Here Where We Live Is a Home for Everyone

Molly Crabapple knows how to get attention. On tour publicizing her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (New York: One World, 2026), the artist and anti-Zionist activist has waded enthusiastically into the turbulent waters of the contemporary Israel-Palestine conflict. “For leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult, the Bund is a model” is the kind of statement designed to turn heads, and Crabapple has done just that. 

Most critiques of the book have been in response to this combative marketing, with the heat of the reviewers’ rhetoric rising in proportion to the extremity of their own ideological position. John Podhoretz, neo-conservative editor of the combatively Zionist Commentary, has denounced Crabapple in the sort of terms a Klansman might use toward a white liberal (and topped it off with a dollop of misogyny). The writer Debbie Lechtman, in the liberal Zionist Tablet, doesn’t engage in that kind of personal invective, but the title of her review and her dismissal of the book as “a grade-school level history” leave no doubt about her stance. 

Conversely, Crabapple has been a darling of the anti-Zionist commentariat, receiving glowing reviews and favorable interviews in such outfits as Current Affairs, Jacobin, and Dissent. Prominent anti-Zionist Naomi Klein, a board member of Jewish Voice for Peace, went beyond glowing to adulatory while leaving the book’s substance largely untouched: “Molly Crabapple is a time traveler, a necromancer, and an unclassifiable genius …. Reading [the book] feels revolutionary.” 

I want to detach the book from the angry discourse surrounding it and examine its argument—which, as I hope to demonstrate, is not actually for the resurrection of Bundism—from neither a Zionist nor anti-Zionist perspective. This is not to say mine is a neutral perspective: I doubt that any Jew alive today is neutral on the topic of Israel, and I certainly am not, so I want to reveal my own cards here. 

I consider myself a non-Zionist: I have no family connection to Israel, never went there on a Birthright trip, never learned to sing Israeli songs at sleepaway camp. The universalism of my Reform Jewish faith calls me to believe that if there is an Almighty God, ruler of the universe, then they play no favorites: there is no Chosen People and no Holy Land. I feel no spiritual connection to the Land of Israel (although I appreciate that others validly do), even less of a political connection to the idea of a Jewish state, and less connection still to the illiberal, supremacist nightmare that Israel has actually become. Unlike liberal Zionists, I do not believe “Israel has a right to exist,” but that’s because I don’t believe any state has a right to exist: states don’t have rights, people do. But the fact is the State of Israel does exist and, unlike anti-Zionists, I don’t see its dismantling as necessitous or even desirable. I am alarmed by the illiberalism and antisemitism that has infected the anti-Zionist movement—that has indeed always been a part of it. As a non-Zionist I hope for a peaceful and just solution to the decades-long catastrophe in the Levant, whether that takes the form of one state, two states, or some political configuration yet undreamed of.

Any non-polemical review of Here Where We Live Is Our Country ought to begin by noting that the book itself is far less polemical than its own marketing suggests. Although Crabapple is never shy about voicing her opinions, the book is not primarily about the present conflict. It is a substantive history of six decades of Jewish life in America, Palestine, and especially Europe, using the General Jewish Labor Bund and its leaders and members as a focal point. Lechtman’s dismissal of it as “grade-school level history” is simply a calumny: Crabapple learned Yiddish, went to the archives, conducted the interviews, walked the tragic terrain. 

The book isn’t without flaws: there are occasional errors of fact (Crabapple references the interwar Polish government funding and equipping Lehi, the extreme-right Zionist militia in Palestine, which only came into being in 1940, for reasons directly related to the outbreak of World War II). And there are more of omission: the book fails to mention either the Jewish Volskpartei (a non-socialist, liberal analog to the Bund, whose principal leader was the father of one of her viewpoint characters) or, perhaps most tellingly, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi collaborator who was the face of militant anti-Zionism in the 1940s. 

