Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

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: The Story of the Jewish Bund 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. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]

ISBN: 9780593229453 | One World

Watch author and artist Molly Crabapple discuss her new book with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! below.

Praise

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. 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’s words are as glorious as her colors, her writing as vivid as her painting. Reading her Here Where We Live Is Our Country today, with Gaza in ruins and the rest of the world seemingly on the road to ruin, is revelatory, a reminder that in even in the most dehumanizing of times a loving humanity might endure, even if only fleetingly. — Greg Grandin, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth

Remarkable for its historical sweep as well as its timeliness, Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a true tour de force. — Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Che Guevara: a revolutionary life