Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country puts the Jewish Labor Bund back at the center of a fight over Jewish politics that did not begin on social media and will not be settled there. Pluralistic describes the book as a major history of a socialist, internationalist movement that once shaped Jewish political identity across Eastern Europe and the diaspora.
The Bund, according to Pluralistic’s account of Crabapple’s book, counted hundreds of thousands of members in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its base included the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire confined many Jews, and Jewish communities abroad, including New York City. The organization took part in the Russian Revolution, resisted European fascism and operated in underground antifascist guerrilla networks in Nazi-occupied territory.
Pluralistic says the Bund has largely disappeared from popular memory despite that reach. The review frames Crabapple’s project as a recovery job: a history of Jews who argued that safety and liberation should be won where they lived, alongside other workers, rather than through a separate Jewish nation-state.
A rival answer to Zionism
The Bund’s slogan, translated as “Here, where we live, is our country,” gives Crabapple’s book its title. Pluralistic contrasts that position with Zionism, saying both movements emerged in response to antisemitic violence against Jews in Tsarist Russia. In the review’s telling, Bundists pursued universal liberation and solidarity with oppressed people, while Zionist leaders pursued a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Pluralistic attributes to Crabapple the argument that Bundist politics anticipated what is now called intersectional analysis. The review says Bundist newspapers, including underground papers in the Warsaw Ghetto, followed the struggles of Black workers in the Jim Crow South, while Black radical publications reported on antisemitic violence in Europe. It also says the Bund underground sent telegrams of support to Gandhi from Nazi-occupied Poland.
The review is explicitly political about the present. Pluralistic connects Crabapple’s history to Jewish opposition to Israel’s actions after the Hamas-led massacre of October 7, 2023, and describes Israel’s response as genocide and extraterritorial aggression. Those are Pluralistic’s characterizations, not neutral institutional findings cited in the piece.
Research, family history and reviews
Pluralistic says Crabapple learned to read and speak Yiddish to work with primary sources and traveled to sites tied to Jewish persecution and resistance. The review also notes that Crabapple’s great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, was a Bundist who left the Pale of Settlement for New York City. A Rothbort painting, “Itka, the Bundist,” is described as part of what drew Crabapple into the subject.
The book also includes Crabapple’s own monochrome ink-wash art, according to Pluralistic, which presents the images as part of the book’s argument about culture inside radical movements: sport, song, picnics and art, not only meetings and street protests.
Other reviewers cited by Pluralistic place the Bund in similar terms. In the New York Review of Books, historian Adam Hochschild discusses how the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act shut out many would-be immigrants for decades, including Jews seeking to leave Europe before and during the rise of Nazism. In The New York Times, editor Max Strasser describes the Bund as a movement combining party politics, mutual aid and social life, with newspapers, soup kitchens, summer camps and athletes in socialist competitions.
Pluralistic’s central claim is that the Bund lost, but did not fail. The review argues that Nazis and Stalinists destroyed much of the movement, and that Zionist politics helped erase it from Jewish memory. Crabapple’s book, as presented by Pluralistic, is meant to restore that missing branch of history to current arguments about nationalism, solidarity and Jewish safety.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.