Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 182: No Country For Old Mensheviks, with Molly Crabapple

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Matt and Daniel are joined by the author of the forthcoming book ‘Here Where We Live Is Our Country,’ Molly Crabapple. They talk through the Jewish Labor Bund, its role in anti-zionism, and then finish with a country anthem ably performed by a server array running so hot you could flash sear a New York Strip on the chassis.Please donate to United Palestinian Appeal: https://upaconnect.org/Preorder ‘Here Where We Live Is Our Country,’ Available Aprilhttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/New Bad Hasbara Merch: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraWhat’s The Spin playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdURSkad Skasbarska playlist: http://bit.ly/skadskasbarskaSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://spoti.fi/3HgpxDmApple Podcasts https://apple.co/4kizajtSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hello on and welcome to Bad As Barra. The world's least presidential podcast. That's right. My name is Matt Lieb. I will be your world's most hating of the presidents, all of them, co-host for this podcast. I'm Daniel Mate, and I would put any president in the Hague and or on death row any day of the year, not just today. We're recording this on President's Day if you had one. are recording us on President's Day if you got confused by that. Also, if you are from any other

country that's not the United States, you were probably extra confused and still don't know what we're talking about. You see, every year we celebrate a day. It's called President's Day. What is it about? I don't know. I think just being like, isn't it cool that we have a president? I guess. And to be honest, I feel like at this point, most people are anti-having a president. And not just because they're anti-Trump, but like the whole idea, see, I'm now I'm into, parliamentary bullshit. I don't know how they, you know, do it everywhere else, but I like this idea. Where's the parliamentarians day? According to the Democrats, they're the ones who really hold the key to change the policy.

That's right. Where's the Senate parliamentarians day? The ones are sovereign ruler and potentate. That's right. That's the person who decides whether or not you deserve a bigger minimum wage. And guess what? Not this year. Sorry folks. God, that was the fucking, that was a parliamentarian. It's like, What's the name of that character in the second or third matrix, the Marindigian? Oh, Maravingian. The Merivindian. The Maravigian is as sensible to me as Merovingian. The Senate Merivindian made a cake that makes you come and says, oh, sorry, you cannot get $15 minimum wage.

That's my French accent. I can't do French. God, I hated those sequels. you know, I've softened on them. I feel like those are my, those are my Star Wars prequels, you know, like people, there's this new wave of children

who talk about the Star Wars prequels like they're good and all of us like normal millennials are like, what are you talking about? It sucked. Well, that's kind of how I feel about those Matrix sequels. Maybe if I went back and watched them, I'd be more excited about Cornell West at a, you know,

subterranean rave. I thought it was, he wasn't at the rave, he was on a council talking to Neo or Morpheus or some shit. Doesn't matter. Five stars in a review. You don't be funny if Norm the thing though, dear brother,

Neo is. If I... James Baldwin once said. I would love it. If Norman Finkelstein was also on that panel. Neo! Neo! Enough of this nonsense.

You are not the one. And Chris Hedges is there. And in the end, the Matrix will consume. us all. And the sentinels are coming for us already. It is too late for the resistance.

I love that. That is, if someone rewrite the Matrix please. Five stars an review on all of the podcast apps and subscribe wherever you can. And also go to Patreon.com slash badass bar.

Get yourself an extra episode every week. You can also buy a year-long subscription, which is even cheaper than doing a monthly subscription. Do you know who we had on last week on our Patreon episode? I don't even remember. On our supposed extra episode, our bonus episode. That's right. It was fucking Taylor Lorenz, man.

It was Taylor-R-Lor-Ler-R-R-R-R. That's a big name. It is a- It is a- And we put it on the fucking Patreon because there's just no room on the main feed to have all of our great guests. Exactly. There's not enough room at the end. You know what I mean? for all my Christmas loving people out there.

There's not enough rum at the inn, Matt? What kind of bar are they running? I said it normal. I say words normal and everyone just chirps at me because they're jealous. I'll be up on my roof. I'm on my roof drinking my rum. What if I pronounced rum like room? Can I get a room and Coke please?

Can I get a room poonch please? Room pooch You can buy shirts You like shirts I got shirts Go to Bannesbarra.com Buy one Buy one before they run out

Because that can happen Today's episode is brought to you By United Palestinian Appeal The United Palestinian Appeal has worked in Gaza for 45 years And is currently providing Critical Pharmaceuticals, Medical Supplies and vaccines in the region

They also provide farm-made clothing and sleeping bags for families in Gaza. If you have any money and you want to give it to a good cause, go to upa connect.org and give them your money. They need it more than

we do. They probably need it more than you do. So, go to upa connect.org or just click the link in the description. Daniel, what's the spin? Well, starting things off, we lost Robert Duval today. I know. What a bummer.

96 years old or 95. What a great actor. He gave my favorite line reading of all time, I think, in Paddy Chiafsky's network. Oh, I thought you were going to say in John Q. But go ahead. I haven't seen John Q. I haven't seen any of those 90s and aughts like revenge movies. Oh, that John Q is great. It's just a genre I don't really know. No, John Q is sort of revenge movie. It's actually about Denzel Washington's son needs a heart transplant, but he doesn't have insurance, so he holds up a hospital.

Who wrote it? Bernie Sanders? Yeah, probably Bernie. Bernie wrote it's a Bernie Sanders joint It's really good though No my favorite line comes from network So many great lines where he says After Howard Beal goes on the air

And the ratings are baffo you know Yeah yeah yeah It's a big fat Big titted hit And I don't have to waffle with ready anymore I love it I love when he does that He did this He like slicks his non-existent hair back

He touches his bald his shiny scalp just rubs the liquid around he has a similar like sort of cadence in John Q he goes what about the people the human beings and I just I love when he talks like that's great

and a great later DeVo film is the Apostle. Incredible. Oh I love that movie. Did he read it I think he might have even directed it it's beautiful anyway so what do I have in my collection that's Robert DeVall oriented only one soundtrack the natural.

Yes, yes. Robert Redford as well, who we lost? Yeah. Redford died too? What's that? When did Robert? I think Redford died some time ago, no? Oh, man, I don't keep up with my celebrating news.

No, you, I think you're probably right. Everyone was posting that the meme of him with the beard nodding. That's right. 2025 last year you died. That's fucking crazy. Anyway, many of his films are available to watch on Apple. And speaking of Apple, we have, we have an Apple-filled episode today.

There's many different kinds of apples and many different instances of apples showing up throughout my music collection. First of all, Walt Disney presents Johnny Appleseed. I don't expect this one will be on the playlist, but, you know, it's an old 1950s, 60s cartoon. Okay. Is it the one that goes, Lord, there goes,

Johnny Apple Seed. He may pass, I'm in the hour of... It's possible. The songs include Pioneers' song, Pioneers a heading west, the Lord, oh, the Lord is good to me, so I give thanks, whatever. Got them apple trees growing and friend to all the creatures of the world. The Apple song, Pioneer's song.

Is that a real guy, Johnny Appleseed? But it's cute. What's that? Is that a real guy? Johnny Appleseed? Yeah, I don't know. It's like, I feel like I grew up listening, like hearing people talk about him, like he was a real guy. He's like, no, he's a real guy who went around with a pan on his head, putting apples seeds in the ground.

I don't think he's real. But you know who is real? Bonita Applebum. from a tribe called Quest's first album, People's, instinctive travel, and the paths of rhythm. I got a chance to invoke this recently when Jesse Brown replied to a comment of mine about Jewish summer camp. I was talking, you know, there's a thing going on in Canada where there's a group that's like targeting Zionist summer camps that, like, support the IDF and higher IDF soldiers and stuff like that, of which I went to one. And I guess I have mixed feelings in my gut around like making a list of summer camps, like my little, oh, they're coming for us, censors go off. but at the same time, I can't stand the lies.

And it's totally understandable to me that people are interested in, like, what are they teaching their kids, given that there's a genocide going on, and people are being tribal and shitty about it. So Jesse was like, these summer camps are a refuge from politics. I'm like, what the hell they are? We used to march, we used every Friday night, we used to sing and march to the Shir Halpal Mah, the fucking fight song of a paramilitary organization that carried out,

I can still sing every word and translate it for you. And he replies to this, I'm sorry Jody Applebaum. I'm sorry, I hope someday you can forgive Jody Albaum for never making out with you. And I said, Jody Applebaum, I was never into her. But her cousin Bonita, she really definitely had to put me on. Hell yeah. That's, that was my love. Joe, is that like, I read that and I was like, is that a real person?

Like, or did he? No, no, no, no, no, no. We're not from this. He pulled a J.K. He pulled the J.K. Rowling where he was just like, I got to name someone a Jewish name. he went with Jody. That's right. Okay.

That's right. So then we've got, of course, Fiona Apple. Of course. With the idler wheel. I could have chosen any of her albums or classic, but right. But XTC with Apple Venus, volume one, great album from later in their career. Adams Apple by Wayne Shorter. Great album as well.

