The indomitable activists of the Bund [i]
HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY
The Story of the Jewish Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World, New York 2026
By Mike Joseph
When asked how history would treat him, Winston Churchill replied “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”.
Churchill survived, victorious, to write his history. The Bund was destroyed and history has duly forgotten it. But a Cambridge linguist cautions: history is not necessarily written by the victors, though it is always written by the literate [2]. Now, in Molly Crabapple, the Bund finds its highly literate champion.
Founded five weeks after the first Zionist Congress in 1897, the General Jewish Labour Union – the Bund – was a secular, socialist revolutionary movement. Bundists were democrats, educators, trade unionists, Yiddish language revivalists and fighters. For half a century, the Bund fought back against pogroms and changed the course of history, from St Petersburg to Odessa, to Warsaw.
It was instrumental in the Russian revolutions, 1905, 1917 and 1918. It was the leading secular Jewish movement in inter-war Poland, consistently winning more support than the Zionists, even in the last elections of 1938, before Poland fell to the Nazis and the Soviet Union. At the Holocaust’s climax in 1943, it headed the most sustained armed revolt against Nazi genocide, the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Starving, isolated, doomed but fighting to the last. Tough Jews!
The leader of the uprising, Bundist Marek Edelman, claimed 300 Nazi casualties killed and wounded. (Molly Crabapple comments ‘Zionists have tried to say that they were the only tough Jews. Which is utterly untrue.’[3]) And many decades before the world started to think that something might be wrong with Israel, the Bund was stridently warning of the Zionist threat to Palestine.
But the Bund and Bundists were decapitated by Stalin and destroyed by the Nazi genocide, leaving the stage clear for Zionism.
So thoroughly forgotten – but now vividly remembered in these 400 plus pages of documentation, imagination and celebration, with a cast of 50 characters, from Molly’s great-grandfather, artist Samuel Rothbort, to poet, sex columnist and Bundist revolutionary Sophia Dubnova, to Anna ‘The Fury’ Lipshitz, inflaming the Odessa strikers while Battleship Potemkin steams into port flying the Red Flag, then summoning the mutinous sailors to use their firepower in solidarity with the uprising.
This is historic reconstruction on an epic scale, and published exactly now for its message to our age of livestreamed genocide.
Molly Crabapple is a New York artist, writer and journalist. What moved her to spend eight years recovering the memory of the Bund from oblivion? In 2018, her 5000-word memoir of her artist great-grandfather appeared in The New York Review of Books:
‘During his elder years … Sam Rothbort, tried to paint back into existence the murdered world of his shtetl childhood. Amid the hundreds of watercolors that he called Memory Paintings, one stood out. A girl silhouetted against some cottages, her dress the same color as the crepuscular sky above. A moment before, she’d hurled a rock through one now-shattered cottage window. On the painting’s margin, her boyfriend offers more rocks.
‘“Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows,” Sam captioned the work.
‘I may have been fifteen, seventeen, or twenty when I saw the watercolor, in my great aunt’s sunbaked living room or my mother’s apartment; I don’t recall exactly. What sticks with me is the Old World awkwardness of the heroine’s name. Itka. I turned the Yiddish syllables on my tongue. And Bundist. What was that?
‘This question became a thread that led me to the Bund, a revolutionary society of which my mother’s Grandpa Sam had been a member, whose story was interwoven with the agonies and triumphs of Jews in Eastern Europe, and whose name has all but been erased.[4]’
Eight years later, young people still stop her on the street to say how much the article meant to them. Now it forms the opening of the 400-page Odyssey, Here Where We Live Is Our Country. Interviewed for the launch, Molly Crabapple explains:
‘… the Zionist narrative, which is that, there were the weak Jews in the diaspora, who were all murdered, and then there are the strong Jews in Israel, strongly oppressing Arabs, and they’re alive, and the weak diaspora Jews were killed because they were weak, and the Zionists were strong and they lived. And that narrative could not be further from the truth. And I think one of the things that really drew young people to my article was – the Bund was a group that ferociously fought for their place in Europe. And I don’t just mean that they fought with words … I mean they fought with guns, right? They fought against pogroms, they fought against terrorist nationalist youth paramilitaries, and ultimately, they helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto revolt. But at the same time, they were socialist, they were secular, they were ethical universalists, they were internationalists, and they opposed Zionism from the first days of their existence. And so finding out about this group, for a lot of young people, was like … finding out about ancestors they never knew they had. [5]’
Immediately after reusing the words from her 2018 article quoted above, the new book adds text absent from 2018:
‘But this thread did not merely draw me back into the vanished past. It became a guide for our moment, in all its repression, courage and loss. [6]’
So this will be a saga of recovering memory, plus opportune recovery of a lost inheritance of solidarity and resistance. We need this story today.
