Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Molly is the author.

She's also an artist and a journalist, and she's the author of the New York Times bestseller, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the story of the Jewish Bund, which was a secular socialist revolutionary Jewish group that came to be in the late 1800s in the former Russian Empire and their political arc over the course of from the late 1800s through World War II.

And the book is an incredible read.

I would highly recommend that you get it.

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to Critical Babe Theory.

My name is Francesca, and my guest today is Molly Crabapple, journalist, writer, and artist who wrote this incredible book called Here Where We Live Is Our Country, The Story of the Jewish Bund.

Did I do it right? You got it.

... um, uh, who, who, who developed this con- concept of hereness.

In large part in dialogue and in rejection of Zionism, um, between the wars, um, well, a, a little bit b- before the, and during and after the First World War, when the Jewish Labor Bund and our friend Molly Crabapple, who we, we quote throughout the book, um, has written this spectacular history of the Jewish Labor Bund called Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

Right.

Which was a slogan of the Jewish Labor Bund, and it really was in response to, um, the idea that the way to, to be safe in response to virulent antisemitism, um, pogroms, uh, um, a, s- a, s- a feeling that, that, that Jews would never be, be welcome in, i- in the Pale of Settlement, was to go to Palestine, um, and create an ethno-state.

And the Bund said, "No, here where we live is our country.

Our safety is in multi-faith, multiracial coalition with other working-class people." And it's, you know, it, it's a story that ended in tragedy, but, you know, many of the stories that we write are, you know? [laughs] Um, and you know, I think we reject the idea that having been crushed by the brute force of both Nazism and Stalinism means that they were wrong.

[laughs]

Yeah.

So I recently finished Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which was not light reading.

But it's a really interesting history of the Bundist movement among Eastern European Jews, which is a very different concept of what it means to survive here.

as a people, as captured by that title, Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

And it's rough going because Eastern European Jews have been through it, starting with the pogroms back when.

But it was really, in the end, uplifting to sort of hear alternate visions of survival that don't involve displacing other people.

Can you say the author and title one more time for me?

Yeah, it's Molly Crabapple, and the title is Here Where We Live Is Our Country.