Molly Crabapple Awakens the Bund

The artist and journalist Molly Crabapple grew up surrounded by the work of her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, an independent-minded artist who once took his own painting back from the Brooklyn Museum because he didn’t like where they had hung it. He made hundreds of what he called “memory paintings,” depicting his childhood in Volkovysk, the Russian town where he lived before he emigrated to New York City. In them, Molly told me, he shows “himself at religious school, which he hated, just like I hated school, and he was teaching the other little boys how to draw cruel caricatures of the rabbi, and I also drew cruel caricatures of my teachers.” Their kinship transcended continents, and a century. 

Molly was particularly struck by one memory painting, called “Itka the Bundist,” which showed a “young woman on a miserable dirt road at night, throwing a rock through a window while her boyfriend stood next to her, offering more rocks.” This was the spark for Molly’s interest in the Bund, and of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. As she defines it in the introduction: 

Founded in 1897 in the city of Vilna in the Russian Empire, and reaching its height in interwar Poland, the Bund was a sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish. Bundists fought the tsar, battled pogroms, exalted the Yiddish language, and built vast networks of political and cultural institutions out of little more than love and grit. Seeking to liberate Jews from the poverty and violence of interwar Poland, they raised their children on the radical ethos of working-­class solidarity and subaltern pride. Ultimately, these youth helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. Though the Bund was largely obliterated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the group’s opposition to Zionism better explains its absence from current consciousness. Though the Bund celebrated eastern European Jews as a people, they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies. 

Molly’s own “here” is New York City, where she has participated in uprisings and documented them, too, through sketches, paintings, and journalism. In a sense, she has drawn many Itkas — occupying the Financial District in 2011, striking against landlords, protesting police violence. She has reported around the world, covering the wars in Syria and Ukraine, the movement of the squares in Greece, the international refugee crisis, and much more.

Molly is a contributing editor to Lux, where she published a profile of poet Irena Klepfisz, a daughter of Bundists, who appears in the book. (You can also read Molly’s essay about the Bund, “Against Zionism, For Socialism;” a conversation about feminist self-defense and the uprisings in Egypt; and view her illustrations for “Who Goes Fascist?”)

On Monday, please join us for a conversation between Molly and Ibtisam Azem at the Brooklyn Public Library. 

Below, find our conversation about Here Where We Live Is Our Country. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. —Sarah Leonard

SARAH LEONARD Tell me a little about researching this book over the last six years. I know you learned Yiddish in order to work in the archives, which for a lot of people might have been prohibitive. 

MOLLY CRABAPPLE This is what journalists do, right? If a journalist wants to report on the Middle East, for instance, they really ought to learn Arabic. If I want to have conversations with the dead, I have to learn their language, just as I would if I wanted to have conversations with the living. I translated god knows how many books and pamphlets. I also hired research assistants who spoke Russian and Polish. 

Obviously, I did tons of research in the Bund’s archives and the archives of the Jewish Labor Committee over at NYU. Also, I had other things, like an amazing group of Polish socialists that researched the Polish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, and they sent me the Comintern archives of certain Bundists who fought in Spain. Also, because I am a member of a socialist movement, I know our bullshit, I know our self-glorification, so I really fact-checked things. And I really tried to read stuff that the Bund’s enemies wrote, stuff by Bolsheviks, ex-Bundists who joined the Communist Party, the Zionist press, Polish fascists. 

Where I could, I looked at photos and videos. As an artist I felt like it was really important to get the visual texture of things. I went to Poland twice. I went to Latvia, to Lithuania, and to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. It’s a very disconcerting thing if you’re Jewish and you’re trying to do your little heritage tourism, because the Nazis set up ghettos, mostly, in the Jewish neighborhoods of a city, so death is inextricable from that. 

I went to Ponar Forest, which is the forest where all of the Jews of Vilna were shot by their Lithuanian brothers. One of the women I wrote about, Pati Kremer, was shot in a pit there and before she died, according to witnesses, she told the other women who were with her, let’s sing the Bund’s anthem, so death won’t be so terrible.

SL In the book, you insist that we relate our own experiences to that of the Bundists, that we not allow the past to seem like it couldn’t have happened to us. You imaginatively lead us through a rioting slum in the Pale of Settlement, and you compare these uprisings to those that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The book is very committed to demystifying the past in that way. 

MC I’m trying to do necromancy, and I have a few things that guided me. The first thing is that if you were in 1933 in Germany, you didn’t know the Holocaust was going to happen. If you were in 1913 in Russia, you didn’t know the revolution was gonna happen. So I really tried to avoid looking backwards, and see things from their perspective. And then I also came at it with the sense that people have bodies, right? People get tired, they have sex, they are hungry, it sucks to wait outside of prison in the freezing cold with snow falling on your head and you’re also anxious for your husband who’s inside. We have not evolved in the course of 80 years into a different species. And then the third thing is I sometimes feel like the way that people write about the past — especially the recent past, because again, I’m writing about events in living memory — they write about these people like they’re the Triceratops roaming the plain, and that not as if they’re our literal grandparents.