State security men lock immigrants in concentration camps and punish the crime of speech
When Marx wrote, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’,[7] the Bund listened, and fought to change the world. Molly Crabapple rescues the Bund from oblivion with a three-layer approach: rigorous documentation (denying being any kind of academic, yet her book features over 2000 endnotes), candid family memoir (including her own life as a lefty New York artist) and literary nonfiction. From the first sentence, she interweaves these levels, knowing she has the chutzpah to pull it off:
‘The events that would change my great-grandfather’s life – and the history of Europe – began … in the walled medieval city of Vilna.
‘How many girls like Pati – pretty, vivacious – have fallen for cold, ironic boys like Arkady Kremer? [Pati and Arkady were co-founders of the Bund]. How many have tried to save those boys through the energetic bounty of their love? You can’t rescue the world one man at a time, I told my friends when they fell in love with New York’s angry radicals … It seldom ended well … So it was for Pati.
‘In the America of today, just as in the Bund’s interwar Poland, state security men lock immigrants in concentration camps and kidnap dissenters for the crime of speech. As I wrote this book in the New York Public Library, chants for Palestine resounded outside the windows. Often, I went down to join the protestors.’
Here is Molly Crabapple speaking of her rationale as an author:
‘It’s very concerned with the emotional life of being in a movement … the way that leftist movements are written about is as a series of conferences and decisions that are written down as texts … The writing doesn’t show any awareness of emotional life. The love affairs, the gossip, the beefs that are going on, the thrill of thinking that you can change the world … I quickly realized that I wasn’t just writing about the Bund. I was writing a history of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated. [8]’
In this moving account, many readers will discover their personal threads and connection. Here’s mine:
Thirty years ago I sat with my Hebrew translator, Meir Weiss, once a refugee from eastern Europe, now an Israeli taking refuge from Israel. We were reading a 1947 witness account of the Holocaust by bullets in Stanisławów [now Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, but until World War II part of the Second Polish Republic]. There in 1941, SS and Ukrainian fascists killed my mother’s family, 46 relatives in all. This book was the sole record of what happened, and my slender hope of finding ancestors. Suddenly Meir exploded in irritation.
There’s no mention of the Bund the Jewish Socialist Movement. No mention at all. Strange. Why don’t they talk about it? The Bund hated the guts of the Zionists. There was strife. It’s ignorance about something so fundamental.[9]
This was my first encounter with the Bund. My mother spoke of victims, survivors and Zionists, never the Bund. She was a survivor and a Zionist. Her beloved father, my grandfather, turned down a chance to escape Hitler for Palestine in the 1930s, stayed in Europe and was killed. ‘It was the most tragic mistake he ever made’[10] said my mother.
Later I discovered that my grandfather thought differently to my mother. He wrote to his brother in Palestine:
How are relations with the Arabs? Strive to get along with the Arabs in peace and friendship. It’s definitely a most important thing![11]
My grandfather had left the artisan class for the bourgeoisie, but remained a humanist and internationalist – like the Bund – only on the wrong side of the class war to the fiercely sectarian Bund.
Marek Edelman and Henryk Erlich were key Bund leaders in Poland between the wars. Erlich was married to Sophia Dubnova. Her father, historian Simon Dubnov –
‘… publicly scolded the Bund for their stubbornness. In Dubnov’s view, the Bund had cut themselves off from the Jewish people at the very moment when they most needed to unite.’
Erlich thought differently to his father-in-law, writing his response in 1938 which Molly Crabapple shows –
‘… became the Bund’s iconic statement on Zionism. While the Bund fought for Jews’ place in Poland, the Zionists sided with a government trying to force Jews from their homes. While the Bund called protest strikes against the pogroms, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky pranced on Polish stages, giving speeches that supported the pogromists demand for Jews to leave … “Zionism … has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism … Zionism has always regarded the law of force … as the normal law of history … The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens”.[12] ‘
Bitter political enemies though they were, Bundists and Zionists united in 1943, led by Bundist Marek Edelman, in a final battle for survival in the Warsaw ghetto against the annihilationist Nazis.
