Doikayt (‘Hereness’) Now! w/ Molly Crabapple

For episode 189 of The Fire These Times, Elia Ayoub is joined by friend of the pod Molly Crabapple to talk about the Jewish Labor Bund and how their concept of Doikayt (‘Hereness’) can help us build a better world than the hellscape being proposed by techno-dystopianism and end-time fascism. Molly’s upcoming book is called “here where we live is our country: the story of the jewish labor bund.”

Speaking of end-time fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor will be joining Elia and Dana El Kurd on TFTT to talk about their essay “The rise of end times fascism.”

Elia’s Links

Support: You can support my work with a one-off or monthly donation on Ko-fi.

Masterclass on Modern Lebanon: Registration is now open for May 2026.

Newsletter: Subscribe to Hauntologies

Social Media: I’m on Bluesky, Instagram and Mastodon.

Contact: To collaborate, reach out on ayoub@thefirethesetimes.com

The Fire These Times

Listen: Wherever you get your podcasts such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Pocket Casts and RSS.

Social Media: TFTT is on Bluesky and Instagram.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠

Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics). Molly’s portrait on the cover photo is also done by her.

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

In addition to rejecting Zionism because they thought it was racist, imperialist, and extremely stupid, Bundists also rejected it because, despite everything, they loved eastern Europe. They loved Warsaw, they loved Vilnius. They loved these places as their home, and they did so much to give Jewish communities the feeling that “Here where you live is your country.”

Molly Crabapple: I’m so grateful to be back on the podcast again. The conversations we had at the start of my project on the Bund helped shape how I thought about things as I wrote this crazy four-hundred-page book.

How did I come to the Bund? I came to it through my great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbort, who was a post-impressionist painter from what is now Belarus, and who taught my mother how to paint—so in turn, through the generations, taught me how to paint. I grew up entirely surrounded by Sam’s paintings, sculptures, and self-published writings—and especially by these watercolors that he called “memory paintings,” that were six hundred images of the murdered world of his shtetl childhood in Volkovysk.

They showed every aspect of life in the small town he grew up in, from the most sacred to the most profane, from men reading the Torah to Jewish girls fucking their Russian boyfriends behind a fence while their dads looked for them—everything. But there was one painting that I was always obsessed with: it showed a young woman who had her hair up in a Gibson girl hairdo and a little corseted waist, and she was standing on a dirt alleyway at twilight, throwing a rock through a window. Next to her was her boyfriend, who was holding more rocks (because a lady should not carry her own rocks on date night).

This painting was so different from everything I thought about what a young Jewish woman would be in 1903 that I grew obsessed with it. I especially grew obsessed with its title, which was “Itka the Bundist.” I remember turning those words over on my tongue. “Itka,” the old-fashioned name, and “Bundist”—what was that? It was this watercolor that led me to the story of the Jewish Labor Bund, which was a secular, socialist, anti-Zionist, and defiantly Jewish revolutionary party that my great-grandfather had belonged to back in his hometown.

It was a party that educated shtetls, freed prisoners, fought religious fundamentalists, battled on the barricades against the goons of the tsar, defended its people against pogroms—and most of all it was a party that believed that Jews had the right to live in their eastern European homes of the last thousand years. They believed that in spite of all the racism of eastern European society, in spite of all the state oppression and freelance violence, that there where they lived was their country, and they decided to fight for that.

Elia J. Ayoub: And the concept that underpins a lot of that philosophy is “Doikayt” (translated as “Hereness”).

A bit of a back story on me: ten years ago I did a Master’s, and the dissertation was on the politics of language. I focused on Yiddish and Hebrew; I looked at how Yiddish and Hebrew were used in twentieth-century Jewish political thought, especially in debates around Zionism. There were underlying themes: a lot of those who were more on the Yiddishist side of things tended to be more on the Bund side of things, and in contrast to that, what became the language of Zionism, modern Hebrew, contrasted itself against the Bund, against Hereness, against Doikayt, with the ‘Thereness’ of Zionism. The homeland isn’t here, it’s over there.

It wasn’t a very well-known history. I’m not Jewish; I have no personal connection to it. As my uncle put it, it was me trying to be a bit provocative as a Lebanese Palestinian doing this kind of research (he didn’t mean it in a complimentary way, but maybe it’s true). It’s been ten years; since going into this rabbit hole for a university, this topic—in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza, especially since October 2023 and the ongoing genocide—has gotten more prescient. It’s forced a lot of diaspora Jews (Jewish Americans and others) to think about “Zionist realism” (there’s a Jewish Currents podcast I recommend on this): how even people who consider themselves anti-Zionists are often limited by the horizon set by Zionism.

All of these conversations have become more common, which I’m personally very happy to see. What has your experience been with that? In 2015-16 when I was writing, the big story in our circles was that Bernie didn’t go to AIPAC. That was a massive thing; a major Democrat didn’t go to AIPAC, and he’s Jewish! That pissed off a lot of people. Since then we’ve seen Jewish Americans (and yourself as well) doing sit-ins and blocking roads; it’s become more of an active thing.

MC: The hideousness and the vileness of the Israeli genocide, and also what I can only describe as the whining piss-baby cry-bully actions of their defenders in the US, who simultaneously pretend to feel victimized while calling for students to be locked in cages—all of this will make anyone who has a basic ethical compass pretty disgusted at Israel. That includes young Jewish Americans (and old Jewish Americans, too).

There’s a huge rift going on between people who are looking at the horrors that Israel is inflicting with open eyes and saying, Fuck no, not in my name, and then other people who are so tied and hamstrung by loyalties to tribe and communal groups and religious leaders that they’re allowing themselves to forsake the basic adult ethical responsibility of looking the truth in the eye and acting on it. That’s what’s going on with Jews becoming anti-Zionists, or Jews standing against what Israel is doing right now.