Road Apples by the Canadian group The Tragically Hip, whom I featured before, I think. Okay. A couple more. Just hang in there, Matt. Just hang in there. Oh, no, I'm just here. Yes, I'm sure.

Thank you for holding space for my obsession. Yes. We've got... Daniel's Mishigas hour. That's right. This is the humoring Daniels segment. It's the humoring. We all love it, all folks.

Apple Tree is a great song on Erica Badu's debut album, Baduism. And then a couple from like other languages basically. This is a Cuban like I don't know if they were like Centuria, but the Afro-Cuban group from the Nigerian Yoruba tradition called patato and Tautico. And in French, Pome de Ter is potato which means apple of the earth. So chose patato and. I love that. And finally, for our Cockney rhyming slangers out there.

Oh, al-a-la, please. the people under the stairs. How do you say stairs in Brits? In Cockney? Up the apples and pairs. The apples and pairs. There you go. That's right.

I know what you're to do about the Brits. That's the spin at long last. I also know a lot about, you know, specifically the Yoruba people of Nigeria. I'm, you know, I like Housa too. And Igbo. I love them all. All right. Shout out to all the Nigerian homies out there.

Yeah. But yes, I knew. Bushoon and leg, what's the name of the other god? Anyway, I'm not going to fucking butcher the names of the Urua God from this podcast. I'm not going to bring shame, disrepute, and a curse upon us and our listeners. Definitely not a curse. Well, speaking of apples, we have a wonderful guest. How do you like them apples?

What if that's where I went with it? I like apples, and you'll like this apple too. She is an artist and a writer. Her new book is coming out April 7th, and it is called Here Where We Live is Our Country, the Story of the Jewish Boond. Ladies and gentlemen, oh, look, he's got an advanced copy. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, please welcome to the podcast, Molly Crab Apple. What's up? Hey, how you doing?

I'm doing good. You know, I spend so much time listening to Bad Hasbara while I draw that it's kind of surreal being on it with you guys. Really? Yeah, yeah, I do. You actually have listened to this podcast before? Many, many times. So when you draw, you're basically making small, repetitive, and extremely boring motions with your hand for like five hours. Sure. That's what we do with words.

No, but your words accompany me while I am drawing. So I love your Naomi Klein episode, your Tony Karen episode. I'm a fan. Oh, I love it. Well, the Tony Karen episode in this one are going to be natural companions, natural significance given the topic. But I am such a fan of your art. I mean, you're. you illustrated the cover you illustrate you all the art in the book

I've been to your studio I've seen much of your it's yeah big big big big fan I came to know you through your politics I was you were one of the people whom I followed due to your very specific pro-diaspora anti-Zionist politics for a long time and of course, you became and remained one of the voices of sanity out there talking specifically about, you know, what it's like to be Jewish and be in America. So I appreciate the fact that you've even heard of our podcast. Very cool. Very cool for all of us here.

And I want to talk to you about the Boone because you wrote a book about it. I did seven years of my life I spent on this book. Yes. You learned a whole dang language to write this book, didn't you? I learned, I learned Yiddish, yes. It's not the most useful language. I resent the fact that it kicked my Arabic out of my head. There are no useful Yiddets. Yes. Not Urshkait, but I did learn Yiddish to write this book. That is, I mean, that's really impressive. It's, it is, Yiddish for me as someone, you know, who didn't, who grew up as a, you know,

half Jew in Los Angeles. Yiddish has always been almost a, um, sort of, it's such an old school Jewish language that it almost exists just to give us fun new words for things we didn't know people made new words for. And, uh, you know, like, sometimes you find out a word that you've been saying your whole life is a Yiddish word and whatnot. But later in life, it became very explicitly tied with the sort of the anti-Hebrew, almost like the anti-Zionist language form, to the point where I knew anti-Zionists who had started learning Yiddish almost in revolt against Zionism, in revolt against modern Hebrew. Did you go into learning the language from a place of praxis, or was it from just something you actually just needed to do in order

to be able to do the research about it. Oh, I needed to do it. I mean, the Bund was obsessed with the Yiddish language. They viewed it as this huge kind of matter of cultural pride that the language that working class Eastern European Jews spoke should be elevated, should have its own literature, its own music, and so on. And so if I wanted to write about the Bund, I needed to know it. But it was also something really cool to do

because it's the language, you know, my grandparents spoke. It's the language I think all our grandparents spoke probably. There were words that my mom would say to me when she was like yelling at me or being affectionate that I later learned were from Yiddish. But most importantly, when you learn Yiddish, you can speak unmediated to your past. There have been like a bunch of different sort of language modernization projects. I think about modern Turkish, for instance, where there's just this rupture, right? A language gets reformed, a language gets discarded, and people can no longer read even their own grandparents' letters. And so in learning Yiddish, I was like, oh, I can understand what my ancestors thought.

I don't need to wait for someone else's translation. I can just read the things that they said. And very often those things were extremely interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's an incredible way of looking at it because, yeah, that language barrier, obviously. being broken down is going to give you much deeper insight into what you're reading, especially on like a family level. Well, and speaking of family, the book starts with and threaded through it is your

family's history. Can you tell us about your great-grandfather and his connection, his role in creating this organization and maybe use that as a springboard to tell us a bit about who the boon were and why they're significant? Just, you know, those little mini topics. Just go for it. It might seem a little bit funny to be this into your great-grandparents. I mean, it's a long time away. But with my great-grandfather, I grew up entirely surrounded by him.

He was a painter. He taught my mom how to paint. Mom taught me how to paint. What was his name, Holly? Sam Rothport. And I grew up surrounded with like hundreds and hundreds of paintings of sculptures. I read his self-published philosophy book. And I felt like I knew him because he was this bohemian artist.

He was a crazy nonconformist. He tried to make a no-kill chicken farm, no-kill egg farm during the Depression that went bankrupt. He literally has notes that I have that say, reject spineless authority. So, you know, he was this amazing figure and he shaped my mom's whole life. He was like her substitute father figure. And so I felt like I knew him. And he had come to America in 1904. I had always heard it was because of trouble.

But I started really looking into his past because of a body of work he did. They were these paintings of his hometown, Volkavisk, this tiny, godforsaken, like, mud and herring, pale of settlement town. that kind of in the middle of nowhere, it's not historically significant, but that he did 600 paintings of. And they were every aspect of life. They were sacred images, but also images of himself

like spying on women in the bathhouse or of Jewish girls' fucking Russian soldier boyfriends while their dad looked for them on the other side of the fence. Wait, wait, a great-grandfather wrote the original IP for Porky's? Yeah, the OG Porky's script is all in unit. He literally wrote. He had ones from this religious school he was forced to go to where the rabbi was falling asleep and he was lighting the rabbi's shoes on fire. He was a bad kid.

He had one that this spoke to me so deeply where, again, he's at this terrible religious school and he's teaching all of the kids how to draw cruel pictures of their teacher. Hell yeah. I mean, this was me. I was like, oh, across the generations, bad students doing mean drawings. Yes. And he had this one picture that I was obsessed with. So it's this girl, and she has a little corseted waist and big old Gibson girl hair, and she's on some godforsaken dirt road.

And she's throwing a rock through a window. And next to her is her boyfriend who is offering more rocks because you shouldn't let the lady carry her rocks. Absolutely, a gentleman, a gentleman. A gentleman, exactly. Take tips, sir. And it was called Itga the Boondas. Be classy, Vandals. That's right.

Chivalry is possible. Chivalry is not dead. Shivalry is not dead. And so it was called Itga the Bundest. And I remember reading this title and I was like, Boondest, what's that? And so this was something that I sort of kept in my back pocket for many years and occasionally I would Google it and I'm like,

oh, it's a Jewish revolutionary group. They were against the czar. But then after I went to, Palestine the first time in 2015. I was talking with my mother and we were talking about grandpa Sam and I started Googling the Bundists more and I was like fuck they were anti-Zionists they were Jewish socialist revolutionaries who were anti-Zionists. Oh shit it me. It me. Itka. And so I got a little bit obsessed and I started reading every single book that was available in English. There's some good academic books,

like shout out Jack Jacobs. But there were all these kind of like dusty academic books or else these translated memoirs. And I started being like, how is this group that was so popular, most popular group for revolutionaries in the Russian Empire? How is this group that was there at so many big historical moments, why don't we know about them? Like, why isn't this group part of current consciousness? Like, why do Jews, like, learn about, like, the Hasamonian dynasty or whatever the fuck at Hebrew school, but they don't know anything about this massively influential Eastern European Jewish group, which is where all our grandparents come from, that, you know, fought for us and did amazing things? Right. Why do we know every single hour?

of the war in 67 in which, you know, the Israelis invaded and occupied the land still do today, but we don't know anything about the boons. Anything, except we don't, they're not taught, you know, that Israel started the war in 67, but nonetheless. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I wrote this article for the New York Review of Books where I traced their history. I talked about how they started as this party of young Jewish Marxist troublemakers in the Russian Empire who were rebelling both against the fact that they lived in this massively oppressive hemophiliac autocracy of idiocy and bullshit and repression.

