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We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist revolutionary party that fought for freedom and dignity for Jews in Europe. The movement formed in the waning days of the Russian Empire in an atmosphere of intense antisemitism, but it "rejected, from the very start, calls to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine," Crabapple says. "They felt that Zionism was a capitulation to the same bigots that wanted to kick Jews out of Europe."
Bund members — known as Bundists — navigated profound historical changes from the founding of the movement in 1897 until its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust. But Crabapple, who learned Yiddish for the book, says the Bund is not just Jewish history.
"This is a history that belongs to all rebels. It belongs to everyone who believes in the necessity of human solidarity," she says.
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Salah Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian immigrant, green card holder and president of Wisconsin's largest mosque, the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, has been locked up in an ICE jail since late March. Despite his lawful permanent resident status, the government says he could be subject to deportation for failing to disclose a conviction by Israeli military authorities when he was a teenager in the occupied West Bank. Sarsour says he never understood the charges presented against him in Hebrew and that he was tortured in Israeli custody. Supporters view the case as an escalation of the Trump administration's crackdown on Pro-Palestinian speech. Munjed Ahmad, a member of Salah Sarsour's legal team, says, "Salah's case will be a litmus test. Will we allow the administration to gut those rights and to strip people from their free speech?"
Ahmad is joined by Sarsour's son Kareem, who calls Trump's federal immigration agents "kidnappers" and says his family initially had no idea what had happened to his father. While incarcerated, Salah Sarsour missed the birth of his ninth grandchild. "He's a community pillar," says Kareem Sarsour. "The entire thing shook us as a family."
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