"Here Where We Live Is Our Country”: Molly Crabapple on Resurfacing Jewish History of Anti-Zionism

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]This is democracyow democracynow.org the Warren peace report. I'm Amy Goodman with Narine Sh.

[00:00:07]>> A new study finds a dramatic increase in Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip in the five weeks since it halted its air strikes on Iran. According to the conflict monitoring group at that is armed conflict location and event data, Israel carried out 35% more attacks on Gaza in April than it did in March.

[00:00:27]According to the Gaza's health ministry, 120 Palestinians, including 13 children, have been killed since April 8th. All the attacks came despite a US brokered ceasefire agreement that was supposed to have taken effect in October. This is FISA alami, a displaced Palestinian living in a tent in Gaza City.

[00:00:52]>> The war has not stopped yet. The war has not stopped in order for me to worry that it'll return. The war is ongoing.

[00:00:59]The bombing continues and every day we hear that there are martyrs here and there. There is grave danger everywhere.

[00:01:06]Every moment we are expecting a missile to fall on us on my son or daughter. We are scared.

[00:01:12]>> Israeli forces continue to occupy more than half of Gaza, forcing over 2 million people to crowd into a thinner sliver of land along the coast. More than a million people are living in makeshift tents, most others in damaged structures. On Friday, Palestinians across the occupied territories plan to mark Nekba Day, the day that marks the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes during Israel's founding in 1948.

[00:01:41]Well, today we spend the rest of the hour looking at an oftenforgotten piece of history about Jewish anti-ionist activists in Eastern Europe who opposed calls in the early 20th century to form a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine. We're joined by the award-winning artist and author Molly Crabapple. Her new book is titled Here Where We Live Is Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. The Guardian praised the book, saying, "The relevance of her material for our present moment is impossible to ignore."

[00:02:14]Molly Crabapple is an award-winning artist and author. Thank you, Molly, so much for coming into the studio to talk to us. First of all, congratulations on the spectacular book. If you could just begin by explaining the title of the book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, the Story of the Jewish Bund. I'm so honored to be here and to be talking with you guys about my new book. Here where we live as our country is a slogan from a bundist campaign poster in 1918.

[00:02:44]And I chose it because it encompasses this value that the bondo held the value of dokite here.

[00:02:52]Born in probably the most anti-Semitic place on earth in 1897, the Boon built their philosophy on the defiant insistence that Eastern Europe was their home and they had a right to live in freedom, in dignity and have a beautiful flourishing life there. And they also rejected from the very start calls to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine.

[00:03:16]>> Why?

[00:03:18]the reasons they evolved as Zionism evolved, but there were two major ones.

[00:03:24]The first was that they felt that Zionism was a capitulation to the same bigots that wanted to kick Jews out of Europe at a time when all of these governments were saying that Jews were sworthy oriental foreigners that ought to get the hell out to somewhere else.

[00:03:41]For Bundists, Zionists seem to agree.

[00:03:43]But after the Balfor declaration gave Zionism the backing of the British Empire and the British Empire's bayonets, the Buddhists opposed Zionism for another reason. They thought it was the handmaidaden of imperialism. and Buddhists scrupulously supported on scrupulously reported the brutality that has always marked Zionism, the expropriation of Palestinian land, the brutal evictions of Palestinian farmers and the collaboration handinhand with the British occupation. And Molly, as you have just mentioned that Zarus, Russia was perhaps the least welcoming place uh for the Jews of Eastern Europe and that's the year that the Bund was the year was the location where the Bund was created uh and was that it was the year 1897 uh which is the same year that Theodore Herzel launched the World Zionist organization. So if you could talk about this uh the coincidence of these two uh organizations and also what gave rise to the two in that historical moment and place.

[00:04:54]It is a great irony of history that 1897 the same year as 13 young Marxist troublemakers were gathering in a safe house attic in VNA.

[00:05:07]Theodore Herzel was >> in VNA Lithuania >> in VNA Lithuania. Then part of the Tsarist Empire. That same year, Theodore Herzel was launching uh the Zionist Congress at a ritzy c at a ritzy casino in Switzerland.

