The Jewish Bund and Political Imagination

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. No gloss, no filter. Just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Trends come and go, your skin barrier doesn't. E45 lotion is effective science-backed hydration for everyday use. Light weight, fast absorbing, and trusted to do what your skin needs. No fuss, no compromise. Just soft, smooth, healthy-looking skin every day. Grab your E45 lotion now. Corso Media. Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Elkurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by Molly Krabapple, an award-winning writer and artist. She's written three books. She's co-author of the book Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Moulin Hisham, which was a New York Times notable book, and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. And her memoir, Drawing Blood, also received global praise. Her most recent book is Here Where We Live is Our Country, The Story of the Jewish Bund, and it'll be out on April 7th. I've already pre-ordered, I'm very excited. So I wanted to talk to Molly today given how relevant the history she outlines in her book is to this current moment, especially for the American Jewish community. So thank you, Molly, for joining us. Thank you so much, Dana, for having me. It's my total honor to be here. So you describe in the book the Bund's philosophy of doike, or hearness as a rejection of the idea that Jews need to seek a homeland elsewhere to find safety. How did you come to understand this concept personally, and why do you think it was, at least from my perspective, so thoroughly erased from mainstream Jewish historical memory after the Holocaust? I mean, I came across doike through studying the Bund, which I came across through the watercolors of my great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbard, who was a post-impressionist painter, who was a member of the Bund as a young man back in Russia. And the concept of doike, or hearness, means is it's a defiant assertion of rootedness in a place that wanted Jews dead. Jews had lived in Eastern Europe for over a thousand years, but in the 18th, 19th, and at the dawn of the 20th century, these countries were some of the roughest places to be a Jew in the world. In the Tsarist Empire, Jews were a racialized minority. It's set it on their papers. They could only live in a certain area. There was military conscription for 25 years. It sucked, shall we say. And in interwar Poland as well, the government was trying to use racism as a glue to hold this diverse and quite impoverished country together. So what hearness meant is it meant that Jews had the right to live and not just live, not just survive, not just cling to life, but to flourish and have beautiful lives in their homes that they'd lived in for the last thousand years. And that even if European Christians thought that Jews were swar the Oriental aliens who needed to be forcibly deported to Palestine, which is exactly what the Polish interwar government thought, even if that's what those in power thought, Jews had a right to live and flourish in freedom and indignity in their homes because that's the right that every single human on this earth has. And in many ways, it almost reminds me of this precursor echo of the Palestinian concept of Samud, of the steadfastness to stay in your home despite the genocidal predations of the Israeli state. And I think that the concept of hearness was crushed by a variety of things. I mean, first of all, as we all know, you know, there was a genocide in Europe that wiped out two thirds of European Jews and wiped out 90 percent of the Jews in Poland. But it wasn't just that. It was also that after the genocide, countries like Poland were so psychopathically violent to Jewish survivors that it convinced the overwhelming majority of Polish Jewish survivors that they had to go somewhere else. There were about a thousand Jews that were murdered by nationalists in the aftermath of the Holocaust, including, you know, dozens who were burned alive in this like famous town called Kielce. Now, whether that somewhere else meant Palestine or whether that meant New York City, that was something that was very much up to the visa regimes of the era. The vast majority of Jews who survived the Holocaust did not necessarily want to go to Palestine, let alone to, you know, sign up to join the Haganah and throw themselves as cannon fodder into another war after surviving Auschwitz. The majority of Jewish survivors probably wanted to go live with their families in America and in other countries that had large Jewish communities. But the Western democracies and tell me if this sounds familiar in the current moment, while the Western democracies preached a language of human rights and universalism, in practice, they were quite content to let impoverished refugees rot in camps. Does that I could see no other echoes. Of course not. No, it only happened once ever. Yeah, yeah, definitely. We've learned our lesson. And yeah, exactly. The world has definitely learned its lesson about the corrosive effects of hypocrisy. And so Zionist groups were able to take over camp administrations and use them as recruiting grounds and to convince and, in fact, sometimes violently coerce survivors to go to Palestine and in many cases to do the nakba. And I think that these are the concrete reasons, right, that the concept of dokite was so crushed, so erased, right, like physically erased, you know, violence. But there's something