Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple
Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple
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Here Where We Live Is Our Country
The Story of the Jewish Bund

Author: Molly Crabapple

Narrator: Molly Crabapple, Nina Yndis

Unabridged: 20 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/07/2026

Synopsis

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.

*Includes a downloadable PDF containing the Cast of Characters and illustrations from the printed book

About The Author

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 Award. She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Robert on January 13, 2026

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Although not well known today, the Jewish Bund was a fascinating organisation at the intersection of Jewish identity and Socialist ideology. They proudly stood up for their Jewish identity instead of subs......more

Goodreads review by Jordy on March 22, 2026

This book combines a big, bursting history—not only of anti-Zionist Jewish socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but its significant intersections with and influence on broader socialist and communist movements and world history—with an incredibly focused and fine-grained parsing of t......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on January 27, 2026

A fascinating and important piece of untold history- when the Jewish internationalist movement, The Bund, had more members in Russia than the Communist Party. Opposed to zionism and yet extremely Jewish- The Bund is the pre-cursor to organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace today. Crabapple is a wo......more

Goodreads review by JXR on March 31, 2026

Fantastic, unique, and well-written book that's well-sourced and tells the story of the Jewish Bund, one that needs to be more known. 5 stars. tysm for the E-ARC.......more

Goodreads review by Abaigh on March 27, 2026

I wanted this to read more like it was telling a story but was more of a bunch of facts that seemed to be compared to Sam and cultural movements from the past 15 years.......more

Quotes

“Molly Crabapple’s terrific Here Where We Live is Our Country unearths the story of a Jewish political movement that opposed ethnic nationalism of all stripes . . . thrillingly energetic . . . delightful . . . vivid.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Here Where We Live Is Our Country is that rarest of books: a gripping, human story of love, idealism, and betrayal—and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary.”—Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelleganger

“Molly Crabapple not only recounts, with a novelist’s mastery of detail, one of the most extraordinary rebellions of the human spirit in modern history. She animates, too, elegantly and boldly, a political and spiritual tradition that the zealots of ethnonationalism had managed to suppress for too long. In the long battles ahead for truth and dignity, her book will be an indispensable resource.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of the New York Times Notable Book Age of Anger and The World After Gaza

“Vast in scope, elegiac in prose, Here Where We Live Is Our Country brings to life the profound humanity of those who stood up to the blood-soaked ethnonationalisms that led to so many of the twentieth century’s storied horrors. Molly Crabapple, with this great work, adds to her growing legacy as a unique American genius.”—Jason Stanley, New York Times bestselling author of How Fascism Works

“Molly Crabapple’s words are as glorious as her colors, her writing as vivid as her painting. Reading her Here Where We Live Is Our Country today, with Gaza in ruins and the rest of the world seemingly on the road to ruin, is revelatory, a reminder that in even in the most dehumanizing of times a loving humanity might endure, even if only fleetingly.”—Greg Grandin, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth

“Molly Crabapple takes us through decades of forgotten memories to rediscover an essential part of Jewish history and a revolutionary movement whose organization and ideals are more relevant than ever, and which may yet point the way towards a better future.”—Mike Duncan, author of New York Times bestselling Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution

“Remarkable for its historical sweep as well as its timeliness, Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a true tour de force.”—Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Che Guevara: a revolutionary life

“A superb blend of personal and social history, alive with radical spirit . . . Brilliant evocation of the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund, a beacon of hope for a renewed left.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Writing with lyricism and great depth of feeling, Crabapple movingly presents the principled Bund, decimated by the Holocaust and sidelined postwar by Soviet socialism on one side and Zionism on the other. . . . Readers will be rapt.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

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