[00:05:23]And the two groups hated each other from the start. But let's talk about Herzel. Herzel came from a very different background than the Bundists did. He was not a citizen of the decrepit Tsarist Empire. Instead, he was a citizen of the Hapsburg Empire, which was much more liberal. He came from Vienna and he loved Vienna. All he actually wanted to do was assimilate.

[00:05:46]And in fact, he even joked that maybe Jews should just convert to Christianity.

[00:05:52]But it was covering the Drifus trial in France when an obviously innocent French military officer named Alfred Drifus was banged up on fake charges of spying and then shipped off to Devil's Island. And then there were huge anti-Jewish riots all over France. This experience of covering the Drifus trial as a journalist marked Herzel profoundly and it convinced him that Europe was just racist at its core and that as long as Jews didn't have a state of their own, they would always be at the mercy of European racism.

[00:06:30]and he would spend the next years of his life meeting with every single despot and or autocrat that he could to try to acquire some land in order to create this Jewish state.

[00:06:43]>> Um I went to VNA with my mother and my brother and uh a partisan took us into the woods, a woman partisan and I'm wondering if you can talk about who the Jewish partisans were. It's a story that's not very wellnown how they were connected to the Bund um and what the Bund at the time since they weren't supporting the state of Israel was calling for when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

[00:07:14]The Bund was the most popular Jewish political party in the country. They had swept the Polish elections. They were the majority of Jewish seats in basically every major city in the country. and they were able to keep their underground going um throughout the Nazi occupation. And the underground meant many things. On one hand, it meant partisans, but it also meant saving kids, having underground soup kitchens, smuggling newspapers all over the country. A young bundist named Zman Friedrich actually went undercover as a Polish railway worker and exposed the truth of the Trebinka death camp to the world. Now, who were the partisans? The partisans were young Jews, usually either bundists, left-wing Zionists, or communists, who were able to escape to the woods, get weapons somehow, often from like the black market, occasionally from Red Army detachments, and to fight until the end of the war.

[00:08:15]And it was actually Jewish partisans who worked with the Red Army to liberate VNA from the Nazis.

[00:08:21]>> Well, let's just go to some context. As you point out in the book, this history, the history of the Bund has been almost entirely erased. How did you unearth this history? And speak specifically about your great-grandfather.

[00:08:35]>> Well, I grew up obsessed with my great-grandfather, Sam Rothport. First off, my mom taught me how to paint and Sam taught my mom how to paint. And so, my whole life, I've always viewed the fact that I was an artist as a sort of gift that I had gotten from him through time. But he was also he was a character, right? I grew up with his paintings all around me, his sculptures, photographs of him hanging from a chin-up bar by his ankles into his 80s, eating fire, playing a violin he made out of Venetian blinds. And he had this one body of work that I really loved. It was over 600 watercolors that he did of Vulisque, his hometown in Perus, a hometown he had left in 1904.

[00:09:20]And they were every aspect of life from him praying on Yum Kapoor to him being a bad kid drawing mean character of his rabbi in religious school. And he had one painting that I always loved. And it was a young woman and she had the long skirt and the hair and an updo. And she was standing on a dirt road at twilight and she was throwing a rock through a window and next to her is her boyfriend with more rocks because chivalry is not dead, right? Lady should not be carrying her own rocks. And it was titled it the bundist. And this drawing was so different than how I imagined a young Jewish woman would live in turn of the century Zarist Russia that I thought the key to why it was so different had to be in that word bundist. And that was how I came across the boond through my great-grandfather's drawings.

[00:10:16]And I explored the boond more in 2018 when I wrote an article for the New York Review of Books, which has been the most viral article I've ever written in my life that told the Boon's story from, you know, its birth in the Tsarist Empire through its role in the Russian Revolution, interwar Poland to its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust.

[00:10:39]And after I wrote this article, these amazing older people got in touch with me. People like the pioneering lesbian poetry Klepic, whose father Mikuel was the bomb maker in the ghetto. People like the great union leader Mark Erlick, whose grandfather Henrik Erlick ran the boond in Poland. And when I started hearing these stories from these amazing people about their families, I knew I'm I was not finished with this. this was not going to be just like one article.

