Journalist and artist Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund is a fantastic read about the continuing century-long struggle of a labor, social, and religious movement all wrapped into one. The research for the book took years—starting with the notes, diaries, and paintings of her great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbort, who was an artist and part of the movement.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World, 480 pages
Publication date: April 7, 2026
This isn’t the story of a “great man” like so many other written histories, but rather a remembrance of a struggle that is alive with many fascinating characters. Artists, writers, doctors—all regular folks—were turned into activists as they saw the world around them. Like Howard Zinn’s and Kim Kelly’s books, this is a people’s history of a movement. As one activist falls away due to jail, sickness, or death, another picks up the metaphorical flag to carry on the fight. This is how movements survive.
Crabapple explains that the Bund was a defiantly Jewish, socialist, and revolutionary party born in 1897 in Tsarist Russia that rejected the idea of forming an ethnostate in Palestine in favor of fighting for freedom and dignity in their homes of a thousand years in Eastern Europe.
I spoke with Crabapple in late December 2025 and asked her about the ideas in the book.
Artwork by Molly Crabapple
Vilna Street
Q: You write that the Bund was anti-Zionist before Israel was created. Can you explain that history?
Molly Crabapple: I think a lot of the psychosis [of Zionism] comes from nineteenth-century European ethnonationalism and the idea that a state should be for one ethnic group with one religion and one language—Serbia for the Serbs, Poland for the Poles—and this has never existed anywhere in the world. People have always been mixed. People have always been cosmopolitan. Areas have always been diverse. And any time you try to draw a border around something and say, this is the land for such and such group, and not for such and such group, it inevitably leads to ethnic cleansing, whether it’s in Palestine, in India with partition, or in the postwar Eastern European states, where Ukrainians and Poles mutually ethnically cleansed each other.
For mixed cities, this very European idea of the ethnostate is responsible for so much idiotic bloodshed all over the world. And Zionism is the absolute child of that idea. It absolutely comes from the fact that Jews, along with other diaspora groups like Roma, were seen as outside of the body politic of the healthy European ethnostate, which should just be Serbian and Orthodox, or Polish and Catholic, or Greek and Orthodox, or whatever.
Zionists felt we can solve this not by rejecting the disgusting ideology of ethnonationalism, but by regularizing ourselves, by making an ethnostate of our own. And because Jews are a diasporic people, the only way to create that ethnostate was to set up a settler colony somewhere else. That ended up being in Palestine.
For myself, I think I am very much a product of being born in New York City. If I had to say I had one identity that goes above all else, it’s that I’m a New Yorker. That’s where I’m from. And New York is the antithesis of all ideas of purity, all ideas of the ethnostate.
One World
Q: How did the struggle against the genocide in Palestine influence your writing of this book?
Crabapple: Over the last two and a half years, which were the years of my most intensive work on the book, I got the Pullman Fellowship, and I worked at the New York Public Library ten hours a day writing it. Those were also the years of the Israeli genocide against Gaza.
I was writing this book while anti-genocide protesters were chanting outside the windows at the library, and I would go down and join them. So the genocide against Palestinians, and the profound courage and intellectual clarity of Palestinian writers who were my friends, was something that is interwoven with the book.
Q: It’s incredible that you were able to find so many primary documents for a book about a relatively untold story.
Crabapple: There was this huge thrill for me while reading these books, and when I was going to the archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where they have the archives for the Bund’s Foreign Committee and for the Bund itself. These papers were smuggled out of countries at the risk of death. These papers were buried in metal crates that were hidden in the walls of convents. The risk that people took to preserve these papers is almost incomprehensible. And so there’s an electricity, there’s a magic to reading them.
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Now Crabapple has shared that history, combined with sixteen original drawings in this new work.
Editor’s note: The original version of this article in the magazine misidentified the Cullman Center Fellowship as “Pullman Fellowship.” It has been corrected here.