We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist revolutionary party that fought for freedom and dignity for Jews in Europe. The movement formed in the waning days of the Russian Empire in an atmosphere of intense antisemitism, but it “rejected, from the very start, calls to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine,” Crabapple says. “They felt that Zionism was a capitulation to the same bigots that wanted to kick Jews out of Europe.”
Bund members — known as Bundists — navigated profound historical changes from the founding of the movement in 1897 until its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust. But Crabapple, who learned Yiddish for the book, says the Bund is not just Jewish history.
“This is a history that belongs to all rebels. It belongs to everyone who believes in the necessity of human solidarity,” she says.