So they're rebelling, right, just as like people who live under the Russians are. But they were also rebelling against the fact that as Jews, they had all of these specific, legal restrictions against them. They couldn't move out of the pale of settlement. They couldn't go to university. They couldn't buy land. Their army term was 25 years. All of this stuff.

And so I followed them from their very earliest days, creating this Jewish socialist party, how they fought against pogroms, how they educated Stettles, how they fought in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. and then about how they built this amazing counterculture in interwar Poland. And the world that they built, it reminded me of like the Black Panther Party. On one hand, they were creating these whole structures of community care. They had free breakfast programs and clinics like the Panthers. They had a sanatorium for tubercular slum kids.

They had community kitchens. They had a woman's movement that fought for birth control. they had kids movements. But also like the Panthers, they were devoted to elevating their own culture, which the whole world said was shit and not a real culture. They're devoted to elevating Yiddish, right? With theater troops, publishing houses, with newspapers that would tell these like broke-ass Jewish workers about like socialism in China, you know, or about Gandhi. And also like the Panthers, they were completely committed to armed self-defense. And their slogan was, here where we live is our country.

That's where I get this somewhat unwieldly title from. But what they meant, it wasn't like me. I could say, like, here where I live in New York is my country. And that makes a, that's pretty easy to say. New York is great. I love it here. But to say here where you live is your country in a place as massively racist and as massively dangerous to exist in as interwar Poland was, that was an act of defiance.

that they backed with guns. That was an extraordinarily tough thing to say that they fought for. As opposed also as opposed to there where other people live is our country. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think what's fascinating about that, you know, slogan and, of course, title of your book is the fact that it almost is very specifically a response to Zionism from the jump. You know, the idea of where you are is your country.

the idea of you not being separate from it, or the idea of diasporism, or as they called it doichite, which means heerness. Heerness, right. You know, that is, it's almost been overtaken, I think, by Zionism. You know, the idea of diaspora now, we are all just considered, you know, at least by Zionists, to be people who were once cast out from Israel and are just, begging to return home and just going to at any moment

just two more trips. We're just biding our time. Three more, four more, five more generations of utter comfort and privilege on this continent. And we're talking up, that's it. We're going. We're like Steve Hartman and the jerk. All we need is our thermos and that's it. That's all we need. We're going. Yeah, I just need a couple more.

Yeah, yeah. Just a little bit more in the greatest city in the world, New York City. And, you know, any moment, any moment, I want to But it's like very, you know, it's, I love the slogan and I love the title of the book because it offers this very simple idea that is at this point taken for granted. It's almost like sacrilegious to say that here, you know, where you are is where you're from. That's, you know, who you are not in any way obligated to take other people's land in order to be a nation. nations, the idea of a nation, is not tied to a specific land.

And I think I want to hear more about the creation of the boon with regard to also the creation of modern Zionism and what their interaction was between the two. One of the great coincidences of this history is that the Boond and modern Zionism were created the same year. They were both created in 1897. But the Boond was created by a group of 13 Marxist troublemakers in the safe house of an attic in Vilnius. Hell yeah. Yeah, fucking kings.

I love it. And political Zionism was launched at a ritsy-ass casino in Basel, Switzerland. That's right. And, you know, its founder was a Viennese Jew named Theodore Herzl, who, his reaction to, his reaction to, the seemingly insurmountable racism of Europe was we need to make our own ethno state somewhere else. We need to be normal like racist Europeans. Right. We need to do the racism to someone else.

Exactly. That's how you become an equal player in the stage of nations. Exactly. And so the Boone's relationship to Zionism was always one of enemies from the very start. But the reason for the anonymity, the anonymity, it changed. So at the start, in 1897, when the boond is looking at Zionism, they are like, what DMT are you smoking? You're telling me that nine million Jews are going to leave their homes to become collective farmers on land that you buy from the Ottoman Sultan. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yeah. And they basically just thought it was a crackhead fever dream. And also that it was something that rich Jewish bosses were using to deflect from the very real labor challenges that their Jewish workers were doing. I saw Daniel's face when you said crackhead fever dream. And I knew in his head, I read the words, if you will it, it is no crackhead fever. I wish I'd had those. I was too busy thinking of a Bundes Jean Wilder meme, like them listening to the idea of Zer and being like,

mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Go out. Yeah, tell me more. And so they were just like, this is clearly something that Jewish bosses are saying, oh, we endowed a yeshiva in Palestine, so we don't have to pay you a living wage here in Poland. Right. And they just thought it was nonsense.

And also, they resented it. They resented in their bones, the idea of it. Because you have to remember that the racist governments that they were dealing with, first in the Tsarist Russia and then in Poland, did not consider Jews to be Europeans. They did not consider Jews to be part of Russia or Poland. They thought of Jews as this quote unquote oriental alien race that should probably be deported somewhere else. And so when the Bhun sees these Zionists being like, actually we are an alien oriental race that ought to be evacuated. cuated somewhere else.

Yes. They're like this, wow, this sounds very similar to what our enemies are saying. Right. It sounds like you guys hate Jews. I just have to ask you, does it drive you absolutely insane as it does me that there's now such a thing as the anti-Semitism czar? Yeah, there was an anti-Semitism czar. His name was Zarr Nicholas II.

And he was very good at it and they shouldn't appropriate his culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The anti-Semitism czar. We have appointed that the head gay basher in charge. of GL, you know, queer rights. They need an anti-Semitism, furor, next. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah.

But so, basically, so that's it in the early days. But then once Balfour Declaration happens, and once Zionism gets the backing of the British Empire, the Boond is like, oh, this could actually happen, and it's fucked. And they're like, this is dependent on British imperialism. you're literally making yourselves the handmaids of the British Empire. You're also incredibly racist. You are stealing people's land first, you know, in these horrible evictions, which was one of like the first sort of Zionist moves was like buy land from these wealthy absentee landlords

and like brutally violently evict farmers who had lived there for hundreds of years. So the Boond was like, that's fucked. You say fucked things about Palestinians all the time. That's racist. We're socialists. We don't believe in that. And also, you are collaborating not just like with ideas, but materially with the racist Polish government that wants to deport Jews from their homes.

And this is something that I think also isn't known about Poland between the wars. basically Poland between the wars, a lot of the political parties were psychopathically racist. And one of the most popular ones was a party called the National Democrats that wanted to deport all 3.3 million Polish Jews from Poland. They were like either they can go to French Madagascar or they can go to Palestine. And you literally have these moments in interwar Poland where these mobs of Polish, you know, Aryan-looking. blonde thugs are marching through Jewish neighborhoods, throwing bombs in Jewish shops, beating people and stabbing people, and screaming Jews to Palestine. And at the same time, as the Polish government is funding this, they're also providing weapons to Zionist militias

in Palestine. They're providing weapons to the Haganah, even to the absolutely deranged Lehi, Sterngang, to the Ergun. And the idea is that they want Jews to leave Poland. And so they are willing to materially help the Zionist militias murder Palestinians to help get Jews out of Poland. Lehi being the precursors to Beatar. Right. Yeah, yeah. No, no, Betar was before Lehi. Lehi was even more deranged and psychopathic.

Okay. Offshoot from Betar. Oh, man, there's an extra, extra Beatar-e Batar out there? There's founded by a poet. You saw Shemir was a member of the Stern. Yes, exactly, exactly. And yeah, they were, I mean, all of the Zionist militias were pretty murderous and deranged, but I feel like Lehi, being as it was, founded by a poet, particularly gets into like the fever dream derangement parts.

Well, that's a lot of fun. You had this on your Instagram, and I want to like get into it just because it captures something really interesting, you know, including the, the Buns unsurprised. and I think very sober assessment of, say, the 1929 Hebron massacre. And it reminded me very much of what Finkelstein said after October 7th in terms of, you know, the abolitionists saying, we're not surprised by Nat Turner's revolt. But let's take a look at this. So this is a post entitled The Bund Against Zionism, a lesson from here where we live is our country. While the Bund had banned Zionists from membership in 1901, their opposition.

to the ideology reached its height in interwar Poland. The Bund loathed Zionism's nationalism, its racism, its contempt for the Jewish diaspora, and its slavish dependence, if not Slavish. Hey, nice. Is it true that those words are related? I'm not sure. We'll ask GROC later. Yeah, exactly.

Don't ask no AI shit. Hey, GROC! Sorry, this is my friend. Rock, you stupid idiot. Get up! Get your ass up! I need a factoid! On British bayonets, and it's dependent on British bayonets. When riots broke up in Palestine in 1929, killing over 100 Jewish residents, Jewish communities around the world plunged into mourning that quickly morphed into calls for bloody vengeance.

