Fran Shor
Posted August 8, 2026
Here Where We Live is Our Country:
The Story of the Jewish Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World: New York, 2026. 433 pages, $32 hardcover.
MOLLY CRABAPPLE’S HISTORY of the Jewish Bund traces its rise and fate, from its inception in 1897 through the Russian Revolution into the interwar years and ending with the Holocaust Era.
In reconstructing this vibrant social movement among Eastern European Jews, she unveils for contemporary readers a world inhabited by leftwing, anti-Zionist activists.
For Crabapple, however, the Bund’s story constitutes more than resurrecting the past. As she points out in her Introduction, “in the story of the Bund — across decades and geographies, ages and faiths — I found a story of our own times, a blueprint for survival, a cautionary tale of death, and a philosophy that might yet save us.” (xxi)
To tell that story, Crabapple draws not just on important secondary sources, some in Yiddish (which she learned in her research for the book), but also on memoirs of key leaders of the Bund. In addition, she traces the role of her own maternal great-grandfather from his time as a teenage Bund member in Eastern Europe through his transition to the United States in the early 20th century.
Finally, she interjects her own movement activism from Occupy through transnational solidarity efforts to anti-Zionist organizing against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (While these interjections are mostly illustrative of the resonances from the Bund’s past, there are times when they become rather forced and even misdirected.)
Throughout all her efforts, the book comes alive with a cast of characters whose political experiences reflect not just the struggles of Marxist Jews in the first half of the 20th century, but also for those of us who “believe in the necessity of human solidarity.” (xxi)
Lives in Struggle
Among the most significant members of the Bund was Pati Kremer, whose life spans its founding in Vilna in 1897 to when she perished with the tens of thousands of Jews murdered by Lithuanian and German fascists in the Ponar woods outside Vilna in 1943.
Pati and her husband, Arkady, were among the small group of revolutionary Jewish youth who birthed the Bund. Unlike the vast majority of Jews who were barred from entering the major Russian cities, she and her husband went to St. Petersburg to attend the university.
During that time, Pati became involved with the militant populist Narodniki. After her subsequent arrest and imprisonment, she rejoined her husband in Vilna to start a Marxist study group.
Hoping to spread the revolutionary message to workers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, they quickly realized a fundamental feature of Jewish working-class identity in Czarist Russia: they were oppressed as workers and as Jews. For Crabapple this represents a pre-figurative “intersectionality.” (Trying to fit this double oppression into the African American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw’s theoretical insight is a bit forced since it neglects gender, the other part of the triadic oppressive apparatus.)
Shortly after that first meeting of the Bund in October 1897 in Vilna, Pati was arrested again. Nonetheless, the Bund would join the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party as “an independent organization for the Jewish proletariat.” (28) Five years later the Bund would become the largest left-wing cadre organization in Russia (45)
Another key member of the Bund during this time was Vladimir Medem. Although baptized as a Lutheran, Medem soon not only discovered his Jewish roots but found a home in the Jewish Bund in Minsk.
Fleeing Czarist police repression, he arrived in Berne, Switzerland in 1901 to be part of the Russian Marxist exiles. (In what Crabapple calls “Exileland,” she cites her own experience in Istanbul working with a journalist chronicling the lives of exiled Syrians in that city.)
As a budding theorist for the Bund, Medem wrote and spoke about mobilizing the Yiddish-speaking working class into autonomous networks. This organizational and ethnic difference led to an inevitable clash with Lenin and others at the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party Congress in 1903.
Medem and the small contingent of Bundists withdraw from the acrimonious split, later joining the Mensheviks. (For an account of the political issues in the split and Vladimir Medem’s theoretical contributions, see Enzo Traverso’s detailed study The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate, 1843-1943 — ed.)
A Family Legacy
One of those youngsters in the Jewish Pale who responded to the Bund’s appeals was Sam Rothbort, Molly’s great-grandfather. After a brutal pogrom in his hometown of Volkovysk, Sam may or may not have been involved in a shooting of one of the local Czarist police officers that played a role in the pogrom.
