The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - The Secret History Hidden By Zionists - Molly Crabapple

[Celerity]

'For leftist Jews, the Bund is a model': the radical history behind one of Europe's biggest socialist movements



A new book by Molly Crabapple documents the rise and fall of a revolutionary Jewish party that fought against Zionism and for ‘solidarity across difference’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/07/molly-crabapple-new-book-jewish-socialism


Bund members demonstrate in 1917. The Russian and Yiddish banner reads: ‘Hail the Russian Social Democratic Worker's Party! Hail the General Jewish Worker's Union Bund. Hail the International Proletariat.’ Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

There is perhaps no more vivid illustration of the moral nadir Israel has reached than the Knesset’s passage, two days before Passover, of a death penalty law that applies only to Palestinians. The measure, whose approval was greeted with tears of joy and the popping of champagne in the legislative chamber, is a concise legal expression of the core animating idea of modern Israel: that there exists no humane obligation in Jewish tradition with a durable universal ambit. The notion that Jews should have a special concern for the fate of all humanity, regardless of ethnicity or creed, lies dead beneath the rubble in Gaza.

It had to be killed, however, because there was a time when it lived. Cosmopolitanism over nationalism, social democracy over rapacious capitalism, collective liberation over ethno-chauvinist fortress-building – these were the values that animated the Jewish Labour Bund, a revolutionary party founded in 1897 in the Tsarist empire. “For leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult,” as author, activist and artist Molly Crabapple puts it, “the Bund is a model.” A model with an audience – Crabapple’s new history of the Bund was already in its second printing the week before it came out.

Crabapple, who speaks in the blunt and artfully profane manner of a born New Yorker, has been participating in and documenting resistance movements – in art, articles and two previous books (one co-authored with Marwan Hisham) – for 15 years. Her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, she says, is “like a defeated person’s history of the 20th century”. In 380 lush, high-tempo, strikingly poignant pages, interspersed with her own illustrations of its key characters, Crabapple documents the Bund’s extraordinary rise and fall. For half a century, Bundists fought for liberation as Jews and as Marxists – for a time, the Bund was the most popular socialist movement in Russia – before the seismic events of the 20th century spelled their miserable end.



Bundists fought, as Jews, for the liberation of all. “On one hand, they were people who ferociously believed in the value and dignity of eastern European Jewish culture at a time when this was sneered at,” says Crabapple. “But on the other hand, they were internationalists.” They agitated and educated the shtetls. They formed defense squads against pogroms. They championed the Yiddish language. And they fought on the barricades in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

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