Early in Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple’s history of the Jewish Labor Bund—a staunchly anti-Zionist, socialist movement founded by Eastern European Jews in 1897—she describes in harrowing detail the waves of anti-Semitic pogroms that tore through the Pale of Settlement. During a brutal convulsion of violence in January 1905 in Odessa in which pogromists murdered hundreds of Jews, Bundists reported to comrades abroad that “pogroms exist only where the government wants them.” Drawing an apt comparison to the racialized terror of police-backed lynchings in the American South, Crabapple writes that Bundists, and the Jewish community at large, faced insurmountable odds precisely because “both police and soldiers helped their attackers.” Today, in the name of Zionism, the descendants of those ravaged by pogroms and genocide subject Palestinians to the same crimes.
According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli settlers have displaced 1,700 Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank since January of this year—a figure that exceeded in three months the entire total from 2025. What is obscured by the bloodless language of this UN report is the horror, in all its visceral particularity, of such attacks. Far-right Israeli settlers—often backed and even armed by the Israeli state—have beaten, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, leaving burnt homes, cars, and agricultural land in their wake. Crabapple’s archival reconstruction of the debates animating the Bund’s political world reveals the ethnonationalist through line linking European antisemitism and Zionism from the late 19th century to the present.
Remarkably, she shows that Bundists themselves foresaw the inevitable inversion of victim and perpetrator demanded by Zionist ideology. In 1938, Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote, “Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism…. The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and to make the Arabs second class-citizens.” In the Bund’s political project—its emphasis on the practicalities of mutual aid, labor organizing, and armed self-defense; its unwavering rejection of all ethnonationalism, including Zionism; and its steadfast belief in intergroup solidarity—Crabapple identifies “a guide for our moment.”
The Bund’s revolutionaries, poets, and militants fought and died not just in the name of an emancipated socialist horizon. Rather, they forged a capacious form of belonging, at home in diaspora and exile, reliant not on blood and soil but a shared struggle for freedom and dignity wherever they found themselves. They called their philosophy do’ikayt, or “here-ness.” We would do well to listen.
The Nation spoke with Crabapple about socialist internationalism, Yiddish cultural production, and the tedium of leftist infighting. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ishan Desai-Geller: Your book is subtitled “The Story,” not “The History,” “of the Jewish Bund.” In the book’s introduction, you write of the Bund not as an ossified historical artifact but as a “guide for our moment, in all its horror and possibility.” What was the Bund?
Molly Crabapple: The Bund was a secular, socialist, defiantly Jewish, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist revolutionary party that was born in 1897 in Tsarist Russia. Tsarist Russia during those years, where Jews were subject to specific racialized laws, was probably the most miserable place to be a Jew.
Jewish workers were living under dual oppression: They were oppressed as subjects of the tsar as workers, and also as Jews. The Bund was founded by young Jewish Marxists who wanted to overthrow the tsar and establish democratic socialism, but also to liberate their own people specifically.
It was a movement that educated shtetls, created armed brigades to fight pogromists, and fought on the barricades of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. After the Bolsheviks booted them out of Russia after the October Revolution, the Bund reconstituted in independent Poland.
There it became an organization that reminds me most of the Black Panther Party. It was an organization of Marxists, by and for an oppressed and racialized group that built these vast networks of communal care—soup kitchens, the Medem Sanatorium for slum kids, youth movements, women’s movements, and popular sports clubs. But it was also devoted to the uplift of Jewish culture, which was very much a subaltern culture.
The Bund threw itself into the promotion of Yiddish literature. It had theater troupes, publishing houses, and newspapers that introduced the Jewish working class of Warsaw to international socialism. Also like the Panthers, it was a group committed to armed self-defense.
Because of its commitment to communal self-defense, and its construction of these cultural and mutual aid networks, it became the most popular Jewish party in Poland by 1939. In September of that year, the Nazis invaded and the Bund resisted from the first days to the last. They defended their city during the siege of Warsaw and created an underground. Eventually, Bundist youth helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, and fought as partisans after the destruction of the ghetto.
IDG: How might the Bund’s example “illuminate the tumultuous present,” as you put it?
