Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Episode 58: We Belong Here with Molly Crabapple
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski with episode 58 of Antifascist Dad Podcast. We Belong Here with Molly Crabapple.
Molly Crabapple: I think that if you believe that this world is all you have and that the only justice that you will ever get, the only goodness that you will ever get, is the stuff that you make alongside other people right in the here and now, that gives you an almost overwhelming ethical imperative to do it right now. Because there isn't going to be a redo. There is not going to be a redemption. There's not going to be a heaven. There's only this right here. Right here. And that's what the Bund did. They made life better here now. Reading clubs, self defense groups, theaters, sanatoriums for tubercular slum kids that were the envy of the world. They made life better here and now because there was nothing else but here.
Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And this week I talk with Kelsey Lyseng, a nurse in Edmonton who under her own steam and political compulsion, has been doing anti-genocide activism online and at public events like Jesse Brown's recent public forum at the University of Alberta where he moderated a public conversation centered on Zionist feelings. So that is up now on Patreon.
I'd also direct you to the links in the show notes, including the link to my book Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
Please pick up a copy. Review it if you've got it.
Thanks a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and imagine that if you're listening to this podcast that you've heard of Here Where We Live Is Our Country by journalist and artist Molly Crabapple. If you haven't read it already, or maybe you've heard her on one of the hundreds of podcasts she's been on or seen seen clips of talks from the dozens of book signings she's given all over the world.
I've been a writer for a long time and I can't remember a book stamping such a large footprint on a historical moment. And with good reason.
This richly detailed, meticulously researched, ideologically nuanced, but accessible and captivating and enthralling text marks a turning point in the global war over the meanings and effects of Zionism as a colonial and racist project. Because it presents the full, fullest picture to date of how anti-Zionism is a Jewish tradition that the powerful have tried their hardest to erase.
Now our conversation is on the longish side, so I'm going to keep my summary of the book succinct, but I just want you to know that every sentence here is like a fractal for an entire world of adventures.
So Molly dives into personal lineage and the archives of the Jewish Labor Bund, which was founded in Vilna, now Lithuania, in 1897 as a secular democratic socialist movement of Eastern European Jewish workers who in response to the rise of political Zionism in Western Europe, formulated the principle of doikayt, or hereness, the radical insistence that Jewish workers had the right to fight for freedom, dignity and equality in the European lands where they had lived for a thousand years.
They armed themselves in a two front battle against both tsarist pogroms and eventually Lenin's top down Bolshevik centralism and Communist Party control.
And then between the wars, the Bund built a vast secular Yiddish counterculture of socialist care, establishing trade unions, schools, children's groups, the Morgenstern Sports Club and the Medem Sanatorium.
Now, women were always at the vital core of the movement, from pioneers like Pati Kremer to writers like Sofia Dubnova, who championed women's bodily autonomy, and then couriers like Vladka Peltel and Adina Blady, who were at the heart of wartime resistance.
Under Nazi ghettoization, Bundist activists organized soup kitchens, underground presses and combat units and played a pivotal leadership role in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Now, after the Holocaust gutted the Bund and the Soviets continued to suppress it, Molly's lineage entered what I'd call, quoting Carsie Blanton, the keep the little flame alive era of its history, which her book now reignites.
The survivors scattered globally. They preserved Yiddish culture and internationalist anti-Zionism while continuing to raise the alarm against the forces they formed themselves against originally, which were hardening into what is now the ethnofascist state of Israel.
That, in a nutshell, is the story of the book. And because Molly has told it so many times, I wanted to focus on the many questions I, and I'm going to assume many others, might have in the afterglow of reading, and which I think would generalize the Bundist experience as a set of broader antifascist lessons. I wanted to ask her about doikayt as a universal, palpable material reality. A rooted commitment to one's immediate neighbors and streets contrasted against the fascist fantasies of escape that inundate the culture.
I wanted to ask her about how her art making might have been the seed of her political awareness and her rebellion against fascist aesthetics. I wanted to ask about how the Bund's refusal of both imperial statecraft and Bolshevik authoritarianism offers kind of third path for contemporary anti-Zionist and democratic socialist politics.
And I also wanted to ask her about secular spirituality and how she's dealt with backlash and how non Jewish socialists like myself can best stand up when Bund aligned figures like Avi Lewis get death threats for expressing their anti-Zionist faith on Yom Kippur.
Here's my conversation with Molly Crabapple.
Matthew Remski: Molly Crabapple, welcome to Antifascist Dad, and Free Palestine.
Molly Crabapple: Thank you so much for having me.
Matthew Remski: You have been working like a force of nature, giving more interviews on this crucial book than I can count or keep track of. So I wanted to make sure this one is a little bit different.
And I don't want to, you know, have to run you through the incredible historical detail of this tome like it's a real history textbook.
You've done a lot of that so far. I want to get to some core themes. I'll also give the 101 in the introduction of the podcast here. And I want to focus really on the concept of doikayt in the center of the book or at the center of the book and at the center of anti-Zionism itself.
I know that it is primarily a political commitment first and foremost, but in reading your book, every page really gives me this feeling of what it means to fully live where one is, whatever it costs, come what may. And I hope that by unpacking that, listeners can discover what everyone, Jewish or not, including young people, especially young people, can learn from doikayt in this world of rising fascism. So my first question is going to trust you to imagine something on behalf of a lot of people, like how does a person know, do you think, when they are living in the principle of doikayt, is it fair to say that it has something to do with the difference between living in reality versus living in a fantasy?
Molly Crabapple: I think I want to talk a little bit about where doikayt or hereness comes from, the specific context.
So when the Bund articulated this principle right here where we live as our country, hereness, they were an extremely persecuted minority. They were from a racialized group that huge swathes of the elite in Europe were wanted to evict from their homes. Jews were viewed as like this swarthy oriental other, this like toxic virus that had no place in Europe, that did not belong there and should get out. Maybe to Madagascar, Palestine or hell, it didn't matter.
And so doikayt was something very defiant. It was what one reviewer called an anti-eviction philosophy. It was the defiant insistence on staying in their homes and fighting alongside their neighbors who might be very, very different than them for what Jewish socialists called the better and more beautif.
And when I think about this principle, I also think about Paul Robeson, you know, the great Black radical actor, great renaissance man of the 20th century, when he was hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
And one of the things he said in those brilliant speeches that he gave was he said, I am not a foreigner in America. This land is soaked through with my people's blood. We built this country and I am not going to be evicted by any fascist minded person.
