Here Where We Live Is Our Country

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. "Molly Crabapple beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice."-Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelganger 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.

Molly Crabapple got her start drawing at underground burlesque shows, and became a journalist on the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street. She has reported with words and art from Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Greek refugee camps, the US-Mexican border, and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, for places like The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and three Emmys. She's done animations with AOC and Jay Z and her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Most recently, she was a 2024 Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library.