This isn't just a book review; it's a historical rescue mission that reframes the entire modern debate on Jewish safety and political identity. Cory Doctorow presents Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country not merely as history, but as an urgent mirror held up to our current moment of xenophobia and genocide. The piece forces a confrontation with a forgotten radical tradition that argued for universal liberation over ethnic separation, a choice that feels dangerously relevant today.
The Lost Mirror World
Doctorow anchors the argument in Naomi Klein's concept of "mirror worlds," using it to explain how two movements can start from the same diagnosis but arrive at opposite prescriptions. He writes, "The thesis of Doppelganger is that the world is full of 'mirror world' pairs with opposite political valences." This framework allows Doctorow to contrast the Bund—a socialist, internationalist organization—with Zionism without reducing the analysis to a simple binary.
"In the real world, we observe the dominance of parasitic finance capital over productive labor and embark upon a great class struggle to seize the means of production. In the mirror world, antisemites observe this same fact, combine it with the fact that some of these bankers are Jewish, and embark on a genocidal program of antisemitic violence."
The commentary effectively uses this historical lens to show how the Bundists understood their struggle as part of a universal fight against oppression. Doctorow notes that "the Bund more-or-less invented intersectional analysis," pointing out that they tracked Black struggles in the Jim Crow South while Black radical press reported on European antisemitism. This detail is crucial; it demonstrates that solidarity was not an abstract ideal but a tactical necessity for survival.
Critics might argue that the Bund's refusal to prioritize ethnic separation left them vulnerable to annihilation, a point often raised by defenders of the Zionist project. However, Doctorow counters this by highlighting the moral bankruptcy of the alternative: "Zionist leaders were willing to align themselves with antisemites, finding common cause in the idea that European Jewry should abandon Europe in favor of Palestine." The text suggests that the Bund's failure was not a strategic error of their own making, but a result of a world that refused to help them.
A History Written in Blood and Ink
The piece moves beyond political theory to examine the human cost of these ideological divides. Doctorow emphasizes Crabapple's rigorous scholarship, noting she "taught herself to speak and read Yiddish so that she could consume primary sources." This dedication grounds the narrative in the voices of the people who lived it, rather than just the historians who wrote about them later.
"The Bund lost , but it did not fail . The Bund was failed , as were the Zionists, the Roma, European socialists, disabled and queer people — everyone the Nazis burned, gassed, or buried alive."
This distinction between losing and failing is the emotional core of Doctorow's commentary. He argues that the tragedy was not the Bund's ideology, but the world's response to it. The text brings in historian Adam Hochschild to illustrate how the United States "slammed its doors" through the Immigration Act of 1924, preventing millions from escaping persecution. This historical fact serves as a stark parallel to current policies regarding refugees and asylum seekers.
"Even after they joined the war, they refused to admit Jews and other victims of Nazi genocide. They refused visas, closed borders, turned back boats of escapees, sometimes sending them back to occupied Europe to be slaughtered."
Doctorow's framing is particularly sharp when he connects this history to the current conflict in Gaza. He suggests that "no one who's paid attention to the genocide in Gaza and the official response in the 'free' world to Palestinian solidarity movements can fail to see those parallels, either." The argument implies that the same mechanisms of exclusion and dehumanization are at play today, regardless of which side claims moral superiority.
"For the Jews who are told — by Zionists... that all this is being done for us , that our continued existence requires it, Crabapple's history of the Bund shows us what's on the other side of the mirror."
This section challenges the reader to consider whether safety can truly be secured through "mass slaughter and imperial conquest," a question that cuts to the heart of current geopolitical debates. The text does not shy away from the complexity, acknowledging that "Crabapple manages the admirable achievement of being both sympathetic and pitiless" toward all factions involved in these historical struggles.
Bottom Line
Doctorow's commentary succeeds by refusing to let history remain a dusty archive; instead, he uses Crabapple's work to expose the living consequences of political choices made a century ago. The strongest element is the reframing of the Bund not as a failed experiment, but as a moral standard that the world abandoned at its own peril. However, the piece risks oversimplifying the immense pressure on Jewish communities facing existential threats by presenting a clear ideological dichotomy that may not have felt so clean to those living through the terror. The reader must now ask: in our current mirror worlds, which side are we choosing?