The left is very marked by the culture that made the Russian Revolution. The whole reason that we have little communist grouplets now that are trying to sell newspapers is because there was once a communist grouplet that was called the Bolsheviks that had a newspaper that was called Iskra, and they sold it. And then a revolution happened. 

This is part of our shared collective history. I come from the left, my father is a Marxist, I learned about Marxism when I was six. And I have no desire to be pious about it. I’m not pretending it’s the sacred religion where everyone who was a major revolutionary was Holy Daddy Saint. This was done by people, and it also was done by people who were working in a lineage that I’m not unfamiliar with. I have this one part where I talk about how hellish socialist meetings are.

SL Yes, I appreciated that part.

MC It’s a torment, but you can only know how hellish they are if you’ve sat through it. 

SL What political questions were you trying to answer by researching the Bund, and what made them an exciting movement through which to seek those answers?

MC First of all, the Bundists were just extremely prophetic. They saw through Zionism from the start. You read Henryk Erlich’s quote from 1938 about how if a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, it would be in a state of eternal, internal and external war that would lead not to a flourishing democracy, but to militarism and racism. You also read Bundist quotes from 1918, where Trotsky is at the height of his power, and Soviet Russia is the great hope of the world, and you have Vladimir Medem saying, if today the Bolsheviks want to shoot socialists from other groups, who’s to say tomorrow they won’t want to shoot Trotsky? Inconceivable in 1918. It happened, with an ice pick, not a gun, but it happened.

And I think because they were very, very ethical people, they were able to see what happens to movements that aren’t grounded in ethics, and that aren’t grounded in respect for human life, which neither Zionism, nor in many ways, the upper echelons of the Bolshevik party was.

Also, as someone who’s been involved in leftist spaces for so long, I deeply admired the subculture that they built, or counterculture is what Bund scholar Jack Jacobs calls it. They built an entire alternate world in interwar Poland with soccer clubs, and theater troops, and schools, and a women’s movement, and a militia to defend themselves, and it reminded me of some of the most amazing chapters the American left, like the Black Panther Party. And it also reminded me of things that the DSA tries to do and what socialism tries to do at its best, right? Which is to provide a better and more beautiful way of life for people, and I thought that was incredibly admirable.

SL New York City itself is a major character in this book.

MC The Bundest idea of solidarity across difference is something that’s very natural in New York City, because we live with people who are so different from each other in every way, and we have to organize together in order to have any sort of decent life. I mean, like, the Zohran coalition includes people who are so different from each other. I thought that the Bund’s idea that you don’t have to assimilate, you don’t have to forget your language, forget your god, change your name to Bob, or Ivan or Franz, or whatever. You can remain yourself, but also fight alongside others for socialism — it’s just the only practical politics. I don’t actually know any other way that we get to a better world except that.

I love my city, I’m such a patriot about New York City, and I have always admired how literally anyone can become a New Yorker from anywhere in the world. You don’t have to learn English, you don’t have to change how you dress, change how you pray. Anyone can become a New Yorker, as long as you adapt yourself to the punishing ethos of this place. 

It’s almost so compatible that there didn’t need to be a Bund in New York and you have all these Bundists that come to New York, and they become major leaders in the labor movement, or in LaGuardia’s administration.

SL Your book is obviously coming out at a time when many Jews in the U.S. and around the world, in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, are desperate for an anti-Zionist Jewish tradition to be part of. How do you hope people might use the book right now?

MC There’s sort of two different audiences, right? There are people who aren’t Jewish, especially people on the left, and I think that there’s immense value in studying our valiant ancestors and that the Bund’s demand of solidarity across difference is literally the only thing that can save us. So I encourage everyone to read this as part of our collective human history, our collective leftist history. I do not think the Bund story is a story for Jews alone.

However, I also do want to speak to Jews, and I think that many Jewish people have been put in this situation where the worst scumbags are claiming a monopoly, not just on a Jewish identity, but on all of Jewish history as well. And they’re trying to use it in service of a genocide in Gaza that is now rapidly spreading to consume the entire region in blood and horror, right? This is one of the most revolting weaponizations of identity I’ve ever seen.

Many young people, especially, didn’t learn anything about Jewish history outside of Zionism. And while the Bund is one amazing aspect, Jews lived all over the world. There is Jewish history in Uzbekistan, and in Kolkata, and in Vienna, and in Mexico City, and one of the things Zionism has always done is it’s taken these, very rich, diverse, often disputatious histories, and it’s monopolized them into one thing, for the service of the ethnostate.