MC: First, Bundists were valiant. They lived in a brutal time with so much betrayal and racism. They fought against that from a position of profound ethics and a belief in human dignity, but also with toughness and courage. Toughness and courage is what we need as we’re facing fascism in America.
On a more philosophical note, while the Bund celebrated Jews as a people, they were opposed to ethnonationalism, whether Jewish, Russian, or Polish. They were opposed in their very deepest core to the idea that discrete peoples need discrete bits of land with an ethnically homogenous state where everyone speaks the same language, has the same culture, and worships the same God. They thought: This is bullshit. It’s a recipe for ethnic cleansing and endless bloodshed. Every time a group draws a border to create a homeland, there’s always a minority that ends up with the boot on its face. That’s a lesson we need to relearn. There is only one Earth.
IDG: In a dialectical fashion befitting a group of revolutionary socialists, the Bund’s worldview negotiated two ostensibly irreducible principles. They were fiercely committed to their culture of secular, working-class Jewishness—elevating Yiddish to a revered literary language and rejecting European demands for assimilation—but, even when it cost them dearly, were unwaveringly internationalist and coalitional in their commitment to solidarity across difference. The synthesis of these principles formed the backbone of their ideology: Here-ness, or do’ikayt in Yiddish, which you describe as a “diasporic nationalism.” What does here-ness mean?
MC: It begins with an acknowledgement that Jews had lived in Eastern Europe for a thousand years and they had built homes, communities, and a language: Yiddish. They had a right to live in freedom and dignity in Eastern Europe. Even if the Russian Empire, and interwar Poland, said they were harmful aliens who ought to be deported to Palestine, they wanted to stay in their homes. Not just stay, but flourish and thrive in their homes. That’s what “here-ness” was. It was the right to stay in your home, even if your existence ran contrary to the ideals of an ethnostate. In a way it echoes the Palestinian concept of sumud.
IDG: How did their philosophy of here-ness inform the Bund’s staunchly anti-Zionist relation to Palestine?
MC: Even before the Bund existed, the people who would create the Bund were arguing with Zionists at local synagogues. There were a few reasons that the Bund hated Zionism in the years before Balfour. First, they thought it was absolutely ridiculous: You’re going to take 9 million people and have them move to collective farms in the Levant on land purchased from the sultan? What an idea!
They also saw this as a harmful idea because Jewish bosses were using it to distract from the terrible wages they paid Jewish workers by saying, “Maybe I’m not paying you a living wage, but I endowed a yeshiva in Palestine.”
Secondly, they felt that it was collaboration with the same anti-Semites that wanted to drive Jews from their homes. When [ultranationalist, anti-Semitic] groups like the Black Hundreds in Tsarist Russia and the National Democrats in Poland were saying Jews should be deported to Palestine, the Zionists agreed. Thirdly, after the Balfour Declaration, when Zionism got the backing of the British Empire for its settler-colonial project, the Bund rejected it on anti-imperialist grounds.
The Bund repeatedly refused to collaborate with Zionists—even in the earlier days of the Warsaw Ghetto—because of a profound ideological gulf. They called Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionist group, Betar, “little Jewish fascists.”
IDG: If the Bund’s revolutionary horizon—a new world devoid of racial hatred, capitalist exploitation, and the scourge of ethnonationalism—seemed grand and faraway, it never precluded practical action in the here and now, whether through mutual aid, labor organizing, or armed anti-fascist defense squads. Could you describe the political institutions and cultural programs Bundists built and how such efforts fit into their broader project?
MC: I’ll focus on Poland in the interwar period because that’s when they had the most room to build. They built a counterculture. It’s the only way to describe it.
They built institutions for every stage and aspect of life: a movement for little kids, a Boy Scout type movement, a youth movement, summer camps, a women’s movement that fought for childcare and birth control. They had schools, including night schools, for teenage Jewish workers who worked 12 hours a day.
They had clubhouses and all these labor unions. They had newspapers, publishing houses, and an amazing sports club. There are really cool pictures of Bundist guys running foot races in their slums and sexy girls in their little booty shorts doing gymnastics together.
Many people in these communities were hungry and living in highly polluted neighborhoods. The Bund’s sports club taught kids how to ice skate and to swim. It took them to the countryside. Jews in the cities often had no access to the countryside, or were scared they’d be beaten up there. But the Bund believed that all of the beauty of the Polish countryside—its mountains and rivers—belonged to Jews as well. So they organized hikes, summer retreats, and camps.
