Writer-artist-activist Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is Our Country tells an improbable story that features a militant, sometimes clandestine and sometimes above-ground, international network of Jewish organizers who banded together in the late 19th century to oppose authoritarian rule, establish mutual aid organizations, and promote peace and working-class solidarity. They called themselves the Bund.
But the book about their century-long efforts is not just a recounting of a proud history. It is also an instructional look back with deep implications for today’s progressive movements: zeroing in on the fragility of coalitions; noting the unpredictability of triggering incidents in prompting people to fight back; and warning about the lulls that typically follow a frenzied period of political activity. The book also highlights activism’s emotional toll on those who make it their life’s work, introducing Bund activists who experienced shattered personal relationships, loneliness, depression, and constant fear about their own safety and the safety of their loved ones.
Moreover, Here Where We Live is Our Country centers the Bund’s anti-Zionism—their belief that appropriating land that belonged to another people violated Jewish ethics—and defiance of anti-Semitic tropes that blamed Jews for everything from the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II to the killing of Christ.
In fact, the persistence of anti-Semitism is the book’s throughline, since attacks on Jews have been a historical constant, with the late April knifing of two Orthodox Jewish men in London being a case in point.
The Bund adamantly defended world Jewry and decried murderous pogroms in Russia, Poland, and the Pale of Settlement and, later, denounced Nazi propaganda that depicted Jews as vermin. They did this while simultaneously promoting do’ikayt, the Yiddish word for hereness, and argued that Jews have a right to live in their longtime homelands, a position the Bund held throughout its more than 100-year existence.
Still, anti-Semitism frequently pushed Jews to leave their homelands for presumably safer ports in the U.S., Palestine, Central and South America, Africa, and Europe.
Among those who left was painter-sculptor Sam Rothbort (1881-1971) Crabapple’s maternal great-grandfather, who had been a Bundist in Tsarist Russia before emigrating to the U.S. in 1904. Once here, he continued to support his comrades, memorializing them in paintings that showcased their audacity. One particular depiction, of a young woman hurling a rock through a store window, gripped Crabapple, and prompted her to begin a seven-year study of Bund history that took her to archives, museums, and cities on several continents. Here Where We Live is Our Country is the result.
The book opens in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of Russia, where the Bund was founded in 1897 and tracks its work in helping lay the groundwork for revolutionary change. From the start, Bundists worked to mobilize people from the ground up. “Talk plainly,” leaders advised group members. “Make things better in the here and now.” Their initial goals were winning a 12-hour workday and promoting worker-to-worker solidarity.
These ideals resonated and the Bund’s influence in Russia grew, at least until splits fractured unity on the left, including within the Bund. Lenin wanted a centralized communist party; Crabapple describes him as favoring “obedient professional revolutionaries.” Most Bundists, she writes, bristled at this idea and instead pushed for a decentralized coalition of autonomous groups.
An unsuccessful revolution in 1905 led to further infighting. Meanwhile, by 1906, violent pogroms resulted in more than 125,000 Jews leaving Russia for the United States.
By the time World War I erupted, those who favored fighting the war faced off against those who opposed it and Bundists soon found themselves siding with a faction called the Menshevik International. Opposing them were the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, who many Bundists considered “a dictator in waiting.” Rupture upon rupture followed, but it was not until the formation of the Communist International or Comintern in 1919 that Bundists fully broke with Lenin and his allies. The reason? A requirement that all groups in the Communist International “purge themselves of moderate socialists and kick out any leader who disobeyed the dictates of Moscow.” When Bundists were told to dissolve the Bund and join the Communist Party, they refused. From that day forward the group was vehemently pro-socialist and just as vehemently anti-communist.
But they were also not deterred from their mission, and Bund members soon began organizing in Warsaw, then a center of Jewish intellectual and social life. There, they organized exploited workers and set up secular Jewish schools, sports clubs, and mutual aid organizations. They also established a women’s organization that promoted birth control, set up child care centers, and demanded equal pay for equal work.
Until 1939, when anti-Semitism became the official policy of Nazi-occupied Poland, the Bund held significant sway. Then, virtually overnight, those Jews with the means and connections to leave Poland did so. Others ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto and Crabapple’s exhaustively detailed look at ghetto life, and the eventual rebellion that brought Bund members and socialists together, is riveting if gut-wrenching.
After the war, those Jews who’d survived were sent to Displaced Persons camps in U.S.-occupied Europe. By this point, 90 percent of Poland’s Jews and one-third of the world’s Jews, had been murdered. Nonetheless, the Bund limped on, opposing the British Mandate to establish Israel and opposing the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.
A decade later, in the late 1940s, the Bund declared itself “an international organization” and set up shop in New York City. The effort lasted until 2003.
Sad? Yes, but as Crabapple reminds her readers, “history keeps moving. No victory is final. Neither is any defeat.” Groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, The Workers Circle, Jewish Voice for Peace, and T’ruah now lead progressive Jews in demanding workplace equity, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive justice, peace, and Palestinian sovereignty.
They know that the Bund paved the ground they walk on.
The Indypendent is a New York City-based newspaper, website and weekly radio show. All of our work is made possible by readers like you. During this holiday season, please consider making a recurring or one-time donation today or subscribe to our monthly print edition and get every copy sent straight to your home.
