182: No Country For Old Mensheviks, with Molly Crabapple

Quick Overview

The podcast episode features artist and writer Molly Crabapple discussing her book "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund," detailing the anti-Zionist Jewish socialist revolutionary group, the Bund, which fiercely opposed Zionism from its inception in 1897, viewing it as a nationalist, racist ideology collaborating with imperial powers.

Key Points: Molly Crabapple spent seven years researching and writing her book, learning Yiddish because the Bund viewed the language as central to working-class Jewish cultural pride. The Bund and political Zionism were founded in the same year, 1897, with the Bund starting in a Vilnius attic and Zionism launching at a casino in Basel, Switzerland. The Bund viewed early Zionism as a "crackhead fever dream" and resented its adoption of the same 'oriental alien race' rhetoric used by their oppressors in Tsarist Russia. Crabapple connects the Bund's ideology to the Black Panther Party, noting their creation of community care structures like free breakfast programs alongside their commitment to elevating Yiddish culture and armed self-defense. Bund leader Henrik Erlick predicted in 1917 that a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to "eternal fear of the external enemy" and an "untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine." The Bund refused to participate in mourning rituals after the 1929 Hebron massacre, holding a 30,000-person rally under the banner "Liquidate Zionism," blaming the violence on Zionism's collaboration with the British occupation. The hosts and Crabapple conclude that blaming Jewish groups like the Bund for not escaping the Holocaust is an act of profound cruelty, as no Jewish group could have stopped the Nazi war machine, a point underscored by the Armenian Genocide museum experience.

Context: The hosts of the "Bad Asbara" podcast, Matt Leeb and Daniel Mate, recorded this episode on President's Day, opening with commentary on the holiday before introducing their guest, artist and writer Molly Crabapple. Crabapple discusses her extensive research into the Jewish Bund, a revolutionary socialist organization active in Eastern Europe, whose history and anti-Zionist stance she details in her forthcoming book, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund."