A History that Is Part Memoir and All Polemic
Ralph Seliger — July 20, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
“Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund” by Molly Crabapple, 2026, Random House, 480 pp.
Although not without its flaws, the Jewish Labor Bund was a major force on the revolutionary left in Czarist Russia, organizing workers’ councils and fighting units during the massive but ultimately suppressed revolution of 1905, and provided armed protection for Jewish communities facing bloody pogroms. As a political party in Interwar Poland, the Bund emerged on the eve of the Nazi onslaught as the largest vote-getter of any Jewish party. It cultivated the Yiddish language and culture, sponsoring schools, health facilities, sports clubs, youth groups and other institutions.
An artist and writer, Molly Crabapple animates her book with the portrayal of larger-than-life personages. To name just a few: the hardened underground fighter Bernard Goldstein, who survived the Czarist police and the Holocaust; Pati and Arkady Kremer, co-founders of the Bund in Vilna; and the Warsaw Ghetto Bundist courier and arms smuggler Vladka Peltel — whom I knew personally in New York by her married name, Vladka Meed, as Vice-President of the Jewish Labor Committee (the JLC is cited more than once for its rescue work). Many individuals appear repeatedly in the author’s chronological narrative across numerous locations in Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and even in New York.
Crabapple’s interweaving of her personal and family history adds some warmth to the telling, but is also forced in places. Where this works best is the story of her great-grandfather, the artist Samuel Rothbort. Examples of where it doesn’t work smoothly include: her brief mention of the Occupy movement’s encampment in and eviction from a NYC park in 2011; the story of wives and sweethearts visiting their imprisoned Bundist menfolk, prompting a reference to her visit to Riker’s Island; and the drawing of a crude parallel with the Black Panthers.
Both the Panthers and the Bund were “Marxist” and struggled on behalf of embattled minorities, but the Panthers’ “Marxism” was a shallow identification with Marxist-Leninist dictatorships in places like Cuba and Vietnam, while the Bund was genuinely democratic in its principles.
At some points, Crabapple reveals how rigid Bundists were ideologically and tactically naive. They rejected entreaties from Alexander Kerensky to join the provisional revolutionary government in 1917, because it would not be a “socialist” government, since Russia was not economically advanced enough according to Marxist theory to transcend the bourgeois capitalist stage of development.
The Bolsheviks were not bothered enough about Marxist doctrine to refrain from seizing power in a coup against Kerensky. In fact, they owed their name as “the majority” to a walkout by Bundists during a little-known internal dispute in 1903 among Russian Social Democrats (the umbrella party of most Russian socialists at the time); those Bundists acted out of principle, but this is regarded even by the author as a political blunder.
Almost to the end, the Bund refused to cooperate with Zionists in the Warsaw Ghetto. As Crabapple notes without comment, the Bund refused Emanuel Ringelblum’s invitation to participate in the Oneg Shabbes Archive project, solely because he was a “Zionist.” Oneg Shabbes provided a treasure trove of documentation on how Jews lived under the most dire circumstances behind the Ghetto’s walls. The entirely separate Bund archive of Jewish life in the Ghetto has never been found. And the Bund initially refused to join with young leftwing Zionist activists to form the Jewish Fighting Organization (the ZOB), before finally relenting and fighting heroically alongside them and others.
Crabapple’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is gripping. Still, she takes a gratuitous swipe at Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement selected to command the ZOB because (according to the author) he had an inflated ego and was the only one who really wanted it. As Crabapple relates later, he died at the age of 23, along with his girlfriend, allegedly by their own hands, as their command bunker was being flushed out by the Nazis. Their remains were never identified, but they surely lie in a mound, now a memorial, with scores of other fighters buried forever where they perished.
The Bundist Marek Edelman succeeded him as ZOB commander. A lifelong anti-Zionist, Edelman remained in Poland until his death in 2009, even after his wife and children emigrated to France because of the Communist government’s antisemitic purge campaign in 1968.