[00:11:09]This was going to be my life for quite some time. And so that's how I made the decision that I was going to write this book.

[00:11:16]>> And talk more about going from the Bund and its role in the Warso ghetto uprising, which is so often ignored, um, to the anti-Zionist movement in the United States. I mean, you are telling a story. You're uncovering a story through your own family. That leads right to your, to say the least, marvelous illustrations. You've won two Emmys for um your illustrations and your writing and how your grandfather um and greatgrandfather influenced you both in your politics and your artistry.

[00:11:57]>> Thank you.

[00:11:59]I mean, even though Sam died before I was born, I feel like he's someone who shaped my entire life. Not just the fact that he was a painter, not just the fact that being surrounded by paintings gave me permission to dream of being an artist. It was that Sam was a non-conformist in his bones and he was a leftist. He was someone at a time when intermarriage was kind of taboo, who welcomed my Puerto Rican father. He was someone who believed that everyone was created equal even if he thought that artists were a little bit above and I feel myself shaped by him.

[00:12:39]Now, in terms of the the anti-ionist movement and the boons and the Warsaw Ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt was the work of a group primarily called the Jewish Combat Organization, which was left-wing Zionists, Bundists, and Communists.

[00:12:56]There were other people in the ghetto that fought, but that was the main group. And these were very young people.

[00:13:02]The youngest fighter was 13 years old.

[00:13:04]He was a bundist named Lucak Blondes.

[00:13:07]They had 50 guns from the Polish home army and one machine gun and homemade Molotov cocktails and light bulbs filled with battery acid. And with that they launched the first urban revolt in Nazi occupied Europe. And they held off the Nazis longer than the entire country of France.

[00:13:26]But as we know, courage cannot ultimately compete with airplanes and firebombs. And the Nazis annihilated 90% of Poland's Jews.

[00:13:42]After the war, there were uh pilgrims in Poland. That led to the majority of the Jewish community fleeing to displaced persons camps in occup in American occupied Germany.

[00:13:57]And these Jews spent years applying for visas to Western democracies that refused to accept them.

[00:14:06]Meanwhile, in the camps, Zionist groups quickly seized control of the camp administrations and they used this power, which is again the power to distribute rations, the power to give people jobs and housing to coers people to join the Hagana and eventually to take part in the Nakba and the creation of Israel.

[00:14:28]And despite this intense pressure, despite the unspeakable horrors that Buddhists had went through, they held firm to their belief in internationalist solidarity and their opposition to a Jewish state. And there's a line that I think of from the great Buddhist pedagogue Schlom Mendelson.

[00:14:48]It was in the last article he wrote before his death in 1948 where he said that it was shocking that Jews who had been the primary victims of fascism were now adopting its methods to suppress dissent in the Jewish community. And he wrote it's as if the slaughterer has infected the victim with his germs during the slaughter.

[00:15:09]So Molly, I want to talk about one one of the uh very interesting parts or let's say form of the book is the perspective from which you write. Uh you your work, it seems to me follows in the tradition of people who write a history from below. Uh representing the voices of those who are oppressed, the subalter outsiders. And you've said explicitly that you came to see you were writing not just about the bund but also quote a history of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated. So if you could elaborate on that and then the case you make again and again that the bund was in fact not a failure it was defeated and that's a very different thing.

[00:15:51]The Boom story from 1897 to 1945 is the story of the 20th century in Europe. It is the story of World War I, of the collapse of the old multithnic empires and the creation of new violently nationalist ethnostates. It's the story of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. It's the story of independent Poland and the story of the Holocaust.

[00:16:21]And one of the sort of guiding quotes that I had in my mind when I was writing this book was by Mahmud Darwish.

[00:16:29]It's the quote that I start the book with where he says, let's let's read it.

[00:16:38]Soon we will search on the margins of your history in distant countries for what was once our history.

[00:16:46]That's Mahmud Darwish, 11 stars over Andalucia.