Both this form of ethnic cleansing and others throughout Russia, especially the infamous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, provided the impetus for Sam and thousands of other Russian Jews, to leave and flee to the United States. He quickly integrated into the lively Yiddish and socialist culture in New York City in the early 20th century.
The pogroms not only fueled the desire of many Jews to seek refuge elsewhere, but also provided incentive for the emergence of numerous Zionist movements in Eastern Europe.
From the Bund’s perspective, Zionism reinforced the anti-Semitic push to expel Jews from where they lived. In response the Bund emphasized remaining in their homes. This would become the Bund’s belief in do’ikayt, Yiddish for “hereness.”
“Hereness as opposed to the There of Palestine,” Crabapple notes, would require Bundists to “fight for freedom and dignity in the place where they lived.” (53) (Later, as she would recount numerous times, Bund literature and spokespeople denounced Zionism for its ethno-nationalist oppression of the Indigenous population in Palestine.)
The Russian Revolutions
The Herenesss of the Bund, however, would be buffeted by the winds of revolution and repression in Russia.
Bund members played a leading role in the 1905 insurrection. In Odessa on June 15, 1905 one of the Bundist firebrands inciting the large crowds that had formed by the harbor was Anna Lipshitz. Most likely she was the Bundist female orator depicted in Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent film Battleship Potemkin. (75-6)
As Czarist troops, both in the film and during the rest of 1905, put down the Odessa revolt, so throughout Russia the uprising was blamed on the Jews. Terrible state repression and pogroms followed, considerably thinning the ranks of the Bund.
Nevertheless, during the revolutionary upheaval of 1917, the Bund gained back many adherents.
The leadership of the Bund, especially Henryk Erlich and Marc Liber, were instrumental in helping form the Provisional Government in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Czar. Unfortunately, Erlich and Liber made the decision to side with Kerensky and the Mensheviks in that new governmental formation.
The misfortune that accompanied the alliance was the decision to remain fighting in the imperialist war as the army was collapsing, workers were occupying factories, and peasants were in revolt.
V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were better attuned to the grievances and demands of soldiers, workers and peasants. Capitalizing on this in October 1917, the Bolsheviks booted Kerensky out and established the soviets (workers’ councils) as the ruling power in Russia.
At this point, the Bund began to splinter into different factions. Some followed the International Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov, and made a temporary alliance with the Bolsheviks. As Crabapple recounts, some Bundists actually joined the Bolsheviks, especially given their ostensible denunciations of anti-Semitism.
Others were desirous of retribution against the Czarist forces that imprisoned them by the thousands. Among the most notorious of these ex-Bundists was Felix Dzerzhinsky. After being tortured and sharing a cell with Medem, Dzerzhinsky, like other dogmatic Bolsheviks, was in no mood to compromise, even with his old Bundist comrades.
Dzerzhinsky would go on to become the head of the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s secret police and exact revenge against friend and foe alike. (139, 145)
Some Bundists, led by Erlich, rejected the new revolutionary soviets and separated entirely from the Bolsheviks. In doing so, they still believed that their Marxist vision required going through a reformist capitalist stage. As a consequence, Crabapple so eloquently writes, they resolutely marched “into a future shaped by violence and a Russia in which they would no longer play a part.” (141)
Indeed, Bundist local leaders were arrested by the Cheka, putting a fine repressive point on Trotsky’s arrogant consignment of these Jewish Marxists to the “dustbin of history.” Although Erlich would escape this first wave of Soviet repression, he would be captured later by the new Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and languish in Stalin’s gulags until committing suicide in 1942. (336)
Continuing the Struggle
The Bund nonetheless not only survived this tumultuous period, but managed to flourish to the west of Russia. In Poland, especially in Warsaw with its large Jewish population, the Bund, even in the face of Polish anti-Semitic pogroms, reconstructed its Jewish communal power and resurrected leaders like Henryk Erlich.
