Here Where We Live Is Our Country: Molly Crabapple with Naomi Klein
Artist Molly Crabapple presents the first popular history of the Jewish Labor Bund alongside author Naomi Klein at the New York Public Library.
Why we picked this
The secular Jewish Bund — once Eastern Europe's most influential socialist movement — has almost no popular history. Crabapple, who wrote the book during a fellowship at the NYPL itself, brings it back to life with Naomi Klein in conversation.
Artist and writer Molly Crabapple presents her new book, a vivid and deeply researched popular history of the Jewish Labor Bund — the secular socialist movement that fought for dignity “here where we live” rather than in a distant homeland. Founded in 1897 and active across Eastern Europe until the Holocaust, the Bund once claimed hundreds of thousands of members and shaped the course of twentieth-century Jewish and labor history. This is the first book to bring their story to a general audience.
Through portraits of insurgent poets, clandestine revolutionaries, and everyday activists, Crabapple reconstructs a vanished world where the Bundists intersected with the Russian Revolution, resisted fascism, and ultimately perished in the Holocaust. The event is framed as a conversation with Naomi Klein, whose own work on political economy and resistance makes her an ideal interlocutor for a history about fighting back when everything is against you.
The program opens with electropop musician Max Fractal performing an electronic rendition of “Shtil Di Nakht,” the Yiddish partisan song about a young woman fighting Nazis. A livestream is available for those who cannot attend in person. Walk-in standby tickets may be available at the door.