Molly Crabapple

Anyone who has been to any kind of sort of leftist meeting knows that there is always a piece of this in them.

And it reminded me too of, I know you, I know you're a big fan of Molly Crabapple's, uh, Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

Mm-hmm.

There's a moment in that where she's talking about, I think it might still be about the Vilna Group, and then she's kind of comparing it to all of these, like, basement meetings that she sat in in New York City with, like, interminable stacks and [laughs] uh, being either too hot or too cold, um, and how it is so familiar to, again, to, like, anybody who has ever been in those spaces.

Welcome to Critical Babe Theory, the podcast where we change hearts and minds one liberal at a time.

And today I'm thrilled to have on the show Molly Crabapple in special celebration of our 75th episode.

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.

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.

Uh, there's, um, you know, your book obviously is, uh, v- very detailed about that.

Uh, Molly Crabapple's written a, a book, uh, about the Bund called, uh, Here Where We Live is Our Country.

And then there's just a new book out, um, by Benjamin Moser, uh, called Anti-Zionism: A, A Jewish History.

So there is this, um, quite a swing, uh, perhaps, uh, given impetus by Israel's actions as well.

Never telling us of course that kibbutzim were established on stolen or Palestinian land or razed Arab villages, that they were Jewish only institutions, and they were an essential part of the apartheid construction of Israel itself, so.

I mean, Zionism as I say has rewritten not least its own history, but that too is coming under the microscope like it's never before.

And that, that's not just simply Molly Crabapple and Ben Moses books, but people like Ilan Pappé, the foremost Israeli historian, uh, and his book at the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The work of people like Moshe Machover, for instance.

And Tamim Fruchter, who actually organized a kind of letter to the Jewish Book Council for making their Zionist commitments operative and the way that that kind of pushes anti-Zionist novelists and writers out of the community, put it very well, which is just like instead of reckoning, they're digging their heels in.

And so many of our Jewish organizations are doing that, and now our Jewish literary organizations are doing that, in spite of the fact that there is an enormous amount of anti-Zionist literature being published that's very interesting, like Molly Crabapple's book about the Bund, for example, which also is a bestseller and having a real cultural moment.

So I don't know.

I mean, like, I hear what you're saying, Josh, that like the more the merrier.

It has to do with what people want to read, what they want to put their money behind, what they're interested in.

And the changes, the broad changes in American political life.

I mean, I think we heard this from Molly Crabapple and from Benjamin Moser and from others.

But like, you know, people who've been critical of Zionism for a long time, it felt like a lonely position for a long time in this country.

Right.

Um, Molly Crabapple's book on the Bund.

Precisely.

The Bund.

If one step to that was the choice to write together, because I found myself so taken by the idea that there was more than one of you in this book, because the scale of what you take on seems so enormous and at times... impossible, but somehow it felt fortifying to know that it wasn't just me reading, but that there were also the two of you.

And I wonder how much friendship and that really human personal connection was a method and a kind of through line for the book, but also what kind of challenges come up as two people with different perspectives living in two countries with two different voices.

How did you find a common voice? Where did you disagree? If we read close enough, could I find Astra and Naomi? Or did you try to find a third melded voice?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is really... appropriate that this is a co-written book and I think it's something that we both agree like neither of us could have written alone partly because of the the time that we wrote it in but also because it I mean to be really honest it was really hard I mean, there were moments of total despair.

So yeah, I think that we had that compliment.

And for me, as somebody, Astra has co-written before, I haven't.

And it was a challenge for me to sort of lose, like, you know, the eye, you know? But I do feel like we got to something that is more powerful, like the fact that the book really does come from friendship.

And I think people feel that.

It was a perfect encapsulation of here-ness, an idea developed by the Jewish Labor Bund, a Yiddish socialist group that was founded in the 19th century and grounded in fierce commitment to place and community not based on bloodlines.

Molly Crabapple, a proud New Yorker and artist who recently published a best-selling history of the Bund, made the connection in a piece published in The Guardian.

Like New York itself, Mamdani's campaign was multicultural, multiracial, polyglottal, she wrote.

When Andrew Cuomo tried to bait him as un-American, he released ads in Spanish and Bangla, Hindi and Arabic.

Um, there are actually two books that I recommend right now.

Um, one is by Molly Crabapple, it's about the Bund, and one is by, uh, Ben Moser, and it's called, uh, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History.

Uh, and it's basically takes the form of 12 different lives, 12 Jewish lives, 12 Jews who over, in different countries and d- during different t- periods of time, uh, were a- anti-Zionist, 'cause that is a history that people just don't know about.

Um- And then the Molly Crabapple book about the Bund, uh, is, is really excellent.

The, and I, I highly re- recommend both of them.

But, you know, it, what's interesting is that these people get...