Crabapple’s polemics against Zionism accurately reflect Bundist ideology, and there’s plenty in the history of Zionism and Israel that can be criticized; in her vehemence, however, she’s unfair to a movement that managed to preserve the lives of hundreds of thousands in Palestine who would otherwise have perished in Europe. What should be said that the Bund was totally destroyed as a mass movement --- first crushed in the Soviet Union by Communist totalitarianism, and then exterminated in Poland by the Nazi genocide --- while Zionism succeeded in fulfilling Herzl’s dream of “the Jews’ state” (der Judenstaat)?
In a postscript, the author addresses this obvious question: Why so much love for a movement that failed? Not “failed” says Crabapple, “lost.” She argues creatively that “Failure is what happens to those overcome by their own faults and errors; to lose is to succumb to greater force.” Then she argues more convincingly that the real failure was on the part of the Western democracies that allowed Nazi Germany to amass its power, and callously closed their doors to most of its Jewish victims.
Her fervent anti-Zionism remains throughout, from the story of the Bund’s pre-Holocaust struggles with Zionist groups through today, as she cites the university encampment movement against “genocide” in Gaza as illustrative of the Bundist value of “solidarity”; she describes Gaza as Israel’s “ghetto” being “liquidated.” This rhetorical allusion to the Holocaust is more polemical than enlightening. “Liquidation” and “genocide” during World War II meant systematic and wholesale slaughter. Hardly any Jews survived the Warsaw Ghetto. The extreme level of destruction in Gaza and the deaths of so many of its people is a different historical calamity.
One should feel outrage at the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and for their fellows being attacked and dispossessed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Yet a broader solidarity would promote peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. It would raise up anti-occupation Israelis (even if they identify as “Zionists”) who support Palestinian self-determination alongside Israel in two independent states, possibly joined in a confederation as advocated by a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians.
Prior to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the Bundist-Zionist conflict had an abstract sectarian cast to it. The fearful premonitions of Zionists from Theodor Herzl to Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky of the urgent need for Jews to flee Europe en masse must have seemed like paranoid fantasies. It was a profoundly cruel and disordered world that validated this Zionist vision. Crabapple admits this in a backhanded way, acknowledging that Britain’s White Paper of 1939 effectively shut the door to most Jews seeking escape from what became a giant killing ground.
Still, she flattens Zionism into a single entity, an “ethno-nationalism” that’s all about power, ignoring its ideological diversity. A.B. Yehoshua, the late Israeli writer, speaking before a Meretz party conference about 20 years ago, described Zionism as a “shared platform” for political and philosophical streams ranging across the spectrum from left to right, and Orthodox religiosity to militant atheism, rather than a single movement.
The actions of pre-independence Zionists and post-independence Israelis are generally portrayed in isolation, as if armed Palestinian factions have never acted to prompt a nasty reaction, undermining efforts toward peace. Sadly, massacre and extremism has been a two-way street. The mournful history Crabapple documents runs counter to the repeated invocation of her title, that “here, where we live, is our country.” This was not the experience of most of Europe’s Jews during World War II, nor even of most survivors after.
She pulls no punches on violent Polish antisemitism, even within elements of the anti-Nazi Home Army, and during the immediate post-war period, culminating with the Kielce pogrom in 1946; but she cannot bring herself to draw a different, or at least a more nuanced conclusion. Instead, her political messaging invites unbridled hatred of all that’s “Zionist” and Israeli, even casting them as “monsters” along with other mass killers, rather than accepting the diverse humanity of what has become the national home for nearly half of the world’s Jews, and the largest single Jewish community ever.
Ralph Seliger edited The Third Narrative website from 2015 until June, 2025. Prior to that, he edited the print and online publications of Meretz USA (now Partners for Progressive Israel). He's been an active supporter of the Zionist peace camp since 1982. Among other print and online platforms he's written for: The Forward, Tikkun, The Daily Beast, In These Times, Jewish Week, New Jersey Jewish News, Jewish Currents, Huffington Post, Dissent.