[00:16:50]And this quote was a guiding thing for me because the boon they never took state power, right? They were kicked out of Russia by the Boleviks. They fought a valiant fight and became the most powerful Jewish party in Poland between the wars. But ultimately, you know, Poland was run by nationalists, Polish nationalists. and they were they were murdered during the Holocaust and then the remnants of them were suppressed by the Sovietbacked dictatorship afterwards. And so there aren't the resources for about the boon that there would be about the people who won, right? Like there is not the things that you'd read about George Washington or Vladimir Lennon for that matter. So instead writing about the boond it was a project of searching in the margins of other histories of reading other people's memoirs of going to countries like I went to Ukraine during the Russian the Russian invasion I went to Lithuania I went to Poland and looking at the margins and then also the boond wrote in Yiddish which is the language of the Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. This is not a largely spoken language today. Yiddish never had state power. It never had the resources to have an academy from say, you know, and in order to write about the boond, I had to learn Yiddish. And so much of this process was about going through these archives, looking at pages that were printed with hecttoraph that were so faded and crumbled that I could barely make out those letters. It was like an act of necromancy and an act of reclamation.

[00:18:24]Also, you quote at the beginning of your book, Molly, tradition is not the worship of ashes, it's the preservation of fire. Uh, Gustaf Mer, um, if you can talk about what that means to you and also the researching, writing, traveling for this book in the midst of what Israel was doing in Gaza.

[00:18:52]I use that quote because for me, this book is not just taking some dinosaur bones, right, and putting them in a glass case at a museum. This is the preservation of our leftist past. I mean, the Bunda is a Jewish story, but it is not for Jews alone. This is a history that belongs to all rebels. It belongs to everyone who believes in the necessity of human solidarity.

[00:19:15]And I viewed this book as my contribution towards the preservation of that fire.

[00:19:23]I mean the research I did for this book is a bit lunatic I would say. I think because I don't have a college degree. I came in with a sense of inferiority. I was like I was like I must learn everything. I read every single book I could in English, Spanish, French and then eventually Yiddish as well. I had Polish and Russian research assistants who showed me perspectives like that of the great Polish socialist Ziggman Zeremba, a comrade of the Bundists. I translated endless Yiddish pamphlets, including many pamphlets that have never been digitized before, especially anti-ionist Yiddish literature from the boond. I translated the work of their enemies as well, of boleviks, of Zionists. I traveled to countries where the very urban grid had been erased in the streets that the Boond walked.

[00:20:15]Warsaw was systematically destroyed by the Nazis during the war. The streets that the Boond lived on that they had their battles on largely aren't there.

[00:20:24]But I wanted to see what the sunlight was like and I wanted to see what wild flowers grew there. And I went to the grave of of Patty Kmer who is one of the pioneers of the Boon. Her grave was outside um Vilmius in Ponara Forest and I I played the song that she sang with the women before she was murdered which is Dishua the oath. And I mean how did this feel to write the majority of this during the Israeli genocide of Gaza? I mean I think it it broke me in probably ways that I I I have difficulty expressing. I mean to forensically reconstruct the genocide of the Jews of Warsaw while a country that claims the Holocaust as some sort of sick justification for its crimes does a genocide in Gaza as it segments and liquidates Gaza block by block as Israeli bulldozers and bombs a face Gaza like Nazi bombs a faced Warsaw.

[00:21:26]You know, there were often protests for Palestine downstairs at the library where I worked, and I would go down and join them.

[00:21:34]>> Molly Crab Apple, author of the new best-selling book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, the Story of the Jewish Bund. It became a New York Times bestseller before it was even published.

[00:21:51]That does it for our show. I'll be in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday night. We'll be celebrating WRFG.

[00:22:00]Also showing the film about Democracy Now. It'll be screening. Uh um that screening will take place in Atlanta. Uh on Saturday we'll be in Austin, Texas and we'll also be in Houston, Texas this weekend uh celebrating KPFK as well as Co-op Radio in Austin. You can check our website KPFT in Houston which was blown up by the Ku Klux Clan when it first was founded in 1970. To see the travel plan for this weekend and the showing of Stila story, please go to democracynow.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nurmine Sh.

[00:22:44]Thanks for watching Democracy Now on YouTube. Subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications to make sure you never miss a video. And for more of our audience supported journalism, go to democracynow.org or where you can download our news app, sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to the daily podcast, and so much