Molly
Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish
Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern
Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly
anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an
imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.” In the first
popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary
world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious
rebels, clandestine revolutionaries
and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this
violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories
interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s
rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a
movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity,
was largely destroyed?
Highlights include:
Crabapple’s personal connection to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort;
How the Bund built a vibrant youth counterculture amid harsh anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe;
The significance of “Hereness” to the Bund’s politics and how it
distinguished the group from Zionist groups advocating the colonization
of Palestine;
A discussion of “theory-pilled nerds” and how Crabapple’s activism and
journalism since Occupy Wall Street shaped her insights into the inner
life of the Bund;
The future of anti-Zionism in the context of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun
(with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award.
She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the
Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker,
and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R.
Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of
Modern Art.
Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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