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I come from a long line of Jewish Bundists. Now, Molly Crabapple is part of our family.
My grandparents live in a small apartment in Santa Monica. It has white walls and wood floors and is full of light. The living room window faces the street, and my grandma, Kathy, likes to poke her head out and talk to her neighbors, many of whom moved here after the Palisades fire, just like them.
To me, the Palisades house where my grandparents lived for 60 years always felt frozen in time. While opulent mansions sprung up on their street, their house served as a reminder of the days when a humble community college English professor (my grandpa, Marvin) could buy property in those idyllic, quiet, near-enough-to-smell-the-ocean streets. It was filled with books and family photographs. The living room mantle was covered in beach glass, sea-shells and surf paraphernalia, reminders of Kathy’s 1950s Malibu surf career that was immortalized in my great-grandfather’s novel Gidget, which inspired a series of books, a movie and a TV show.
Marvin’s office was filled with hundreds of Yiddish books with multi-colored spines and black-and-white photos, some of which showed his Bundist father in Polish prisons. As a child, I would scan the spines of fat history books with frightening titles like The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 and Never Say Die! Printed out and pinned to the wall was a quote by Marek Edelman, the Bundist second commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed & never the oppressors!”
The Bund was a socialist Jewish political party, at one point the most popular in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The party was founded on the premise of doikayt, or hereness, the belief that Jews deserved to live in freedom and dignity wherever they happened to be. In practice, this meant that the Bund ran a complex network of schools, self-defense squads, athletic clubs, literary journals, unions and local courts, designed to celebrate Jewish life and protect Jews from ever-surging antisemitic hostility. Knowing that my great-grandfather and namesake, Rubin Zuckerman, was a Bundist meant knowing that he was secular, proudly Jewish, believed firmly in egalitarian values, and was critical about the founding of Israel.
During the pandemic, I would sit in Marvin and Kathy’s overgrown garden, six feet away next to a rusted exercise bike. I would practice my Yiddish by reading aloud postcards sent from some young woman Marvin thought was the greatest — Molly Crabapple.
Molly began interviewing Marvin for her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, seven years ago. She has a resume that would make anyone’s head spin. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and her journalistic output has covered Occupy Wall Street, Syrian rebels, and Guantanamo Bay. She’s won two Emmys and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Marvin told me about her with glowing eyes, and I responded with the type of disinterest reserved for recommendations from elder family members. OK, yes, there’s this young woman, she cares about the Bund, she makes art. But I too was a young woman who cared about the Bund and made art, and the narcissism of small differences precluded any real enthusiasm.
In 2026, with my grandparents’ Palisades sanctuary in ashes, I came to their house with a galley copy of Molly’s book. I had received it in the mail a few days earlier, and was quickly stripped of any skeptical haughtiness. Molly was describing a world, an ideology and a sensibility I knew so dearly and intimately from Marvin and Kathy. I had never seen this world so well described, neatly explaining concepts I have failed to adequately convey to even my closest friends.
I was eager to show Marvin the book, hear what Molly had gotten right or wrong, and share in the strange melancholic joy that comes from jewels of truth surviving over time, even as the physical, lived experience is washed away. With our personal archive up in smoke — the letters written by my great-grandparents, the stray notes, the marginalia in books toted from Poland to the Bronx to the Palisades — Molly’s book had a lot to live up to.
We sat on the couch and Marvin licked his finger to flip through the first pages. He went down the opening “Cast of Characters,” which outlines major players in Bundist history.
“Rafael Abramovich — I met him,” he said. “Meyer London — my father was in a picture with him.”
At 93, Marvin struggles to read without reading glasses and a dentist-grade clip-on magnifying glass. I read the introduction aloud to him and he recognized himself as the “octogenarian Yiddish scholar” who sang “partisan hymns” to Molly.
I continued to read aloud — about Molly’s own connection to her Bundist great-grandfather, her experience with leftist organizing, the overwhelming outpouring of support when she wrote about the Bund for the New York Review of Books, and her travels to the former Pale of Settlement, Ukraine and Gaza.