And so I think that that defiant insistence on staying is at the heart of doikayt. It also reminds me of sort of a precursor echo to the Palestinian concept of sumud, right? Of steadfastness, the defiant insistence on staying on your land despite all of the violence and predations of the Israeli state.
But another aspect of it is the refusal of these dreams of mythological and exclusivist escape, namely of Palestine, right? The refusal of the idea that in order for Jews to be safe and free, they had to go colonize land and ethnically cleanse an entire society out of their so called biblical homeland. Right,
Matthew Remski: right.
Molly Crabapple: And this desire for fantasy that you're talking about is something that is so shot through the fascism of the present.
Whether it's the desire to create these bunkered ethnostates built on fictitious stories of past glory. That's what MAGA is, right? Whether it is these science fiction hallucinations of the like of Elon Musk imagining AI planets on Mars as an excuse to starve humans in the present.
This, this notion of fantasy of escape is so, so toxic. I mean, I think about like my very dear friends, you know, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, their book End Times Fascism is truly all about this,
Matthew Remski: right?
Molly Crabapple: And I think that in order to reject this, we need a politics of being here, right? Being here where we live and of loving this here, of saying like, I am committed to these streets, I'm committed to these tenements, I'm committed to these blocks and I'm committed to my neighbors and my friends and the real living, flawed community around me, as opposed to the fantasies of fascists, whether they're tech fascists or whether they're ethno fascists.
Matthew Remski: I think that's part of what strikes me most about doikayt is that it's a deeply material principle about the place where you're at and the materials at hand, but it also radiates with a kind of like, I don't know, maturity or even spiritual gravity because it seems to say, like, you know, we grow out of these conditions amidst all of our troubles and joys, and no abstract memory or invention of a homeland or ideal of nationalism can replace that. And if we try to, we'll be disfiguring ourselves and everything around us. Is that fair, do you think?
Molly Crabapple: I think absolutely. I mean, the Bund grew up in this context where all of these old multiethnic empires that had dominated Europe for so long were about to shatter into a million warring pieces.
And, you know, one of the principles of this shattering, right, was this idea of, you know, ethnostates. This idea that instead of, you know, being committed to the multiethnic, multiracial, multi religious city where you actually lived, you know, Sarajevo, let's say, right.
Constantinople, even Volkovisk, you know, where my great grandfather was from, there was Muslims and Christians and Jews living there in the small town. The tsarist empire. Instead of being committed to that, you had to have a commitment to this essentially fictitious and imagined community based on blood.
And what you see in Europe that came out of this philosophy is you see the most brutal, horrific border wars and mutual ethnic cleansings and sort of revanchist wars of conquest, you know, a tumult of bloodshed that started with, like, the Balkan wars, with the mutual ethnic cleansings of Greece and Turkey, and, you know, probably culminated in the genocide by Serbs against Bosnians and against Kosovars. Right.
This idea is deeply, deeply, deeply toxic. And it's essentially based on abstraction. People try to act like these sort of ethnic cleansings, these sort of killings are about eternal grievances and conflicts that were there forever. No, they're ideas that are built on the masturbatory pamphleteering of fulminating racists in various corners of Europe. And this is very much. This sort of ethnonationalism is very much the intellectual climate that Zionism comes out of.
Matthew Remski: You know, it's such a great point about the invention of this mystique because you can see how quickly it can shatter in those who hold it. You know, when we have. When I hear, you know, typically, it will come. The statement will come from, you know, a liberal or a liberal Zionist that, oh, you know, the stories of West Asia and the Middle East are so deep and, you know, mysterious and ancient, and they're so, you know, so complicated. And of course it is complicated.
Molly Crabapple: All history is complicated. Yeah,
Matthew Remski: but the notion that I have an ancient claim to this place or that place based on a nationalist mythology is always generated in the present generation. And that's why it can crack open so quickly.
And so this argument that it's complicated, that almost it's epigenetic or something like that, and so it's in our blood and we can't really get rid of it, it's really belied by the fact that people actually do change. They change their orientation towards whether they're nationalistic or not.
Molly Crabapple: Exactly. And also a lot of what it's complicated is meant to hide, right, is it's meant to hide how the state of Israel came into being, which is that Zionist paramilitaries ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes using torture, using rape, using internment camps where there was slave labor, and using massacres.
That's what Israel actually was created with. And they continued to torment and confine and disempower the Palestinians who managed to remain on their homes inside that new state.
And all of the like, hand waving about complexity, all of the biblical mythology, all of the like, oh, my heart feels this connection with this land.
None of that fucking matters. Compared to the very simple thing, ethnic cleansing is wrong.
History is always complicated because it's the story of the lives of many people. Ethnic cleansing is always wrong.
Matthew Remski: I want to turn to how you began to discover this because you came into it. You weren't born with this knowledge. You. I think you carried it with you in your family.
And I think it has something to do with. Or it seems that it has something to do with learning art within your family, which I think you learn, you know, before you learned a lot about your own anti-Zionist heritage.
But I feel like there is something about doikayt in there, because when I first saw your work in relation to the Occupy movement, I thought, oh, like this person is really absorbing and revitalizing and using the materials around her and the materials of history instead of just wiping the slate clean and starting anew.
It's very anti minimalist what you do. The textures and colors and figures are really rich.
And in the book you talk about your great grandfather Sam Rothbort as a toddler in Volkovisk, and he's like pilfering bits of dough that are coming off of his mom's table, baking table, to mold into little sculptures of lions. And so everything like food and art and domestic life and the stuff that is available and at hand is right at the center of that process. And I think all of that seems to run directly against the aesthetics of colonialism, which, you know, are always razing the world to the ground in order to build whatever they fantasize about. You know, fascists are always dreaming of these, you know, castles, you know, and these days they have to begin with, you know, the minimalism of drywall and laminated surfaces, and then they add the gold sconces. So do you think that, you know, some of the politics of doikayt came to you almost osmotically first through art.
Molly Crabapple: I mean, I've been drawing since I was 4. I would be drawing on a desert island. My mom taught me how to draw. I do not imagine a life where I would not be drawing. I'm literally like, whenever I've been, you know, arrested and I've been stuck in, like a cell for a while, I'm like, drawing in the Styrofoam cup with my nail. You know, I just. This is who I am. What can I say, right?