more than that, even, because, you know, there are many, many movements that are physically crushed with violence, whose memories are vivid and alive and resonant. I think about like the Black Panther Party in America, you know, who were subject to the most brutal violence by the state, but who remain as legends. And I think the reason that the Boons wasn't just physically crushed by the 20th century, but the reason that it was so ideologically marginalized was because they always opposed Zionism from the very first days of their founding. They opposed Zionism as a capitulation to the same European racists that wanted to kick Jews out of their home. And not only did they oppose Zionism, because many Jewish groups opposed Zionism. The Satmar Pacific community, where I live, also opposed Zionism. It wasn't just the Boons opposition to Zionism that made Zionists so angry. It's that Zionism is built on this very self-hating dichotomy. And that dichotomy is that there are diaspora Jews who were weak, and that's why they were murdered. And then there are the brave, big, dicked Israeli sabras who are strong and bravely oppressing and murdering themselves. And that's why they live. And what the Boons did was it shows the lie of that because the Boons were strong. They didn't just fight for the right to stay in Europe with graduate school seminars. They fought for it with brass knuckles and with guns. The statement here, where we live as our country, isn't something that has the same meaning as it would mean if I said it in New York City. Like, of course, New York is my city. It's fucking awesome. When they said it, I always felt like there is an implied motherfucker at the end. Here, where we live as our country, motherfucker, whether you like it or not, we are born here in its hours. Right. It's so powerful. And I'm glad that you mentioned other kind of ideological resonances, like the Black Panthers. They don't really exist in the same way anymore, but they're still resonant in Black Lives Matter. It brings me to this next question, which is that, especially younger Jewish Americans, they increasingly are questioning Zionist narratives, and they describe their solidarity with Palestinians, not as a rejection of Jewish identity, but as an expression of their commitment to universal justice, and as a rejection, maybe of Zionism, but not their Judaism. Do you think that this is a boondist inheritance, even if unconscious, or is it something new? I think that decent people of all stripes are seeing what Palestinian journalists and Lebanese journalists have risked their lives exposing. They're seeing a genocide live streamed on their smartphones, and live streamed by these amazing journalists who are living in killing cages. And anyone who's a decent person, whether you're Jewish or not, will turn away from the ideology that is responsible for that genocide. So I wouldn't say it's a boondist resonance that's making young people turn against Zionist institutions. I think it's just their basic humanity, the same as so many other groups of people are. And I credit it a lot to the amazing work of Palestinians who have done so much work with so much grace at such huge risks to their lives to be able to tell these stories for the world to at least see. However, I think that there's something a little bit different going on, which is that young Jews are seeing the Israeli mass murder machine for what it is. But if they've gone through the standard issue like Hebrew school education, they don't really learn a lot about Jewish history. Like the way you would learn about it would be ancient kingdoms, the Park Hockba revolt, maybe if you're lucky. And then like a big, long, you know, 2000 year gap of horror and murder where nothing interesting or good ever happened and where you were just a victim of all of history and then, you know, glorious creation of the state of Israel redemption. Like that's the sort of bullshit narrative you'd get. And when young Jews reject that narrative as they should, you know, when they learn about the reality of what Zionism means, a lot of them are left with a real hole in them because they haven't like learned anything positive about their own heritage. They've just been fed fairy tales that are meant to, you know, legitimize the state. And so, you know, there's like a lot of a lot of shame, right? A lot of pain over that. And I think what a lot of young Jewish people are trying to do is they're trying to look back to like their own grandparents and their own great grandparents. And for Jews in America, like most Jews in America come from Eastern European backgrounds. You know, it's a different sort of demographic breakdown than in Israel. And that sort of like Jewish socialism is something that's very, very, very present in so many people's family history, not necessarily that, you know, your grandfather was like the greatest socialist revolutionary in the world, but just that he belonged to a socialist garment union and was part of like a socialist mutual aid thing, because that was just the culture that so many American Jews swam in 100 years ago. And so I think there is this huge rediscover of the boond and of Jewish socialism that's inspired by the rejection of the Sinaiist genocide. