Here Where We Live Is Our Country Quotes

“Despite all manner of degradation, humans stubbornly resist their own erasure. They refuse the role that fascists have written for them. They mock their oppressors. They create and love.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“demands for political freedom and self-government. The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger…. The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable upset of the Jewish community…. This meeting calls on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish Street. The answer to tragically but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in more national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clashes, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“In the aftermath of the 1881 pogroms, an Odesa physician named Leon Pinsker began to advance the new idea that Jews could only be safe in an independent Jewish state. In a few years, this would be known as Zionism.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“She would always remember how "excited young voices criss-crossed.... Little tongues of flame leapt up from person to person, and the whole attic was humming and sizzling like dry birch bark set aflame, throwing into the dark, dense night of the shtetl the voices' challenge and yearning.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls…pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt?”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“Though they liked their guns, the Bundists believed that solidarity was their greatest weapon. If they liberated Egypt alongside the Egyptians, they wouldn’t need to flee across the sea. Bundists raised strike funds for Christian workers and loaned them their printing presses. In the Grodno, they led strikes amongst Christian brick workers. In Riga, they organized draft riots. In Ukraine, they created parallel organizations. In the tsarist empire’s rural Belarusian borderlands, they worked with local peasant groups to publish pamphlets that described how the peasants’ true enemies, “the military, the rich, and the uncaring regime,” used Jews as their scapegoat.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“As I read London’s speech, a pair of sentences struck me. Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives…for liberty? They…pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“Basel On the way home from one interminable political gathering full of enemies, Medem stopped by Basel, Switzerland, to observe another group of antagonists—the Zionists, who were in the midst of their sixth world congress. Political Zionism had made its global debut in 1897, the same year as the Bund, and the two groups had been enemies from the start. They couldn’t have been more different. While the Bund’s first congress comprised a few fugitives in a Vilna attic, the inaugural Zionist congress filled a posh Swiss casino and turned Theodor Herzl, its founder, into a superstar. A journalist from Vienna, Herzl had once thought Jews could win acceptance through assimilation; he even proposed mass conversion to Christianity. Then he covered the Dreyfus affair. In sophisticated France, Herzl watched the courts condemn a Jewish army lieutenant named Alfred Dreyfus on obviously fake charges of espionage, then sentence him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Dreyfus was loyal. He had fought for France. He had assimilated. He had done everything right. It didn’t matter in the end. After the trial, French crowds beat Jews and burned Jewish”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“When they parted, the samovar cold, the cigarettes smoked down, the rich to their silken beds and Sam to his rat-infested shirt factory, they were equals, just like the poor Arkady and the rich Pati were equals, because the revolution would make everyone equal, and never again would anyone have to bow their head.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“The more I dug into the Bundist past, the more I realized it was not past at all. It was, rather, a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present. Despite war, state collapse, and genocidal repression, the Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions at the ballot box. The Bundists built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today. The Bund was a Jewish group, but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity. In the story of the Bund—across decades and geographies, ages and faiths—I found the story of our own time, a blueprint for survival, a cautionary tale of death, and a philosophy that might yet save us.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies.”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger…. The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable upset of the Jewish community…. This meeting calls on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish Street. The answer to tragically but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in more national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clashes, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement. To”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“But just like every thug wants to be an artist”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“Unlike immigrants”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

“Governments are machines far sturdier than most radicals imagine. The ecstasy of the street fades quickly. Cold sets in. Intellectuals dither. Respectable folk long for order. Daily life resumes”
― Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund