The Bund lives

I have written about the way the Bund has been hijacked by antizionists. Some have taken to calling themselves neo-Bundists, as if the Bund no longer exists and they are going to revive it. The antizionist Bund of their dreams.

What none of these latter-day lovers of the Bund have done is talk to actual Bundists. Indeed, they have more or less refused to talk to real live Bundists. Melbourne has a thriving Bund organisation that is almost 100 years old, in fact the only Bund organisation in the world. I grew up in the Bund, in SKIF, its youth organisation. I have written a lot about this. But we have not heard from live Bundists. About how the antizionists are co-opting their organisation for ideological reasons.

My nephew is on the executive of the Bund. He remains committed to the Bund in a way that I no longer am, though I have a deep affection for it, for the place where I grew up. That’s why I have decided to publish this piece, by my nephew.

By Allan Preiss

In April 2026 Molly Crabapple’s book Here Where We Live Is Our Country was released. It quickly became a New York Times best seller. It was promoted as a history of the Jewish Labour Bund, the anti-Zionist, democratic socialist party that dominated Jewish politics from its founding in 1897 until the end of the Second World War.

As a lifelong member of the Bund in Australia and a longstanding Bund committee member I looked forward to reading the book. (This review is written in a personal capacity)

I read the book with mixed emotions, pride in the achievements of the Bund she described and a growing sense of discomfort.

The book is Crabapple’s version of the Bund’s history, a selective version that says more about her than about the Bund. It is written to justify the arguments of those, including Crabapple herself, who seek to delegitimise Israel and its founding in 1948. Although she draws on historical documents and accounts, she selectively presents evidence and, in places makes factual errors.

The book has led to renewed interest in the Bund and has been embraced by antizionists and those who are strongly opposed to the Netanyahu government in Israel. After neglecting, or rejecting the Bund and its ideology for many years, they now embrace it as justification for the antizionist views they hold.

Recently Sarah Schwartz representing the Jewish Council of Australia appeared at the Royal Commission On Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. The JCA is a trenchant critic of Israel and strongly pro-Palestine. She stated that over the years, she was exposed to the perspectives of historical Jewish organisations like the Jewish Labour Bund that she had never been taught about.

This echoes the views of Crabapple and for the same reasons. They are interested only in the historical anti-Zionist perspective of the Bund, an organisation that is still alive and active today.

They are inspired by the historical Bund. But not at all interested in today’s Bund.

Crabapple is a talented storyteller and an engaging writer. The book is an easy read and contains some excellent descriptions of key events in the life of the Bund, a life that formally began in an attic in Vilna in 1897. Coincidentally, this is the same year as the first Zionist congress was held in the Stadtcasino in Basel Switzerland. The contrast between those two beginnings could not be starker.

Crabapple’s book spends a great deal of time contrasting these differing ideologies. However, she ignores or downplays the fact that their differences were less about the legitimacy of a yet to be founded state of Israel, and more about an internal debate within European Jewry about how to ensure the ongoing survival and development of vibrant Jewish communities.

Although the book is absorbing, my feeling of discomfort persisted.

It struck me that it was written the same way I learned maths. I was an extremely poor maths student and often went to the back of the book where the answers were posted and worked my way back to the problem.

Crabapple begins with the conclusion – Israel is a white colonial settler enterprise that ethnically cleansed Palestine and has no right to exist and then constructs a selective history of the Bund to support the conclusion.

The book is not an attempt to faithfully record the history of the Bund in its full complexity.

For example, she states that the Bund ceased to be an active organisation in 1949. That is simply incorrect. After the War there were Bund groups active in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, France, Australia and even Israel. There was an active Bund World Coordinating Committee until at least 1977.

It would be disingenuous to argue that the Bund, although still active in Australia and to a lesser degree France, is more than a shadow of itself. Just as it is disingenuous of Crabapple to assert that the Bund died in 1949.

As a serious historian of the Bund, Crabapple should know that the Bund Coordinating Committee condemned the 1975 United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. And that there was a small but active Bund in Israel for many years. She mentions neither. She is either unaware or has chosen to overlook these things as they do not fit with her narrative about the Bund being implacably opposed to the State of Israel.

Crabapple knows of the work of the Bund in Australia, where it has been active continuously since 1928. She refers to it in her book.

She should know that the Bund in Melbourne has played a prominent role in either establishing or maintaining many important Jewish institutions including Jewish Care (or the Jewish Welfare Society as it was originally know), the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and Library and the Sholem Aleichem College, the only day school in the world that teaches Yiddish as part of its curriculum.

This year SKIF in Australia, the youth wing of the Bund, will celebrate 100 years since the founding of SKIF in Poland and will also mark 76 years of continuous SKIF work in Melbourne. In those 76 years thousands of young people have attended regular Sunday meetings or attended SKIF camps.

Yet she made no attempt to reach out to the Bund and/or SKIF in Melbourne for a view about the work of the Bund today. Surely, a serious historian would have done so.

There is, I suspect a reason for this. Like all enduring organisations, the Bund has evolved and its view of Israel has developed since 1948. It is now more accurate to describe the Bund as non-Zionist than anti-Zionist. Had Crabapple engaged with the Bund here in Australia she may have encountered perspectives that challenge the central thesis in the book – Israel is an illegitimate settler colonial enterprise that the Bund opposed to the bitter end.

Crabapple uses the book to burnish her revolutionary credentials by inserting herself into the narrative on multiple occasions. She imagines what she would have done. Or equates situations she describes in pre-War Europe with her own involvement with contemporary revolutionary causes.

She describes Exileland, her term for “the crucible that forged the revolutionaries who defined the 20^th century”. It fanned out from Switzerland to other European capitals and was populated by left wing radicals trying to stay a step ahead of the regimes that would imprison or murder them.

Crabapple goes on to describe her own stint in Exileland in Istanbul where she was writing a book with a journalist from ISIS-held Syria. She recalls that upon hearing Turkish Samat music the nostalgia cuts her deeply and reminds her of the parrot in the lobby of the Grand Hotel de Londres that she tried to teach to say, “Fuck the police.”

The comparison is jarring. Is she seriously equating her journalistic work with that of the revolutionaries who risked prison, or even death to continue their work? What exactly was she risking?

Similarly, when writing of the 1905 Revolution Crabapple describes Vilna’s old city as functioning as a temporary autonomous zone, then quickly pivots to her experiences during the 2011 anticapitalist protest that occupied Wall Street for 59 days. Again, she uses the opportunity to showcase her revolutionary credentials in a false equivalence between events separated by more than 100 years.

At other points, she imagines conversations and invents scenes in order to attribute motives to historical figures. This is a literary technique, but it is not one that strengthens the work as serious history.

There are also significant errors in the book. These are detailed in a Substack article by Eliezer Aryeh in his Substack article from May 29, 2026, where he outlines four significant errors.

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One of the errors is revealing. She quotes from Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 Iron Wall essay to prove that subjugating the local Palestinians was inevitable and the desired outcome. What she omits, is his conclusion in that essay that once the Palestinians accepted that Israel was there to stay that both people could live together with equal rights.

Finally, in her acknowledgments she thanks many individuals and organisations. This is common practice.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, she specifically thanks Palestinians.

I am at a loss to understand why she has done this. What has been their role in her research? How have they contributed to a deeper understanding of the Bund’s history? What insights has she gleaned from them about how to build and sustain vibrant Jewish communities?

Now more than ever Israel needs a Bund organisation to fight for the rights of Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians to live full and active lives and build communities that fight for dignity for all, while sustaining rich cultural and intellectual and communal lives.

If Crabapple were truly committed to the values and history of the Bund that is what she would be advocating.