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people in the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through this sub-CD hachaker, reached the pinnacle, stung by the snake and I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore. And when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt Show on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. In Carmel, we value the moments that matter. We value friendship. We get to catch up while we travel. I value my time. Taking the bus gives me extra time on my commute. I value family time. The family day ticket makes exploring easy. We have a range of fares to suit everyone and under fives travel free. Download the Transport for Cornwall app for all the bus info you need. On the one hand, I'm witnessing what you're saying. You know, like we're all kind of witnessing, like I said, it's not specifically to the Jewish community, but because the Jewish community has been fed, you know, this idea that is really so integral to their Jewishness and to their safety and to these kinds of things. There is a very maybe specific way that they are metabolizing that. And I think that's a very specific way that they are metabolizing that. Or acting out against it. But at the same time, you know, we've seen a number of different polls, including most recently the Jewish federations of North America. They put out polling results where 37% identified as non-Zionists and 7% of their polling identified as anti-Zionists. But it was an interesting poll because it's like both people who were, like, critical of Israel and those who were supportive of Israel took it to me, and I think that's a very important thing. But it's also important to me that it confirmed their biases, because despite the fact that the genocide has happened and is happening, that anti-Zionism component hasn't really risen very much. And then still a lot of polls show that people presume Israel is vital to Jewish continuity. So how do you make sense of that contradiction? Well, that's one question is how do you make sense of that contradiction? But the second question is, like, how do you really discovering Dundas thought, like, offers a way through it? I do, actually. I mean, I think that, you know, people have not just been fed this idea that Israel is, you know, like, essential for their safety, for continuity, but also that it's like an essential part of themself. And I do think that it's very life-affirming and important to know that you have something better that you can reject this shitty ideology. I mean, in terms of polls, I often feel like, I mean, maybe I'm just wrong about Americans, but I sometimes feel like people don't even know what the hell they're signing on to with polls. Like, I will see something where people be like, we want strong borders and to, like, you know, deport all the illegals, but also we fucking hate ICE. And I'm like, you just want, like, wildly contradictory things. And I wonder, like, how, I don't know, like, how educated people even are and how much, like, the framing of questions affects what people think. I mean, I'm trying to think of what to make of it. I mean, I do think, you know, very sadly, like, there are a large number of, you know, American Jewish people. And in some way, I'm talking, like, outside of my own experience, because my own family is not Zionist. So this is more like my speculation type thing. But, you know, they're very progressive. They believe in, you know, like, out of kid for all. They believe in, you know, they believe that cops shouldn't be constantly murdering black people as they do in America all the time. They believe even ICE should be abolished. But they also have this, like, unthinking emotional attachment to Israel, even if they literally hate everything that Israel is doing. And I feel like a lot of those people, what they'll do is they'll try to blame it on Netanyahu and not on the entire system. Like, like, I would see people who supported the protests, you know, over the judicial reform, but they weren't willing to, like, fully confront the absolute fucking horrors, not just of the occupation, but of Israel itself. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I've also, you know, obviously experienced that kind of block, you know, where it's easier to blame a particular government than to maybe think about, I mean, the specificities of Israel's founding and Israel's ideology, but also, like, the violent nature of nation states. And, and, and like, just kind of thinking through that, I think, can be a little bit difficult for people. And as someone who works on polling, like, yes, there are so many contradictions. We take polling to understand the starting points, but that doesn't restrict our political imagination. Like, that's how I think of it. It's obviously also difficult for people to start to kind of maybe disentangle their emotional commitments to the state of Israel, especially in this moment where there are, like, white supremacists and Nazis and neo-Nazis and all sorts of evil people regaining control of all sorts of, you know, state institutions and finding, you know, a great deal of legitimacy and a great deal of traction amongst the American public. It's difficult to tell, I think, some parts of the American Jewish community, like, hey, Israel's not a safety valve for you when, in fact, there's so much anti-Semitism now in the United States. I mean, I feel like it's a self-reinforcing loop, though. I mean, on one hand, you have Jewish institutions who are literally sticking up this fucking flag of a state that is connected by the ICC of doing genocide and, you know, waving that flag around and having soldiers from an army that's doing a genocide, speaking there, like, honored guests and saying, like, this is what it means