A dream of a socialist commonwealth

JVL Introduction

Adam Hochschild reviews Molly Crabapple’s new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund.

He situates his discussion by imagining an alternative history in which US antisemitism was not pivotal to the closing of its borders to Jewish refugees from 1924 – and one in which US bombs have not reduced Gaza to rubble.

Such imaginings are prompted by Crabapple’s new, carefully-researched-but-passionate history of the Jewish Bund and its fight for a world in which Jews could live safe and full lives.

The Bund was militantly secular, socialist to the core and, intensely anti-Zionist. As the Polish Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote in 1933: “No, we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful…as the nationalisms of all the other nations.”

The Bund’s hopes were crushed in the nightmare of Nazi rule but, says Hochschild, “like many paths not taken, the Bund’s example can still inspire us. Its members fought for their egalitarian, secular, profoundly cosmopolitan vision in the very darkest of times and places.”

Crabapple has evoked the world of Bundism, its philosophy speaking to her “sense of Jewishness in a way that neither the synagogue nor Israel ever had”.

Its vision, brought to life in this book, resonates with increasing numbers of Jews today, capturing as it does an alternative vision to counterpose to the horror of a genocide in Gaza and the monster that Zionism has become.

RK

PS: You can watch Peter Beinart in discussion with Molly Crabapple and Joshua Zimmerman about the Bund here: They Called Zionism “The Most Evil Enemy of the Jewish Proletariat”

This article was originally published by the New York Review of Books on Thu 28 May 2026. Read the original here.