Molly Crabapple Discusses Here Where We Live is Our Country with Ibtisam Azem

This event is full but you can watch the live-stream here.

BPL Presents welcomes back Molly Crabapple, who discusses Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division. Molly will be in conversation with author Ibtisam Azem. This conversation is co-presented with Lux Magazine.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.

Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.”

In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?

Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.

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Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award. Her reportage is the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

 

 

 

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist based in New York. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in 1948. She lived in Jerusalem and studied at the Hebrew University before moving to Germany and later to the US.  She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). The latter has been translated into English, Italian, and German, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Her first short story collection, City of Strangers, appeared in Arabic in the summer of 2025. Azem’s short stories and essays have appeared in several anthologies and various magazines, including Evergreen Review, Journal of Palestine Studies, World Literature Today, and Jadaliyya. Azem holds an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies with minors in German and English Literature from Freiburg University, as well as an MA in Social Work from NYU.

Lux is a feminist magazine covering politics and culture, founded in 2021. We are interested in the many points at which identity intersects with politics. We publish a glossy print edition three times a year featuring our award-winning writers, and a regular newsletter. 
https://lux-magazine.com/