to be Jewish. It's that we back Israel. And on the other hand, you have these wormy little neo-Nazis, like Nick Fuentes, who have always hated Jews and not because of Israel. Nick Fuentes also thinks all women should be put in breeding camps and all black people should be locked behind bars. He hates Jews because he's a neo-Nazi who are seeing the rightful anger that people have with the ongoing genocide and they're seeing people's disillusionment with both political parties who are continuing to provide weapons and Q&A cover to Israel and they're exploiting that. And that's something that fascism has always done, right? Like, fascism has always exploited issues that are popular. It will try to exploit the desire that people have for peace, for instance. It will try to exploit the desire people have for economic justice. But instead of, you know, actually giving people economic justice, they'll just say, oh, it's the Jews. Oh, it's the leftist billionaires or it's George Soros. And yeah, like, you absolutely see some of the worst scumbags on Earth who are exploiting the anger that people feel over the genocide in order to worm their way into power and to worm their way into legitimacy. And I always think about this with Tucker Carlson. I mean, for me, like, OK, like he's like, you know, standard issue. He has anti-Jewish shit. That's like standard issue Christian shit. But like for me, the thing that's so I hate so much about seeing smart people boost Tucker Carlson is that Tucker Carlson advocates the ethnic cleansing of the United States of immigrants. Ten months ago, he was on Megan Kelly praying about how he wanted one million people deported in Trump's 100 days. He was even saying, we don't have to put them in detention centers. We can just force a million people, a million people over the border into Tijuana and, quote, let the Mexicans deal with them. This is hardcore white supremacist ethnic cleansing, and it's not just a speculative thing. There are tens of thousands of immigrants right now in concentration camps in the U.S. And the fact that anyone, because he gives good clip on Palestine, thinks that he's their ally when he would happily support the same ice system that is locking up Palestinians right now is insane. It's madness. And I just I mean, I know that people are so traumatized and so heartbroken and, you know, even being like driven crazy by the ongoing genocide and by the American enthusiastic collusion with the genocide. But there has to be a certain basic level of solidarity with other groups who are also under threat, like all the other immigrant communities that are getting around. I've been putting in concentration camps right now. No, absolutely. I mean, there has to be a basic minimum level of solidarity and like a basic minimum level of like analysis. Like, yeah, yeah, exactly. The animating force behind Tucker Carlson is not love for Palestinians or like some, you know, desire for justice or or or anything. You know, so it's like the natural conclusion of a Tucker Carlson is something like the ethnic cleansing that he's asking for. It has been disturbing to see and continue to see how people have really convinced themselves that this is something to to try to capitalize on. I mean, Tucker Carlson went to the Middle East and people were taking photos with him. And I'm like, this man hates you. This man doesn't care about any of these things that you care about. But like you said, it's just the situation is so bad that people are willing to forgo solidarity and basic political truths to engage with someone like him. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub city, Hachak. The reach, the pinnacle, stung by the snigger and I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore. And when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty. Stay for the fire. I mean, you've kind of mentioned it and alluded to it in your answers already about Jewish institutions like fine Israeli flag and things like that. Who are the forces today? What are the institutions today that benefit from something like the Boond and like its philosophy not being revisited? And what do they stand to lose if these Buddhist ideas become widely known again? I mean, I feel like the vast majority of mainstream Jewish institutions. I mean, there's obviously like the ADL, right? You know, a ridiculous group that I almost feel like primarily exists to try to like terrify elderly people so that Jonathan Greenblatt keeps getting his ridiculously inflated salary and keeps getting to like prance around like he's important. There's like the the campus Hillel's, right? Who claim that they're just a neutral thing for Jewish identity, but make it a prerequisite that you're Zionist. There's just like a vast amount of institutional Jewish groups that are not democratic. They're not things that we vote for. I did not fucking vote for Jonathan Greenblatt to be appointed my spokesman. You know, I didn't I didn't vote for these things. Like these are institutions led by very wealthy people that are in no way responsive to young Jews. They're not responsive to like ordinary people. And they want to keep having their sort of stranglehold on getting to be the like spokesman for these very, very, very diverse communities. And I think that, you know, as the boond and as other anti Zionist forms of Jewishness are discovered and rediscovered that these spokespeople are terrified because I mean, the biggest thing that they wanted that they're so terrified about is they're terrified