Two catastrophes haunt Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country. One is the Holocaust, which devoured the lives of many of the people in her pages. The other, more in the background but never far from her thoughts, is the ordeal of the Palestinian people. This includes the Nakba of 1948, in which some 750,000 men, women, and children were forced to flee their homes and land; the slow, creeping seizure of Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank by Jewish settlers¹; and the Israeli military campaign that has left large parts of Gaza reduced to rubble, much as the Nazis left the Warsaw Ghetto.

Are the two tragedies connected? “The Holocaust and the Nakba,” writes the Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov, “are inextricably linked,” despite “each group’s insistence on the exclusivity of its victimhood.”² And, of course, Americans are implicated in both. We closed our borders to almost all Holocaust refugees, and many of those Gaza hospitals and apartment buildings were flattened with American bombs.

If we could magically change something in history to greatly reduce the toll of both these cataclysms, what might it be? Imagine that the United States had not passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially slammed the door on almost all newcomers for more than forty years. Without it, Jewish immigration to the US would surely have soared during the 1920s and 1930s. Some 2.5 million Jews, most of them hoping for a better life than they had in tsarist Russia, had already come here between 1880 and 1924. Then, even in the decade before Hitler took power, Jews still had many reasons to leave Europe. Poland, whose Jewish population of 2.8 million was the continent’s largest, was a cauldron of antisemitism between the wars, with outbreaks of deadly violence, segregated seating and de facto quotas in many universities, and numerous other humiliations.

What if Jews from Poland, Germany, and elsewhere had been allowed to immigrate to the United States with no restrictions after 1924? Millions might have done so, escaping Hitler, and far fewer might have gone to Palestine. In this imagined scenario, Jews and Arabs might have found a more equitable way of sharing a part of the world where both peoples have roots. And with our power to adjust history, we would give both Jews and Arabs leaders who were far more open to coexistence and compromise than either people have had over the past century.

Finally, we would have to eliminate the powerful surge of American nativism that was responsible for the Immigration Act of 1924. The political ancestors of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller became ever more vocal during the first decades of the twentieth century. And sadly, millions of Americans across the class spectrum agreed with them.

Major contenders for both parties’ presidential nominations in 1920 campaigned on promises of mass deportations. Beginning in November 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, angling to be the Democratic candidate, staged his notorious Palmer Raids to arrest deportable leftists. He promised New Yorkers, reported The New YorkTimes, that one ship after another would be “sailing down their beautiful harbor in the near future” to take noxious immigrants back to wherever they had come from. Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington state, a principal architect of the 1924 act, spent his entire political life railing against immigrants, at one point charging that “aliens were being smuggled across the Mexican border at the rate of 100 a day, a large part of them being Russian Reds who had reached Mexico in Japanese vessels.”

Johnson, a small-town newspaperman, first became steamed up against Asian immigrants; his major ally in writing the act, the wealthy New York lawyer John B. Trevor, was more focused on Jews. The prospect of more of them arriving in the United States gave him “convulsive shivers,” Trevor wrote to his friend Johnson.

“If a man’s love for his country is measurable by his detestation of all who had the bad taste to be born elsewhere,” a critical journalist wrote of Trevor, “there probably is no greater patriot in America to-day.” Trevor remained vigilant long after the Immigration Act passed. In 1939, when some legislators proposed an exception to it that would allow 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the United States, Trevor helped lead the successful fight against what he called “this foreign invasion.” Astonishingly, a Fortune poll that same year showed that 25.8 percent of American Jews opposed increasing the tiny quota for refugees, because they feared it would provoke antisemitism.

Crabapple’s book makes readers think about alternative historical scenarios because it is the story of a movement that fought for one that did not happen: a world, and especially a Europe, in which Jews could safely thrive anywhere. The General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, informally known as the Jewish Bund or simply the Bund (bund is Yiddish for “union”), was founded in 1897 in the attic of a safe house in what today is Lithuania and was then part of the Russian Empire. The Bund was a combination of cultural federation (summer camps, youth orchestras, libraries, old-age homes), labor union, self-defense militia, and political party. (At the peak of its influence, in 1938, it won the majority of the Jewish vote for members of the Warsaw City Council.)

The Bund was militantly socialist, forging ties with other such movements and spreading to more countries through immigration. By 1905 there were 59,000 members in Canada and the United States. Important figures in the early American labor movement such as Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky got their start as Bund activists battling the regime of Tsar Nicholas II. Yet the group has been all but forgotten today.

