Molly Crabapple’s ‘Here Where We Live Is Our Country’
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Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country is one of the most important, timely and salient works of history I've ever read. It's a history of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist, internationalist organization that once dominated Jewish political identity:
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were hundreds of thousands of Bund members, both in the Pale of Settlement (the rural regions of the Russian empire that the Tsar confined most Jews to) and in diasporic centers like New York City. The Bund played an important role in the Russian Revolution and in the resistance to the rise of European fascism, and fought valiantly in the antifascist underground guerrilla bands in Nazi-occupied territories.
Despite this faded prominence, the Bund is all but unknown today. I was only vaguely aware of it, even though I attended seven years' worth of Yiddish classes at the Workmen's Circle, a Bund-originated socialist fraternal organization, and was bar-mitzvahed at a Workmen's Circle hall. It wasn't until I read about the Bund in Naomi Klein's essential 2023 book Doppelganger that I first caught a glimmer of its significance:
The thesis of Doppelganger is that the world is full of "mirror world" pairs with opposite political valences. For example, the mirror world version of the health justice movement is MAHA. Both MAHA and health justice share many commonalities (such as a skepticism of Big Pharma and its captured regulators), but arrive at totally different conclusions. Health justice demands universal access to medical care, compulsory licenses and patent reform for life-saving medicines, and systemic interventions to address discrimination against gender minorities, women, and racialized people. MAHA starts from the same diagnosis, but arrives at a totally different prescription: "eating clean," buying unregulated supplements from grifters, rejecting vaccines, attributing chronic health problems to personal moral failings, along with a conspiratorial rejection of life-saving medication.
Mirror worlds are everywhere. One chapter of Klein's work deals with the "mirror worlds" of Jewish identity and what radical Jews once called "the Jewish question":
In the 19th century, antisemitism was often described as "the socialism of fools." In the real world, we observe the dominance of parasitic finance capital over productive labor and embark upon a great class struggle to seize the means of production. In the mirror world, antisemites observe this same fact, combine it with the fact that some of these bankers are Jewish, and embark on a genocidal program of antisemitic violence.
But antisemites weren't the only mirror-world pairing with a view on "the Jewish question." Early 20th century Jews also lived on either side of the political looking-glass. On one side, you had the Bundists, whose motto (and the title of Crabapple's book) was "Here, where we live, is our country." For Bundists, Jews belonged everywhere Jews were. As the Jewish socialist Meyer London wrote, "Thousands of Jewish boys and girls pray to God not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them free Egypt."
The Bund saw its struggle as just one aspect of the universal struggle for liberation. They understood that persecuted minorities everywhere labored under the double bind of racist and class oppression (and further, that women labored under gender oppression), but they also understood that these identity markers were tactical facts about how these workers should set about freeing themselves.
They didn't mistake identity for a strategic difference: the goal was always universal liberation, and the reason to consider identity-based oppression was to ensure that every comrade was brought along in the struggle. As Crabapple writes, the Bund more-or-less invented intersectional analysis, and they practiced it with an eye to all the struggles of the world. Bund newspapers (even those published by the Bund underground in the Warsaw Ghetto) closely tracked the struggles of Black workers in the Jim Crow south, just as the Black radical press of the day reported closely on antisemitic lynchings in Europe. The Bund underground even managed to send telegrams of support to Gandhi from Nazi-occupied Poland.
On the other side of the Jewish mirror was (of course) Zionism. Zionism and the Bund were founded in the same year, in response to the same events. The Bund was founded in secret by exiled radical Jews in Vilna whom the Tsar had banished for their resistance activities. Zionism was founded in Geneva by Theodor Herzl, who sheltered Jews who had fled Tsarist Russia to escape antisemitic violence.
Where the Bund called for universalism and solidarity with all workers to keep Jews safe in every place where Jews lived, Zionists dreamed of a Jewish homeland, a stronghold to which Jews could retreat from the world. Where the Bund fought antisemites who would banish or exterminate Jews, Zionist leaders were willing to align themselves with antisemites, finding common cause in the idea that European Jewry should abandon Europe in favor of Palestine.
Indeed, the Balfour Declaration – which established a plan for the UK handing over its occupied territories in Palestine to create a Jewish homeland – was fomented by vicious antisemites as part of a plan to ethnically cleanse the UK of all Jews:
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232119
As Crabapple documents in detail, in the ensuing decades of struggle that followed, Zionist leaders repeatedly entered into alliances with antisemitic politicians, even those who presided over (and sometimes directed) campaigns of racist terror against Jews. Despite their mutual hatred, they shared a common goal: terrorizing Europe's Jews out of Europe and into Palestine.
Meanwhile, Bundists never wavered from their rejection of antisemites. In the Bundists' socialist, internationalist program, the pursuit of a Jewish homeland merely dangled the possibility of Jewish liberation – at the expense of Palestinians, and without having anything to offer to all the other oppressed peoples of the world.
