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The Story Of The Jewish Bund / Molly Crabapple

Jun 16
Episode 1913
Bundists and Zionists, they hated each other. They hated each other in the way that only people from a relatively small community can hate each other. And the Bund always saw that Zionism was an imperialist movement. They always called out the dispossession of Palestinians and they had a profound ethical critique of Zionism that was extremely prophetic. I think about a quote by the Bund's leader in interwar Poland, Henryk Ehrlich. Where he says, ‘If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, it will be in a state of eternal war with the external enemy, Arabs; of eternal struggle over every scrap of ground with the internal enemy, Arabs; and will be waging a campaign of extermination against the culture of the non-Hebraeized Jews of Palestine’. Ehrlich asks, ‘Is this a climate in which democracy and progress will grow, or is this a climate in which reaction and chauvinism will flourish?’ Ehrlich asked that question in 1938. What is it? It's 88 years later and Israel is a state where government ministers wear noose pins and bake cakes for their birthday celebrating the hanging of Palestinians. I think anyone who looks at Ehrlich's words would know that he was dead right.

Artist and writer Molly Crabapple joins This Is Hell! to talk about her new book, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund", published by Penguin Random House.

Molly is the author of two books, her 2015 memoir, "Drawing Blood," and "Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War," which is written and Illustrated by Molly and Marwan Hisham. "Brothers of the Gun" was long-listed for a National Book Award. She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage was the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

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Molly Crabapple

 

Guest

Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer .She is the author of the NY Times bestseller, Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which was released by One World/Random House in April 2026.  Molly’s two previous books are Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which  long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award, and her memoir, Drawing Blood, which received global praise and attention. Her animated films have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Molly’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, and the winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022. In 2023, she was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She became a journalist sketching the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street, before covering, with words and art, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lebanese snipers, Guantanamo Bay, the US-Mexican border, Pennsylvania prisoners, New York cabbies, Greek refugee camps, and hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated journalism, collaborating with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The ACLU. Her animations are on permanent display at The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Molly has spoken to audiences around the world, from Jakarta to Beirut, São Paulo to Ramallah, Mumbai to Paris, at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, The University of Chicago, Princeton, and The London School of Economics, and at museums including The Brooklyn Museum and The Guggenheim.   Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, Columbia University and the New York Historical Society.