Here Where We Live Is a Home for Everyone, by Ivan Hodes – 20 July 2026

From Liberal Currents

Molly Crabapple knows how to get attention. On tour publicizing her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (New York: One World, 2026), the artist and anti-Zionist activist has waded enthusiastically into the turbulent waters of the contemporary Israel-Palestine conflict. “For leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult, the Bund is a model” is the kind of statement designed to turn heads, and Crabapple has done just that.

Most critiques of the book have been in response to this combative marketing, with the heat of the reviewers’ rhetoric rising in proportion to the extremity of their own ideological position. John Podhoretz, neo-conservative editor of the combatively Zionist Commentary, has denounced Crabapple in the sort of terms a Klansman might use toward a white liberal (and topped it off with a dollop of misogyny). The writer Debbie Lechtman, in the liberal Zionist Tablet, doesn’t engage in that kind of personal invective, but the title of her review and her dismissal of the book as “a grade-school level history” leave no doubt about her stance.

Conversely, Crabapple has been a darling of the anti-Zionist commentariat, receiving glowing reviews and favorable interviews in such outfits as Current Affairs, Jacobin, and Dissent. Prominent anti-Zionist Naomi Klein, a board member of Jewish Voice for Peace, went beyond glowing to adulatory while leaving the book’s substance largely untouched: “Molly Crabapple is a time traveler, a necromancer, and an unclassifiable genius …. Reading [the book] feels revolutionary.”

I want to detach the book from the angry discourse surrounding it and examine its argument—which, as I hope to demonstrate, is not actually for the resurrection of Bundism—from neither a Zionist nor anti-Zionist perspective. This is not to say mine is a neutral perspective: I doubt that any Jew alive today is neutral on the topic of Israel, and I certainly am not, so I want to reveal my own cards here.

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Ivan Hodes is an educator based in Alaska. A US Army veteran, he holds a degree in European history from the United States Military Academy.

Here Where We Live Is a Home for Everyone, by Ivan Hodes – 20 July 2026

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