Only the boonned refused to participate, blaming the riots on Zionism, which had collaborated with the British occupation, to deny Palestinians their political rights. Next slide. Yeah. Instead, they held a 3,000-person mass rally at Warsaw's splendid theater. What a great name for a theater, by the way.

Under the banner, liquidate Zionism. Their resolution read, this meeting calls on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism. It's a great word for Zionism, chauvinism, that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish street. the answer to is to tragically but

pointlessly spilled blood cannot be cannot lie in more national hatred which will inevitably lead to more communal clashes but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement in Poland the Zionist movement responded by trying to shut down

the boone's school system man I this is like plus change this all feels like we're just reliving the same moment Oh, you're saying a bunch of Zionists have responded to criticism against their project with, can we try to, I don't know, cancel their schools and do everything we can to kick them out?

That's great. In 1938, later in the game, Polish Zionists attempted to make a coordinating committee of Jewish groups to fight against the worsening situation in the country. The Boone refused to join to explain the decision their leader, Henrik Erlich, described how Zionism had collaborated with the racist Polish government that sought to expel Jews from the country. And then you've got a little explanation of Henrik Erlich. This is a Bundist and Menshevik leader on the Petrograd Soviet in 1917,

lawyer and journalist later leader of the Bund in interwar Poland. Do you want me to keep going? Daniel, do you have some questions? Let's see what's next, yeah. he then predicted that the establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbors and the people it had dispossessed. Quote, if a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate, is that what it says?

Spiritual? Yeah. Will be eternal fear of the external enemy, as in Arabs, at eternal struggle for every last bit of ground with the internal enemy, Arabs, and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraeus,

Jews of Palestine. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow? Erlik asked, indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish? I think we can leave it there.

But can you speak about Erlich and his prescience and more about the... And what other predictions he had maybe for like who's going to win the World Series this year? I mean, there was one Buddhist prediction. Did he know about Kelshi? Okay, the best Bundes prediction that it's not about Zionism, this is just a segue,

is in 1918, when Trotsky was the head of the Red Army and the most popular man in Soviet Russia, like, you know, he was going to be the heir to Lenin, there is a line by Vladimir met him, the Bundes leader where he's like, each year the circle of kosher bolsheviks is growing smaller and smaller. Today they want to shoot Abramovich. Who's to say tomorrow they won't want to shoot Trotsky? Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, boom.

Called it. They were really good at calling it. Well, they got close. If he had said, stab with an ice pick in Mexico. Want to shoot Trotsky and, but stabbing with the ice pick, nonetheless. No, so,

Henrik Erlich was an amazing figure. He's my friend's grandpa, too. Shout out to Mark Erlich, first Jewish head of the Carpenters Union in Boston. But Henrik Erlich. What the fuck? You got this posse of Bund descendants that you're, you're rolling with.

I do. I love them. I love my old descendant so much. I never would have written this book without them. It was my posse that made me do this.

Also a Jewish carpenter. Yeah, exactly. And head of the union in the Northeast. Wow. I mean, I'm just saying, ever heard of Jesus Christ? Ever heard of Jesus Christ?

There was a break. Molly's low key, low key humble brag, flex that she's friends with our Lord and Savior. Friends with new Jesus. Mark. So, Henrik Erlich was this lifelong revolutionary.

He, you know, was a participant in 1917 Revolution, got booted out after the Bolsheviks took power. And he and another boondist named Victor Alter become the leaders of the Bund in interwar Poland. And they're doing everything from organizing labor unions to mutual aid to serving on the city counsels. They're these like very deep, very, very smart, hard-nosed activists. But both of them are also people who immediately recognize Zionism for what it is. In 1917, before the Balfour Declaration is even a thing. Henrik Erlich is visiting London in this failed attempt to set up some sort of peace delegation to end World War I. But in that trip,

He's like trying to argue with the labor party against supporting the Balfour Declaration. He's like, are you going to hand over the Arab majority of Palestine to a bunch of religious fanatics? So he was someone who saw it from the start. And he has another line in that same speech where he says Zionists see themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Right. And they want to make themselves first-class citizens in Palestine. and to make Arab second-class citizens.

Basically, I think that Erlik, but not just Erlik, I mean, many, many people, socialists, leftists, and not even leftists, even like liberal Yekijews in America immediately saw that you can't go into people's countries

and take their land at gunpoint and expect to have a project that's built on peace and mutual respect. in democracy. You're locking yourself into a cycle of vicious repression, which will provoke resistance, which will provoke more repression until violence will poison everything about the society. Yeah. And with the 1929 riots with the Hebron and the Safed massacres, you know, these massacres were horrific. And they targeted Jews who were not Zionists primarily, many of them,

like Sephardi Jews, who wouldn't accept the help of the Zionist militias like the Hagan However, the cause for why these riots kicked off was this campaign that was really championed by Jabotinsky to try to take over and bulldoze the Moroccan neighborhood that was around the whaling wall. And they were also done in the background of these like increasing Zionist land purchases and then very, very violent evictions that happened afterwards. And the Boond, when they looked at these massacres, they were like, these are, massacres are horrific, you know, no doubt. They were not saying they were good or an act of liberation or that, but they were also saying that these massacres are happening in the context of people who are being brutally, viciously repressed by the British occupation and by their Zionist helpers. And in fact, Zionists are not just endangering themselves. They're endangering the entire Jewish population of Palestine, which has many people who are not Zionists, many people who lived there for hundreds of years. And they saw these mass demonstrations of mourning that took place all over the Jewish world after the Hebron and Safed massacres as an exploitation of the dead as trying to use these people who had been murdered.

to whip up more war, to whip up more support for militias, like the Argun, which is Jabotinsky's militia, comes out of the aftermath of the 1929 massacres. And they're like, listen, you know, we don't think anyone should be massacred. But if you want there to be safety for Jews in Palestine, And you cannot collaborate with British imperialists to steal people's lands and to suppress people's ability to assert their political rights. Right. And I'm sure they were accused of justifying the massacres or siding with, I mean, just like Not condemning Hamas enough.

Not condemning Hamas enough. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you got it. You got it. You know, because it's like anytime someone, and it's the prophetic tradition, to not say, it's not right, it's not wrong. It's inevitable. It's physics. This is the way the universe works.

There are certain principles. And if you try to mess with that and skip the line and become safe by becoming like your oppressors and treating other people the way your oppressors treated you, you're going to reap what you so. Right. And they already had American history to, you know, and they had Haitian history. I mean, it's a big world. There's been a lot of, a lot of. projects involved, involving subjugation and domination and resistance. And so they were intelligent

viewers of the world. Right. Yeah. And it seems like, you know, also I think, and this is for me an important thing to talk about, which is that ideologically, these things are so night and day. And it's funny that they all, both Zionism and Buddhismism, get kind of wrapped up into being the same sort of project almost. You don't really hear about Buddhism, obviously, but it's almost like

two groups of Jews trying to decide how do we keep Jews safe. To me, I look at what Zionism is and what Buddhism is as being polar opposites to the point where they almost are in

conversation with each other, because one is talking about Jews almost as chattel. I mean, you know, they're talking about themselves in a way where they go, you know, we are, when we die, you know, for this cause of land, we're going to just replenish it with more babies. Like, the life is cheap. Land is forever. And then you have this other side bundism, which is very much about internationalism. It's about solidarity. It's about being against racism, against classism, against all of the things that would make Zionism in the mind of a Zionist

a peaceful, wonderful, idealistic project. And it's beautiful to look at and read about the, I think what it gets mostly known for, at least in the historical context, obviously dominated by Zionism, is for being wrong when it came to what Jews needed to do in Europe because of the, you know, obviously the Holocaust happening. But then also, you know, the way in which... The Holocaust was such a massive own. Yeah. You know?

Right. They just got poned. They got so poned. But they treat genocide like it's some sort of intellectual argument and it proves who had better and worse ideas. They don't just treat it like it's a fucking genocide. Yes, exactly. And also they treat it as an own.

They treat it as the gotcha against anyone, anyone who's a bundist or anyone who was a leftist Jew who was like, oh, where I am is where I'm from. That is historically how it is been viewed, especially by Zionists. but in ways that have not really been corrected by sort of the, I guess, general historical record. What are your thoughts on this argument

that if the boon was right, then how come they're dead? Or if the boon was right, then how come the Holocaust happened? There's so many threads to untangle here. I'm going to try to do that and hope I don't get like... If you can do it under 60 seconds, I'm just kidding. Well, so the first thing is that the reason that Jews who went to Palestine were not murdered in the Holocaust was not because Palestine is a magical place with a laser force field. It's because the British were able to stop Rommel's armies in Egypt. If Rommel's armies had taken over Palestine, the same thing would have happened to the Jews in Palestine that happened to the Jews in Poland.

