# Molly Crabapple, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund" (Random House, 2026)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-jewish-studies-313327/molly-crabapple-here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund-random-house-2026
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-jewish-studies-313327/molly-crabapple-here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund-random-house-2026.md
Podcast: [New Books in Jewish Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-jewish-studies-313327)
Published: 2026-07-05T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2240149011.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2240149011.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3545

## Resource

Molly Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). 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? Highlights include: Crabapple’s personal connection to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort; How the Bund built a vibrant youth counterculture amid harsh anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe; The significance of “Hereness” to the Bund’s politics and how it distinguished the group from Zionist groups advocating the colonization of Palestine; A discussion of “theory-pilled nerds” and how Crabapple’s activism and journalism since Occupy Wall Street shaped her insights into the inner life of the Bund; The future of anti-Zionism in the context of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine. Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Awa…

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