Join the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, the Center for Palestine Studies, and the Committee on Global Thought for a discussion with Molly Crabapple and Rashid Khalidi about Crabapple’s new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund.

"Vast in scope, elegiac in prose, Here Where We Live Is Our Country brings to life the profound humanity of those who stood up to the blood-soaked ethnonationalisms that led to so many of the twentieth century’s storied horrors." — Jason Stanley, New York Times bestselling author of How Fascism Works

"Here Where We Live Is Our Country is that rarest of books: a gripping, human story of love, idealism, and betrayal—and an immense, rigorous contribution to the historical record. Reading it feels revolutionary.” — Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppeleganger

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” 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 “here where we live.”

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 Bund’s 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 Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.

Copies of Here Where We Live Is Our Country will be available for purchase.

This event is sponsored by the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, the Center for Palestine Studies, and the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University.

Nubar Hovsepian’s new book, “Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual,” deals with a simple question: How does Said’s Humanism inform his politics, on Palestine, the Middle East and US policies? Nubar Hovsepian will read excerpts from his book and be joined in conversation by Bruce Robbins.

Nubar Hovsepian is Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Chapman University. He is the author of Edward W. Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual (2025) and Palestinian State Formation: Education and the Construction of National Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and he edited and contributed to The War on Lebanon (Interlink Publishers, 2008).  He has also written and edited four books in Arabic, most notably on the Iranian revolution of 1979, and has published articles in professional journals, newspapers, and magazines in various parts of the world. Hovsepian has devoted enormous time to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and served, from 1982 to 1984, as Political Affairs Officer for the United Nations Conference on the Question of Palestine.

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. His most recent books are Who's Allowed to Protest? (Melville House, 2026) and Teaching Politically (Fordham, 2025), coedited with May Hawas. Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford, 2025), won the Wellek Prize for the best monograph in Comparative Literature. He is also the author of Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022), The Beneficiary (Duke, 2017), and Cosmopolitanisms, co-edited with Paulo Horta (NYU, 2017).  His essays have appeared in The Baffler, n+1, The Nation, The New Statesman, Public Books, the London Review of Books, and the LA Review of Books. His efforts on behalf of justice for Palestine began in 2002, when he collaborated (with the physicist Alan Sokal) on an "Open Letter of American Jews to Our Government" that called for cutting off American aid to Israel if Israel refused to recognize the relevant United Nations resolutions.  The "Open Letter" was published in the New York Times with over 4000 signatures and translated into various languages.  He is the director of two documentaries, “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists” and “What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?” His book Why Read Said Now? is forthcoming from Polity in 2027.

Organzed by the Center for Palestine Studies
& co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a lecture demonstration by Tareq Abboushi,
with Taoufik Ben-Amor.

The past five decades have seen several deliberate efforts to archive Palestinian popular songs by initiatives such as The Palestinian Sound Archive and The Palestinian Folk Music Archive, as well as music and dance troupes, such as Al-Hannouneh and Al-Funoun, and individual singers like Sanaa Moussa, Reem Kilani, Rim Banna, and many others. These songs, however, are not frozen in the archive, but are constantly reinterpreted musically and poetically with many variations and additions. Thus, these songs remain open and alive—a living archive of a collective memory.

Tareq Abboushi is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, and educator. After graduating with honors from William Paterson University with a Jazz Piano Performance degree, Abboushi decided to pursue the buzuq as a means to explore Arab Music. As a performer this led him to collaborate with such notable musicians as Simon Shaheen, Omar Farouk Tekbilek, Suad Massi, Abeer Nehme, and Lotfi Bouchnak. As an award winning composer, his diverse background can be heard across multiple genres ranging from classical Arab, to Jazz, Electronic, film scoring, dance projects, radio, television, as well as commissioned soundscape design for art projects. Abboushi’s discography includes two albums with his band SHUSMO, five albums with Amir ElSaffar, and appearances on many other albums including three with Grammy-winner Dan Zanes. His extensive experience in various styles of music has also made him an invaluable teacher, with a global profile including lectures at Columbia University, NYU, Juilliard, The Museum of the City of New York, Birzeit University, Agder University, and the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.

Taoufik Ben-Amor is the Gordon Gray Jr Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies, Columbia University. He specializes in Arabic language and linguistics, language and identity, Arab music, and music in Sufism. His research combines his interests in music, language and identity in the Arab world through the study of lyrics.