So that's a matter of historical contingency. It's not that Jews were smarter and better that they went to Palestine. They just happened to go to a place that didn't get taken over. Jews who fled to France happened to go to a place that was taken over by the Nazis. That's it. Right. The second thing, though, that I want to say about this is that the thing that broke my heart when I was writing this book, like the thing that fucking killed me when I was writing it is I think I was looking to try to find some way that there was something that Jews could have done.

to have saved themselves in Eastern Europe that there was something. And what I realized was that there wasn't actually, that no one was a, no Jewish group could have saved the Jews of Eastern Europe, not Zionist, not Bundist, not communist, not assimilationist, not Hasidic, nothing. And that's because they were a small minority. And the Nazis were probably the greatest war machine of that moment in time. How could Jews have saved themselves, any Jews, if the nation of France couldn't save itself from the Nazis, right? If they rolled over Western Europe, if England was about to fall before America bailed them out,

they pushed the Red Army back to Moscow. And we lacerate our ancestors for not being able to stop them. And I had a moment. Talk about self-hatred. Jesus fucking Christ. No, I had this moment. I was in Yerevan, in the capital of Armenia. And I was at the genocide museum there.

And I feel like such, like, I don't know, like, sympathetic. like commonalities, you know, with this experience that Armenians had, especially because so much of the ways that Armenians were framed similar to how Jews were framed, that they were like greedy merchants and, you know, double dealing, all of this fucked up shit. And also because a lot of the mechanics of the Holocaust were figured out in the Armenian genocide. So I'm at this museum and I'm with my friend who's from a family that went through the Armenian genocide. And I'm feeling such like commonality. And then I ask her, I'm like, friend, I need to ask you something. Did anyone in your family ever say that the Armenians who stayed in Istanbul were stupid? That they should have

gone to France or, you know, to Zarist Russia, like to Armenian majority cities like Tbilisi, something that would have been even easier for them to do than Jews because the borders were quite open at that time. Did anyone ever criticize their ancestors for staying in their homes despite the racism of the Ottoman Empire. And she just looked at me and she was like, no, why would we do that? Who would do that? What kind of psychopath? Who would do that? She was just like baffled. She was like, why would you criticize your ancestors for staying in their homes? And I'm like, well, and then she's like, no, we blame the Turks

for doing the genocide. Yeah. And it just, and it just, made me realize like what the fuck are we doing like why are we blaming ourselves for a fucking genocide or blaming our ancestors like what an act of profound cruelty to our own past that we do yeah um the the thread that i want to entangle though it's not like whether zionists were right and buddhists were wrong because that's that's stupid but it's whether eastern europe was so irredeemably racist that you couldn't actually make a decent life there, which is a different question, right, which doesn't necessarily lead to Zionism. That might lead to moving to Brazil, you know, or France or New York. And that's the thing where you read the history and you're

like, oh my God, because it wasn't just the Holocaust. It was the 200,000 Jews that were killed between 1918 and 1921, you know, in Ukraine during the Civil War. It was all the pogroms. It was the thousand Jews that were killed after the Holocaust when they were returning to their homes by a nationalist insurgency in Poland. It was in 1967 when the Polish government facing student protests like everywhere else in the entire world decided to blame the Jews for it and fire all the Jews from their government jobs. I mean, it was something unrelenting. And that isn't something that I blame the boon for. I don't blame anyone for fighting the racism that they're subjected to,

for fighting to stay in their home and defend their community. But I do blame the larger society for doing those horrific things. And I think that one of the reasons that Zionism has been able to, or not now, not now, but let's say, you know, 80 years ago, that it was able to sort of seize this. hegemony was that many places in the world were really, really fucking racist. And they were unrepentant about it. And they did not allow Jews to make decent lives there.

And so Zionism, I think, thrives on that cynicism, right? And it says there's big, strong victors and there's weak victims. And do you want to be a victim or a victor? Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yeah. I mean, you mentioned Jabotinsky. It brings my own family history to mind because I think I'm alive because of Jabotinsky. I think I've told you this in private, but it's very, very likely that my dad and grandmother only got into the Swiss glass factory and just outside the Jewish ghetto in Budapest because of some connection to my great-grandfather's friendship with Jabotinsky, apocryphly, but it very likely could be true. And, you know, I know that there was Zionist groups in Budapest,

who were smuggling weapons and to the resistance. And, you know, there were, once the, once the Holocaust started, it didn't matter who had been right and who had been wrong in their analysis. And I'd be curious as I read the book, I don't think we have time to handle this, this question right now, but like, to what extent did the Bund dovetail with things like the Warsaw Getter Uprising, were there any, you know, because you spoke about the need for Jewish armed resistance that they believed in and all that. but I think I'll leave that as a mystery to be unraveled in the reading of the book.

Yeah, it's a teaser for people who want to buy the book. It is answered in the book. It is indeed answered in the book. I could say many, many things about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. I guess my question for you is as the book gets ready to come out, first of all, congratulations on it. Thank you.

It's very exciting. What do you hope this book will do for the discourse, given the moment we're in? and having published a book myself, like, when it comes out, matters just as much as what's in it, you know? And I feel like this is an auspicious time for this book to be landing. So what are your hopes for it? At a really basic level, I want people to know that Zionism doesn't own our history. I feel like in addition to colonizing land, right, they colonize history, and they tried to make it seem like, their ideas were both ubiquitous and inevitable and that no one disagreed.

And I want people to know that there were huge Jewish communities that disagreed that totally had their number. And these Jews were not naive. They were not weak. They held guns and they fought for their right to stay in their home and they also refused to become colonizers. So that's one thing. the second thing is I feel like of all of the Boone's ideas of all the amazing work they did as organizers

the one to me that was the most powerful was their idea of Heerness. And it's not just something that's for Jews either. It's something that's for all of us. There's such an effort right now by the most powerful and wealthy scumbags on this earth to escape from like our shared project of living as humans to escape from our shared worlds to try to do you know what naomi klein calls you know end times fascism right yeah and i feel like the boon's call that here where we live is our country is reaffirming the commitment to the fact that this is all we have all we fucking have is each other all we have is the world around

us, the city is the blocks that we live on. This is where we are and we have to fight for it and we have to defend it. Yeah. And I love that the title implies that both a duty, like obligation in both directions. Like if here where we live is our country, then our country owes something to us. We are deserving of rights if this is our country. And we are obligated to it. It asks something of us, citizenship and the question of what does citizenship look like,

what does solidarity look like, what does group tribal solidarity? do you look like and self-defense and community, you know, but at the same time, what does it mean to be part of this larger society? Yes. Especially when we are a marginalized and oppressed group. What is that relationship? And so it's a more relational model of belonging than Zionism. Zionism is transactional.

It's possessive. It's. And separatist. And separatist. You know, and yeah. And I want to say one thing. I know we weren't going to get into the war. ghetto. No, please. In addition to being Jews, in addition to being revolutionaries, the Boond

were internationalists and they were believers in solidarity as one of the primary human values. And when I think about how far they took this, I think about a telegram that I found when I was doing archival research. It was during the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto when over 90% of the ghetto's inmates were deported to Treblinka. And the Boond, they had an illegal radio that they were using to communicate with the representative in London that they had. And during the height of the great deportation, the Boone's leaders sent a telegram demanding that the British release Mahatma Gandhi. Wow. And demanding freedom for India because they saw themselves as part of a universal project of socialism and liberation. Yes. And that's what Zionists like God sod,

sad God. Sad God. Who's God? Who's God? Who's sad god? He's a rapper. No, he's a gad sad. You know, Gad's sad? He's like a Canadian. He calls that suicidal empathy. Yes.

And that's the Zionist view of internationalism, solidarity, and believing in principles that affect all human beings. Well, Molly, this has been such a rich conversation, and it only represents half the time we have, or even a little bit more than half. So we need to take a break. We have other things we need to get to. but it's it's so rich and I can't wait to finish this book. Yes.

Thank you so much. Yeah. And Molly, you're still going to be around and so will all of you. So everyone stick around because we will be right back. And we're back. This is Bad Has Barra, World's Most Moral Podcasts here with Molly Crab Apple. How you doing, Molly? I'm doing good.

We are doing great as well. It's honestly, this is, during the break, we're having a conversation. Like, I don't know why we feel the need to be like, well, now we're done talking about the boond and this very interesting conversation. Time to move on to something stupid. We don't need to do that. So I've decided, we've all decided, though we're just going to keep talking to you about, you know, the boondism, about your book and stuff like that.

But just real quick, before we do, I want to say that, uh, I made a bumper for a segment that we are not going to do, at least on today's episode. It was going to be about how LeBron James said he's heard nothing but good things about Israel, and he really wants to go there one day. And I made this bumper. I love Israel. Give me all your tax money, but I can buy weapons. Shout out to John Tesh.

