Not many people today know about the radical history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the Jewish socialist party founded within the Russian Empire in 1897—but they should. Understanding the Bund is essential for understanding the long and critically relevant tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. “From the Bund’s very earliest days,” artist and author Molly Crabapple says, members “saw that if there was an attempt to create a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine, it would mean a state of eternal war with both the neighboring countries [and] the Palestinians… inside that country.” In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Crabapple about what the history of the Bund can teach us today in the midst of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine, and about how anti-Zionist Jews, including Crabapple herself, continue to fight for a socialist alternative to Zionism. Studio Production: David HebdenAudio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: What you just heard is Di Shvue, the anthem of the Jewish Labor Bund. It’s appropriate for our guest. This is Marc Steiner. Welcome to the Marc Steiner show here at The Real News, and I’m about to talk to Molly Crabapple. She joins us once again. Artist, activist, writer, co-author of Brothers of the Gun, which is an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a New York Times notable book and listed for 2018 National Book Award, and her memoir, Drawing Blood, which received global praise and attention. Her animated films have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award, Disappearing Rooms. Crapapple’s reportage has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and right here on The Real News. So Molly, welcome. Good to have you back with us. Molly Crabapple: Thank you so much for having me, Marc. And thank you so much for starting with Di Shvue, the Bund’s anthem. Marc Steiner: Tell me, before we get into what’s happened to you recently, getting arrested and what you were protesting, let’s talk a bit about the Bund. I really want to understand how you get into them, and for our listeners, let’s stop here. For our listeners right now, let’s talk about what is the Jewish Bund and then how did Molly jump into it? Molly Crabapple: What was the Jewish Bund? The Jewish Bund was a Jewish socialist, secular, and defiantly anti-Zionist revolutionary party that started in 1897 in the Tzarist Empire and became one of the most popular Jewish movements in Poland and the former Pale of Settlement until it was destroyed by the Holocaust and then by Stalin. And the Bund was a movement that was based on this idea that they called hereness, doykayt in Yiddish, that said that Jews had the right to live in the countries where they were born, where their fathers and mothers were born in the Eastern Europe that had rejected and brutalized them, but was still their home. It was a philosophy that said, “Here where we live now is our country. We don’t have to go to the there of Palestine and colonize it in order to have lives of freedom and of safety. We can do it here and we fight for it here.” Marc Steiner: That whole argument, that discussion has been lost since the founding of Israel, and especially during these wars with, A, the passions about Zionism even if you’re not a Zionist, and B, because Jews always feel preyed upon and the other. But the struggle inside that world, inside the Jewish world, over Zionism and things like the Bund have been around for the last 150 years. Molly Crabapple: As soon as Zionism, political Zionism was created, there was anti-Zionism. Marc Steiner: Exactly. So talk a bit about what you think the Bund’s legacy is now for us, because you’re working on that at this moment. There’s a book coming out, so talk a bit about what their relevancy is for what we’re facing now and what they say to us in this age. Molly Crabapple: Sure. So I spent the last five years working on a book about the Jewish Labor Bund. It’s called Here Where We Live is Our Country, and I think it’s the first full history of the group that’s written for a popular audience. It’s not an academic book. It’s a book that is written in a way that’s as exciting and vivid and funny, where characters talk. That’s something that you could give to a 25-year-old and say, “This is your history.” Now, why did I choose to write a book about the Bund and why does it say something that’s so relevant and so vital for us now? To me, what their legacy is, it’s threefold. The first is that they were humane democratic socialists. They were people whose philosophy was in line with the DSA here. They were people who did not go over to Stalinism, but who nonetheless were a party that fought with their fists and in electoral politics and in the streets for the rights of workers. So that’s the first thing. They were socialists in the best way. They were also people who said