I also am someone who, you know, is not. I'm not just from New York myself, but my mom's family has lived in New York for 120 years, right? Like, this city is my city. And I think my family, me, my father, who came, you know, to New York when he was a kid from Puerto Rico, were just very imbued with how the city is, with all of the filth and hardness, all of the dysfunction, you know, like in New York City, you know, when we got trash cans, when we learned that we should put our trash in a can and not just put it in a bag on the street, you know, when we learned that,
Matthew Remski: when?
Molly Crabapple: Last year.
The first laws about putting your trash in a can, they're from the 1300s, you know, we're a very dysfunctional place in a lot of ways. I don't mean to glorify us, but it's a city, right, where you have people from everywhere in the entire earth who are speaking their languages, they are dressed how they want to dress. You know, you don't have to, like, stop wearing a sari or, you know, your turban, your hijab, whatever. They are living their cultures and also they're fighting together for the better and more beautiful world, right? They're co creating the city. And it's not always.
It's not always coexistence where people, like, are hugging it out and using the perfect word. But nonetheless, like, we are.
We are co creating the city together despite vast, vast differences. And across those vast differences, and the differences are celebrated in this city. And I think that's also something that I was imbued with at a really, really young age.
It's also a city that's a fractal, maximalist city at its core. It's a city where every single lamppost is plastered in flyers, everything is graffitied. This is why I hate the modern buildings that are going up so much because they're.
They're just these like blank slates, right? Like iPhone packaging. They're so antithetical to the actual heritage and aesthetic of this place, you know, with all of its, like, curlicues, with all of its tenements, all of its, like, secret places for birds to live.
And New York is, you know, what doikayt looks like in practice.
Matthew Remski: What do you think people want with the iPhone packaging condo?
Molly Crabapple: I think their souls are bad.
Matthew Remski: They're bad?
Molly Crabapple: Yeah, they're bad. No, I mean, that's glib. No,
Matthew Remski: they've gone bad. Like, they've gone off.
Molly Crabapple: Yeah, yeah. No, I think the reason that the iPhone packaging condo exists, right, it's because of capitalism, because it's cheaper to build that way.
And also, it's not just cheaper, but it involves less skilled labor. And one of the things that bosses always want to do is they want to de skill workers so that workers have less power, so that they're more like fungible, right? So more replaceable.
And it requires a lot more skill to build with plaster and lattice work than it does with drywall. It requires a lot more skill, right, to have, you know, carved gargoyles than it does to, like, put up prefab sheets of things. And that's what the bosses want. And I think because this type of housing is so good for the profit margins of bosses, I think that there's been, you know, just this huge campaign to try to tell people that this is what it looks like to be rich. This is what it looks like to be classy and all of that. But no, I think that if you are rich and you voluntarily live in one of those glass towers, it's probably cause your soul is bad.
Matthew Remski: Okay, does that. Does that imply that, like, Marie Kondo is a psyop that's applied by capitalism after the fact, or do people actually find that attractive? The minimalism I'm even seeing on Instagram now, this is getting away from your book, but I think it's related.
Molly Crabapple: It's okay. It's okay.
Matthew Remski: I think I've seen on Instagram now a number of, like, young women who are sort of becoming influencers as drywall plasterers. And they get up on stilts, and then their whole thing is they create incredibly clean, pure surface rooms in an instant. And it's almost like fetishized. And so there's something that is appealing to people. Maybe a kind of simplicity in an overcrowded world. I don't know.
Molly Crabapple: I mean, you look at like, Kim Kardashian's beige ass life, it's grim.
I will say, in the defense of young women, there are like many other young women who are influencers because they are ornamenting every single little bit of their life.
Whimsy maxing. Is that what you call it? I forget how. Yeah,
Matthew Remski: I think so.
Molly Crabapple: And one thing I always think about, I know we're getting away from my book, but I.
So Adolf Loos, he's the guy who wrote Ornament and Crime.
He's one of the ideologues of minimalism, if you ever read that book. One of the main reasons that Adolf Loos says that ornament is bad is because Black people like it. It's one of the most shockingly racist books that you can possibly read. And he is like superior white people, men, Europeans,
Matthew Remski: yeah,
Molly Crabapple: they like clean things, whereas Slavs and women and criminals and. And Black people, they like. They like ornament and color and whimsy and all of that. So it's bad because they like it. And I think that this really shows kind of like the fascist roots of this idea.
Matthew Remski: This comes back to the book because the next question I had is about this kind of flattening or world razing that is required for fantasy. Just yesterday, you know, I saw a video of a bulldozer starting to cover the rubble in Gaza with a layer of sand.
I watched another video of a bulldozer on the West Bank ripping out a centuries old olive tree while the orchard keeper is weeping.
And I mean, on one hand it made me realize how impossible it is to process the genocidal razing of Gaza.
But something about the single machine against the single tree brought it back into focus.
And this is a theme that comes up in your book because, you know, you talk about Bundist writers reporting from old Mandate Palestine on how, you know, they watched early Zionists beat this Palestinian girl who dared to sell milk in Tel Aviv.
And so I'm just wondering that like, if you truly have this sense of doikayt, this value, you just can't bulldoze an olive tree, can you?
Molly Crabapple: No, no. I mean, Zionism is built on erasing Palestinians, right? Erasing Palestinian life, erasing Palestinian history, erasing Palestinian culture, even erasing parts of the physical environment like olive trees that, you know, generations upon generations upon generations of Palestinian farmers have tended. Because Zionism is all about this like idea of like fictitious return with a V. And it cannot stand the fact that this land was always multicultural. Even if you read the Bible as a historical document, which you shouldn't, but let's say you did. Even there, the land is always a mixed, multicultural land.
And that the Palestinian presence on this land and the Palestinian presence as the majority on this land has existed for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. And Zionism just cannot countenance that. And I mean, one of the things that is really shocking is how Zionism. People use archaeology to delete Palestinians.
Matthew Remski: They dig through the past to find a particular type of it.
Molly Crabapple: And if you were like a responsible archaeologist. Right. Like there's so much of the world that is filled in the ruins of ancient civilizations. I spend a lot of time in Athens. Right. Another place that is, you know, filled with layers upon layers upon layers of civilizations.
Responsible archaeologists do not go into Athens with a bulldozer and start just knocking over buildings to dig and dig and dig until they find, you know, Pericles. That's not how it works. Right,
Matthew Remski: right.
Molly Crabapple: But because Zionists use archaeology as a means of erasing Palestinian history, that's what they do. They're like, we will dig to the level that has the pottery shards that we think validate our project.
