Reading Wednesday
Apr. 22nd, 2026 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: Nothing.
Currently reading: Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple. This is a weirdly dense book—like, not in terms of content but in terms of typography where it turns out to be much longer than it looks. So it will take awhile and I'll no doubt have very scattered thoughts on it. I'm up to a weird point just before WWII where Piłsudski has done a coup in Poland and provided some kind of respite for the Bund there, while Molly's great-great grandfather Sam is in the US, trying to make it as an artist. The revolution in Russia has almost immediately turned sour. The Zionist movement is ascendant in Eastern Europe but still looked on as profoundly unserious by the Bundist majority, who are like, "you're going to be farmers in the desert? Good luck with that and also fuck you."
This is just such an important book, right now in our history with what was once the biggest current of socialist thought in Europe being whittled down to a few of us hobbyists in 2026. It's not just hereness, but a lineage that I think most Ashkenazi Jews are lacking, even ones like me who know a fair bit about the Bund. The majority of Jews in the West have accepted the Devil's bargain of whiteness: give up your culture for safety and assimilation into the power structure, sure celebrate your holidays but now you're part of the dominant culture. There have been times, watching the livestreamed genocide of Gaza, that I have thought, "well, can I just not be Jewish anymore? I want no part of it, I want to wash my hands of it, I cannot participate if this is what most of us feel is okay," but you can't, can you? I mean you can but not in any meaningful way that helps even a single person. It's better to have a history, to know why and how that history has been suppressed, not because of some nostalgia or historical LARPing but because of the whole "first as tragedy, then as farce" of it all.
Which is to say that this book is giving me a lot of feels. You should read it, probably.
Currently reading: Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple. This is a weirdly dense book—like, not in terms of content but in terms of typography where it turns out to be much longer than it looks. So it will take awhile and I'll no doubt have very scattered thoughts on it. I'm up to a weird point just before WWII where Piłsudski has done a coup in Poland and provided some kind of respite for the Bund there, while Molly's great-great grandfather Sam is in the US, trying to make it as an artist. The revolution in Russia has almost immediately turned sour. The Zionist movement is ascendant in Eastern Europe but still looked on as profoundly unserious by the Bundist majority, who are like, "you're going to be farmers in the desert? Good luck with that and also fuck you."
This is just such an important book, right now in our history with what was once the biggest current of socialist thought in Europe being whittled down to a few of us hobbyists in 2026. It's not just hereness, but a lineage that I think most Ashkenazi Jews are lacking, even ones like me who know a fair bit about the Bund. The majority of Jews in the West have accepted the Devil's bargain of whiteness: give up your culture for safety and assimilation into the power structure, sure celebrate your holidays but now you're part of the dominant culture. There have been times, watching the livestreamed genocide of Gaza, that I have thought, "well, can I just not be Jewish anymore? I want no part of it, I want to wash my hands of it, I cannot participate if this is what most of us feel is okay," but you can't, can you? I mean you can but not in any meaningful way that helps even a single person. It's better to have a history, to know why and how that history has been suppressed, not because of some nostalgia or historical LARPing but because of the whole "first as tragedy, then as farce" of it all.
Which is to say that this book is giving me a lot of feels. You should read it, probably.
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Date: 2026-04-22 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-22 12:19 pm (UTC)