that the answer for Jews was not to go and colonize and ethnically cleanse another country in order to make a sort of ersatz homeland, but instead that Jews had the right to live where they were and that this was something worth fighting for, that your home now where you were, was worth defending and could be defended in solidarity with other people. Bernard Goldstein, who was a fighter for the Bund who ran their militia, he compared their philosophy in interwar Poland to that of Black people in America. And Bernard said that from knowledge he spent the last years of his life in the Bronx. The third reason that I have been obsessed with them is that they were so, so prescient about what Zionism would become. From the Bund’s very earliest days, they saw that if there was an attempt to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine, it would mean a state of eternal war with both the neighboring countries, but also with the Palestinians that were inside that country, and that it would mean also an eternal state of war with the Jews that were taken into this project to get rid of their previous cultures, whether it was the Arabic culture of a Jew from Baghdad or the Yiddish culture of a Jew from Vilnius to create them as these new Israelis. And they saw that eventually this violence that Israel would need to inflict from its very first moments would turn inward and create a state that was based on racism and religious fundamentalism. They literally have letters and articles where they’re writing this in the 1920s and the 1930s. Marc Steiner: And here we find ourselves in this moment. This is probably, I think in my lifetime, one of the most dangerous moments we face, not just in Israel, in this country, across the globe, for the rise of neo-fascism. And Israel is at the heart of that. It’s painful and difficult to fathom that Jews could end up running a neo-fascist state. There have always been fascists among the Jews as well as communists and liberals and everybody else, but the idea that a neo-fascist state has taken hold, and that we are, the larger we, are pressing on other people at this moment and also could cause that we bring the Masada to ourselves again. That’s where I think we find ourselves. Molly Crabapple: We find ourselves where a self-declared Jewish state with a big old Star of David on the flag is doing a genocide in Gaza and is involved in an evil, unspeakable invasion of Lebanon, and that’s creating hell every day on the West Bank for Palestinians. That’s where we find ourselves. It’s one of the most shameful and heartbreaking moments that I can think of. On one hand, I’ve always rejected this idea that because a people has been oppressed, that it makes them good people. I don’t actually think oppression, let alone going through a genocide like Jews did, makes anyone better. Marc Steiner: Right. Molly Crabapple: In fact, I think it makes you worse. I think that in fact, the role that the Holocaust has played in cultural and ethical life has in some ways blinded people to the fact that suffering makes no one into saints. I often think about the people of the Soviet Union who had 20 million people were murdered, 20 million who had their cities destroyed, who suffered ungodly amounts under the Nazis, and who pretty soon afterwards killed millions of people in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and no one would look and say, “How could the people of the Soviet Union after suffering so much inflict suffering on others?” Marc Steiner: Right. Right. Molly Crabapple: It wouldn’t even cross people’s mind. But I think because the Holocaust is this event that’s almost put apart from history, this basic truth about humans has been forgotten, that enduring a genocide just means that you’re a people that endured a genocide. It does not mean that you are destined by history never to inflict one on others. Marc Steiner: Exactly. To me, it’s the contradiction that exists when you look at the fact that in the sixties, 70% of all the white freedom fighters were Jews. At the same time, I had cousins who I loved dearly I would sit with, but they were slumlords, and they owned corner stores that ripped off the people in poor neighborhoods where they lived and worked. And the contradictions just abound. And that’s just human existence, I think. I think in the Jewish world, we could use some kind of internal discussion about who we are and let’s deal with reality. Molly Crabapple: Exactly, that we have the same flaws and contradictions and idiocies and heroisms as any other group. Marc Steiner: Let’s talk a bit about your recent arrest. Molly Crabapple: My recent arrest. Marc Steiner: With Nan Goldin and others at Wall Street. Molly Crabapple: Yes. So I was arrested trying to block the stock market from opening with… How many people were we? I think several hundred people organized by Jewish Voices for Peace, which is, speaking of things that give me hope in our