And by doing so, we will also erase the many centuries and millennium of Palestinian life that lie on top.
Matthew Remski: I wanted to turn to a kind of social relation of doikayt, I think, because you write about Pati Kremer, who's a co founder of the Bund in. Back in 1897. So this is in Vilna.
She is somebody who translates Marx into Yiddish.
And she's also doing like an amazing amount of organizational work.
And as I go through these stories, you know, I look at, or I'm reading about women who are setting up daycares and birth control clinics for their communities.
There's one figure, I forget her name, but she's writing about women's pleasure and reproductive.
Molly Crabapple: Sofia Dubnova.
Matthew Remski: Yes, exactly.
And reproductive autonomy. They're running soup kitchens.
Later on in the Warsaw ghetto, they're running courier networks.
And so there's a parallel to some of the women's networks that operated in the Soviet Union before Stalin put an end to them.
But I'm wondering whether their constant fight for respect, they helped to both, I don't know, concretize the notion of hereness in care work. But also, did they hand on a feminism to you that you still draw strength from
Molly Crabapple: the world of a traditional Jewish woman, like my great, great grandmother, for instance, Chaya Rachel would have had.
It was a very, very constrained world. It was a world where, you know, she was married when she was 12. Right. It was a world where you have a lot of kids, where you are sort of endlessly toiling, not just, you know, to raise your kids, not just to, you know, do the toil that all women do. But it' run a kosher home according to these specifications to, like, you know, do, like, family purity laws, like mikvah to support your husband, because your husband might be just studying Talmud with the boys all day, and you also have to work and bring money in to support his intellectual pursuits. This was a very, very rigid world for women.
And for many women in the Bund's early days, the Bund was a way to live a better and more equal life. It was a way to break through these very patriarchal strictures that you grew up in and, you know, to have friends who are men to marry the man that you wanted or not marry. Right. To have lovers, to be able to live alone, to give speeches on the streets, to fight back pogromists. Not just to do care work, though they did plenty of care work, but to smuggle guns and pamphlets on your body.
Matthew Remski: Right, right.
Molly Crabapple: It was something that was full of excitement, that was full of bravery, including a very physical bravery, and that must have tasted like freedom.
And the Bund, like all organizations in the world, did not always live up to its stated ideals. There were plenty of, you know, men with piggish behavior.
You're talking about Sofia Dubnova in the book, the Bund's sex columnist in interwar Poland.
She has a whole thing where she's reproaching a boy for using Marx, for using Marxist idea of, like, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, to talk about why his ex girlfriend still has to sleep with him.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Molly Crabapple: Because he needs it so much and she has the ability.
Matthew Remski: Right, right.
Molly Crabapple: But nonetheless, I mean, these were women who were redefining the world for themselves, who were seizing desire, who were seizing independence, who were seizing strength. And you can feel how thrilling that must have been when you read their writing.
Matthew Remski: Now, you mentioned physical bravery and strength.
Women were also active in the physical culture movement of the Bund as well. Is that right?
Molly Crabapple: Oh, yes, exactly. Yeah. There are amazing pictures of girls and women who are, you know, who are athletes. Right. Who are, like javelin throwers, who are, you know, doing, like, group gymnastics, who are, like, flipping on ring bars. I mean, the Bund had a sports club in interwar Poland. It was called Morgenstern. It was the most popular sports club in the whole country.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, amazing.
Molly Crabapple: And it was something that boys and girls, men and women, all took part in. And one of my heroines of my book, she's a Bundist resistance member in the Warsaw ghetto, a nurse named Gina Klepfisz, she, you know, got her start in the movement as a javelin thrower, as a discus thrower for the sports club.
She also was.
Her lover was a Polish woman who was part of the Polish sister sports club, Skra, where she was a sprinter. And, you know, these two young women, like, they traveled together to Vienna for what was called the Workers' Olympiad. It was a socialist alternative to the Red
Matthew Remski: Vienna.
Molly Crabapple: Red Vienna. And, you know, and they fell in love as young athlet,
Matthew Remski: Their own brand of physical culture. So there must have been a kind of, oh, we're not going to sit down while that's happening.
Molly Crabapple: There's that. But also, I mean, sports are cool. People like them. You know, there's a reason, right, that fascists use sports. And it's not just that, oh, they fetishize muscles or it's also because sports are really fucking fun and being strong is really fun and running around and chasing a ball is fun and lifting weights is fun. And if you want to attract people to your movement, good or bad, you try to do things that are fun. Same reason that fascists also, they will have dances as well, just like Communists had dances, just like Tammany Hall had dances. Because if you want to attract people to things, you have to do things that people are attracted to, right? And then you could add your ideology, good or bad, on top of that.
Matthew Remski: Getting to ideology, one of the things that I find fascinating about the Bund is the number of, through its value of universalism, how many pressures it has to withstand from one side or another. It had to resist the Bolsheviks, for example, because the principle of the Soviet is not exactly universalist, if you're interested in doikayt. The Bolsheviks rejected the Bund as an independent party, for example. And so it seems like they were always being pressed from these different directions. You tell this one story of the leader, Rafael Abramovich, who's riding on a tram in Petrograd in 1917. So this is like right after the revolution and he gets shoved by this woman worker who is sneering at him because it seems like he's, I don't know, dressed up, he's got a suit on and she has nothing, no idea that, you know, he spent years in tsarist prisons fighting for the working class. And she has no idea that he's a huge radical.
So on one side, the Bund is fighting against autocracy from the Tsar. They are fighting capitalist exploitation, they're fighting pogroms. But then they also are resisting Leninism and vanguardism and Moscow's top down centralism. And so I'm wondering whether walking this universalist line tells us something about anti-Zionist politics in general and maybe even democratic socialism today.
Molly Crabapple: They rejected authoritarianism. I mean, when you read about the fights between the Bund and Lenin, these do not start in 1917.
Matthew Remski: No,
Molly Crabapple: the Bund came up alongside Lenin. Lenin was quoting Arkady Kremer's work in What Is to Be Done? and saying that Arkady's book on agitation was like the de rigueur guide for organizers of his generation and the Bundist. And Bundist theorists like Vladimir Medem. They lived alongside people like Lenin in these communities of exiled Russian radicals. I call them exile land in my book.
And from the first moment that these guys encounter each other, Bundists viewed Lenin as a sort of dictator in waiting. And they did not imagine he'd be the dictator of a country. They thought he was gonna be the dictator of a small newspaper. Right?
