Molly Crabapple in Detroit: The Jewish Bund and a Radical History of Solidarity
We’re pleased to help host a rare Detroit appearance by artist, writer, and journalist Molly Crabapple, who will speak about her new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund at University of Detroit Mercy on Thursday, September 3 at 7 PM, Location: Exhibition space, Loranger Hall
School of Architecture and Community Development, 4001 W McNichols Road, Detroit MI 48221 This event is free and open to the public.
Crabapple tells the story of the Jewish Labor Bund, the secular socialist movement that emerged in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and fought for Jewish dignity, workers’ rights, Yiddish culture, and solidarity across ethnic and national boundaries. Once a major political force in Eastern Europe, the Bund has largely disappeared from conventional histories of Jewish life.
Her connection to the subject is also deeply personal. Crabapple’s great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, was a Bundist who later became an artist. In the years after the Holocaust, Rothbort created what he called “memory paintings,” attempting to bring back the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, Crabapple discovered one of these paintings: a young woman throwing a rock through a cottage window. Rothbort had titled it Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.
That painting led Crabapple to ask a simple question: What was a Bundist? The question eventually became a seven-year journey of research into the Bund, its revolutionary history, and the people who built it.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is both a personal journey into her family history and a history of a movement that imagined Jewish life in terms of “hereness”—the idea that people should be able to live with dignity and freedom where they are, building solidarity rather than seeking refuge in an imagined elsewhere.
“Molly Crabapple beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice.”
—Naomi Klein
Molly Crabapple — Here Where We Live Is Our Country
Thursday, September 3, 7 PM
University of Detroit Mercy, Exhibition space, Loranger Hall, School of Architecture and Community Development
Signed and personalized copies of the book are available now for preorder from Book Beat Gallery:
The event is free and presented with Jewish Voice for Peace and University of Detroit Mercy.
About Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York whose work combines drawing, reportage, and political storytelling. Her journalism and artwork have taken her from Occupy Wall Street and migrant labor camps to Syria, Guantánamo Bay, Ukraine, and other places marked by conflict and political struggle. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, among others.
Her art is in the permanent collection of the **Museum of Modern Art** in New York. Her illustrated book *Brothers of the Gun*, created with Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, was longlisted for the **2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction**. Her memoir, *Drawing Blood*, received widespread critical acclaim, and her animated films have won two Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award.
Her latest book, *Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund*, is her third book.