Shout out to John Tesh. Shout out to John Tesh and the NBA on NBC theme song that used to exist before ABC bought the rights. Yeah, but we will be talking about, you know, Ball Hasbara on our bonus Patreon episode this week. But I just really need people to hear that. I mean, I put it in so much work. I'm going to do it one more time. I love this right up. Give me all your tax money, but I can buy weapons.

Wow. It's good. That's awesome. You can see why I want to do this segment real best. Yes, yes. But yeah, no, let's continue talking as I think it's an interesting conversation. Daniel, you were saying during the break that there was a quote you wanted to read very specifically about Brooklyn. Yeah, I liked it when you, you know, I love, I mean, it's very compelling the way the book threads your relationship to this material familiarly, but also culturally and subculturally and just the way.

way the residences you feel as, you know, a bohemian artist, a denizen of the tenements, you know, all this kind of stuff. You had one line, the Vilna group had aimed to produce revolutionaries, mostly they'd created hipsters. That's not the paragraph I wanted to read, but what did you mean by that? And who was the Vilna group? The Vilna group was a group of young Jewish Marxists who was organizing in like the 1880s who would later go on to found the boon. This is in Lithuania, correct? Yeah, I mean, it was in the Democratic Socialists of Lithuania.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. The borders mean nothing at this point. It's all the Tsarist Empire. But the thing is that the theory of how Marxist thought they should organize then was they were like, what we should do is we should take workers and we should educate them and we should teach them by like Darwin and Marx and all of these things. And then if we educate them, they can go to the factory and they can educate other people.

And eventually, one by one, we're going to educate enough workers to have the revolution. And the podcast theory of taxes. This is the theory that leads DSA to make things called socialist summer school disregarding the fact that almost no one likes summer school. It's a bad thing. Right. It's like, yeah, exactly. This is, instead of going to the people now, everyone just make podcasts and hope people listen. So they were having like podcasts, but IRL and illegal.

And they were, they were quite popular amongst Jewish workers who are culturally nerds. But basically all they were leading to was it was not leading to these Jewish workers becoming revolutionaries. It was leading to them like carrying around books in German to look cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like acting cooler than other people at the factory. So that's what they meant when they said they created hipsters. Nice.

The game is the same as it ever worked, Daniel. Always. Always. Always. So you're speaking about, A woman named Patty, what's her name? Patty Kramer. Patty Kramer, right.

Can you spell that last name for me? K-R-E-M-E-R. All right. My grandma is a Kramer. Oh, wow. But I don't know if it's the same. You know what I mean? Like, it could be, there's lots of Kramer's out there, right?

Yeah. And it was like a pseudonym as well. So, you know, everyone has like their crazy underground names. That's true. That's true. All right, well, then fine. I just want to say maybe I'm related. That'd be sick.

Can't I be related to someone cool? Molly, I'm allowed. You're related. You're related. Thank you. My name was Kremmer. I would form a rap posse called Kremmer Fresh. Oh, I like that.

It's very Canadian of you. Or French. One of the things I hate, by the way, it's not a Canadian or French thing. Like, in middle America, if you, like, get some kind of, like, sweet fucking sugary coffee drink. They'll spell cream. Dougie fresh. Exactly. Very good.

Very good. Dougie fresh. Crem. They'll spell it Crem. Yeah. Yeah. That's how you know it's fancy cream. I'm like, what are you doing?

I love it. I can only think of, I can only think of the South Park episode with the fit bit that squirts. Creme fresh. Come all over you. I think about it. That's how I used to pick what pasta restaurant to go to. I was like, I'll go to anyone that says a restaurant.

If it's this, that's spelled that way, that's how you know it's good. That's how you know it's authentic. They're signaling. They're trying, like, so hard to signal that it's not just, like, pesticide-wrapped American hickishness.

They're doing with all they can, with all, like, as much European spelling as they can and failing. This is a restaurante, all right? Anyway, you're talking about Patty who fell in love with a cold, ironic boy named Arcadi Kramer. How many have tried to save those boys? boys through the energetic bounty of their love.

You can't rescue the world one man at a time, I told my friends when they fell in love with New York's angry radicals, the mean deridah quoting grad students, the pouty anarchists fresh out of lockup, the supposedly brilliant writers who preferred video games to writing. Ouch. Fucking nail. But they fell hard anyway. It seldom ended well. Trists at squats left them covered in spider bites.

The boys drained their bank accounts for experimental. magazines that never materialized. Then hopped freight train. You really didn't rush this paragraph. You really just got yourself. These are all true, by the way. Every single one of these things happened. You're not feeling any compulsion to get back to the history.

Then hop freight trains down south to disappear into the latest protest encampment. Sometimes, more dangerously, they stayed. So you can talk about that, but more generally speaking, like what was it like throughout the book finding these resonances and what a sort of? some of the others that surprised you in terms of like, oh, wow, you guys, me too. I mean, my dad's a Marxist, right? Like, I grew up hearing about the left. I grew up with my dad being involved in the left.

I grew up in the left. Like, it's just this was my family history. And so because of that- Your dad is Puerto Rican? Yeah, my dad's Puerto Rican. He's not Jewish. Was he involved with, like, the young lords or anything like that? Was he part of those movements?

He knew people in the young lords. He wasn't a young lord himself, but he met them especially. there were like building occupations at CUNY to try to the city university of New York to try to establish black and Puerto Rican studies and he was involved in those. Okay. But but so one of the things that you realize when you read enough about the left and especially when you read memoirs rather than just theory is that we have the same fucking pathologies. Things never change.

We are always doing the same. It's like we're caught in this loop of doing the same things over and over again. And I, when I wrote this book, I wrote it with like a real commitment to follow the things that I enjoyed. And one of those things is like the sometimes ridiculousness of movement politics. So I have a moment where I'm talking about the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, a very formative moment in the history of the party. But I was also interested in the fact that this endless fucking conference that leads to the boon, leaving the party, happens in the back of a Belgian wool cooperative that's infested with fleas. And everyone is being bitten with fleas while they are arguing for 15 hours a day,

sometimes with the most inane arguments that are entirely based not just on ideals, but on who slept with someone's friend and then was really mean afterwards. Yeah, ego and spite and petty greed. Exactly, exactly. And like not liking Lenin, not just because you don't like his ideals, but because you think he's like the biggest dick who ever lived. And you just do not want to put your part of the organization under this asses. And I write about that.

Be it resolved that Trotsky is not Bates. Trotsky also enters the book as the guy that stands up at Abundits lecture and says, I don't have a question, I have a comment. Speaking of DSA. Exactly. I'm guessing you're going to have some Trotsky's

at your book events. Oh, God. Some Trotsky had some Leninists. I have a whole list of all of the different communities I've offended in this book. And there are many. I just mean commenters in the guise of it. Oh, yes. That too.

There will be many comments, not questions. But, okay, so here's another, like, this is a fucked up moment in the Warsaw Ghetto, but it's something where when I was reading it, I was like, oh, my God, we are always like this. So in the Warsaw Ghetto, it was illegal to have a newspaper. people were starving themselves in order to get the ink and the paper to do these newspapers. They are risking being tortured to death to distribute these newspapers. What are the Jewish leftist groups writing in these newspapers? They are writing denunciations of the other Jewish leftist groups in the Warsaw Ghetto

for not understanding dialectical materialism. And so I think we often think, will things get so bad that we will eventually unite and get past our bullshit? And the answer is maybe not. Probably not. There's, I mean, it's, the only comfort I take from it, and it's cold comfort, is watching it happen no matter where someone's from. Watching the way in which it's almost a through line throughout all of liberation politics is. You see it in Palestine politics too? Absolutely.

Yeah. You see it devolving into which of our, you know, fellow oppressed is the most wrong. In fact, I hate them more than my oppressor is, I mean, it's a through line. And I think it speaks more so than anything to the power of oppression and, you know, the way in which the oppressor gets into someone's mind and makes you even like subconsciously subservient. And the difficulty of keeping your eyes on the prize staying focused. and understanding the ways that your strategy can be derailed like that. Right. Yes, yes, exactly.