Despite my best intentions, my voice broke when I read this line: “The Bundists built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today.”
I turned to Marvin and he was weeping as well.
“It’s true,” he said, “they were beautiful, beautiful people.”
“Are you two crying?” Kathy called in disbelief from the kitchen.
In Santa Monica, my grandpa’s office is inside of a closet. When I first got the news that the Palisades house had burned down, I emailed David Mazower, the curator at the Yiddish Book Center. I wanted to know if he could help me replace Marvin’s Yiddish books. Over the course of several months, he generously mailed nearly 100 books to us. They have strangers’ names written on their inside covers.
Feteshizing books
Family history embeds itself in your psyche through roundabout means. Marvin picked me up from school every Wednesday from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated high school. He would buy me ice cream and listen to my favorite CD’s — The Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel, which sounded brand new to him since he stopped listening to popular music after Benny Goodman and prefers classical to anything else. He was my caring friend, who prioritized my own curiosity over anything else. Words like Bund, Yiddish, democratic socialism, Poland, the Holocaust, Zionism entered my subconsciousness, but I didn’t recognize the particular bent of Judaism I was born into until my later teens, when I started to seek out my own community.
Marvin urged me to attend the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program for high school students in 2015. Stepping inside their shtetl-inspired wooden building deep in lush Western Massachusetts was the first time my Yiddishist, Bundist history had a context. I recognized a Jewishness based in literature. A Jewishness based in solidarity and multiculturalism, without borders or armies. Today, my great-grandparents, Manye & Rubin, are featured in the permanent exhibit curated by David Mazower. Their picture stands above a bookshelf with Yiddish translations of Darwin, Marx and George Brandes’ literary criticism, and a full set of Guy de Maupassant and Jack London. Next to the books is a video of Marvin, describing how his parents, although they had no formal education and were garment workers, read all the time. When I tell friends that my great-grandparents are in an exhibition, they ask what they achieved.
“They liked to read,” I say, with my heart full of pride. Their values speak to me as loud as any accomplishment.
“Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together,” Molly writes in her book, “until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions.”
“Jews fetishized books,” Molly writes elsewhere, describing the “gluttony” for knowledge most working class Eastern European Jews nourished.
Marvin is often critical of any work describing his history, but as we read the first 30 pages of Here Where We Live Is Our Country aloud, he had little to say other than brief exclamations of excitement and agreement. Molly’s writing style is full of delicious and evocative details that allow us to fully inhabit this vanished world. As we read about how Polish borders were drawn and re-drawn, Marvin told me about how he would fill out forms for his parents when he was a child.
“The forms would ask when were you born,” he said, “well, they didn’t really know. OK. Then, the forms ask where you were born. They would shrug and look at each other, saying, ‘Poland? Russia? Was it Russia then? Was it Poland?’
“Then the form would ask, what is your profession. They would say ‘operator.’ They meant sewing machine operator, but as a boy, I just thought, what’s wrong with these people? They don’t know when they were born, they don’t know where they were born, and they’re telling me ‘operator’ is a real job?”
Molly and I share the same generational gap from our Bundist great-grandfathers. Both of us have parents who are not Jewish. And we are both women. Her perspective about female psychology, sexuality and experience allowed me to relate to Bundist history from a new axis. She writes about women who lost their virginity or had sex with multiple men in one day while surviving in the Warsaw Ghetto. She brings Pati Kremer to the forefront over her better known husband, the official founder of the Bund, Arkady Kremer, starting with Pati’s abandonment of her bourgeois upbringing and ending with a visit to her unmarked mass grave in Poland. Molly articulates the pull that many women, including myself, feel to “[subsume themself] in the domestic sphere that takes so many women out of historical record, while sometimes compensating them with private joys”
Women in Here Where We Live Is Our Country crush on their “family maid with sapphic fervor,” have long noses that “a male comrade mentioned unkindly in his memoirs,” make men their projects, sustain relationships with incarcerated men, or sometimes, “never married… had no lovers… just worked for the Bund.” She describes Sophia Dubnova’s efforts to disseminate birth control and lecture series about a woman’s right to orgasm. A non-Jewish Polish Socialist ally woman hides a message in her lipstick case. Abortion happens inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where many women were unwilling to risk bringing a life into such terrifying circumstances. It’s thrilling to hear these subjects written about so candidly, with no sense of shame or secrecy. I realize that in some ways, only a woman from my generation can do this.
