The dramatic story of the Jewish Bundâa revolutionary movement from a vanished worldâand its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division. âMolly Crabapple beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice.ââNaomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelganger In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created âmemory paintingsâ 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 âhere where we live.â 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 Bundâs 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 Bundâs remarkable story and messageâthat liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we standâreaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.
