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.
VENUE
Columbia Journalism School
Pulitzer Hall, Lecture Hall, 3rd Floor
2950 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
Advanced registration is required for all attendees, including CU/BC ID holders.
"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.