Stylistically, Crabapple frequently uses two frustrating techniques. First, she uses the long-deprecated historical technique of imputing thought and action to her “characters” (the term she uses in her front matter) that cannot possibly be justified by the documented historical record: “It was the infinity of pink, of such fragile freshness that it must have reminded her of her youth in Paris, of the soft evenings she walked with Henryk by the Seine, of everything she thought she’d left behind.” Second, she regularly inserts herself into the narrative, sometimes making tenuous connections to her own life, sometimes imagining herself visiting the past: “I hold her hand as she leads me through some Pale of Settlement slum shuttered tight on the Bund’s orders. We come upon a cordon of thugs in flat-caps, members of the party battle squad.” This imaginative, romanticized approach to the source material sits uneasily with its form as a history book with 40 pages of endnotes. Crabapple’s vivid pen-and-ink illustrations of her characters are a highlight of the book, and it is no insult to say the whole might have been better suited as a graphic novel (or work of graphic narrative) non-fiction in the style of Persepolis, with whose late author Crabapple is something of a kindred spirit.

The substance of the book was a bit of a surprise, given the discourse surrounding it. Crabapple gives only limited attention to the rivalry between the do’ikayt (“hereness”) of the Bundists, who wanted to stay in Europe and fight for Jewish political rights and autonomy, and the dortkayt (“thereness”) of the Zionists, who sought statehood in Palestine. The bulk of the book actually details the Bund’s struggles with its many non-Jewish rivals and enemies: brutal Stalinists, dismissive Gentile social-democratic parties, bigoted Polish nationalists, and—looming over all—the Nazis. The narrative climaxes with Bundist and Zionist youth banding together to die fighting in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto. (To further reveal my own cards, I have the emblem of ZOB, the militia formed via this alliance, tattooed on my forearm, where the numbers would have gone.)

When the intra-Jewish rivalry is discussed, it is with an impressive amount of nuance and empathy. Crabapple recognizes that many of the Jews decamping for Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s were not out to displace or oppress indigenous people; they simply wanted to escape oppression in Europe and had no place else to go. She even gives the more ideologically committed Zionists a fair hearing. In one memorable passage, she notes future Israel Prime Minister Golda Meir’s presence at the 1938 Evian conference, in which nearly every Western nation refused to accept refugees from Hitler’s Germany; Meir concluded that Jews needed a sovereign state with a demographic majority, because (in Meir’s words) “Only here could Jews be masters, not victims, of their fate.” Crabapple offers no counterargument.

Crabapple nevertheless convincingly demonstrates that the Bundists were right about the Zionists. When Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist tendency in Zionism that eventually produced Benjamin Netanyahu, visited Warsaw in the 1930s, the Bundist press pegged him as “the spiritual father of Jewish fascism.” In the words of the preeminent Bundist leader Henryk Erlich, he was “a small-scale Hitler, a fascist clown.” Erlich further predicted the dark future of Zionism like a football announcer calling a play-by-play: “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)... Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow?” 

Crabapple is less willing to come to grips with the idea that the Zionists were right about the Bundists. In the book’s postscript, Crabapple insists that even if the Bundists were defeated, they were “right,” but this is unconvincing. She seems to be arguing that the Bundists’ fundamental belief in socialist solidarity was a moral absolute, and that solidarity should be held to because it is morally correct, regardless of the consequences. But the Bund was a specifically Jewish movement, not just a socialist one. The Bundist argument was that solidarity with the gentile working class was a strategy by which Jewish freedom and autonomy could be achieved. They were tragically wrong about this, and on a colossal scale. Jews who stayed in Europe—whether as a conscious decision to fight for what they believed was their country, or because they had no choice—mostly died in the Holocaust; those who left for Palestine survived.

Crabapple never deals satisfactorily with this grim and unyielding truth, and never convincingly concludes—or concludes at all—that Bundism was an effective strategy for Jewish survival, let alone liberation. Even when describing the Bund at the peak of its vitality, in interwar Poland, she takes time to remind her readers that it will not last—that everything the Bund built, and the rest of Polish-Jewish society along with it, would be destroyed in the crematoria within a decade. Indeed, while it’s clear that Crabapple fiercely admires the defiant Bundist spirit—as do I—it’s less clear that she truly believes in Bundism as an ideology. 

From Bundism to New Yorkism

She first tips her hand early in the book, describing the mass exodus of Jews to America in the aftermath of some bloody pogrom or other: “If this was eastern Europe, no wonder so many of us had decided to leave.” This is an understandable sentiment, but quite the opposite of Bundism, whose fundamental premise forms the book’s title: Here where we live is our country. 