While I discovered the Bund through reading Naomi Klein, many others learned about it from Crabapple's widely circulated 2018 New York Review of Books article, "My Great-Grandfather the Bundist":
Predictably, Crabapple's article provoked attacks from Zionists who told Crabapple they blamed the Bund for its own extermination. In their telling, the Bund's stubborn refusal to confront antisemitism as "history's oldest hatred" was a suicidal delusion that led their members into the Nazis' mass graves.
But for many Jews, Crabapple's article was a revelation about a different way to be Jewish, an identity that rejected the Apartheid state of Israel (South African Apartheid and the state of Israel share a birth year, and Apartheid South Africa and Israel carried on a robust program of mutual trade in arms and surveillance tools):
This revelation only gained salience and prominence after October 7, 2023, when Israel responded to a massacre perpetrated by Hamas by embarking on a years-long program of genocide and extraterritorial aggression. Zionists have defended these crimes against humanity as inseparable from Jewish identity and the only plausible answer to "the Jewish question."
Israel's defenders insist that even naming the genocide in Palestine (let alone opposing it) is inherently antisemitic. Ironically, Israel's loudest cheerleaders are the millions antisemitic evangelical Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber Jewish Zionists, who support Israel in hopes of bringing about a Biblical prophecy in which Christ returns and every Jew is cast down to Hell.
In the years since, Crabapple's work to revive the Bund has only gained adherents, especially among Jews who refuse to accept that their safety can only be secured through mass slaughter and imperial conquest. Crabapple's response to this burgeoning movement is this book, a massive, heroic, brilliant, and pitiless history of the Bund that proposes its own answer to "the Jewish question."
Beyond its political importance, Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a remarkable scholarly and artistic achievement. Crabapple taught herself to speak and read Yiddish so that she could consume primary sources, and she crisscrossed the globe to see and research the key sites of Jewish oppression and the Jewish liberation struggle.
It's a monumental book. Thanks to Crabapple's voluminous research, Here Where We Live delivers a blow-by-blow look at the Bund's rise and its triumphs, but even more importantly, the tactical disagreements, factional disputes, and personal animus that too often snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for these committed revolutionaries.
At times, Crabapple's tick-tock of these fights seems to embody the wry maxim: "Two Jews, three arguments." But the point of all this nuanced, textured detail isn't to rehash the tittle-tattle of the previous century, nor is it to show off Crabapple's prowess as a researcher. Rather, in rehearsing these fights, Crabapple shows how reasonable these disputes seemed at the time, and how terrible the consequences were for all concerned.
In this mode, Crabapple manages the admirable achievement of being both sympathetic and pitiless. Crabapple, after all, is a veteran political activist who has traveled extensively to active war-zones to document atrocities and offer mutual aid to those fighting for justice. She's endured every failure that radical politics can manifest, sat through every kind of bad meeting, and she recognizes in these disputes the same personalities and personal failings that have broken her heart a hundred times. She understands why these people are this way – but she can also see, with perfect hindsight, the ghastly horrors that followed, which swamp any matter of principle these people might have stood on.
There's plenty of this sympathetic pitilessness to go around, and it's not just the Bund or Jews who come in for it. Every factionalist blunder in pre-Revolutionary Russia, in the Soviet Union, in interwar Poland, and in occupied Poland comes in for examination – as do every imprisonment, maiming, rape and death that these blunders opened the door to. Crabapple's heroes are principled, but they are imperfect, and sometimes foolish, and sometimes self-deluding (for example, the Palestinian leader who insists that his rank-and-file fighters want to establish a multi-ethnic democracy, despite the undeniable presence in their number of people who want to banish all Jews from Palestine).
The twentieth century was a charnel house, and so the cost of these mistakes is high. Often, these mistakes lead to mass graves, with these mistake-makers tangled among the bodies. They never had the chance to learn from their mistakes. But, through Crabapple's work, we might.
It is in the postscript to this book that its true message lands. After 480 pages, we arrive at Crabapple's conclusion. In reflecting on these people, who died in their millions and whose memory was all but erased, she asks, "Did the Bund fail?"
Her answer is a resounding no. The Bund lost, but it did not fail. The Bund was failed, as were the Zionists, the Roma, European socialists, disabled and queer people – everyone the Nazis burned, gassed, or buried alive. These people cried out to the rest of the world – to America, to Canada, to the UK, to all the places that were not under Nazi occupation – and begged for help, for safe passage, for rescue.
The world slammed its doors. Even after they joined the war, they refused to admit Jews and other victims of Nazi genocide. They refused visas, closed borders, turned back boats of escapees, sometimes sending them back to occupied Europe to be slaughtered.
In his review in the New York Review of Books, historian Adam Hochschild writes:
Imagine that the United States had not passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially slammed the door on almost all newcomers for more than forty years. Without it, Jewish immigration to the US would surely have soared during the 1920s and 1930s. Some 2.5 million Jews, most of them hoping for a better life than they had in tsarist Russia, had already come here between 1880 and 1924. Then, even in the decade before Hitler took power, Jews still had many reasons to leave Europe. Poland, whose Jewish population of 2.8 million was the continent’s largest, was a cauldron of antisemitism between the wars, with outbreaks of deadly violence, segregated seating and de facto quotas in many universities, and numerous other humiliations.