But they did not want to be in the room with this guy. They saw how he attacked other socialists viciously. They saw that with him it was either my way or the highway. They saw that he would use all sorts of parliamentary skullduggery to stack committees to get people to not be at crucial meetings. And they were like, we do not fucking trust this guy. We don't trust him. And when the Bund gets booted out of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which is a party that they helped found, and it's the party that will eventually become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the ostensible reason is about an argument over whether there should be an autonomous Jewish group within the party, which would be the Bund, and also whether there should be autonomous other linguistic groups like Armenian Social Democrats, for example.
Matthew Remski: Right,
Molly Crabapple: That's. That's what's ostensibly about. But I truly believe that a big reason that the Bund was so dead set on this idea of autonomy was that they did not want to subvert, they did not want to subsume this magnificent organization. They had built an organization that was the largest revolutionary party in the Russian Social Democratic Empire.
I'm sorry, an organization that was the largest revolutionary party in the Tsarist empire. They did not want to subsume that under the dictatorial leadership of Lenin.
And for that, Lenin and Trotsky and Yuli Martov are able to maneuver the Bund out of a party they helped create.
And when Lenin rolls back into Finland Station and Petrograd in 1917, this beef has not been healed, however. And this is something that I. I want to say.
The Bund also made terrible mistakes in 1917.
And the biggest of those mistakes is that the majority of Bundists supported continuing World War I. I'm sorry, the majority of Bundists supported.
The majority of Bundists supported Russia continuing its role in World War I, a war that had killed millions of people, a war where Russian soldiers were having to take the boots off of their dead friends and to salvage.
Matthew Remski: Wear them home.
Molly Crabapple: Yeah. And to salvage guns from the people who had been shot before them. This was a horrific war. Right. And the Bund, they basically huffed a bunch of Marxist theory and talked themselves into thinking that it was a good idea to stay in it. And so Lenin, while he was authoritarian, while he was Machiavellian, while he was an absolute liar, while his government would set up concentration camps and gun down workers, Lenin realized that Russia could not continue in the slaughterhouse of World War I. And that is why the Bolsheviks are able to take power. And I think it's really important to talk about the fact that even though the Bund was dead right on Lenin's authoritarianism, they were dead wrong on the most important questions of government in the newborn Soviet Russia.
Matthew Remski: Do you have a clear understanding of why that Menshevik position developed? Because it's still a little bit mysterious to me. I'm not quite sure what the rationale was behind. Yes, we actually should stay in the war. This is a good idea, because this is Lenin's hook. Right.
Molly Crabapple: I think that there's a few factors. The first factor is that by the time that the Russian Revolution breaks out, huge swaths of Russia are under. I'm sorry, huge swathes of the Russian Empire are under German and Austrian occupation. And these swaths of the empire contain tons of their agricultural land. They contain tons of their industrial. Their industrial land. These are really, really important areas. So just from a practical level, that's one reason they don't want to lose those areas. Right. Like, they don't want to lose their breadbasket Ukraine, for instance. That's one reason.
Another reason is that they subscribed to a Marxist theory of history that said you could not have a socialist revolution until you've had what's called a bourgeois revolution set up by
Matthew Remski: parliamentary
Molly Crabapple: government. Yeah, exactly. So basically, you can't make socialism until you've gone through Cromwell and the Parliament and you're like, how England is now. Right.
Matthew Remski: And they just sort of thought that if they had this, they had a kind of like, mathematical equation. Yeah.
Molly Crabapple: They had a line graph and they're like, well, we were just like a feudal autocracy. So we're not on the part of the line graph where we do the socialist revolution. That means we have the bourgeois revolution, which means we can't be part of the government and we have to let bourgeois parties that want to continue the war run the government because of the line graph. You see? Can you imagine how infuriating this was to the average worker that was listening to these people who claim, who were socialists, talking about why their sons and husbands have to keep dying in a charnel house? It was ridiculous.
So that's why. But I would say, okay, so back to your question about this ethos and what it has to do with anti-Zionism. The Bund had an incredibly strong ethical compass. And that ethical compass is one of the things that led them to reject Zionism. And it's also one of the things that led them to reject the Bolsheviks because they saw their willingness to lie, to do coups, to murder their rivals, to suppress other socialists. I mean, there's this line by Vladimir Medem. He says it in 1918. He says, the circle of kosher Bolsheviks is going to get smaller and smaller.
Today they want to shoot Rafael Abramovich.
Tomorrow they're gonna wanna shoot Trotsky. When he said this, Trotsky was the most popular man in the country, except for Lenin. He was the hero of the Red Army. No one could have imagined that he was anything except, like, the golden boy of the new regime.
But Medem, because of his universalism, because of his strong ethical compass, was like, once you start shooting the socialists who are a little bit out with you, soon you're gonna start shooting each other. That's how it works.
Matthew Remski: Well, and he was right.
Molly Crabapple: And he was right. Yeah.
Matthew Remski: I wanna talk about doikayt and time, because this is such, as I said at the beginning, this is an incredible historical work.
And, you know, to read it is to spend time 120, 130 years going through the sort of, you know, dialectics of the 20th and 21st century now.
And you open the book with this scene of Itka the Bundist. This is where you begin. This is your sort of origin story for this research.
And Itka is breaking windows with thrown rocks. This is rendered in watercolor by your great grandfather Sam.
And this image, you know, it's almost dreamlike. It sparks something in you that sends you on this odyssey into the archives and, you know, reclaiming Yiddish, I think. Did you have to learn from scratch or you had some Yiddish on board?
Molly Crabapple: I mean, I had the sort of Yiddish that I think most New Yorkers have. Yiddish has.
Whether you're Jewish or not. I think Yiddish has seeped its way into the New York vernacular the same way, like various Italian words might have. But no, I had to learn it from scratch. I couldn't read Hebrew letters. I.
Matthew Remski: Damn.
Molly Crabapple: I certainly. I didn't know German, which is what Yiddish is based on. This language slayed me. I'm still not good at it.
Matthew Remski: Not bad.
Molly Crabapple: But, yeah, I took the summer program at YIVO for two summers in a row. I had to force my donkey brain to get through this language. And luckily, socialists have a limited vocabulary. This saves me for when I'm doing translation. But, yeah, I had to learn it from scratch.
Matthew Remski: So Itka is throwing stones in this painting and in this kind of like, eternal return of imagery.