One place to which the Bund did not spread was Palestine, for it fiercely opposed Zionism. Its members believed that Jews should fight for full rights wherever they were, not in a new homeland somewhere else. Here Where We Live Is Our Country takes its title from a Bund slogan. The organization celebrated “hereness,” doikayt in Yiddish. Its members wanted not for God “to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them free Egypt.” A fine ideal, but freeing the Egypts of the world turned out to be a tall order.

The organization was determinedly secular. “At a Bundist gathering,” Crabapple writes, “the pastries might be fried in pig fat, just to prove a point.” Zionists promoted the revival of Hebrew as the language of the new Zion to be carved out in Palestine, while the Bund operated largely in Yiddish. This “portable homeland,” as Crabapple calls it, was spoken in the early 1900s by the majority of Jews in Europe and the United States. In the society the Bund envisaged, everyone would have the right to speak their own language.

In its worldview, class, not ethnicity or religion, was what mattered. This gave its politics a whiff of the nineteenth century, for World War I made painfully clear that the prospects for a revolution by Europe’s working class were dim. But what does feel acutely relevant today is that from the beginning Bund leaders saw that the project of their Zionist rivals risked the displacement of another people. In its foresight the group was not alone. There have been many distinguished Jews, from Hannah Arendt to the German diarist Victor Klemperer,³ who were critics of Zionism, but the Bund was the largest, longest-lived, and most multinational Jewish organization to take that position.

The enmity between Bundists and Zionists in interwar Poland, their main battleground, was intense. In 1922, Crabapple writes,

the party decided to publish a Saturday edition of[its newspaper] Folkstsaytung, deliberately flouting rules that forbade work on Sabbath…. Soon, the Warsaw rabbinate excommunicated Folkstsaytung’s entire staff.

The dispute escalated into street fighting. A few years later, following much more deadly battles between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, a Bundist leader wrote, “We oppose any nationalism, any chauvinism, be it Arab or Jewish.” The newspaper aired Arab voices in its pages, and a meeting of three thousand Bund workers in Warsaw adopted a resolution declaring that “Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine’s existing Arab population.” Bund leaders retained their principles even as Hitler’s shadow spread. “No, we are not a chosen people,” wrote Henryk Erlich in Poland in 1933. “Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful…as the nationalisms of all the other nations.”

Crabapple also points out something too little known to most readers: the Zionists had a quiet ally in a Polish regime eager to rid the country of Jews. “During the same years,” she writes,

that the Polish government supported fascist youth gangs terrorizing Jewish neighborhoods, they provided machine guns, Mauser rifles, and military training to three Zionist militias in Palestine…even though all three groups had already murdered countless Palestinians. Prospective fighters signed pledges to leave Poland immediately after training.

Although Here Where We Live Is Our Country is documented with forty pages of small-type endnotes, don’t expect a dispassionate work of academic scholarship. Crabapple tells you where she stands: “As I wrote this book in the New York Public Library, chants for Palestine resounded outside the windows. Often, I went down to join the protesters.” She has reported from Gaza, and while at work on the book she received desperate text messages from friends there. She raised money for them, some from the son of a Bund activist, but “two million people cannot crowdfund their way out of a killing cage, any more than the Jewish Labor Committee could pay enough bribes to save the Jews of Poland.”

Crabapple’s connection to her subject is deeply felt and highly personal:

The Bund’s philosophy spoke to my sense of Jewishness in a way that neither the synagogue nor Israel ever had…. Despite the vast differences in the worlds that we inhabited, Bundists seemed to me like kin.

One of them was kin: her artist great-grandfather Samuel Rothbort, whose paintings hung on the walls of her Brooklyn apartment. He grew up in the shadow of famine in what today is Belarus, joined the Bund there, and then fled the tsar’s police for New York. Crabapple humanizes her book by winding through it the letters, memories, and personal stories of Rothbort and other Bundists. The narrative leaps between decades and continents, from pogroms in Russian shtetls to Polish courtrooms to Soviet prisons to Hitler’s Berlin to the Lower East Side.

On a few occasions, when there are no memoirs or documents to quote, she lets her imagination roam. Of a Bund celebration in Warsaw in 1927, for instance, she writes:

I notice something else in the photos of the Bund’s anniversary: the girls…. They don’t wear corsets, these girls. They wear drop-waist dresses and arrange their bobbed hair beneath cloche hats. They are sleek babes of the jazz age, red-lipped flappers whom I might pass in a New York nightclub. They make out with guys. They drink vodka and talk back in three languages. They seize the stage at meetings. They hold their own in a street fight. They belong to themselves.