people, I love JVP. What a profoundly ethical and brave and amazing group. We were trying to blockade the stock market to protest the full-throated material support that American corporations were giving to the genocide and Gaza, to protest the bombs and bullets that companies like Lockheed Martin, for instance, are sending to tear apart Gazan children. That’s why we were there. And there was a small, pathetic little band of Zionist counter-protesters that threw eggs at us, tried to yell at the meathead cops to be allowed in to scream in our faces, but in general, we were all arrested. And I was very proud to do that. And I think that, honestly, it feels like the least I could do. Marc Steiner: And that’s been happening across the country too and across the globe. And I think it’s really important that, as you were describing, that Jews come out as activists saying, “Not in our name. This is not going to happen. We don’t stand with this.” Molly Crabapple: Oh my God, it’s the most important thing in the world. You have this state that claims us, it claims that it’s acting on behalf of Jews. It perverts our history. It blasphemes our symbols by carving them into the literal earth of Gaza and into Palestinian faces, and it says, “This is Jews. This is Jews doing it. We are Jews and we are inflicting this horror.” And every bit, every particle of my being is like, “Fuck you. No. How dare you?” And for me, I think it is so essential that Jewish people are screaming with their full chests that, “No, this genocidal Israeli state does not represent us. It has no right to excuse its atrocities with our history, with our identity, with our religion, with our pain. It has no right at all, and no, not in our name.” Marc Steiner: So you’re a woman who’s been an artist and a writer and an activist, and you have taken yourself into war zones. Molly Crabapple: I have, yeah. Marc Steiner: To Ukraine and other places. Molly Crabapple: Yeah. I was in Ukraine in 2022. Yes. Oh, man, you’re making me do math. Yeah, 2022. Marc Steiner: It all melds, I know, I understand. Molly Crabapple: Yeah, I know. Marc Steiner: And your writing out of that was very powerful and very painful. That war is going on and has not ended. And it’s also where that borderline between Ukraine and Poland is where my family came from originally. And so we got a lot of back and forth about that. But I’m curious, looking at what’s happening in Ukraine and looking at what’s now happening in Palestine-Israel, where do you think after all this work you’ve done, the kind of visionary kind of thinking you’ve been involved in, where do you think this is taking us? None of us are prescient, but your analysis about where this is taking us and how this happened to us. Molly Crabapple: In terms of particularly the war against the people of Gaza, it’s part of this cheapening of human life. It is part of this, how do I put this? Willingness by governments around the world to countenance people literally being thrown into a meat grinder and mass murdered. This is the worst, what’s happening in Gaza is the worst thing that I have ever witnessed, even though I obviously was not reporting from Gaza, just communicating with my friends inside, but it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I’m not saying that there aren’t worst things going on. It’s not like a hierarchy of suffering, but it’s certainly the worst thing that I’ve ever been aware of in the sense of people who are literally trapped and totally cut off who are being bombed and murdered from the sky, from the ground, from the sea, and who are basically without defense. To me, that element of people being without defense and also totally cut off and unable to escape is what makes this so, it makes it different than Ukraine. Despite the horrific and obscene atrocities that Russia has visited on Ukraine, at least Ukrainians have an open border to Poland, and at least they are being armed by America. They have some ability to defend themselves, inadequate though it is. It’s also what makes it different from Syria, because in Syria, people could still, they could flee to Turkey or to Lebanon, and also they were getting arms, inadequate and often used in bad ways, but still they weren’t defenseless like people are in Gaza. I just think that this phenomenon where we are all watching literal babies having their limbs blown off, and girls with half their skull sheared off on our smartphones every day, while those in power continue to arm and fund it, is something that is like a wound in all of our moral fabric. Marc Steiner: I was thinking about the work you’re doing now in the Bund and JVP now. There’s an arc here to me, a historical political arc, but I’ve never seen before the numbers. Since the Bund was very powerful in Poland and Russia, but looking now at JVP and the anti-war groups, the anti-Zionist and non-Zionist groups of young Jews especially, the movements have