I think of stone throwing and Palestinian children.
I think of today we have, like, French high schoolers are pulling cobblestones out of the Paris pavement and they're hurling them at the riot cops. And so we have these acts of resistance that are recursive. They also seem to never end. Do you ever feel, in going back into this history, which is now, is of course, so important to the present, do you ever feel that you're battling either with the notion of nostalgia or the notion of heroes who are gone, or melancholy over repeated losses?
Molly Crabapple: It's a tragedy, right? It's a Greek tragedy. And you start feeling like you owe a lot to the dead, especially the dead that's been. The heroic dead that has been deliberately erased. And I say heroic dead. Cause they were heroic, which does not mean that they were without flaws. You can be heroic and also infuriating and highly irritating and a jerk to your girlfriend. And you still fucking battled Nazis at the end. Right?
Matthew Remski: Right.
Molly Crabapple: So me saying that they're heroic is not me flattening them into cardboard saints.
But I don't know, I. I feel like the.
The dangers of nostalgia thing, it's something that is brought up to me over and over again by people. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.
It's one of the more common things. And I guess it doesn't really.
It doesn't really resonate with me. I mean, I don't know. I'm like, so the dangers of nostalgia. What is the danger of nostalgia? Like, what are you in danger of doing?
Matthew Remski: I think you're describing how a lot of people, including me, are projecting onto
Molly Crabapple: you.
Matthew Remski: And I think, okay, so this question comes out of me.
Well, a couple of things. There's a personal thing that I'll get to in a minute. But there's an essay, very influential essay for me by Wendy Brown called Left Melancholy. And it describes how an immersion in the history of losing, of tragedy can give people a sense, people on the left, a sense that, oh, this is.
Our fate is tragic instead of our fate instead of the future is unwritten, that we can, in seeing how it has been so difficult for socialism to take root and to survive and to, you know, repel attacks, that we can get into a kind of melancholic mindset that forecloses on our imagination. I don't think you're doing that because you, you as an, as an artist and as somebody who's tirelessly out, you know, in this extroverted way giving this material that's not what you are showing. But I'm wondering if it's in your life anyway, because it's certainly in mine.
Molly Crabapple: So, I mean, I think the culture of mourning has been a part of the left for a really, really, really, really long time. I mean, you see Lenin when he's in exile, speaking at commemorations of the Paris Commune.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Molly Crabapple: When I read Langston Hughes, he had this amazing book that is like a travelogue that he wrote about Soviet Central Asia, where he's like visiting Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And he meets this woman who is a famous Uzbek dancer and she names her child Vanzetina for Vanzetti of Sacco and Vanzetti, as a way of, you know, honoring the martyrs of the left like this, sort of honor our martyrs.
It's not something that's exclusive to Palestinian culture or exclusive to Arab culture. It's something that's deeply, deeply rooted into leftist history and I think always has been as long as a left has existed.
And it's something that it's just such a part of us. Right. It's a way of honoring our past, of showing that these sacrifices were not in vain. And I don't think it does anyone any good to deny the violence and the murder that we've been subjected to. Like, I don't think it would do us any good to deny that Salvador Allende was murdered in this. I'm sorry, it doesn't do us any good to deny that Salvador Allende's humane socialist project was murderously brought down by a CIA backed coup that left him dead. You know, like. Like what good can be done by refusing a frank engagement with our past.
Matthew Remski: I think the question around frankness is whether or not you develop the capacity to grieve and to move on or whether or not you are sort of haunted by. Oh, is this always going to happen?
Molly Crabapple: I mean, the haunting, too, is a part of the left. I mean, one of the things that always struck me when I was reading work by, like, Trotsky, for instance, when I was reading work by these early Bolsheviks, is how much they framed everything in terms of the French Revolution.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Molly Crabapple: Like, I'm sure you've read, like, Antisemitism and Thermidor by Trotsky. Why is he. Why is he bringing up Thermidor? He's bringing up Thermidor because they're haunted by the past. Revolution.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Molly Crabapple: And I think that to act in this world, particularly to act in dangerous and risky ways that risk, you know, shaking the foundation of the world, in order to do that, you do have to look at the past. And if you look at the past, frankly, it will haunt you. It will live inside you. I mean, this past that I wrote about, in addition to these people who make me laugh, who inspire me, who I view as my infuriating and beloved ancestors, in addition to that, I am haunted by this past. And it's something that I probably will always be haunted by because I spent so long engaged with it.
Matthew Remski: The personal story that I'm going to get to, might get to part of this.
I don't know. It's like a. It's not really a confusion. But, like I'm saying, isn't melancholy part of your thing and you're like, no, not really. Because, you know, it doesn't really occur to me because it's part of our history. We have to move on. But I think maybe that is a feature of, or a part of knowing that that's part of your family history. Right. Like, this is what you have lived with. And. And I'm gonna bet that a lot of leftist gentiles like me are reading this book and kind of feeling vicariously thrilled, but that the shadow side of that is feeling kind of genetically uncool. Right, because
Molly Crabapple: why would you feel genetically uncool?
Matthew Remski: Listen, listen. I grew up with a standard white settler heritage in which the main source of pride conformed to kind of like American capitalist exceptionalism. Like our grandfathers fought the Nazis and they came home to build the new empire, right? Like, that's the source of pride. So never mind that the Soviets did most of the fighting.
So my mother's father enlists in 1939. He goes through horrible battles. He comes back to work at the Ford factory with an alcohol disability that shapes my mom's life and then that shapes my own life. So there's survival. But there's no real story of resistance. Right.
And I think I speak for a number of people who grow up on the left ideologically because we are attracted to the culture and to the morals and to the ethics, but we don't really have it in our background. Right.
And the funny thing is, is that in 1936, he grows up in Windsor, Ontario, he could have easily connected with the communists who were coming through his hometown on the way to join the International Brigades in Spain. Right. Like, he's of that age.
I don't know whether he didn't move in the same social sets. He didn't have any exposure to communism or leftism at all. But if he had, like, my family story would be a different story.
And so all of that is to say, like, there's a part of. And maybe the melancholy that I'm talking about is also wrapped up in a kind of jealousy. Like, you know, I don't really have this in my background. It's something that I acquire from others. But, you know, you don't want us to idealize your family, right?
