist, Crabapple delves into personal and communal histories, intimately reconstructing the genealogy of a rebellion for dignity and justice, and in the process, gifting us nothing short of a roadmap for our revolution today.” 

Not all readers are uncritical. One Goodreads reviewer noted that the book “wants to resurrect the Bund as a usable past, a socialist alternative to Zionism whose ideas are fresh and vital today” — a framing some find inspiring, others find tendentious. The Forward observed that Crabapple “has found her anti-Zionist heroes for our time,” signaling that the book engages directly and unapologetically with contemporary debates about Israel and Palestine. 

One reviewer in The Progressive praised its approach as “a people’s history of a movement,” noting that it is not the story of a ‘great man’ but rather a remembrance of a struggle alive with many fascinating characters — artists, writers, doctors, regular folks turned into activists — and that this is how movements survive. 

The consensus: a rich, urgently felt work of narrative history that reads more like a novel than an academic text, deeply researched and stylistically vivid, though readers should know that Crabapple has clear contemporary political sympathies that shape her telling.

What Was the Bund?

The General Jewish Labor Bund was founded in Vilna in 1897, and its central principle was the Yiddish idea of doikayt — “hereness” — a local approach to Jewish struggle and labor politics that opposed Zionism.  The name “Bund” simply means “federation” or “union” in Yiddish and German.

The Bund was an internationalist organization that shared the core Marxist belief in a common class struggle aimed at achieving the liberation of all workers, regardless of national or religious origin. It nevertheless insisted that Jews were a distinct national group, and that while Jewish workers should prioritize alliances with other socialists, a separate Jewish socialist organization was required to adequately represent the national and cultural needs of working-class Jews in Eastern Europe. 

The Bund opposed assimilation, defended Jewish civil and cultural rights, and campaigned actively against antisemitism.  This put it in direct tension with two other major forces: religious Jewish orthodoxy and the Zionist movement. The Bund’s ideological hostility toward Zionism was rooted in a fundamental disagreement — while Zionists advocated large-scale Jewish emigration to a homeland in Palestine, the Bund insisted that antisemitism should be fought and defeated within the countries where Jews already lived. 

The founders of the Bund played a major role in the founding of the All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and within less than ten years the Bund had developed local chapters in almost every Jewish city and town in Eastern Europe. Jewish workers were acknowledged to be the best-organized group within the All-Russian labour movement — even by their enemies. 

The Bundist movement was heavily damaged by World War II and Nazism — many Bundists were murdered during the Holocaust, though many were also active in the struggle against Nazism.  Surviving Bundists attempted to regroup in postwar Poland, but were suppressed by the Communist government, and most Bund leaders emigrated to other countries by early 1949. 

The Bund is thus a movement defined by its tragedy: it had a coherent, humane, and intellectually serious vision for Jewish life in the modern world — one that didn’t require emigration or religious nationalism — and it was destroyed by the very antisemitism it dedicated itself to fighting. Crabapple’s book is an elegy for that vision, and an argument that it still has something to teach us.