The real reveal is when, in an aside about the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, she makes the hard-to-justify claim that Alexander Kerensky (the socialist leader deposed by the Bolsheviks) was the real winner because he got to grow old in exile in New York City. For Crabapple, a New Yorker through and through, the best possible outcome anyone can ever achieve is to move to New York City. Her ideology isn’t Bundism; it’s everybody-should-move-to-New-Yorkism. This doesn’t mean the literal city (although it also means that). It means the ideal that New York City embodies: a thriving, multiracial democracy where all people are equal under the law and free to live their own culture. Crabapple puts this in more formal terms in her postscript, writing, “In an age of blood-soaked mass displacement,” do’ikayt means “an attempt … to square homeland with the freedom to leave.” There is another, more concise term for this worldview, although one I suspect Crabapple might bristle at: liberalism.

One of Crabapple’s most profound insights, though not original to her, is that “an oppressed people’s beliefs are not benign just because they lack power.” She rightly notes that power is fluid and “beliefs are good or bad on their own merits, because nothing stays the same … Oppressed becomes oppressor the moment the power flips.” She uses this insight to explain how the oppressed Jews of Europe became the oppressive Jews of Israel, but does not take the next step and contemplate how the oppressed Arabs of Palestine might in the future become oppressors. 

At the heart of militant anti-Zionism is an illiberal belief that Palestine “belongs” to the Palestinians, and only the Palestinians, in the way that Germany was believed to “belong” to the Germans and only the Germans—or that Zionists believe Eretz Israel “belongs” to the Jews and only the Jews. It is blood-and-soil nationalism dressed in the garb of anti-colonialism (a description that once fit Zionism). It would be unfair to say that Crabapple is in denial about this: in a passage where she notes Bundist disdain for the pan-Arab movement that was popular in Mandatory Palestine, she tacitly acknowledges that it is a nationalism like any other. In the postscript, she unflinchingly describes Hamas’s attack on 10/7 as a massacre. But she doesn’t fully follow through with this idea, and just as she was reluctant to really grapple with the implications of the failure of historical Bundism, I sensed she was reluctant to gaze with clear eyes upon the dark side of militant anti-Zionism.

If Bundism didn’t work and Zionism is a moral nightmare, can the story of the Bund tell us anything about the Jewish present? It can tell us that the moral solution to ethnonationalism can’t be more ethnonationalism. This wasn’t true of Zionism, and it cannot be true of anti-Zionism. For all that she identifies as an anti-Zionist, Crabapple is really offering a non-Zionist solution in the form of her great love: New York City. She made this connection, implicit in the book, explicit in a Guardian article she wrote on the occasion of Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor: “‛Here Where We Live Is Our Country’ would make an apt tagline for Mamdani’s New York.”

But even old New York was once Lënapehòkink. The thriving, multiracial democracy that Crabapple (and I) love was built atop a pile of Algonquian skulls. We cannot deny that the modern state of Israel was built on a pile of Palestinian skulls, but that doesn’t mean nothing fertile can ever grow atop the bodies. As Crabapple herself notes in an odd passage about a visit she made to Babi Yar, “All land is watered with blood.” Jews who came to New York in the early 20^th century arrived as settlers in a land that had been ethnically cleansed generations before, and eventually helped build multiracial democracy there; the descendants of those who carried out the ethnic cleansing of 1948 can do the same. After all, for seven million Israeli Jews, the “there” of Palestine is now “here”: Many Jewish families have been in Palestine for as long as others have been in America. The only hope is to begin to build in Tel Aviv, Hebron, and even Gaza City what is being built in Mamdani’s New York.

With Gaza City in ruins, tens of thousands dead, and the lawless Israeli regime continuing to commit atrocities with impunity all across the region, this dream seems enormously far-fetched at present. But the idea of “solidarity through difference” remains alive despite it all—some Israelis and Palestinians are ready to reject the ethnonationalisms that have poisoned their land for so many generations. The grassroots Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together recently launched a new political party, Mekom Lekulanu/Likulina Makan, which is committed to freedom, justice, and equality under the law for all fifteen million people living between the river and the sea: a vision of two distinct peoples peacefully sharing a homeland. Mekom Lekulanu/Likulina Makan translates to “A Home for Everyone,” and what is that if not a new way of saying “Here Where We Live Is Our Country”?

Featured image is Presidium of the National Conference of Bundist Councillors in the city councils and Jewish communal organizations in Warsaw, 1928. By Henryk Bojm