Overview

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.

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9780593229453

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Reviews

“Crabapple is a time traveler, a necromancer and an unclassifiable genius. She beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is that rarest of books: a gripping, human story of love, idealism, and betrayal—and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary.”—Naomi, Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppleganger “Molly Crabapple not only recounts, with a novelist’s mastery of detail, one of the most extraordinaryrebellions of the human spirit in modern history. She animates, too, elegantly and boldly, a political and spiritual tradition that the zealots of ethnonationalism had managed to suppress for too long. In the long battles ahead for truth and dignity, her book will be an indispensable resource.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of New York Times Notable Book Age of Anger and The World After Gaza

“Molly Crabapple is a time traveler, a necromancer, and an unclassifiable genius. She beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is that rarest of books: a gripping, human story of love, idealism, and betrayal—and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary.”—Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelleganger “Vast in scope, elegiac in prose, Here Where We Live Is Our Country brings to life the profound humanity of those who stood up to the blood-soaked ethnonationalisms that led to so many of the twentieth century’s storied horrors. This book is many things: an ode to the grand legacy of anti-Zionist Jewishness; a profound reflection on whether history has morals; and an essential resource for antifascist history, concepts, and tools. Molly Crabapple, with this great work, adds to her growing legacy as a unique American genius.”—Jason Stanley, New York Times bestselling author of How Fascism Works “Molly Crabapple not only recounts, with a novelist’s mastery of detail, one of the most extraordinary rebellions of the human spirit in modern history. She animates, too, elegantly and boldly, a political and spiritual tradition that the zealots of ethnonationalism had managed to suppress for too long. In the long battles ahead for truth and dignity, her book will be an indispensable resource.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of the New York Times Notable Book Age of Anger and The World After Gaza

“Molly Crabapple is a time traveler, a necromancer, and an unclassifiable genius. She beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is that rarest of books: a gripping, human story of love, idealism, and betrayal—and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary.”—Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelleganger “Vast in scope, elegiac in prose, this book brings to life the profound humanity of those who stood up to the blood-soaked ethno-nationalisms that led to so many of the 20th century’s storied horrors . . . This book is many things: an ode to the grand legacy of anti-Zionist Jewishness; a profound reflection on whether history has morals; and an essential resource for anti-fascist history, concepts and tools. Molly Crabapple, with this great work, adds to her growing legacy as a unique American genius.”—Jason Stanley, New York Times bestselling author of How Fascism Works “Molly Crabapple not only recounts, with a novelist’s mastery of detail, one of the most extraordinary rebellions of the human spirit in modern history. She animates, too, elegantly and boldly, a political and spiritual tradition that the zealots of ethnonationalism had managed to suppress for too long. In the long battles ahead for truth and dignity, her book will be an indispensable resource.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of the New York Times Notable Book Age of Anger and The World After Gaza

Author Information

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award. She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

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