Crabapple waxes poetic in her extensive descriptions of the variety of Jewish communal developments in Poland, from newspapers to youth groups among the Yiddish-speaking working class.
She also highlights the role of Polish Jewish lumpen elements, especially the character of Bernard Goldstein. Once again, I believe, the author goes overboard in trying to find a more contemporary and non-Jewish lineage to Goldstein and his followers.
With Goldstein and the Bund developing armed self-defense units, Crabapple cites the Black Panther Party as an equivalent even though this strained linkage overlooks the vastly different historical and social conditions faced by these formations. (173)
Goldstein’s Bundist tough guys not only fought against Polish rightwing students and fascist gangs, but also Communists and Zionists, the latter two groups contending for support from the Jewish masses. The Bund’s leadership, in particular, made clear their rejection of Zionist appeals for support of Jews in Palestine.
As the following 1928 Bund resolution said about the clashes between Arabs and Jews in Palestine: “The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger.” (199)
In turn, the Warsaw Zionist daily Haynt “called for Bundists to be expelled from ‘the table of the Jewish community’” (201)
Holocaust and Uprising
The enmity between the Bundists and even leftwing Zionists would eventually, of necessity, be transcended during the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. But it would take the mass murder of the first few years of the war, and the division of Warsaw’s Jews into a disease-ridden ghetto, to overcome that distrust.
Some of the top Bundist leaders, like Arthur Zygielbojm from Lodz, would flee to the West after a brief and bitter stint in the Jewish Judenrat of Warsaw. (These Judenrat were Jewish councils established by the Nazis in occupied cities in order to expedite their policies.)
He later became a representative of the Polish government in exile in London. Zygielbojm would commit suicide in the aftermath of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. (346-47)
Other Bundists especially Bernard Goldstein, set about creating an underground in the Warsaw ghetto. Efforts to link up with the Polish Home Army were rebuffed, although some connections with the Polish Socialist Party resulted in minor delivery of weapons to the Jewish underground.
While the Bund initially refused to join with the leftwing Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair and other Jewish organizations to form an armed resistance, Bundist youth like Marek Edelman (who would go on to survive the war, remaining in Poland, and becoming an important member of Solidarnosc in the 1980s), drew the Bund into a united front known as the Jewish Combat Organization.
Its chief was Mordechai Anielewicz from Hashomer Hatzair. (326) Besides random attacks against the ghetto’s hated collaborationist Jewish police, they plotted for the shocking uprising in April 1943. As Crabapple makes clear it was “these starving youth, armed only with pistols and homemade bombs, (who) had launched the first urban revolt in occupied Europe.” (345)
Holocaust and Aftermath
Crabapple pays close attention to the tragedy in those years that engulfed Polish Jews, of all stripes. Over 90% of Polish Jews, one-third of the worldwide Jewish population, perished. (360) Further, displaced Jews still were barred from entry in significant numbers to the United States.
Those Jews languishing in DP camps in Europe often faced Zionist recruiters attempting to conscript them to fight in Palestine. One writer for the Bundist newspaper, Unzer Shtime, denounced “the kinds of violence Zionists in the camps exercise toward their Bundist and other non-Zionist political rivals.”
Another Bundist noted: “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction wrought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter’s methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life…It is as if the slaughterer had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter.” (368-69)
In her Postscript, Crabapple responds to a friend bemoaning the fact that the “Bund failed.” To this pronouncement, she replies that the Bund “lost.”
Clarifying the difference, she writes, “failure is what happens to those overcome by their own faults and errors. To lose is to succumb to greater forces.” She goes on to note that the “true failures were the democracies who played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable.” (380, 381)
For Crabapple as well as this reviewer, the book reminds us that in the face of fascism and ethno nationalist hatred, we must insist upon human solidarity whether in the telling of stories from the past or contending with the reactionary political forces of the present.
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