The difficulty of organized organizing. Sorry, Matt, I didn't mean to interrupt, but it felt like. No, yeah. There's so many cautionary lessons in it. Yeah, I guess where I was just wanting to go with it, and this is also, I assume, a historical, and it comes from just at this point a deep-seated, always roiling disdain for the state.

of Israel. But it's part of what made me suspicious and also view Zionism and view Israel and support of Israel as almost not Jewish in essence because of its attempt to create a monolith out of Jews, because of its trying to, at least in the eyes of everyone else in the world make Jews into the exact opposite of, you know, that joke about the desert island. I need to have two synagogues, you know, one that I go to and one that I wouldn't set foot in. It's like, no, we're going to make it all one opinion down the line. And to me, it adds to that kind of almost uncanny valley nature of Israel and Zionism and the Zionist version of Judaism and the Zionist version of Jews where you go like there's something

not right here and it's like oh that thing is that everyone is seemingly in lockstep and I know that's not real that's so unfair yeah you get two Israelis you get three opinions on how to exterminate the Palestinian right exactly

two Israeli three opinions about crazy variety the same end but yeah yeah I mean I think it comes from the fact that Zionism is essentially just comes from stupid and brutish European ethno-nationalism. Exactly. It's white. It's very white-coded in every single way, even to that degree. Yes, agreed. Like, it literally sounds, it reminds me of like, I don't know, Serbian nationalists or like Polish nationalists of like the most brutish, the most violent

and the most dumb, incredibly dumb sorts of European ethnic cleansing, predisposed attempts to create the pure homeland. Yes, 100%. And it is what that feeling is, that uncanny valley feeling is like, why have I heard this before? Oh, this is just white nationalism wrapped up into a different package, a more Jewish-looking package. It's like you put the blue and white Star of David on stuff, but you open it up and just behind it. It's the fucking, it's the same type of European imperialist, you know, chauvinist bullshit that you've seen, you know, throughout the 20th century. and even before that.

Before the break, when I thought we were running low on time, when I thought we were going to talk about LeBron James, I alluded to and you said that the question is raised and answered in the book about armed resistance when it came to the actual Holocaust. Do you want to speak about that now? Of course. I'd love to. And possibly maybe talking about the ways that maybe in that moment,

Zionist groups in certain places, proved to be assets, you know, and when I say assets, I actually mean helpful in the cause of saving Jews. This is absolutely true. So the boon, like, from the start of the Nazi occupation, like, before the ghetto, because there's about a year, you know, before the ghetto was imposed in Warsaw, they immediately reconstituted as a resistance group, whose goal was like both to, you know, just, you know, just provide aid for people, help people survive. But also, they did do actions of physical defense.

For instance, there were pogroms that the German government would basically pay poor Polish people to get drunk and go into Jewish neighborhoods and smash up stuff while the Germans followed them around with film cameras. And this would be used kind of as propaganda to show, you know, the beneficence of German rule and savage Poland. The Bund organized armed self-defense to that, not with guns, but with baseball bats and clubs and whatnot. However, once Jews are herded into the ghetto, and once it becomes clear that like any action of, you know, someone trying to defend themselves doesn't just lead to your own death, but can lead to dozens of people being murdered because of the Nazi collective responsibility, armed resistance becomes much, much more

fraud, not just for the boon, but for everyone, including Zionists. The first group to propose creating a united Jewish armed resistance in the Warsaw ghetto is a Zionist youth group that's called Dror. And it's two activists from this group. Okay, so I went to a Habonim Droar summer camp, which is when Habonim and Dore got together. And it was them. And it was specifically, it was a pair of lovers. Celina Lubetkin and Yitzhak Antek Zuckerman.

And there were a few reasons that I believe that it was a Zionist group and not just a Zionist group, but a Zionist youth group, which is very important. Because Zionist's adult leadership was entirely imposed to armed resistance. And there's a few things. The first reason is that the Boond saw their resistance strategy as being tied with the Polish Home Army and with the liberation of Poland. And so they were very close with the Polish Socialist Party. They thought that they would be fighting for like the liberation of Warsaw and for the liberation of the country as a whole. They were pretty loathe early on to try to do an independent Jewish uprising because they thought it would be an act of mass suicide. The second reason though, and I think this is actually more important, is that Thror was a youth movement.

It did not have adult leadership. And throughout looking at all of the different groups in Poland, middle-aged people did not understand what was happening with the Holocaust. They saw it, I think, as something analogous perhaps to the 200,000 people that were killed 20,000. I'm sorry, they saw it as analogous to the 200,000 people that were killed during the Russian Civil War. And they did not understand that the Nazis intended to exterminate every single Jew. in Europe. And so you have adults, Zionists dissuading and being totally against an armed uprising. You have adult bundists who are like, this is going to be an act of suicide. What are you doing? The communists were wholly subservient to Moscow and also were not interested in like an

independent Jewish thing for its own sake. You know, they were part of the larger Soviet war strategy. Whereas Dror, because they were young, they were able to see things clearly. This is my opinion. And in the Bund itself, in the ghetto, you start having this real divide between the youth activists who have their own, like, sort of adjacent group called Sukumst and the adult Bundist leadership. Because the adult Bundist leadership is completely against working with Zionists because they don't like them. Didn't the Bunn start when those adults were all young? It did, but they've, you know. That's so funny. Yeah, they were completely against working with Zionists.

They were not against, like, there were certainly four like acts of sabotage and trying, you know, like, but they, they thought that if you tried to do like a big sort of stand in the ghetto that everyone would just be butchered. And especially that you couldn't do it without support from the Polish city. A lot of it was like quite practical and, I mean, correct as well. And so when these two activists from Thrur try to pitch the idea of having a united. Jewish combat group, which they do before the Great Deportation starts, the Bundist activists tell them no. They're like, we're with our friends at the Polish Socialist Party and we're like training our own militia and, you know, we're going to like rise up, you know, as part of like, you know, United thing and we don't even like you. We're angry that we're even at the fucking

table with you. And then what happens is the Great Deportation happens and 90% of the Jews in the ghetto are murdered. And the Boone's adult leadership is either murdered or they're in hiding in area in Warsaw. And the leadership of the movement inside the ghetto falls onto teenagers and 20-year-old and, you know, early 20-somethings. And for these young people, they think that their elders' ideological and transents is asinine. They're like, what do you fucking care if these people are Zionists? No one's going to Palestine. We're all going to die here. We just want to die with dignity. And so it's really the young people that decide to unite. And the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a revolt of the young.

Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting parallel too in a very different way, because you've got Zionists now acknowledging that they've lost the youth and that it's not a right-left thing. It's a youth thing. And in times of crisis and heightening contradictions, Yeah, youth does create I mean, there's a clarity to you.

These sort of horizontal splits between one generation. And there's a clarity. And it's interesting that youth would have, you would think they would have more to lose because they have longer life, but they are also more capable of looking ahead being like, what kind of adulthood am I going to have? What's actually happening?

And they can, they've had less time to be conditioned by hypocrisy and lies and complacency. And also they don't, they don't have kids to take care of. of, right? Like, you have to remember, like, even things like, if you were, like, let's say you were like, I want to go into the woods and I want to join the partisans, that means you're abandoning your parents and you're abandoning your children, you know. Well, abandoning your parents sounds good. Yeah, we're all down for that.

But also, I mean, like, so I don't know, it's like, the more I read these memoirs, it's very hard for me to blame anyone for the choices that they made. You know, we have no idea what choices we've made. But I do think when you're facing, when one is facing something that's entirely unprecedented, which is what the Holocaust was for Jews in Europe, that past experience can actually blind you. It can cloud your eyes. It can make you think it's going to be like what happened before. And I think that's why, you know, really none of the adult leadership of any movements, including the Zionists, really saw it was happening. Yeah. So interesting. Just the last question

about this before we move on to an ending thing. Because we do at some point have to stop podcasting. There's laws against podcasting for too long. They're called the Joe Rogan laws. But I want to ask about what you imagine the response will be and what it already has been to your research and work and trying to get this other version of, I mean, it's not even another version. It's the erased past of non-Zionist Jewish history.

What do you think the response will be to you putting it out there and trying to make people more aware of it? And have you already received any negative backlash from Zionists, either individuals or groups? for this history. No, no, they love it. No, no. They fucking hate me. They say that I should be gassed in Auschwitz. They're so charming.

You know, that's such nice people. They say that the Bundes were all gassed, and that proved that they were wrong because being murdered proves you're wrong, and that I should be too. You know, that's, I mean, that's how they win arguments in Israel, I guess. Somehow they don't believe that about the victims of October 7th. Right, exactly, exactly. You settled the Gaza envelope. Yeah.

No, actually, I, low-key, I honestly do believe they think that about the victims of October. October 7th. Well, of course they do because there was Vivian Silver's in there. There were leftists. They were people with friends in Gaza. They were solidarity activists. Exactly. They paid the price.

They've explicitly said that. Yes. Charming people. Yeah, very, very charming. They certainly do love to tell you that they wish you had been Holocausted. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

And that previous Holocaust victims deserved it for being stupid and not leaving their family's homes of 500 years to live in a collective farm. Levant. Yes. So, yeah, I've gotten a lot of hatred, obviously, but also I've gotten a lot of surprising support, including by people who I don't think of as anti-Zionist and who I, you know, don't necessarily agree with. And I think the reason is, is because no one can read this book and think I hadn't done the work.

No one can read this book and think that I hadn't done the research that I hadn't spent that time in the archives and that I hadn't done it with love. And I think just that, the fact that I gave so much fucking blood to this book, in some ways wins over decent people who might not be on my political side. Yeah. And bringing things completely full circle. You know, we started with your speaking to your own ancestors. well, everyone's got ancestors.

