Daniel Denvir interviews Molly Crabapple about her book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. The Bund was founded in a Vilna safe house in 1897 and within a decade was the largest revolutionary party in the tsarist empire — 30,000 members, printing presses, smuggling routes, and funding sent back from New York sweatshops. Its core analysis was that Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, “as a race and as a class,” and that this demanded organizing autonomously as Jews while fighting alongside everyone else.

What the Bund was up against:

  • The Pale of Settlement: the western provinces where the empire confined its Jewish population, from Dvinsk to Odessa
  • Jews barred from the countryside and most trades, capped in gymnasiums and universities
  • A military conscription term of 25 years starting at age twelve, against five years from eighteen for Christian subjects — explicitly to force conversion
  • Pogroms that Bundist histories describe as stirred up by undercover police and state rumor, not popular instinct

The Vilna Group’s founding insight arrived only after failure. Their study circles were designed to turn workers into revolutionaries; instead they produced young people carrying around half-read books to seem impressive. The breakthrough was abandoning theory-first organizing and putting literate cadres at the service of the strikes and mutual-aid funds Jewish workers had already built themselves.

The Bund’s answer to the empire’s “Jewish question” was neither assimilation nor a homeland. It was national cultural autonomy, borrowed from the Austro-Marxists: equal dignity for every language of the empire, Yiddish schools and newspapers and ballots, as against the alternative of mutually ethnic-cleansing border wars.

Then came the political catastrophe Crabapple is most pointed about. At the 1903 congress, the Bund demanded recognition as sole representative of the Jewish proletariat, lost the vote, and walked out — taking its three votes with it. Without them, Lenin’s cadre-party line won, and his faction took the name Bolshevik. Her lesson: “you have got to stay in that room and fight ruthlessly for your position.”

In interwar Poland the Bund reached its peak, building a rival civilization for the Jewish working class:

  • Scouts, a teen movement (Tsukunft), summer camps, a women’s movement fighting for equal pay and childcare
  • The most popular sports club in the country, Morgenstern
  • The Medem Sanatorium — “the Children’s Paradise” — where slum children got their own parliament and newspaper and were never hit
  • Sofia Dubnova’s sex column on women’s right to orgasm; the poet Mordechai Gebirtig
  • Bernard Goldstein’s Warsaw Self-Defense Militia, which restricted guns to top leadership and refused special privileges for its own members, on the theory that armed men with privileges are the seed of authoritarianism

The Bund no longer existed in the Soviet Union by 1923, purged as “Bundists” even when its former members had joined the Communists. The rest was destroyed by the Nazis: Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the war and about seven thousand now.

The interview’s hardest material is the ghetto. Collective punishment for any act of resistance. Nazis promising bread and marmalade to people boarding boxcars for a “work camp.” The Bund’s Zelman Friedrich, dressed as a railway worker by the Polish Socialist Party, following the trains to Treblinka and producing the first major Jewish report on the death camp, smuggled abroad by Jan Karski. And in 1942, the Bund’s Mordechai Orzech rejecting a united Jewish armed resistance — because the Bund wanted to fight alongside the Polish socialist movement. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising followed without it, the first urban revolt in occupied Europe, fought with fifty pistols from a Home Army that did not believe Jews would use them.

Crabapple is unsparing about the Polish left’s partial solidarity: the Polish Socialist Party smuggled and hid people, and also watched its friends burn from the other side of the wall, as Poles rode the merry-go-round in the park outside while the ghetto was in flames in the center of the city.

Two things land hardest in her account of the aftermath. First, that the Jews of Palestine survived not by their own hand but because the British stopped Rommel at El-Alamein — and that veterans of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were, a few years later, ethnically cleansing Palestinian villages. Second, that suffering sanctifies no one. Her line, crediting Olufemi Taiwo: suffering is not a finishing school. The failure of solidarity — closed borders, refused refugees, a Europe and America that would not take people in — is what she says let a violent supremacist answer achieve hegemony among people who had survived the unsurvivable.

The Bund’s wager was that Jewish liberation and everyone else’s were the same fight, and the historical record is that it lost. What survives is the argument, and a pair of practical lessons Crabapple draws from the movement’s failures rather than its songs: don’t leave the room, and don’t lecture the working class about its own interests.