By Molly Crabapple
One World—2026
Reviewed by Steve Halpern
The title of Molly Crabapple's profoundly important book underscores one of the most important themes of our times. "Here where we live is our country." Those words undercut the ideology of the political movement known as Zionism. Supporters of Zionism argue that the true home of the Jewish people isn't where we live, but in the nation of Israel formerly known as Palestine.
The history of the Jewish Labor Bund that Crabapple documented shows how most Jews actively opposed the idea of Zionism for about half of a century. There were two primary reasons for this opposition that continue to be relevant today. Zionists were in fundamental agreement with vicious anti-Semites who argued that Jews did not belong in Europe. Both left and right wing Zionists supported the brutalization and expulsion of the indigenous and majority Palestinian population.
So, what were the politics of the Jewish Labor Bund? The Bund worked to establish alliances of Jewish and non-Jewish labor organization with the goal of establishing a workers government where Jews would have equal rights.
Crabapple started her study of this history by looking at her family members who had been active in the Bund. In his groundbreaking book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi also related his family to the history of Palestinian resistance to colonization.
I happen to be Jewish and one of the reasons why I find Crabapple's book fascinating is because of my background. My four grandparents were Jewish and immigrated to this country from Eastern Europe. Three of my grandparents came from the Pale Settlement of Czarist Russia where most Jews lived for about 1,000 years. My other grandparent immigrated from Hungary.
My parents carried on some Jewish traditions, but like many Jews, they weren't religious. My parents also lived in the years of the Nazi organized Holocaust that caused the deaths of one out of every three Jews in the world. The ultimate goal of the Nazis was to eliminate Jewish people altogether. The fact that I was born and lived for 73 years is evidence that the Nazis failed to achieve their repugnant goal.
Given this background, my parents, as well as other Jewish parents of their generation felt it was important for their children to be exposed to Jewish culture. So, for several years I attended Hebrew School, and at the age of thirteen I was Bar Mitzvahed.
During the years when I attended Hebrew School, my teachers gave me a completely uncritical view of the nation of Israel. In other words, my teachers indoctrinated me into the ideology of Zionism. Then, at the age of nineteen I met a Palestinian woman who began to destroy my illusions in the state of Israel.
I was raised in the city of Newark, New Jersey and attended a high school that was overwhelmingly African American. During those years I became aware of the profound disparity between the inner city schools in Newark and the affluent public schools in the suburban communities.
These were also the years of the movement that protested the U.S. government's war against the Vietnamese people. I began to realize that the injustices I witnessed weren't about mistakes in judgement or a lack of sensitivity. No, the problems of inequality and war were clear examples of how there was something profoundly wrong with the political economic system of capitalism. This was the atmosphere that caused me to develop a socialist consciousness and look more closely at the myth of Zionist ideology.
The Pale Settlement
The Pale Settlement was a section of the Czarist Empire located in the area of the Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. This is where millions of Jews lived and were routinely exposed to vicious discrimination.
In Czarist Russia the Black Hundreds were a prominent political party that also routinely organized raids that murdered thousands of Jews. The Yiddish word pogrom was invented to identify those raids. In the United States, similar raids by the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of African Americans.
Under Czarist rule, Jews were not allowed to live in the largest cities of Saint Petersburg or Moscow. There were quotas of how many Jews were drafted into the Russian armed forces. Those terms of service might extend to twenty-five years. Jews who had been drafted oftentimes divorced their wives because serving this long military sentence could mean they would never see their family again.
The 1905 Russian uprising
The Russian defeat in the war against Japan caused an economic crisis. Workers strikes became commonplace throughout the country. At that time, working people and peasants of Russia did not have basic human rights. Workers were incarcerated for merely having meetings. So, under those conditions worker's organizations came together to form Soviets, or worker's councils. These Soviets protested the victimization of their leaders. The Soviets engaged in political strikes where they demanded basic rights for workers. Political strikes were rare in the United States.
In 1905 there was a mass demonstration in Saint Petersburg that asked the Czar to listen to worker's grievances. The Czar ordered the mounted Cossacks to attack the demonstration. The Cossacks then murdered hundreds of demonstrators.
