The visit of Molly Crabapple to Australia

A very strange set of political bedfellows: the Jewish Council of Australia, the Jewish Labor Bund, the former Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, and the forthcoming visit of ‘Bundist’ historian Molly Crabapple to Australia 

The anti-Zionist Jewish Council of Australia (JCOA) will soon be hosting a speaking tour by New York journalist Molly Crabapple, the author of a contentious book on the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Here where we live is our country: The story of the Jewish Bund.

According to the JCOA’s gushing press release, ‘Fresh off the release of her latest book which tells the little-known story of a revolutionary Jewish movement from a century ago, we’re bringing Molly to Australia to dive deep into what this history can teach us in the current political moment’.

That press release immediately tells us two things: One is that the JCOA don’t know much about Jewish Left history. Most Jewish leftists, and indeed many wider leftists, would be aware that the Bund was a major contributor to early Russian and wider Eastern European, and indeed North American, political radicalism. I briefly covered some of that history of the Bund in an earlier article (2013), and book (2014: 211-215), and of course, Bund specialists such as CUNY Professor Jack Jacobs, a recent visiting scholar at Monash University, and the head of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Professor David Slucki, have authored multiple substantial publications on Bundist politics and history.

The connecting point is that the JCOA aim to use and arguably manipulate Crabapple’s version of history to influence current political debates and controversies on Israel and Palestine. In short, they plan to suggest that because the Bund opposed Zionist agendas in Pre-World War Two Poland, and the JCOA shares the Bund’s universalistic application of Jewish values, that Bundist history compels Jews to endorse an anti-Zionist agenda today (see Schwartz 2026 for what I interpret to be an implicit presentation of that view). Except, transposing binary assumptions from one moment in historical time to another completely different moment in time, without interrogating the totally different political and cultural contexts, usually doesn’t work as we will see.

The JCOA claim to be inspired by the former pro-Soviet Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism (JCCFAS) that existed in Melbourne from 1942-70, and have publicly stated that they adopted their name from that earlier organisation. Indeed, the first issue of the JCOA Kvetch magazine contains what is termed ‘A minor history of the JCCFAS’ by a young activist called Ethan Gandler: https://www.jewishcouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Kvetch-Issue-01.pdf. It’s not a bad preliminary effort at writing history, although it does ignore 95 per cent of the voluminous literature that has been published on the JCCFAS.

But regardless, what Gandler doesn’t tell us is that the Jewish Labor Bund in Melbourne hated the JCCFAS. They detested their alignment with Communist groups and the Soviet Union, and they particularly loathed their apologia for Stalin’s antisemitism culminating in the horrific Slansky trial of mid 1952 and the Doctors Plot of early 1953. The Bund actively aligned with conservative Jewish individuals and organisations including the Zionist movement to drive the JCCFAS out of the Kadimah Cultural Centre and other mainstream Jewish community bodies (Burstin 1952).

Gandler also ignores the other elephant in the room, the awkward fact that the JCCFAS was for most of its history overwhelmingly supportive of the State of Israel. As with much of the international Left during that period, the JCCFAS interpreted the creation of Israel as some form of affirmative action redemption for the catastrophe of the Holocaust. The JCCFAS enthusiastically raised funds for, and campaigned politically on behalf of Israel within the Australian Left, during the 1948, 1956 and 1967 wars. Indeed in May 1968, the left-wing Labor Party Senator and long-time JCCFAS stalwart, Sam Cohen, praised Israel following his first visit there as ‘a country created by a people who had been persecuted, haunted and massacred for centuries, with the sweat of their bodies and the blood from their hearts, built from almost nothing, a stony desert, into a free democratic state’ (Cohen 1968: 4).

But back to Crabapple’s book which seems to abruptly jump from 1929 to 1937 to 1948 and then to 2025 without context or nuance. There are a number of sections in her book which highlight the pre-war Polish Bund’s antipathy to Zionism (for example, pp.51-53; 181-186; 197-201; 226-227; 372). Bund specialists will be better able to judge whether that narrative is either historically accurate or distorted. But in my opinion, the content and language seem highly selective and exaggerated. The Bund confronted many deadly enemies within interwar Poland, including most notably the large numbers of right-wing antisemites who actively attempted to either expel or destroy the large Jewish population, and also the Communists (many of them Jews) who regularly engaged in physical assaults on Bund members and institutions (Crabapple, pp.195-197).

