Molly Crabapple and Jon Lee Anderson: Here Where We Live Is Our Country

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

At the Conduit, artist and writer Molly Crabapple’s dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades, will be brought to life through visual displays and thoughtful conversation, chaired by veteran Journalist and war correspondent Jon Lee Anderson. We’ll revisit the extraordinary world of the Bund: by turns violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust.

As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, can the Bund’s remarkable story and message – that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand – serve as a guide?

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country, 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.

Jon Lee Anderson has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is one of the leading chroniclers of war and political transition. He has reported from conflict zones across the world, including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Angola, Somalia and Lebanon, and has also produced extensive work from Latin America, including profiles of figures such as Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Gabriel García Márquez. His books include To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Guerrillas, The Fall of Baghdad, and The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan. He has received numerous international reporting awards, including the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and has been writing from the field since beginning his career in Peru in 1979.

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