I’ve been told again and again and again by young people that they had no idea that their ancestors fought back not just the Holocaust, but the myriad persecutions of Jews in Eastern Europe and that I was giving them their ancestors back.

SL In the book, you describe the difference between failure and defeat, and you consider the Bundists as having been defeated. 

MC I started with this distinction between failure and loss because of a very disgusting thing that Zionists often do, where they often jeer, oh, the Bund were all killed in the Holocaust.

I get dozens of messages every day: The Bund were so stupid, it’s like a Darwin award, they were all gassed. Literally, the most disgusting things. But it’s not just vile people, it’s also well-meaning people who say, well, the Bund failed. 

I sometimes feel like people haven’t reckoned with the reality that every Jewish group in Europe lost. All of them. Jewish civilization was murdered by the Nazis. It was wiped out. Okay, no Jewish group was able to militarily defeat the Nazis. What did militarily defeat the Nazis? Could the nation of Poland? Could the nation of France or Belgium? These are nations with air forces, with armies, they did not defeat the Nazis.

What defeated the Nazis was 20 million Soviet citizens who died fighting the Nazis. And also, the entire industrial might of America. And also, all of these colonial soldiers fought. One million men from India went and enlisted in the British Army to help defeat the Nazis. It took the entire world to defeat the Nazis. 

The idea that anything that Jews could have done would have defeated the Nazis…I think we say that to ourselves because we wish it were the case. That we were powerless as a collective is something that’s just too horrific to bear, you know? 

SL One of the beautiful things about the Bund and your book is the movement is full of these incredible figures. Who did you love bringing back to life?

MC I loved writing about Sophia Dubnova. Of all the characters, she was the one that I felt the most simpatico with. She’s my friend Mark’s grandmother. She was a Bundest revolutionary in her youth. She smuggled pamphlets taped to her body to mimic a pregnant belly. She incited military mutinies. She lived under fake names, in deep cover, and hid fugitives. But she was also an avant-garde poet, and she was constantly aware of how silly and dogmatic Marxism often was, even while she was literally risking her life for it. 

She loved Paris. She loved costume balls at art schools. She loved smoky basement cabarets where she would do poetry recitals. She loved this thick, artistic milieu of Anna Akhmatova and Blok and Gorky. She combined, sometimes in a very uneasy way, these qualities of an artist and a revolutionary, and she had to flee Russia as a political refugee with her husband, Henryk Erlich, because of the Russian Revolution. And in Poland, she becomes the Bund sex columnist, and she is literally telling teenage Marxist boys that they can’t use Marxist theory to try to whine at their girlfriends to have sex with them. And she’s touring shtetls in Poland, giving talks about women’s right to orgasm. She and her children were able to come to America, and she spent the rest of her life in the Upper West Side. One of her grandsons told me that shortly before her death at age 101, she told him that she had a confession to make: she was no longer a socialist, but an anarchist.

SL The gender politics of the Bund are fascinating, and the book is full of teenage girls throwing cobblestones, women who were among the movement theoreticians, the many women who made up the rank-and-file.

MC There’s this weird idea that women, you know, in the old times before feminism, didn’t work. But poor women in all societies always worked, right? Like, there were tons of female Jewish factory workers who had the same problems as male factory workers, except they also got paid less, and they also had specific bullshit. For instance, there was a custom of doing semi-strip searches of female factory workers by male foremen to see if they were stealing from the factory. Classic, right?

So, women were some of the earliest organizers of the Jewish labor movement, because they were factory workers, and they didn’t want to be exploited. The Bund in Tsarist Russia was about a third women, and a lot of these were women who saw it as a way to have a better life, as a way to get out of what they saw as a trap of an arranged marriage, of having many, many, many children, of working your ass off to support your husband while he studied Talmud while also being under his little domestic dictatorship. This was a way that you could have a relationship with men as equals, as comrades, have a marriage that’s supposedly egalitarian, even though, obviously, that was extremely flawed in practice.

And where you could be a human, right? As well as, you know, just a woman.

In fact, Bund leadership was more heavily female in the Tsarist Empire when the Bund was illegal than it was [aboveground] in interwar Poland. Anna Rosenthal, a Bundist militant, said it was because in the Tsarist Empire you ascended to leadership through physical bravery. You were smuggling pamphlets and weapons, giving these illegal street speeches, risking jail and death all the time — she was like, yeah, women are really brave, and that’s why there were so many in leadership. Whereas she said in Poland, when the party was legalized, even though it was persecuted, you ascended to leadership by being the loudest person at conferences. And she said that that favored men, in her opinion.

SL It really brings us full circle to the interminable meeting.

MC Yes.