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The Story of the Jewish Bund
by Molly Crabapple
The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created "memory paintings" with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.
Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but "here where we live."
In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund's rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?
Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund's remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.
"Writing with lyricism and great depth of feeling, Crabapple movingly presents the principled Bund, decimated by the Holocaust and sidelined postwar by Soviet socialism on one side and Zionism on the other, as 'a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present.'" ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Molly Crabapple is a time traveler, a necromancer, and an unclassifiable genius. She beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is that rarest of books: a gripping, human story of love, idealism, and betrayal—and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary." —Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelleganger
"Molly Crabapple not only recounts, with a novelist's mastery of detail, one of the most extraordinary rebellions of the human spirit in modern history. She animates, too, elegantly and boldly, a political and spiritual tradition that the zealots of ethnonationalism had managed to suppress for too long. In the long battles ahead for truth and dignity, her book will be an indispensable resource." —Pankaj Mishra, author of the New York Times Notable Book Age of Anger and The World After Gaza
This information about Here Where We Live Is Our Country was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 long-listed for a National Book Award. 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.
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