about losing the young people. The whole project, it's about, you know, like this Jewish continuity, they call it. And, you know, Jewish people like getting married to each other, you know, having kids, like contributing money to their institutions, you know, maybe making aliyah to Israel. And if people are like, no, I reject this. I reject this state that's committing a genocide and I reject this ideology built on supremacy and actually it's like fine to live in New York City and to, you know, live and love and struggle alongside my neighbors. That's directly antithetical to their project. And I think that's why the boond has not just been erased, but it's mere mention provokes such anger. Like sometimes I just look through my comments and it's just these endless fucking comments from people being like Boond all died in the Holocaust. LOL, like what do you say to this? Right. That's so disgusting. Yeah, the boond was all gassed. LOL, you want Jews to be gassed, you know, Zionists are thriving. And I'm like, this is the most psychopathic talk about self-hating, right? Mocking people for being murdered in the Holocaust, you know? It's because the boond's ideology of solidarity across difference of here in us and of socialism is profoundly threatening. And honestly, like what what thriving is happening? Like people in Israel are terrified. There are missiles raining down like a garrison state cannot keep people safe. No such ethno state can keep people safe. But and I'm reminded also from your answer about Ariel Angel's article, I think last year in Jewish currents, we need new Jewish institutions. I think it's like they see the writing on the wall, that this is something that's going to happen. And with with books like yours, with kind of a re revisiting of this history, it only hastens, you know, this this kind of political project coming to fruition. My last question that I have for you is more about the the memory project nature of it all. You write in your book about your great-grandfather. You've already mentioned Samuel Rothbard about how he painted these memory paintings to kind of resurrect the vanished world of Eastern Europe. And you've also kind of written this book in the same way. What do you think the relationship is between this kind of recovery of erased history and building a politics for the present? Thank you. I mean, I spent seven years on this book. I learned Yiddish. That's wild, by the way. I know, right? You know, I resented because I studied Arabic for so long and I had finally gotten like, I don't want to say good, but mediocre at it. And then I feel like Yiddish pushed it out of my brain. And I'm just like, no, I want my Arabic back. But yes, I studied, I learned Yiddish. I went to, you know, all the countries that I could that the boom was active in. I wasn't able to go to Belarus or Russia, but I went to like Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, I went to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. I translated so many books. I think I'm probably the only person who has read all five volumes of the terrifically boring a Geshechte von Bund, official for history. And I felt like I was doing necromancy. I felt like I was in love with these rebel ancestors, these gun-toting seamstresses, these lovers on the barricades, these stubborn people who constructed whole worlds out of love and grit, even when society wanted to crush them. I just like fell in love and I didn't just want to resurrect them from a racial because their philosophy was opposed to Zionism, though that was also part of it, of course, I wanted to resurrect them because the Bund were amazing, because they fought back against every single bastard of their age. They fought for an ethos that was rooted in human dignity and in human flourishing and freedom, but also in economic justice and leftism. I just fell in love and I wanted them to live again. And one of the things that the powers that be do is that they try to impose themselves onto the past, they try to say, because we won now, it was inevitable that we would win, it was always going to be like this. There is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher said. And what you do when you preserve these rebel histories is you show that that's not the case. It expands our capacity for fight. It expands our capacity for imagination. Things could have been differently and people still can change the world. Yeah, there's nothing inevitable. And you always have agency. I think that that's like the thing that like I can't go from thinking about when I think about these kinds of people because they give you so much hope in the present that things could be different. Thank you so much, Molly. This has been such an interesting and provocative conversation. And thank you so much for learning Yiddish and for just sending all those books. So that we can read your book and we don't have to do all of that. Exactly. So you don't need to know to suffer through the world's dullest socialist prose stylings. Yeah, no, you've done it for us. And I'm so excited for the book. I'll put it in the show notes. Everybody should read it. Thank you so much, Molly. Thank you so much, Dana. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts can now find sources for it could happen here. Listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. No gloss, no filter, just stories spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bachho on the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty. Stay for the fire.