In the Pale Settlement the Jewish Labor Bund and socialist organizations organized armed uprisings that, for a while, were effective. Then with the defeat of the 1905 uprising there was a wave a pogroms throughout the Pale Settlement.
The Bund, the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks
As with any revolutionary movement, there are disagreements as to which strategy will be most effective. The Bund agreed with the Menshevik wing of the resistance movement. The Mensheviks argued for a decentralized organization where various chapters would adopt to their particular environment. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin of the Bolsheviks argued for a democratic centralized organization. This meant that there would be a democratic discussion at national meetings, but once decisions were voted on, the entire membership would be required to carry out the line of the party.
The differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks mushroomed when Lenin returned to Russia in April of 1917. At that time, a popular insurrection forced the Czar to abdicate. A provisional government ran the day to day functions of the nation. The Soviet workers councils represented workers and soldiers who deposed the Czar.
At that time, literally millions of Russian soldiers died in the First World War, and there was no chance for a Russian victory against Germany. There was famine in the cities. Peasants had few, if any rights and usually worked on land owned by affluent landowners.
Lenin argued that the people wanted peace, bread, and land. He felt that the only way for this to happen was to take power away from the provisional government and give all power to the Soviets.
The Mensheviks as well as their supporters in the Bund opposed that perspective. Molly Crabapple agreed with this perspective of the Bund. She argued that the Bund members had dedicated their lives to liberating Jews and all working people. She implied that Lenin's perspective ignored the life experience of the leaders of the Bund.
What is a political discussion?
In order to put this disagreement into perspective I think it is useful to ask the question: What is a political discussion?
In the United States there are highly publicized events called "elections." While the news media gives a tremendous amount of publicity to Democratic and Republican Party candidates, candidates of other parties are largely ignored.
In the last Presidential election Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed on most major issues. They both supported the Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians. They both supported mass deportations. They both had essentially no problem with the gross disparity of wealth in this country. Their one disagreement was about what to do with the demonstrators who attacked the capital on January 6, 2020.
Donald Trump was apparently frustrated by the fact that his politics weren't essentially different from the politics of Kamala Harris. So, he made the insulting and repugnant remark that Haitians "eat cats." Kamala Harris responded, not by denouncing the statement, but by laughing because she thought this was funny.
Harris criticized Trump for being "weak." Trump criticized his opponents for being "lightweights." In other words, elections in the United States aren't about arguing for or against issues that people care about. No, elections are mud-slinging festivals where candidates argue that one candidate isn't quite as horrendous as the other.
However, in 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued about real issues and organized rank and file workers around those issues. In his polemics, Lenin made forceful arguments, but he never questioned the integrity and commitment of those who disagreed with his perspective.
Before the October 1917 Russian Revolution Lenin argued that, history would not forgive the Bolsheviks if they failed to take power. Today we can put those words into perspective.
Czarist Russia had the largest land mass of any nation in the world. After the Revolution, Russia became the Soviet Union and was attacked by fourteen nations on all of its borders. The Russian armed forces had just been decisively defeated by Germany in the First World War.
Leon Trotsky, who was Jewish and raised in the Ukraine became the commander of the Red Army. In a period of two and a half years, the Red Army defeated all of the invading armies. So, we can ask the hypothetical question: What would have happened if the Bolsheviks failed to take power?
The Nazi invasion of Poland
Molly Crabapple gave a comprehensive history of the Bund before during and after the German Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland. During this entire period, that included the Holocaust, there were vicious and murderous attacks on millions of Jews.
An inspiring aspect of Crabapple's book is her documentation of the resistance organized by the Bund during this entire period. She showed how Bernard Goldstein was the leader of an armed resistance to vicious anti-Semitic pogroms. Goldstein brought together Bund members, with gangsters, Polish socialists, and workers to do armed combat with those who attempted to murder Jews.
The Bund also organized relief for the poor, sanatoriums, summer camps for children, a newspaper, sports contests, and schools etc... The Nazis weren't even able to shut down the Bund newspaper during their occupation of Poland.
Marek Edelman was a member of the Bund and a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He and other Bund members put aside their differences with the Zionists to do battle with the Nazi mass murderers. Edelman survived the uprising and after the war he continued to live in Poland and became a cardiologist.