In 1993, Israeli PM Rabin refused to meet a Bundist leader as he wasn’t a Zionist
The uprising crushed, Edelman led surviving fighters into the sewers to escape from the burning ghetto. After fighting in the full 1944 Warsaw uprising, Edelman stayed in Poland, became a cardiologist and later an activist with Solidarność (Solidarity) alongside Lech Wałęsa. Asked by a journalist “what does it mean to be a Jew?” he said “to be a Jew is to be on the side of the weak.”
In 1993 Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, visited Poland for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He refused to meet or honour Marek Edelman, because he was not a Zionist. In 2002 Edelman wrote to leaders and soldiers of Palestinian militant groups:
… we fought for the survival of the Jewish community in Warsaw … our weapons were never directed against the defenseless civilian population, we never killed women and children … We were isolated in our fight, and yet the powerful opposing army was not able to destroy these barely armed boys and girls … nowhere in the world can urban guerrilla force bring a conclusive victory, but it cannot be defeated by well-armed armies either. And this war will not bring any resolution … without peace there is no future for Palestine, and that peace can be attained only at the cost of both sides agreeing to some concessions. [13]
Israelis were outraged that he addressed Hamas with respect, but ignored his condemnation of mass killing of civilians. Molly Crabapple concludes:
‘Bundists saw the Nakba for what it was: the foundational crime of the Zionist endeavor. Born of another people’s violent dispossession, Israel had yoked itself into an ever worsening cycle of repression and resistance. Its own violence would poison it, and the cancer would metastasize, until there was nothing else left. ‘
This convincing rescue of the Bund from oblivion, its resonant storytelling and the book’s timely release, have the potential to shift the narrative amongst diaspora Jews. Since October 2023, any inheritance of righteous victimhood still felt by descendants of Holocaust generations has been usurped by horror and shame at the genocide of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the Gaza-informed destruction of Lebanon.
Molly Crabapple now offers to restore pride – in resistance and solidarity:
‘Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us.’
Mike Joseph, a regular contributor to the BPP and former TV Current Affairs producer, explores his dual family inheritance of Holocaust and Nakba in film (GAZA: A Story of Love and War), podcast (KEYS: ATroubled Inheritance) and on his website (mikejoseph.wales). Now Mike Joseph is investigating what happened when Primo Levi met two terrorists.
[i] Primo Levi’s description of the Bund in Gli ebrei dell’Europa orientale dall’utopia alla rivolta (The Jews of Eastern Europe from Utopia to Revolt), ed. M. Brunazzi and A. M. Fubini, Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1985
[2] https://www.quora.com/Did-Winston-Churchill-ever-say-history-will-be-kind-to-me-for-I-intend-to-write-it-myself-or-something-similar John Williams – probably: https://www.languagesciences.cam.ac.uk/directory/jnw12%40cam.ac.uk
[3] https://forward.com/culture/816589/molly-crabapple-here-where-we-live-is-our-country-bund-interview-anti-zionist/
[4] My Great-Grandfather the Bundist, Molly Crabapple, New York Review of Books, 6 Oct 2018
[5] New Internationalist, 1 April 2026 at https://newint.org/resistance/2026/story-jewish-labour-bund-molly-crabapple
[6] Unless otherwise attributed, all quotations are from Here Where We Live is Our Country.
[7] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/
[8] The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
Molly Crabapple interviewed by Debbie Nathan, Forward, 6 April, 2026
[9] From Your Ruins, Stanislawow, Tel Aviv 1947, translated by Meir Weiss and Mike Joseph 1996
[10] Lilli Gold interviewed 9 Feb 1998 by Spielberg Foundation
[11] Letter from Israel Gold to Josef Gold, 24 Jan 1935, in writer’s collection
[12] Molly Crabapple quoting Zionism in Point of Fact, Henryk Erlich, “Is Zionism a Liberating Democratic Movement?” in Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, ed. Portnoy 258-63
[13] Marek Edelman, August 2002, accessed at https://portside.org/2023-10-22/never-again-means-never-again-anyone