No one who's paid attention during this century's xenophobic policies and attacks on refugees can fail to see the parallels. And no one who's paid attention to the genocide in Gaza and the official response in the "free" world to Palestinian solidarity movements can fail to see those parallels, either.
For the Jews who are told – by Zionists, including the millions of American gentile Zionists who outnumber Jewish Zionists 30:1 – that all this is being done for us, that our continued existence requires it, Crabapple's history of the Bund shows us what's on the other side of the mirror. As NYT editor Max Strasser writes in his review of Here Where We Live:
[The Bund was] the kind of movement leftists today dream about — political party, social movement, mutual aid group — with tens of thousands of members. The Bund published newspapers and ran soup kitchens and summer camps; its athletes competed in a socialist version of the Olympics. Bund activists organized across Eastern Europe and beyond — they helped elect a congressman on the Lower East Side.
The politics we dream of isn't a fantasy. It's the politics our grandparents lived – a politics that wasn't lost, but rather, erased. Erased by Nazis and Stalinists, who committed wholesale slaughter of Bundists. But that politics was also erased by Zionists, who swept through the Displaced Persons' camps of post-war Europe, imposing a draft on the Jews who'd been penned in those stinking camps by a world that refused to welcome Jews, even after the horrors of the death-camps were widely known. Zionists bullied and coerced these Jews – including Bundists who rejected their cause – to serve as foot-soldiers in the Israeli army, even beating elderly parents until their sons and daughters agreed to fight.
Bundists always rejected all forms of ethno-nationalism. As Jews, they had lived in the violence and oppression that always attended every ethno-nationalist program. They never imagined that Israel would escape this fate. As the Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote in 1933: "We are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful as the nationalisms of all the other nations."
Crabapple has done heroic and important work in excavating this history. She has vindicated the sacrifices made by the Bundist archivists who smuggled their papers out of Nazi occupation and gave their lives to ensure that some day their story could be told.
In so doing, she has also vindicated her own great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, a Bundist who fled the Pale of Settlement for New York City, whose art-practice traveled to Crabapple through her mother, who is also a painter. It wasn't just the art-practices that traveled – it was also the art, and it was one of Rothbort's paintings ("Itka, the Bundist," depicting a girl throwing a rock through a window) that set her on this journey.
This volume is also graced by Crabapple's own art, stark monochrome ink-washes in her characteristic style, which bring these long-dead people to vivid life. They're a reminder of the role that culture plays in every radical movement, of the ways that the Bund welcomed its members to live a radical life through sport and song and picnics, and not just meetings and street-demonstrations.
Even before this book, Crabapple had made a mark through her paintings and writings. But with Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Crabapple has given us a magnum opus, a book that might help us turn the tide of history.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
That is progress, change happening faster, get used to it. Any ancestor of yours with five or more greats likely lived in a village that had been mostly unchanged since their own pentuple-greats existed. All of your descendants will be able to identify you as their ancestor and find your Tumblr posts. They were different times and times to come will be even more different. "Two hundred miles, I don't know where I live any more." "eddie izzard stonehenge walk" https://share.google/BYFtiOUai2oPJ7C52
Because a continuous stream of unqualified ass hats keep telling them so. They used money to usurp the position previously occupied by the likes of Walter Cronkite and those who will always fall for an Appeal to Authority continue to fall because an object in motion will remain in motion.
Moving around my whole life and having lived in 7 states has made me keenly aware of the fact that everyone thinks their city/town is uniquely terrible in exactly the same ways. "Everyone acts nice but they hate you," "The weather here is so unpredictable," "It's so hard to make friends here," "The buses are never on time," "This town is full of the craziest people," girl that's every town. "No but it's worse here" look you can't all be the worst.
"look you can't all be the worst" Hold my local microbrew. Sure they can, each in their own special way. Subjective opinions. Each place is the worst for those experiencing it the hardest. Worst potholes, worst commute, worst school district administration, worst local news coverage, etc. Unless you luckily have a rival, then they are the worst and you are marginally better, see local sports teams.
the common name "fools gold" for iron pyrite is funnier than we give credit for. imagine scientists discover a new metal and they're like "We're calling this Copper for Idiots"
Sometimes in a professional setting you’ll come across someone in their 60s who just cannot open a PDF in their email. And the thing is. They’re lowkey not old enough to be acting like that. You guys were in your early 30s at the latest when email took off. You’ve actually been doing this for longer than I have. Get real and click on the damn attachment.
Guy who’s the same age as the Ferris Bueller who hacked into his school’s systems doesn’t know how to open Outlook and wants me to do it for him brother you must be shitting me
We were the 10% of our cohort that adopted the tech. The other 90% did what their parents did and are now we hide among them for the same reason you don't want to deal with those who did not, and still refuse to, see the future coming. They steadfastly refuse to understand what an attachment is, in either the PDF or therapy case.
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