There was one persistent problem that plagued the Bund and all Polish people during the years the Nazi occupation. Rank and file Polish people did not have guns and the armed forces who had the guns refused to distribute those guns to the people.
Because the Bolsheviks took power they were able to arm the people, and, in spike of tremendous obstacles, they succeeded in defeating the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Stalin and Trotsky
While Molly Crabapple's book is well worth reading, it has another weakness. Because Crabapple supports the Menshevik perspective of the Bund, she neglects to mention the profound difference between the politics of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky argued that Stalin betrayed the essence of what the Russian Revolution was about. Stalin organized show trials that led to the murders of most of the leaders of the Revolution, including Trotsky. He made a disastrous non-aggression pact with the Nazis. Then he supported the nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek after Chiang murdered thousands of members of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927. Stalin gave arms to the Zionist terrorist organization Haganah that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
While the Soviet Union eventually defeated the Nazis, literally millions of Russian people died as a result of Stalin's deal with Hitler. This left the Soviet Union unprepared for the Nazi invasion. However, because the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, the people of the Soviet union were armed, and in spike of Stalin's stupidity, the Red Army defeat the fascist invasion.
Trotsky also ridiculed Stalin's argument that members of social democratic parties were "social fascists." Because of this perspective the German Communist Party refused to unite with the social democrats to defeat the Nazis in the German elections of 1933. Stalin's armed forces organized to murder leaders Victor Adler and Henryk Erlich of the Bund because of his seemingly insane view that they were "social fascists."
Trotsky understood what it would mean when the Nazis came to power. He broke all relations with the Soviet government when Hitler came to power without any of the German socialist parties firing a single shot in resistance. Even the Nazis acknowledged that in their early years they could have been easily defeated had the workers parties organized to stop their advance.
Given this history, I believe it is clear that Lenin and Trotsky's politics were the complete opposite of the politics of Joseph Stalin.
Today, the United States government is trying to overthrow the Cuban government. They use an oil blockade to starve the Cuban people and might be preparing for an invasion of the island. However, the Cuban people have an advantage that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto didn't have. The people are armed and will meet any invasion with millions of Cubans who have guns.
Palestine
The Bund sent their leader Victor Adler to Palestine to investigate and report on the Zionist movement before the establishment of the state of Israel. While Jewish immigrants worked to integrate themselves into the culture of the United States, Jewish immigrants to Palestine had a different approach.
While Palestinians were the vast majority of the population, Zionists felt they had a right to the land and were taking as much Arab land as they could. The European Jews in no way identified with the indigenous Jews of Palestine who normally spoke Arabic. Adler had a discussion with a leading Palestinian who was critical of the Zionist drive to steal his homeland. This leader had no problem with Jewish immigration, but wanted Palestine to have equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.
Crabapple quoted the Bund leader Henryk Erlich as to why he opposed the Zionist ideology. "If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the eternal enemy (Arabs)...Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow? Indeed is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?"
After close to three years of genocide against Palestinians and 76 years of Israeli organized brutalization, this statement by Henryk Erlich rings just as true today as it did before the establishment of the state of Israel. However, there is another aspect to Zionism that is just as insidious.
The Zionist leaders actually believed the racist stereotypes used by vicious anti-Semites. These were the ideas that Jewish people didn't belong in Europe and that the Holocaust happened because Jews are inherently "weak."
Because of this perverted perspective literally all Zionist leaders changed their names to take on a new identity. Golda Meir's initial name was Goldie Mabovitch. David Ben-Gurion's initial name was David Grün. The primary language of the Jewish communities in the Pale Settlement and in the United States was Yiddish. The national language of Israel is Hebrew.
Molly Crabapple's book gives us an inspiring chapter in the history of the worker's movement in the world. Reading her book, we can also view the seemingly insane defense of the criminal policies of the state of Israel from a different perspective. That is how for half a century most Jews rejected the Zionist perspective because it rejected the essence of who Jewish people are. So, in spite of it's limitations, I highly recommend reading Molly Crabapple's history of the Jewish Labor Bund.
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