And there's a lot of Zionists who have Bundist ancestors. Tons. There's a lot of mainstream American Jews who can trace their lineage if it was traceable, if the lines hadn't been erased or smudged, you know, back to Jews like this. And there's something people want to have admirable ancestors. And they want to have, or even ancestors who are problematic. they want to have some kind of conversation with them, you know,

and you're providing, and what you say about writing it with love, it comes through in every word. I've never read a history book that's written with more love than this. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you for writing it and for all the blood you spilled.

Thank you for coming on the show and talking to us about it. We'll make sure that people know when it drops, which, you know, we said earlier, but it's April 7th. And it's on pre-sale now. Yeah, people are... Yeah, it's on pre-sale. And can I give a spiel, like a disgusting Shildebeast spiel?

Yeah, spiel it up. So it's really important if you're interested in a book and you like a book to pre-order it because it shows the publisher that the book is worth investing in. And it's truly, like, one of the best things you can do to advance the ideas in a book that you like is by ordering and in advance. So if, let's sort of like anti-Zionist Jewish history. this sort of leftist history is important to you. Truly, you are doing me a solid one by pre-ordering it.

So thank you. Well, and you're doing the discourse of solid one. I mean, Refad Alarer's book, pre-orders sent it onto the bestseller list, and that makes a difference. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have a link in the description if you want to purchase it right now. I know that I'm going to do so right after this.

You know, I would do it this moment, but I feel like I've got I got to export my audio. I got to do a bunch of other stuff, but I will get the book. And you all should get it too. I got to take a shit. I got to go pick on my daughter. I got to go, I don't know, I was going to watch some of the wire. I just going to rewatch it because I like it.

But right after I finish that, I will buy the book. And you all should too. Link is in the description. Before we get out of here, though, Molly, there's one more thing, Daniel, you didn't tell me what this was, but you said, just have it queued up. So I am ready. So I numbered the slides, so you're

going to play them in order. Oh, okay. They're all in the folder. I got an email from a listener who I've heard from before. And this listener is kind of a

whiz with AI prompts. Oh, no. And, you know, normally that sets my teeth on edge, But this is for a very, very good cause. And we've used AI prompts on this show before, of course. And so I'll just sort of take you through it. So the first slide is his email.

Daniel. So by the way, take it down for a second. This is in the wake of the Super Bowl, right? And remembering the context, right? Yes. Your half-countryman, bad bunny. Yeah. Benito, yes.

Yeah, exactly. I'm actually trying to incorporate bad bunny style, bad bunny style cadence and timber into my normal speaking. Like, hey, I'm going to get a cappuccino, eh. It's got to be in triplets, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me the eggs with a bacon and another burrito, eh. Regatone. I like when he says that.

So in the wake of his, in the wake of his super performance, of course, there was the turning points. Super Bowl half-time show where that guy had in mom about kissing his fish and raising his cat and catching his children and all the things. Which is very funny to me because as someone who was, you know, spoken many times about that time in middle school when I fucked a big mouth Billy Bass. Him talking about, I just want to catch my fish. I was just like, all right, I like where you're going with this. All right, where are we going?

So this listener says, Daniel, I'm not saying I made the. world's worst AI country song and convinced one of the world's dumbest Husbarus to tweet it out simply because he has name dropped in it. But if I had, the result might be something like this. Oh, my God. Okay. So here's Hillel fooled, who we haven't spent enough time on on this show. Tweeting out this link from the artist, the pseudonym is Brentley Baskins.

Don't get fooled again. Exactly. Exactly. Christian country musician from Dallas, Brentley Baskins, of all places, shared his new track supporting the IDF and Israel, and he tags the IDF and Israel. Check out the song from Brentley Baskins.

Believe it or not, it contains a shout out to yours truly at the one minute and 35 second mark. Now, I don't at this moment have the original recording of the song because it got taken down by, I think, band camp. And besides, as we'll see, he rewrote it. And I do have the rewritten version, which is still up. Yeah.

But to be clear, Hillel fooled retweeted this. He was fooled? He was fooled. He got fooled. Exactly. Oh, man. Fooled me once. Great.

So, and in fact, he fooled him twice. That's right. It's fooled me twice, which is a pretty good episode title if we don't go for no country for old Menshaliviks. So let's look at the lyrics to the original. one and Matt I'll let you do a dramatic reading of them. Okay and this is so we'll play the music at the end is what you're saying. I will either play the the original version or the or the rewritten version which we do currently have. He just sent me the original version in an email but after we

started recording. All right here we go. Muscular IDF men on the prowl. No one stops to wonder how. They do it day after day after day in a land where even the littlest children are terrorists, scum, and dirty bums, man. Boom, boom, goes the mosque, goes the hospital. Oh, wait, Mr. Woke, Mr. Human Rights. Let's talk about the human shield inside that preschool. Or did you forget that Hamas's build on lies, lies, lies? I'm sorry Can you just

He wrote the lyrics AI sings a song I think that's right Oh my God And fooled was Was fooled by this Was fooled by this Yes

Yeah You know The smartest Not the smartest bunch They got over there And the whole Hasbarland Some people get their news

From the BBC I like to believe What I can actually see To hell of Pierce Morgan And Candice Owens I want the voices that are actually showing. The truth. The truth in short supply.

The truth is something that it's not hard to hold. The truth of digital warriors like halel fold. It's shining darkness in the light. Oh, my God. Bro, bro, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So then I think Ban Camp took it down. Yes. And he replaced it with this.

And this we can play a clip of as we put the lyrics up on the screen. And then we'll play all of one of them, at least, at the very end. All right. So here's just a little bit of, from Brentley Baskins. You put up the lyrics to the second version. Legal, by the way. Everything about this. Fucking AI music sucks.

Fuck AI forever. Fuck AI Swart. Women. Finding a good fight to bring paradise to hell. Just don't give. Got to be this way because the other way... So in this one... In this one...

Oh, I'm going to let it finish up. All right. So in this one, he drops the lionizing of online digital warriors like Hillel Ful. And just comes out and calls him a sociopathic cretan and follows with Free Palestine from the River to the Sea. Jesus. And Fould still retweeted it. He's still like, I don't know. I still love it.

Shout out to me. Hallel Fool. But now he's been, now he's taking it down. I think someone in his camp alerted him. But why wasn't he, like, tipped off by the AI picture of, like, he man in front of the Burry Hospital? That's the stuff that they create with AI unironically. Do you, do you not believe us?

We'll show you. Hit it, Matt. Oh, yeah. I mean, I got it. Here it is. I always got to look for it at this point. I got it. I got it. I got it.

I got it. I'm a lion with an Israeli flag. And a picture of Hamas as an octopus or a bomb. I'm Israel. I'm Israel. I. I'm Israel. Hey, aye.

Israel. They love this shit. They love this shit. There's an account named Cyber Zionism. do you have to check out? I mean, I fucking think AI should be burned to the ground. I think all the fucking data sensors

should be bombed to cleanse the fucking land. Absolutely. But like, oh my fucking God, never again over the fucking genocided wreckage of Gaza with the fuck. What if bombs made a star of David

that said never again? Talk about a mixed fucking message where they don't even know what they're talking about. Never again means we can do genocide. I guess. They're fighting. stereotype that Jews are smart every day.

Yeah, I know, I know. And good for them, honestly. We deserve to be taken down a few pegs. Anyway, you know, to our intrepid listener, shame on you for doing AI and well fucking done. And also very good for getting Halal Fould to retweet that with the muscle man attached. And shout out to all of our listeners who keep coming back week after week, including

our guest, I guess, Molly Crabapple, who listens to this podcast. Thank you, Molly, for coming on and talking with us. Will you listen to this episode while you're drawing? Yeah. No, because I don't like to hear my own voice when I, like, fucking haunting my brain. No, I will listen to the next episode that's with someone not me.

Hell yeah, hell yeah. I'm the same way. I haven't listened to this podcast since, like, episode three, because I'm like, I don't know what I said, and I don't want to worry about it. Molly, it was really great having you. book the book is going to there's a description there's a link in the description and you can purchase it pre-order it right now the book is called here where we live is our country the story of the

Jewish Booned by Molly Crab Apple we really thank you for coming on talking to us about it it was a really great conversation thank you so much guys this was this was such a pleasure truly thank and your title is much better than what mine would have been which would have been Booned on the run. Unbelievable. And thank you to everyone out there for listening and for subscribing. Subscribe to our Patreon. Patreon.com slash baddizbarra.

Baddha, gmail.com for your questions, comments, and concerns. All right. Thanks again. So much for listening. And until next time, from the river to the sea. Long live the B-U-N-D. Hell yeah. This one goes.

out to the IDF men and women risking their life to create paradise in hell we love you