Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund tells the dramatic story of a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” to resurrect the lost world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these works, and one image stood out: a girl in a sky-colored dress hurling a rock through a cottage window—Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows. Through Itka, Crabapple encountered the Jewish Labor Bund.

Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist, fighting for dignity and equality “here where we live.” Crabapple re-creates this world through portraits of poets, revolutionaries, and lovers on the barricades, their lives shaped by revolution and catastrophe. The book asks what this legacy offers today.

Join the New America Fellows Program for a conversation with 2020 New America Fellow Molly Crabapple and 2024 New America Fellow Rozina Ali about Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

Copies of Here Where We Live Is Our Country are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.