A family affair
This past New Year’s Day, my parents and siblings crowded into Marvin and Kathy’s cramped living room. We ate the pastries Kathy had carefully assembled until the atmosphere abruptly shifted from friendly to tense. My father, a sociology professor, admitted he was planning on going to an academic conference in Israel. Although all of our family leans heavily left, my father feels a more profound connection to Israel. He lived there and worked on a kibbutz for several years.
My dad and I fell into the kind of argument many children have had with their parents since Oct. 7th, 2023. Despite fully knowing our shared values, we couldn’t help accusing the other of representing extremes: My dad must believe war crimes and genocide are legitimate means of self defense; I must believe Jews don’t deserve their own country. Marvin intervened thoughtfully, trying to bring our commonality to the forefront. Repeatedly, he referenced the Bund.
The Bund’s story is able to sidestep so many claustrophobic tropes around Zionism. Their devotion to Jewish safety and cultural autonomy leaves no room for accusations of antisemitism. If nothing else, they prove a point that bears urgent repeating for Jews and non-Jews alike — there has never been a singular Jewish consensus on the necessity of our own ethnostate. Like the Warsaw Ghetto fighters Molly resurrects in her book, like my own family, Jews have always argued about the best way forward.
I take enormous comfort reading Bundist leader Henryk Erlich’s 1933 speech, one that Marvin shared with me a few years ago when I was full of desperation about the atrocities unfolding in Gaza. Reprinted in Molly’s book, his words are clear as ever: “Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all nations.”
A strange sense of ownership
A few days after finishing Molly’s book, I met her at Canyon Coffee, and the two of us sat on the sidewalk while the east side creatives meandered by.
“I feel this strange sense of ownership over your book,” I said.
“You should,” said Molly, “without your grandfather’s encouragement, I would have never been able to finish it.”
I was overwhelmed by a new feeling. Here we were, chatting about the hectic nature of her upcoming book tour and the stress I’ve been feeling as a bridesmaid for my friend getting married next month. Against all odds, the movement that united our great-grandparents created a thread strong enough to find us sitting together. I felt that Molly was family.
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In Congress, a measure to tighten U.S.-Israel military ties sparks backlash on both sides of the aisle
Next year’s National Defense Authorization Act has made its way to the House floor, and has some Democrats and conservatives alike rallying against a provision that critics in Congress say would embroil the U.S. in unprecedented levels of military integration with Israel.
The measure, Section 224 of the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, was advanced by Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., as part of the committee’s annual defense bill. If enacted, it would establish a framework for expanded U.S.-Israel defense cooperation. An official designated by the Pentagon would be responsible for coordinating collaboration with Israel on technologies ranging from missile defense and drones to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and biotechnology. The provision also encourages joint research projects, shared manufacturing arrangements, military training exercises, and closer cooperation between American and Israeli defense companies.
While the proposal has generated controversy in its own right, it is also fueling a broader conversation about what the U.S.-Israel defense relationship should look like after 2028, when the current 10-year memorandum of understanding governing American military assistance to Israel expires.
The United States has provided military assistance to Israel since 1960, but since 1998, the bulk of that aid has been directed by a series of such memoranda negotiated between the two countries. Congress must still approve the funds annually, but lawmakers have historically funded the agreements as negotiated.
But in recent months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that he does not wish to renew the 2016 MOU to its full extent, stating that he hopes to “taper off” U.S. aid over the next decade and wishes to focus instead on a more collaborative defense relationship.