similarities. And the power, though, this time seems to be not winding down, and it seems it’s going to have an effect on this country, maybe Israel-Palestine, including inside the Jewish community, and you are in the middle of it. Molly Crabapple: Yeah. Every day, I am in awe of these Jewish kids in JVP, if not now, in just countless, countless groups, some of which aren’t specifically Jewish. A lot of the people who organized the Columbia encampment were Jewish kids. I am in awe of their courage, of their willingness to face a lot of rejection, often from their families, to get arrested, to affect their job prospects, to risk their university educations because of just their profound moral need to protest this genocide. And it is something that’s growing, right? I think that a lot of older people, like people of my mother’s generation, who are American Jews, they had this very delusional view of Israel that was not actually based on even having visited Israel. Or even there were people who didn’t know Hebrew who couldn’t name an Israeli political party, but they had seen the movie Exodus, and they maybe once had visited a kibbutz when they were young for three weeks or so. And they had this very strong emotional attachment, and this emotional attachment utterly blinded them to the horrific crimes that Israel, since its foundation, was inflicting on Palestinian people. I think that the difference with younger Jews is they don’t have that, right? They’re not people who remember a Israel that claimed to be socialist, right? Marc Steiner: Right. Molly Crabapple: They’re people who probably weren’t, they probably never in their lives saw an Israel that wasn’t being governed by Netanyahu. I mean, Netanyahu has basically been in power on and off since he incited Rabin’s murder, I think. Marc Steiner: Exactly, yes. When I look at that, we all have our journeys. In ’67, I tried to join the Israeli Army to fight because of the war. Molly Crabapple: You did? Marc Steiner: Yes. Molly Crabapple: Zion rejected you, man. [inaudible 00:18:36] Jesus. Marc Steiner: That was in the midst of being an anti-Vietnam war activist and organizer in the underground media as well. Molly Crabapple: So why? Why did you- Marc Steiner: Because it was that war that changed a lot of us. It was that war, meeting left-wing Israelis, meeting Palestinians, that changed everything, that went from being a member of Hashomer Hatzair to saying, “No, this is wrong. This is not us. We can’t do this.” That’s where the switch came. Molly Crabapple: Right. Right. Marc Steiner: I’m glad the war was over in seven days. I didn’t join the IDF. But I think that there was a profound switch then, and it’s happening now. When I think about your work on the Bund, and people really need to know this, I can’t wait for it to come out so we really can dive into it deeply together to understand what that history means for us now, and that war in ’67, and where we find ourselves today with this war in Gaza, where we are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, to destroying the entire strip of Gaza. One of my closest friends is Palestinian Ali Zageb, his nephews, two of them were shot and killed by settlers outside of Ramallah. Molly Crabapple: [inaudible 00:19:58]. Marc Steiner: In this madness now. Molly Crabapple: Yes, yes. Marc Steiner: And I’m in touch with a guy I’m going to get on the air with again, Mohammed Rah, who is in Gaza trying to take care of his people. People don’t fathom how horrendous this war is for the people in Gaza, what it’s doing to them. Molly Crabapple: Every single bit of life is being destroyed. Every university, every library, every hospital, every restaurant, everything that people built against such odds, right? Because these people were building these things under blockade, under extreme limits on construction materials, under poverty. They’re building them while being bombed every two years. People in Gaza still built so much beauty in spite of everything. And all of that has been systematically block-by-block destroyed and turned into blood-soaked dust by this genocidal invasion. I also, I reported from Gaza in 2015, and I had this amazing translator I work with, Mohammed Rajab, and right now he’s a driver for UNICEF, and he is living in a tent with four little boys and his wife and his elderly parents. His father-in-law died because Israel sadistically keeps medicine out of the Gaza Strip. And so he died in pain because of this sadistic Israeli blockade that they’ve done at the same time as they’re doing this genocidal invasion. And I just think about that. One moment you have a home, you have things that you’ve built, you have beauty that you’ve made, you have a family, and then the next moment you’re living in a fucking tent surrounded by just the absolute destruction of everything you’ve ever known. And right now at this moment, where Israel is essentially liquidating Northern Gaza, where they’re