Despite her eloquent prose, some readers may find her imagination roaming a few steps too far. Her great-grandfather had painted a memory from Russia: a girl named Itka, a Bundist demonstrator, breaking a window. Crabapple uses her to evoke the exhilaration of Russia’s 1905 revolution:

The closest I’ve known to 1905 is the summer of 2020, after the police murdered George Floyd, when the sickly silence of lockdown New York was shattered by a mass uprising. Still, the past is a foreign country, and I need a guide. Itka, the girl who shattered a window in Sam’s watercolor that so affected me as a teenager—what was she doing during the revolution’s early days? Let’s light a candle to her. I hold her hand as she leads me through some Pale of Settlement slum…. Red rags wave. Songs sound in multilingual cacophony. Everyone is here—the grandmothers, the brats from the block, the boy who called Itka a whore. Our bodies move with theirs. Our feet carry us into rich neighborhoods we never dared enter. They’re ours…. Despite our century of distance, Itka and I share a few common experiences. We both have taken over a street and mistaken it for a country, both grabbed hands with a stranger and mistaken it for a vow.

Lyrical, lovely, but not convincing to someone who does not already share her enthusiasm. That enthusiasm also gets the better of her when she compares the Bund to the Black Panthers, who also “created a network of communal care and cultural uplift, of schools, clinics, mutual aid centers, and youth groups, backed with weapons and branded with militant chic.” Some of us in the San Francisco Bay Area who had experience with the Panthers during their downward spiral of the 1970s would not be so quick to romanticize them.

Nonetheless, Crabapple rightly reminds us that the Bund stood up for its ideals even when it was crushed between Europe’s totalitarianisms. Bundists whom the continent’s shifting borders left in the Soviet Union found no room for independent politics, and many Bund leaders there ended up executed or in the gulag. Then the Nazi night closed over Poland, forcing its Jews into ghettos and then death camps. The Bund was still active in hiding and maintained its fervent internationalism, smuggling telegrams and messages abroad, mostly about the Jews’ terrible plight but also urging the British to release Mahatma Gandhi from jail in India. The bitter rivalry between Bundists and Zionists continued underground, although in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising they finally joined forces before almost all the fighters were murdered or sent to death camps by the SS and police.

In the end, pointing to the Holocaust’s six million dead, Zionists could claim to have won their argument with the Bund. “See?” they might have said. “For Jews to stay in Europe was fatal. Getting to Palestine, making it ours, was the only possible salvation.”

In one way, that is true, but at what price? For Israel, to quote Bartov again, “there were many forks in the road where the country could have chosen to go one way and not the other.” And some of those forks could have led to a far more just sharing of that land by the two peoples; indeed, a few decades ago a peaceful solution seemed almost within reach. Instead, we’ve now seen mass murder and hundreds of thousands reduced to living in tents and ruins in Gaza, a colossal ongoing grab of territory in the West Bank, and a land divided by a high wall hundreds of miles long, all in a part of the world that seems destined to remain on fire.

In a sense, the Bund failed. The socialist commonwealth so many of its members fervently hoped for did not come to pass. The workers of the world did not unite. And ironically, at least in North America and Europe, most Jews have now risen out of the working class so central to the group’s worldview. But in another sense, like many paths not taken, the Bund’s example can still inspire us. Its members fought for their egalitarian, secular, profoundly cosmopolitan vision in the very darkest of times and places.

Whatever the Bund’s lost hopes, its beliefs have a resonance for this political moment. There still is prejudice against Jews, in this country and in others, but Americans today live under a regime that has shamelessly and ruthlessly weaponized the accusation of antisemitism. Donald Trump has aimed it at anyone who criticizes Israel or who defends the rights of Palestinians. He has used it to viciously smear his political opponents and, above all, to attack universities. He has sued them, opened investigations into them, slashed federal funds for them, demanded curriculum changes and restrictions on student activism, thrown students from abroad into detention, and revoked more than three hundred student visas.

Some established Jewish organizations have cheered on many of these actions or expressed only the mildest of reservations. The history of the Bund, going back for more than a century, shows us not only another way of being Jewish but a more tolerant and compassionate form of political life.