Episode 406: Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Writer and artist Molly Crabapple visited with "The Shmooze" to speak about her forthcoming book, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country", the first popular history of the Bund. Molly re-creates the Bundists’ extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. 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 Molly discovered these paintings, and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. It was this painting—"Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows"—that introduced Molly to the Jewish Labor Bund.

Episode 406

March 5, 2026

Amherst, MA