Kindle$34.99
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund Hardcover – 7 April 2026
by Molly Crabapple (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars (33)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund--a revolutionary movement from a vanished world--and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.
"Molly Crabapple beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice."--Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelganger
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 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.
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From other countries
Ross Ashley
5.0 out of 5 stars History is complicated.
Reviewed in Canada on 1 May 2026
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The men and women who built the Bund are not dead and gone and irrelevant to the future of humanity ... they set an example for oppressed people everywhere.
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Victor Gilinsky
5.0 out of 5 stars A timely book on the remarkable pre-WWII Jewish labor movement in Poland
Reviewed in the United States on 17 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
A terrific and very timely history of what was the majority Jewish party in pre-WWII Poland, a democratic socialist party of high ideals and high aspirations for Yiddish-speaking, working Jews, but importantly also for everyone else. It fought street battles when that was necessary but its emphasis was on improving the lot of Jewish workers and its cultural programs educated a generation of wonderful people. It was both against Communism because it was dictatorial, and against Zionism because it planned to wrest a country away from its inhabitants. The last commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a young member of the Bund. In the end history was brutal and the Bund was extinguished by the Nazis while the Zionist community in Palestine was saved by the British defeat of Rommel at El Alamein and so became the major Jewish center outside the United States. But the recent Israeli wars have cast a dark shadow on the morality and ethics of that exclusionist community, which has departed so far from traditional Jewish values of truth, justice, peace, and empathy. Molly Crabapple's beautifully written book shows there is another secular Jewish way consistent with those values, one that values the community of all people.
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goldie
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Written Book
Reviewed in the United States on 19 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I knew little about the Jewish Labor Bund, so this book by Molly Crabapple was a revelation. Why was this important history of Russia/Poland's Jews, from the late 1800’s to after the Holocaust kept hidden? Why was there an ideological battle between Zionists and Bundists? And what can we learn from the Bund today? Was it truly a failure,or an alternative to Zionism?
This is a beautiful and deeply personal and well researched book. It is part family history, part historical non fiction and part memoir. While the Bund’s organizations did not survive in their original form, I found their brave struggles for what was universally right and fair, both inspiring and prescient.
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Talia
2.0 out of 5 stars Great book printed on terrible paper
Reviewed in Germany on 12 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Really disappointed with the subpar paper quality. This beautifully written book is printed on thin, fibrous, rough paper that looks like it's going to yellow in a year. If you've ever opened a book from a 1970 socialist East Germany publisher - thats what this one feels like. I feel bad for Molly Crabapple.
If you're a book lover, save yourself the disappointment and get the epub version.
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Finn Miller
5.0 out of 5 stars Molly Crabapple's beautiful history lesson...
Reviewed in the United States on 9 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
A phenomenal and beautifully written window revealing an intimate history of the European Jewish Labor Bund, a movement guided by justice and compassion, a movement which contemporary political forces have tried to downplay, ignore, or at worst, erase. In a world where anyone who criticises the Israeli state is labelled "anti-Semitic", here we have a wondrous history not only of a progressive movement from the past, but of an inspiration to action in these troubled times. Highly recommended for all lovers of history too often buried. All props to artist/author Molly Crabapple for researching both the darkness and the light...
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Lauren Lupa
3.0 out of 5 stars Ambivalent
Reviewed in the United States on 25 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
`Fascinating story but writing is very casual and interspersed with contemporary swear words which I cannot include here in order to get this printed. It doesn't sit well with me to read a book like this and have language one would expect in a conversation, not in a book. At least find the Yiddish word for these terms since there are so many good ones in Yiddish. And she turned "pogrom" into a verb! Come on!!!! The history is very detailed which is fascinating, on the one hand, but then impossible to remember all the details, on the other. Glad she wrote it but I'm mixed about the writing which is so important.
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Geoffrey
4.0 out of 5 stars A Rorschach test of how Jews feel now
Reviewed in the United States on 28 April 2026
Verified Purchase
Other reviewers most often use the word "beautiful" to describe this history. I can't help but feel that the reaction to this book is in large part A Rorschach test on how we're feeling about the state of global Jewish life today. Many Jews seemingly want a viable alternative to Zionism and reactions are mostly driven by that, rather than the actual content of the book.
It is very well written. It is romantic in its view of the past, and invokes the elegance and dignity of Jews exiled from their various countries because of their deeply held values. One can just feel heroic Bundists debating philosophy in dimly lit West Bank lofts in Paris and coffee shops in Geneva.
But at the heart of this history is the futility of the Bund and it's aspiration for Jews to be able stand up for themselves by aligning with largely non-existent and imagined gentile allies on the left. Radical socialism/Communism was not to be their (or anybody's) salvation. Doubly damned for being leftists AND Jews, we see again and again that Jews stood up for themselves and yet they suffered just like their fellow Jews who did not stand up for themselves. They vilified pre-state Zionists and those who abandoned their European homes for a better life in America, but in the end it was precisely those Jews who survived and thrived. The Bund, by comparison, were betrayed and murdered by non-Jews on all sides, left, right, and center. The author ruefully makes that very point about a quarter of the way into the history.
I'm afraid those of my fellow Jews who are looking for a viable alternative to a Jewish state as the best means to preserve Jewish life and culture are deluding themselves if they think they have found it in the pages of this tragic - but beautiful-- history.
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ebs
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling Readable Must Read
Reviewed in the United States on 13 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Molly Crabapple weaves meticulously researched primary sources, (having learned Yiddish to do so!) reportage, memoir, interviews, family history, personal experience and pithy personal insight into a gorgeous story cloth. The story of the Jewish Bund, its ideals and tribulations seems prescient for this moment when many communities grapple with the polarities of ethno-nationalism vs inter-group solidarity and Jewish communities in particular struggle to disentangle their identities from the depredations of the “Jewish State” which
suppressed Jewish identities other than those centered uncritically on itself.
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D. Kaye
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, outstandingly researched history of the Jewish Bund
Reviewed in the United States on 13 April 2026
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
I knew very little about this topic even though the father's side of my family, Russian Jews who immigrated to the US in the early 1900's, was extremely labor oriented. After reading this book I would like to imagine they were Bundists. I would be proud to have come from such amazing, courageous people. All thanks to Ms. Crabapple's inspiring work.
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AJ
5.0 out of 5 stars Attention: a Master Piece!
Reviewed in the United States on 28 April 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I am profoundly moved and grateful for this incredible journalistic and historical work -of a depth and sophistication rarely seen these days. A real jewel.
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