Molly Crabapple: No, no. And also, I mean, okay, so, I mean, Jewish families, like, there's plenty of idiocy, plenty of badness. Plenty. Plenty of badness as well. It's like every group of people is filled with heroes and idiots and jackasses and just boring people who, you know, would put you to sleep telling you their life story. Like, every group of people is like this, right? You know, whether your family is from Wales, whether they are from Brazil, whether they are from Indonesia. All of us have a history full of heroes and jackasses, right?
And boring working stiffs. That is just the human condition.
And whether or not, like, you know, you're.
You find, like, political resonance in the stories of, like, your mom and dad's life. I mean, wherever you are from, there are so many people of that heritage that did amazing things, right? It doesn't. It doesn't. Doesn't matter, you know, what your background is. That always exists. Right. You know, and. And also, I mean, I think that there's a lot of value to thinking about, you know, like, your spiritual forebears, too.
I certainly, when I wrote this book, I always tell people that I did not write this book just for Jewish people. If this book was considered just for Jewish people, I have failed. The Bund belongs to the worldwide history of the left. And no matter where you are from, if you are on the left, these are your ancestors as well. These are your spiritual ancestors.
Matthew Remski: You know, you've used the word now. And you know, I know that you're a Marxist, that there's a very sort of.
It's a very dialectical materialist history that you've written.
And I'm wondering whether where the sort of. I think you made a remark about how, you know, early on in the 19th century Jewish home in Eastern Europe that the woman's life is going to be very constricted by, you know, all of this housework while, you know, the, you know, the man is off studying Talmud with the boys or something like that. And I'm wondering what has.
Whether what is the sort of residual spirituality of this very secular tradition called the Bund, and where do you feel it like, what is its material? Because I don't get the sense that it is in the rituals. I don't get the sense that it's in the texts necessarily. It might be, but I'm just wondering where you think it is.
Molly Crabapple: I think that if you believe that this world is all you have and that the only justice that you will ever get, the only goodness that you will ever get, is the stuff that you make alongside other people right in the here and now, that gives you an almost overwhelming ethical imperative to do it right now. Because there isn't going to be a redo, there is not going to be a redemption, there's not going to be a heaven. There's only this right here, right here. And that's what the Bund did. They made life better here.
Now, reading clubs, self defense groups, theaters, sanatoriums for tubercular slum kids that were the envy of the world, they made life better here and now because there was nothing else but here.
And I think that my ethics, my sense of spirit is utterly based on that. The idea that all there is is what we have right here. And so we have to make it good and we have to make it just and we have to make it beautiful because we don't get anything else
Matthew Remski: rounding up recently.
And this is related to this intersection between politics and religion. Our friend Avi Lewis was attacked and defamed and threatened,
Molly Crabapple: yes,
Matthew Remski: as being an antisemite in a fucking national newspaper here in Canada for daring to offer on Yom Kippur a prayer of atonement in which he said that Jews had not done enough to stop the genocide in Gaza. So a guy named Yoni Goldstein goes and writes in the National Post that, you know, well, we know what to do with guys like this. And then he quotes the Torah and Talmud passages about how traitors are to be killed. And I almost lost my mind reading this. Avi is a good person.
I hate bullying more than anything else.
And I know that you deal with this all the time. And it has. There have been, you know, intense incidents during this book tour and communications and things written about you,
Molly Crabapple: what happened with Avi. So I want to, for people who are not like inside basebally about the exact terms that this Yoni motherfucker used. Yoni. Yoni Goldstein's his name. He used the exact term against Avi Lewis that Benjamin Netanyahu used to incite the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. This term is rodef. He used another term, moser. The term moser. Last time I heard that was when a Hasidic journalist was being beaten by a mob of Hasidic teens, led by this street thug named Heshy Tischler, because this Hasidic journalist had dared report on violations of COVID restrictions. He was beaten and hospitalized while he was. While they were screaming that he was a moser. Right? These words, this thing is violent incitement that has caused the injury and death of people previously. It's not like calling someone even a traitor. It's not like that. And for me to see this essentially an ISIS style fatwa from the Jewish perspective being issued in a major Canadian newspaper, I also nearly lost my mind. This is so.
It is so unspeakably vile. And I think that essentially this Yoni Goldstein guy, he's just relying on the fact that there aren't a lot of Jews in Canada and non Jewish people don't know what the hell he's talking about. Because what he's doing is he's trying to incite obviously political assassination.
Matthew Remski: Well, this is. My question for you is like, what advice do you have for non Jews who want to intervene? I mean, I did a bunch of posts and reels on it, but I always have this feeling that I don't really grasp how complex that confrontation is. But maybe it's as simple as you're saying it was a call for assassination and you just. Yeah, it's simple.
Molly Crabapple: Yeah, no, it's simple. He was using vocabulary that a lot of people aren't familiar with because, you know, it's specific religious vocabulary, but once you know what it means, he was just attempting to incite assassination. That's like what he's doing, right? Because he's against Avi because Avi is a human, a humanist, and Avi opposes genocide. That's what he was doing. He was trying to incite Avi's political assassination because Avi is a good person, and he is dead up. And he was just using some terms that most people aren't familiar with, that's all.
So I do not believe in the idea that because you have such and such identity, you can't call bullshit from people in other identities. I don't believe that. I think that we are humans.
Our right to critique, our right to analyze, our right to think these are our sovereign birthrights as humans. And I utterly reject the idea that because, you know, you're not Jewish and someone who's saying something revolting is Jewish, that there's something wrong with you calling that out.
I reject the idea.
Matthew Remski: Or that I can't understand it.
Molly Crabapple: Yeah, or that you can't understand it. It's like, no, you look in a dictionary and then you realize what rodef and moser means. And maybe you Google them and you're like, oh, there's like 20,000 articles about how Benjamin Netanyahu incited Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. And you see what's going on. Right?
Matthew Remski: You know, you've given. It's gotta be 100 events for this book. Is it?
Molly Crabapple: So many. So many.
Matthew Remski: You've spoken to thousands of people.
Do you feel the tide is turning on the legitimacy of Zionism?
Molly Crabapple: Oh, my God. The fact that, like, what, 37% of American Jews, only 37 are willing to identify as Zionists now is pretty crazy.
And the thing is, anyone who has a pair of eyes and a decent conscience is disgusted by what this genocidal ethnostate is doing. That's just it, you know, khalas, as my Palestinian friends would say. Right, that's it. And because of the Internet, and also because of the heroic efforts of Palestinian journalists and ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, their heroic efforts to document their. To document, to document this genocide.
Because of that, people can see what Israel did.