rounding up men and forcing them to strip and writing numbers on their foreheads and taking them to God knows what torture camp, my heart wants to leap out of my chest from rage at this. Marc Steiner: Yes, I understand completely. Before we’ll let you go, I want to go back to this arc and also where you think this takes us now. I mean, the Bund that you wrote about was a very powerful movement, a non-Zionist Jewish movement. Molly Crabapple: Anti-Zionist Jewish movement. Marc Steiner: Anti-Zionist, excuse me, crystal clear, anti is the right word, not non, anti-Zionist. Molly Crabapple: They literally had mass meetings where the banner was “Liquidate Zionism,” and they passed resolutions that, this is in Warsaw in the twenties. They passed resolutions that were like, “It is the duty of every worker to struggle with all his might against Zionism and national chauvinism.” Marc Steiner: So do you think there is actually a hope that we can build a really strong, not Bund, because that’s another century, but a movement that really takes hold inside the Jewish world that speaks to the rest world saying no, and we can actually do something to stop this, that we have a voice, and it’s not just up to the folks that have all the money in all the kind of major Jewish organizations? Molly Crabapple: I absolutely think that a movement is being built and not just in America. There’s networks of Jews in Europe that are standing against this, in Argentina, in Australia. In places around the world that have Jewish communities, Jews are absolutely rejecting this. And they’re organizing both just as people in general political things like how I’m in the Democratic socialists, but also they’re organizing as Jews. And I think it’s something that is scaring the shit out of the people that are the donors to these major Jewish orgs. There was an interesting article. Who wrote it? It was basically labor reporting about how Jewish organizations around the country, from Jewish day schools to synagogues to just like lefty Jewish cultural groups, have been purging anti-Zionist employees, especially young people, who are people who don’t necessarily have a big platform and a lot of means to fight back. They’ve been firing people over being in a keffiyeh in a Facebook photo or liking an Instagram post. And I think the reason that there’s this huge, huge institutional backlash against young anti-Zionist Jews is because these donors are scared shitless because they know that they’re losing an entire generation. Marc Steiner: Exactly. I agree. As we close out today, I want to come back to that day where you all went to Wall Street, you and Nan Goldin and the others, and the effect that had, and those demonstrations are not stopping. Molly Crabapple: Absolutely not, no. JVP has been doing these demonstrations that involve civil disobedience and mass arrests. They have a long history of doing that. But specifically, they’ve been doing that since very, very soon after the genocide began in Gaza. They took over Grand Central Station, hundreds of people were arrested. I was also part of a demonstration where we took over the Statue of Liberty. Over and over and over again, whether in the Capitol or at sites in New York, they have been doing these mass demonstrations, where hundreds of people are getting arrested in order to show that they utterly reject this war. Obviously, I don’t think that we alone can stop the bombs. We’re a very small group, despite how big our mouths are. I mean, Jews in general. But I think that the moral power of Jews utterly rejecting this genocide and utterly rejecting this apartheid being carried out in our name is crucial. And I think it’s terrifying to the Zionist establishment. And it’s not going away. It’s only growing. Marc Steiner: Molly Crabapple, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re an extremely busy human being. I appreciate your work, your creativity, your strength to stand up to all this that’s happening and what you paint, draw, and write. And I look forward to talking when the Bund comes out, your book on the Bund. And thank you so much for everything and taking time out of your valuable work to join us today. Molly Crabapple: Thank you so much. My pleasure to be here. Thank you. Marc Steiner: I want to thank Molly Crabapple once again for joining us and bringing her creative genius to bear on so many issues we’re confronting, especially Israel-Palestine. We’ll link to all of her written and artistic work. It’s well worth the exploration. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, audio editor Alina Nehlich for all of her magic in audio producing, Rosette Sewali for producing the Marc Steiner Show and the tireless Killer Ravala for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at [email protected], and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thanks to Molly Crabapple for joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.