His comments come as public support for Israel has declined in the United States and military aid has come under increasing political scrutiny, with many Democrats and some Republicans calling to reduce or cut off assistance. An April Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% a year earlier. Negative views have risen among both Democrats and Republicans, particularly among younger generations. Today, 57% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable view according to the Pew survey.
Rachel Brandenburg, managing director and senior policy analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said Israeli leaders are likely aware that future aid packages could face greater scrutiny from both Democrats and an increasingly isolationist wing of the Republican Party, a factor that helps explain the Israeli interest in reducing its reliance on U.S. aid. At the same time, she said, Israel’s increasingly sophisticated defense industry and strong economy have made it less reliant on American financing than in the past.
Against that backdrop, supporters of Section 224 argue that deeper cooperation could help lay the groundwork for a future relationship based on mutual benefits.
“The United States has more to gain by harnessing Israel’s defense tech ecosystem, their innovative capabilities,” Brandenburg said. “Their economy is strong, so there’s quite a bit that they could be buying with their own dollars.”
Michael O’Hanlon, the Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, told the Forward he believes the concerns that Section 224 would integrate the U.S.-Israel defense relationship to unprecedented levels are overblown. “My overall sense is that this would move the US-Israel relationship in the direction of AUKUS,” he said, referring to an existing trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“In theory, it shouldn’t really be needed because collaboration is already close,” he explained. “In practice, this kind of provision might help cut through bureaucratic red tape and speed up collaborations. But on balance, I don’t expect huge change because the partnership is already very tight.”
Critics, however, see the proposal very differently.
Its opponents worry that if the U.S. and Israel move away from a military-aid relationship and toward a more collaborative partnership, large parts of the U.S.-Israel defense relationship will be harder to scrutinize or limit. Instead of debating aid packages, lawmakers could find themselves dealing with defense projects that are already built into Pentagon programs and contracts.
“It’s taking one program that’s become unpopular and turning it into another program that those who would disapprove of an intensified U.S.-Israeli defense relationship won’t really know about,” said Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
If combined with Israel’s stated desire to reduce its reliance on aid and other efforts to deepen defense cooperation, Simon says Section 224 could produce a relationship that is “much more integrated, immutable, and immune to political pressures than has ever existed.”
Similar concerns have been raised by lawmakers on the left.
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Monday that he intends to “strongly oppose” the provision, arguing that “Netanyahu is lobbying for Section 224 in the national defense bill, a provision that quietly expands U.S.-Israel military cooperation and weapons development with almost zero oversight.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, also opposes the provision and introduced an amendment to strike Section 224 during committee markup, stating, “The American people are tired of the arrogance and insolence of Prime Minister Netanyahu telling America what we should do.”
On the right, political figures and commentators have framed the measure as a threat to American sovereignty.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tied the provision to the recent reports of Israeli espionage against the U.S., stating on X, “The Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on the U.S. to the highest level and AIPAC is openly cheering Republicans for section 224 in the NDAA that merges our military with Israel’s military.” Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie — who this week held a hearing premised on the conspiracy theory that Israel intentionally killed U.S. soldiers on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War — pledged to offer a floor amendment to strike the section.
The debate has also been picked up by far-right commentators, including podcaster Alex Jones, who stated: “This is beyond treason. This is absolutely a foreign government merging with us. Israel is now the main threat to the existence of this country.”
Brandenburg pushed back on concerns that the proposal would weaken oversight. Rather than moving cooperation further from public view, the legislation calls for additional reporting to Congress and public disclosure of some forms of existing coordination between the two countries, Brandenburg noted.
“That’s new,” she said, “in the sense of adding the accountability and transparency to these elements of the relationship in ways that didn’t exist previously.”
She also asserts many critics have overstated the significance of Section 224, noting that many of the forms of cooperation described in the legislation — including collaboration on missile defense, cyber security and counter-drone technology — are already taking place.
“Those who want to counter the idea that Israel and the United States should be working together have exaggerated what this legislation is actually saying,” she said. “They are accusing it of things like integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, or subjugating the U.S. military to the Israeli military. None of that is actually called for in here.”
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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