There was also an intense ideological conflict with the Zionist movement over whether or not Jews should fight to stay and demand equal rights in Poland, or alternatively leave to migrate to a possible future Jewish state in Palestine. But that conflict was mostly not about actual events in British mandate Palestine, which held little significance for the Bund. Yet, a reading of Crabapple’s book may leave the mistaken impression that the adverse impact of Zionist settlement on the Palestinian Arab population was a central concern for the Bund. To the contrary, it was almost certainly a minuscule issue compared to the daily struggle for all Jews in Poland of just staying alive.

A related concern is that Crabapple’s interpretation of what actually happened in the Middle East, to give two examples: the riots perpetrated by Arab ultra-nationalists and religious fundamentalists against mostly defenceless (and non-Zionist) ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in 1929, and the two-year defensive war fought by the Yishuv firstly against the local Palestinian Arab community in 1947-48 and then the invading Arab armies from May 1948, is framed by contemporary agendas, rather than evidence-based historical reflections. I see no mention in her references to leading Israeli scholars such as Hillel Cohen and Benny Morris, whose nuanced books framing the complex intersecting causes of these events are in my opinion seminal to understanding their consequences and outcomes. In contrast, the narrow nationalist accounts of Palestinian author Rashid Khalidi and Israeli anti-Zionist advocate Ilan Pappe are actively utilized.

A representative of the still active Melbourne Jewish Labor Bund (which is mentioned very briefly by Crabapple (p.375) has commented critically that the contemporary Bund does not share Crabapple’s determination to delegitimize the State of Israel. To the contrary, the Bund now identifies as “non-Zionist” rather than anti-Zionist, and seeks to advance the wellbeing of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East (Preiss 2026).

Young Jewish progressives planning to attend Crabapple’s talk might want to reflect on the major differences between what the Bund argued in a very different pre-Holocaust world about the ethical and practical challenges of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, and the very different views held by the Bund today towards the living and breathing Jewish state of Israel. They may also want to consider whether Crabapple’s anti-Zionist remedy has its origins not in the social justice values of historical Bundism, but rather the dogmatic beliefs of the earlier JCCFAS that prioritized solidarity with Stalin’s Soviet Union ahead of the well-being and very lives of Russian Jews.

References

Burstin, Sender (1952) “The Board, the Council and German Immigration” in Sender Burstin Yiddish Melbourne observed: Memoirs and commentaries of a dedicated Yiddishist and Bundist. Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University: 134-138. https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/6389498.

Cohen, Hillel (2015) Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict 1929. Brandeis University Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/Y/bo43636752.html.

Cohen, Sam (1968) “No peace talks on withdrawal”, Australian Jewish Herald, 24 May.

Crabapple, Molly (2026) Here where we live is our country: The story of the Jewish Bund. Bloomsbury Circus. London. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-9781526628893/

Mendes, Philip (2013) ‘The rise and fall of the Jewish Labor Bund’, Jewish Currents, 30 November, https://jewishcurrents.org/rise-fall-jewish-labor-bund.

Mendes, Philip (2014) Jews and the Left: The rise and fall of a political alliance. Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137008305.

Morris, Benny (2004) The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. https://www.cambridge.org/au/universitypress/subjects/history/middle-east-history/birth-palestinian-refugee-problem-revisited-2nd-edition?format=PB&isbn=9780521009676.

Preiss, Allan (2026) “The Bund lives”, Gawenda unleashed, 20 July, https://michaelgawenda.substack.com/p/the-bund-lives.

Schwartz, Sarah (2026) ‘The Bundists opposed nationalism dictating Jewish identity. The same battles are being fought today’, Crikey.com, 23 October. https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/10/23/jewish-labour-bund-socialist-antifascist-israel-palestine-here-where-we-live-is-our-country/.