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We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist revolutionary party that fought for freedom and dignity for Jews in Europe. The movement formed in the waning days of the Russian Empire in an atmosphere of intense antisemitism, but it "rejected, from the very start, calls to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine," Crabapple says. "They felt that Zionism was a capitulation to the same bigots that wanted to kick Jews out of Europe."
Bund members — known as Bundists — navigated profound historical changes from the founding of the movement in 1897 until its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust. But Crabapple, who learned Yiddish for the book, says the Bund is not just Jewish history.
"This is a history that belongs to all rebels. It belongs to everyone who believes in the necessity of human solidarity," she says.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining major provision of the landmark 1965 law that was a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.
In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, a majority of justices ruled Wednesday that Louisiana must redraw a congressional map that was designed to create a second majority-Black district in the state, where African Americans have long faced racial segregation and barriers to voting. They said the electoral map "relied too heavily on race," an interpretation that is set to usher in another wave of redistricting across the South to help Republicans win more seats in Congress.
"This is central to whether or not we maintain a multiracial democracy in this country," says lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She calls Wednesday's ruling "a free pass to discriminate."
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