They also had deep connections with socialist movements around the world. The Bund sent athletes to the Worker’s Olympiad, the socialist alternative to the Olympics, in 1930s Red Vienna. They participated in the Labor and Socialist International. They sent fighters to Spain to help defend the republic during the civil war.
They built an entire world. This is a very practical part of their “here-ness.” It’s not just that we don’t want to go to the “there” of Palestine. It’s also that we’re not going to wait to live until the revolution happens.
Especially for these Polish Bundists, many of whom had participated in the Russian Revolution, and seen it turn against them. There was a real commitment both to fighting for a socialist, liberated Europe and world in a larger sense but also to fighting for dignity and beauty on a practical, everyday level in their streets, their neighborhoods, and their daily lives.
IDG: Whether in Pale of Settlement shtetls or the Warsaw Ghetto, the Bund unfailingly circulated their ideas and calls to action through clandestine newspapers. Could you talk about the Bund’s use of the written word to build political consciousness?
MC: For them, the printing press was the party. Before anything else, they had printing presses or hectographs—a more primitive method of reproduction that was good for being sneaky because it doesn’t make noise. The handbill, the newspaper, the pamphlet: These were everything to them and were their means of communication. In the Russian Empire, their pamphlets were illegal; the penalty for distributing them was imprisonment. Sophia Dubnova, one of the heroines of the book, would smuggle pamphlets taped to her body, so that they resembled a pregnant belly.
Their pamphlets were multilingual. Their primary language was Yiddish because that was the language of the Jewish working class. But, they always wrote in Russian or Polish—the vernacular of wherever they were. It was never: Yiddish or death. It was more that Yiddish is ours and deserves dignity.
The Bund had newspapers in every town it was active in, too. Volkovysk, my great-grandfather’s hometown, had its own newspaper: the Volkovsyk Awakener. These papers were like doorways. They reported on local and national news, but they were also profoundly internationalist. They reported on the Scottsboro Boys, lynchings in America, Palestine, and attacks on Chinese socialists in China. They also translated contemporary and avant-garde literature into Yiddish.
They opened up the entire world to the impoverished Jewish working class of Poland. To me, that’s so beautiful. Even when the newspapers were resurrected as illegal underground broadsheets in the ghetto, in addition to reporting on the war and the Nazis, they wrote about Tagore and Freud. They believed that art, poetry, literature, and intellectualism were the birthright of the masses. They did not think of them as luxuries, but as vital as bread.
IDG: Your point of entry into the story of the Bund is your great-grandfather, the artist and Bundist Sam Rothbort. I was struck that, even under conditions of extreme deprivation and genocidal violence, art was essential to Bundist life. How did artistic production fit into the Bund’s socialism?
MC: It was there from the very start. When they were organizing little shtetls in the Tsarist Empire, they would use lending libraries as tools, offering not just Marx but also contemporary Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, or translations of Jules Verne. They were deeply embedded in the Yiddish literary world. The great playwright S. An-sky wrote their anthems.
In Poland, they established publishing houses and theaters. At the Medem Sanatorium for tubercular slum kids, art was an essential part of these everyday life. Looking through the sanitorium’s archival books, you see the plays, handmade costumes, decorations, and newspapers that these kids made.
The Bund truly believed that creativity was a human birthright. That was reflected in how they did education. They just believed in beauty.
Bernard Goldstein was the head of the Warsaw self-defense militia. He had no education; he couldn’t speak even one language right. His job was to break the kneecaps of nationalists and had killed some people. But in his free time, he liked to go to the Yiddish theaters and hang out at the Yiddish Writers Club. In his memoir, Goldstein recounts visiting his best friend, the Bundist writer Shlomo Mendelsohn, after he’d just been in a street brawl. He asks, “Why can’t I be like you? Why do I have to point guns at people? Why do I have to have this brutish and violent life? I wish that I could sit at a desk and write beautiful words like you do.”
IDG: You’ve remarked, “This book is also about the ludicrousness of the left. It is not a pious book.” What did you mean by that?
MC: I refuse to consider anyone, whether Lenin, Trotsky, or a Warsaw Ghetto fighter, as God. They’re not gods; they’re humans with all the flaws, idiocies, and pettiness of humans.
