Editors’ Introduction

In 2015, we were honored to welcome Molly Crabapple to the Palestine Festival of Literature. She toured the West Bank and ‘48 with the festival and wrote a deeply affecting dispatch for Vice News from Gaza. When she returned home, she began excavating her family’s history and her great-grandfather’s involvement with the Jewish Bund — a revolutionary movement that was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist that reached its zenith in interwar Europe.

Now, 11 years later, she is about to publish Here Where We Live Is Our Country, an epic history of the Jewish movement that refused Zionism’s pressure to colonize and subjugate another people. It’s been largely erased from history, Molly argues, because of its opposition to Zionism — and her new book is an attempt to ensure it’s not forgotten.

During his elder years, my great-grandfather, the post-Impressionist artist Sam Rothbort, tried to paint back into existence the murdered world of his shtetl childhood. Amid the hundreds of watercolors that he called “memory paintings,” one stood out. A girl silhouetted against some cottages, her dress the same color as the crepuscular sky above. A moment before, she’d hurled a rock through one now shattered cottage window. On the painting’s margin, her boyfriend offers more rocks.

“Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows,” Sam captioned the work.

I may have been fifteen, seventeen, or twenty when I saw the watercolor, in my great-aunt’s sunbaked living room or my mother’s apartment; I don’t recall exactly. What sticks with me is the old-world awkwardness of the heroine’s name. Itka. I turned the Yiddish syllables on my tongue. And Bundist. What was that?

This question became a thread that led me to the Bund, a revolutionary society of which my great-grandfather had been a member, whose story was interwoven with the agonies and triumphs of Jews in eastern Europe, and whose name has all but been erased. But this thread did not merely draw me back into the vanished past. It became a guide for our moment, in all its horror and possibility, in all its repression, courage, and loss.

Founded in 1897 in the city of Vilna in the Russian Empire, and reaching its height in interwar Poland, the Bund was a sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish. Bundists fought the tsar, battled pogroms, exalted the Yiddish language, and built vast networks of political and cultural institutions out of little more than love and grit. Seeking to liberate Jews from the poverty and violence of interwar Poland, they raised their children on the radical ethos of working-class solidarity and subaltern pride. Ultimately, these youth helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. Though the Bund was largely obliterated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the group’s opposition to Zionism better explains their absence from current consciousness. Though the Bund celebrated eastern-European Jews as a people, they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies.

The Bund’s philosophy spoke to my sense of Jewishness in a way neither the synagogue nor Israel ever had. Maybe this had to do with my upbringing. My Jewish mother, a gifted illustrator, taught me to paint when I was four. My Puerto Rican father, a professor of political economy, introduced me to Marxism when I was six. I grew into an incorrigible artist with a commitment to leftist politics. In 2011, when the anticapitalist Occupy Wall Street protests broke out near my Manhattan apartment, I hurried downstairs to draw them. This would be my gateway to journalism. For the next decade, I travelled around the world covering demonstrations, war zones, and refugee camps. I watched the Arab Spring, and other idealistic mass movements like it, buckle under state violence, and I saw how the mass arrival of refugees was seized by the international far right to catapult itself to power.

All of this drew me toward the party that my great grandfather referenced in that evocative watercolor. In my free time, I began to read about the Bund. Despite vast differences in the worlds that we inhabited, Bundists seemed to me like kin. Like them, I knew the floor of a police cell, the boredom of a leftist meeting, the electric charge of passing a pamphlet to a stranger, the high of believing, rightly or wrongly, that you are about to change the world. In 2018, I wrote an article about the Bund for The New York Review of Books. It remains the most popular piece I have ever done. Afterwards, hundreds of young Jews sent me messages to say the essay healed a wound within them. They had never known their ancestors had fought back. I also received notes from the elderly descendants of Bundist leaders, each bearing anecdotes more precious than rubies. These convinced me that Bund’s story was too big for any article. I needed to write a book.

For the next six years, I lost myself in research. In order to read the words of Bundist activists, I studied Yiddish, the once nearly extinct language of the eastern-European Jewish working class that the Bund had championed, even though its Germanic syntax tortured me, and its vagabond vocabulary, garbed in Hebrew letters, laid constant traps for my tongue. This allowed me to dive into dusty archives, decipher forgotten pamphlets and commune, unmediated, with the Bund’s rebel dead. But I didn’t content myself with text. Revolutionary life is far richer than the words in a propaganda pamphlet. To discover the sensual reality of the Bund’s world, I travelled to the former Pale of Settlement. I laid daffodils on the graves of ghetto fighters and took night trains through a Ukraine battered by the Russian invasion. In a Los Angeles parking lot, I listened to an octogenarian Yiddish scholar sing me partisan hymns, and I translated Bundist literature while stuck at Israeli army checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.

As the poet Irena Klepfisz wrote, “history stops for no one,” least of all a writer. Over the course of my making this book, millions died in a global pandemic. Far-right parties rose in Europe. Israel embarked upon a genocide in Gaza. The weakness and hypocrisies of the Democratic party paved the way for the sadistic revanchism of a second Trump term. Horrors multiply. In the America of today, just as in the Bund’s interwar Poland, state security men lock immigrants in concentration camps and kidnap dissidents for the crime of speech. As I wrote this book in the New York Public Library, chants for Palestine resounded outside the windows. Often, I went down to join the protesters.

The more I dug into the Bundist past, the more I realized it was not past at all. It was, rather, a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present. Despite war, state collapse, and genocidal repression, the Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions the ballot boxes. They built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today. The Bund was a Jewish group, but their history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity. In the story of the Bund—across decades and geographies, ages and faiths—I found the story of our own time, a blueprint for survival, a cautionary tale of death, and a philosophy that might yet save us.