And you know, these Palestinian journalists, they died to do this. Over 200 journalists were murdered by Israel. You know, even just regular Palestinian people documenting this atrocity have been murdered by Israel. And yet because of their profound courage and I mean, their eloquence, just the fact that you could hold a camera under this fire because of that, that people all over the world know that Israel is carrying out a genocide. And if you were a good and decent person, you oppose that.
And you quickly realize that the ideology behind this genocide, that's Zionism. Zionism was an ideology that was built on ethnic cleansing and was built on the oppression of Palestinians. And we all know that genocide is what happens when you can't ethnically cleanse people anymore and you want to get rid of them anyway.
And that sort of genocidal rhetoric, you hear it pouring from the mouths of Israeli politicians every day if you translate the Hebrew that they're using.
And so yes, amongst American Jews, the tide is changing. And it's not just changing amongst young people. There's certainly.
Young people are a massive part of that change.
And you know, one of the things that has really touched me at these events is that, you know, sometimes I'll speak to like, I sold out a crowd. I'm sorry, I sold out a theater in Toronto, Isabel Bader Theatre. It was like 450 people, I think came and you know, a lot of them young people and these kids, a lot of them went through like a very normal Hebrew school education that fed them a bunch of Zionist hooey and didn't teach them anything about their past. And so when they reject Zionism because they're rejecting ethnic cleansing and genocide, when they reject Zionism, they don't know anything about their own history and they have like a hole in them. They have a deep sense of shame. Even these kids, a lot of them don't even know that there were Jews on the left. Can you imagine?
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Molly Crabapple: And so when they, when they come to my events, a lot of times they're crying and when they line up afterwards, these kids tell me that I gave them their ancestors back.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. I mean, that's an extraordinary gift because I think that that deconstructive process that so many people who move in leftist streams have to go through of like, oh, this is where I live. These are the benefits that I have. These are where these benefits come from.
Once those things are stripped away, there is. Who is the person underneath? Like, what is. What did you. Well, you're still alive. Have you simply been parasitic in some, some way upon Empire and you haven't really contributed anything, but if you look back far enough, then there's gotta be something there. There's gotta be some sort of history of resistance.
Molly Crabapple: Yeah. Or not even look back that far. Right. Like the generation I'm writing about is the generation of my grandparents.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. On that note, to finish up, what would you say to the 12 year old, let's say who, who doesn't yet feel a connection with the radical past that I think, you know, we can all find?
Molly Crabapple: I don't think that I would say it to the 12 year old. I would say it to the people who are trying to give them that connection. And I would say that they need to tell our stories better.
Matthew Remski: This is a mentorship and adult and parenting problem.
Molly Crabapple: Exactly. Or it's a problem of writers, it's a problem of communicators. I mean, one of the things that I did when I wrote this book is I wanted this book to be for everyone. I did not want this just to be for academics, and I did not want it just to be for people who enjoy attending leftist study groups, though I obviously am one of them. I am a nerd to high heavens. But I didn't just want it to be for people like me. And so what I did in order to do that was I decided I'm gonna use every bit of skill that I have to tell the story as vividly and enticingly to bring out the humor of talk about sex, to talk about violence, talk about betrayal. I decided to tell it through individuals, right? And to tell it through physical, sensory detail, which required so much research to do because I wanted people who were not brain deformed nerds like myself to read this history.
And so much of the reason that, you know, a young person might not feel connection to this past is because the people trying to do the connecting aren't doing a good job.
Matthew Remski: Your capacity for poring through the history and finding the stories, the granular stories, is exemplary. And I think the modern equivalent of it in contemporary journalism would be the person who actually starts to do some ethnographies, who actually goes to the place and actually speaks to the people.
The thing that I find so, so empty about so much of the geopolitical writing is the absence of the individual voice. And when you actually talk to somebody who is Palestinian and had to travel home, or who wasn't able to leave for a long time, or they had some strange borderland experience, or if you speak to somebody who came and went from Iran over the last eight months, and I was speaking to a guy who's an Iranian communist and he's going to Tehran last March, and the story that he's able to tell about the complexity of the situation on the ground and the nuance of the relationships involved and how many political forces are actually active in any given time, that's where people's lives really come alive. And we don't get any of that, really in the typical geopolitical reporting, which basically flattens or razes the worlds that we're trying to save.
Molly Crabapple: 1,000%. 1,000%. And I also just think communication is important. And part of communicating ideas is speaking in the idiom of whoever your audience is. Like, there's this journalist whose work I really like. His name is Jake Hanrahan. He has Popular Front.
I love Jake's work. And Jake talks like what he is, which is like a working class English guy who's into kickboxing and Muay Thai, who is an incredibly brave war reporter. And, you know, for a lot of people, including me, that's a super appealing idiom to hear stories of war and conflict through.
I could listen to Jake's reporting for forever, and there are all sorts of ways to do that. But I think that one of the problems is that often the way that the radical leftist past is spoken about, it's spoken about in the language of academia. And nothing in the world is more brutal than the language of academia. This is a language that is as elaborate as the rituals of Versailles, but infinitely more boring. And its only audience is the people who you're trying to sucker into giving you tenure.
Matthew Remski: Why do you think it defaults to.
Is this the ghost of melancholy as well? Is that it defaults to sort of the theoretical reflection on how something should have worked or how something was supposed to work and how it didn't work out. And so these are the technical details that we have to sort of plow through instead of just getting the story of the person who was there and what they ate and how they slept at night.
Molly Crabapple: I think it's just a reflection of the fact that a lot of leftists have gone through grad school and that grad school beats a grad school. Beats the good prose style out of you.
Matthew Remski: You're absolutely right about Jake hearing his gravelly, like, is it Manchester accent? Or whatever he's talking about, like the type of food he's going to get in Rojava or wherever he is is just incredible.
Okay, well, that's good advice.
Is that I'm asking you, like, what do you say to the young person? And you're like, hey, actually, why don't you pay attention to the stories that you're telling?
Molly Crabapple: Exactly.
Like when your audience has their eyes glazed over often, that's a you thing.
Matthew Remski: Well, Molly, nobody's eyes are glazed over listening to you.
And I'm really appreciative for that. It's a fantastic work. You've done an amazing service to the cause of anti-Zionism and I would say world peace.
And that's not an exaggeration.
So I thank you for that and it's great to speak with you.
Molly Crabapple: This is a delight. Thank you so much for having me on.