There’s a lot of pathological shit that we do on the left, and some of it plays out during the worst circumstances. In the Warsaw Ghetto, every single Jewish leftist group published illegal newspapers at the risk of death to denounce other Jewish leftist groups for having the wrong views. You’d think surely there will be a situation that’s so serious that people will stop doing this.
In her memoir, Zivia Lubetkin, the only woman to lead the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, describes hiding in a bunker as the Nazis bomb the ghetto. What were they doing in the bunkers? They’re arguing about Yiddish versus Hebrew.
IDG: One of the most chilling passages in the book details a path not taken. On the eve of Hitler’s ascension to Chancellor in January 1933, German social democratic parties decided “that since Hitler had been appointed fair and square, they’d suck it up and wait till the next election, in the name of democracy.” The resonance with our own blood and soil conjuncture is unmissable. How might the Bund’s example lead us beyond liberal capitulation to the far right and toward the culture of direct action, resistance, and intergroup solidarity we’ve seen, most recently, in the movements for Palestinian liberation and against ICE?
MC: The German Social Democrats deserve so much of the blame for their inaction and foolishness. We also need to lay some blame on the German Communists who—utterly subservient to every shimmy of Soviet foreign policy—took the Comintern’s brilliant position that the real fascists were not actual fascists like Mussolini, but rather social democratic parties who they called “social fascists.” You have two big parties that are colluding in this nightmare, which is also like today.
It would be wrong to say that the German Social Democrats are like our own Democratic Party because the political compass is different. But, they occupied that role in their inaction, their refusal to use the tool of the general strike, and by sucking it up until the next election. They insisted on their faith in the German people. After Hitler came to power, a German Social Democrat famously said, “Well, Berlin is not Rome.” This reminds me so much of “It’s America, we would never.”
At a meeting of the Labor and Socialist International around 1931, Henryk Erlich, the leader of the Bund, was very upset at what he saw as the mistakes of the German Social Democratic Party. He was especially upset that they were making deals with German industrialists and aristocrats. If the Social Democrats gave up their independence and militancy and didn’t provide a better life for workers, the workers would choose the fascists. The head of the German Social Democratic Party, Otto Wels, looked at him and burst out laughing. “Who the fuck are you to tell us about the German Social Democrats? We got everything under control.”
IDG: What can we take away from that story?
MC: The first thing is about organizing across difference and speaking to people where they are. One of the worst tendencies of the left—both annoyingly minor and devastating to our effectiveness—is that we sometimes talk like we’re HR professionals. Things are too grave and deadly right now to be using vocabulary that alienates people.
The Bundists were working-class people, and they spoke like the working class. They created a subculture that was profoundly desirable,which people wanted to be part of. They were also coalitional. They worked with the Polish Socialist Party. They knew that if you are a minority, you have to fight alongside members of the majority. There’s just no other way.
And unlike many other leftist groups, the Bund didn’t have a lot of splits. I think this was because they had a huge amount of love and loyalty to each other.
IDG: Despite the Bund’s ardent secularism, belief appears as a potent theme throughout their story and your book, particularly the uncertain terrain between quixotic delusion and righteous, even prophetic, political conviction. How has this project impacted your thinking about belief and conviction—and their corollary, hope—in “our age of blood-soaked mass displacement”? What does it mean to feel hopeful, or to believe, in the Bund’s time and in ours?
MC: These people were Marxists, and we think of Marxism as profoundly atheistic. But it’s also a religion in its own right. It has a belief in a preordained history and a preordained better tomorrow. The Bundists truly believed that they were aligned with history and were participants in a historical process that was going to bring about a better world.
When I read these party texts in which Bundists facing execution gave their last testimony, they always said, “I die knowing that I am a socialist, and I die knowing that I was right.” They had complete conviction that they were right.
Their core of morality, their belief in human dignity and human solidarity is correct. That solidarity between people—no matter how hard it is, how easily betrayed, how fraught, how challenged by the forces of tribalism—is the only thing that can save us. That solidarity is what was on display in the streets of Minneapolis [earlier this year]. Solidarity across difference. That to me was the core of their faith, the core of their belief. It is what I hold on to. Solidarity between humans.