Zionism has always been built on an ideology that is called “the negation of the diaspora.” This meant that Jewish communities all over the world, whether in Yemen, Istanbul, New York City, Moscow, or Volkovysk, were shit—they meant nothing. The only “real” lasting Jewish community that mattered was the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. This ideology of the negation of the diaspora went alongside the belittling and suppression of diaspora languages and cultures.

It’s pretty well-known how horrifically Arab Jews were treated, but there was real violence that was used to suppress Yiddish as well—and Yiddish was the most widely-spoken Jewish language in the world. It was the language of the eastern European Jewish street; it was the first language of most American Jews as well. In Palestine, even before the creation of the Israeli state, Yiddish was suppressed with violence, with mobs of armed young guys who would throw smoke bombs into events and beat the crap out of people and burn down their kiosks.

This suppression continued under the Israeli state, and it also continued in the ways that Jewish communal stuff was funded. There would always be more funding for Hebrew school than Yiddish school, even if your own grandparents spoke Yiddish. However, as a consequence of the unspeakable monstrosities that Israel is doing right now, a lot of Jewish people from a variety of backgrounds are starting to look into their own heritage and what that was before Zionism colonized everything.

Jews come from all over the world, so this might be a Jewish girl from Thessaloniki looking back at her great-grandparents who spoke Ladino—but for the vast majority of American Jews, what this means is looking back at your grandparents who spoke Yiddish. There’s a real tragedy that is common to many people who came from cultures that lost languages to suppression and genocide: we can’t directly speak to our great-grandparents.

I’m half Puerto Rican, and I can read my Puerto Rican grandfather’s journal, where he talks about my dad being born. There’s nothing keeping me from learning Spanish; it’s a huge language. It would be the same if I were Russian, if I were French, if I were Arab. These are all massive, imperial languages. But other languages—for instance if I were Kurdish, or if I spoke western Armenian, or if I were speaking an Indigenous language, or Yiddish—these are languages whose speakers have been so whittled down by genocide and then by persecution and erasure that it’s cut off our ability to speak to our own past.

When I learned Yiddish it felt like an act of necromancy. All of the sudden I didn’t have to rely on academics or translators; I could speak directly to my ancestors and I could listen to them. It was a sort of magic, a reclamation. I certainly don’t think everyone needs to learn Yiddish—it’s not the most useful language in the world. But I still think that magic of being able to speak and listen directly to my people was something I don’t know if I could have replaced any other way.

EA: As part of Zionism becoming hegemonic, you mention three battalions in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, where they would literally attack someone who would speak Yiddish publicly. I used a photo in one of my newsletter articles, captioned “Wounded Yiddishists after an attack by Hebrew language fanatics, Tel Aviv, 1928.” There was a concrete purpose: not just to elevate the status of Hebrew in relation to Yiddish, but the war was against the very concept of multiplicity, of having different heritage, of being more than one thing. They even called it “The New Hebrew Man” (there’s a gendered aspect to all of this as well).

There was a scholar I used, [Avi] Lang, who called it “linguistic fascism in the land of Zion.” They were referring to their own family history; here’s a quote: “Family lore in most Ashkenazi households in Israel would almost inevitably include stories of grandparents and great-grandparents experiencing discrimination whenever they spoke Yiddish in the streets in 1940s and 1950s Tel Aviv.”

There’s a lot of irony in all of this; there were flyers that said, Learn Hebrew! Every Jew in Palestine, “whether he has just come or whether he is a long-standing resident, must speak and conduct all his business in the old-new language of the Jewish people, Hebrew!” The irony is, this was a poster written in Yiddish, because most of those who could read it, who belonged to the community, would be native Yiddish speakers. In order to create this new national identity, the old ones (because there was a multiplicity) had to be crushed, had to be turned into taboo, dangerous, risky—while at the same time elevating the status of Hebrew: you could climb the social ladder better if your Hebrew was better.

There is an argument that was made that it was the language that created the state. Without that, it would have been more difficult to “assimilate” (which was a very brutal process) what would later be called Mizrahi Jews (“mizrah” just means “east” in Hebrew), Jews from mostly Arabic-speaking lands, who may or may not have identified themselves as Arabs, into the by then already-established state of Israel.

In contrast to that, what I found powerful about Doikayt—you talk about this in the book—is that there’s a rejection of the desire to be only one thing. You can be fiercely Jewish, but you’re also from this neighborhood; this is your background; your background is likely multiple things at once; what ties you together is not just your Jewishness but also your desire for a better world as part of your socialism, and so on.

Since the Bund was effectively crushed, as part of the crushing of European Jewry in the Holocaust, a lot of mostly Zionist historiography of Yiddish, of the Bund, and of Europe in general, is almost “victorious”—We were proven right by the Holocaust; we were proven right by the success of Zionism. You reject that.

MC: Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about what the Bund meant with Doikayt, which included Yiddish but wasn’t limited to that. The Bund was an eastern European Jewish organization. It had members who lived in Berlin or Paris or New York (most of its members ended up fleeing to New York, the ones who survived); there is still a branch in Melbourne; but at its heart, it is an eastern European organization that is deeply rooted in the streets, villages, cities, and twisted alleyways of the former land of the Pale of Settlement.

In addition to rejecting Zionism because they thought it was racist and imperialist (and extremely stupid), they also rejected it because despite everything, they loved eastern Europe. They loved Warsaw, they loved Vilnius. They loved these places as their home, and they did so much to try to give Jewish communities the feeling that Here where you live is your country.

In the memoir of Bernard Goldstein, who was a militia leader in interwar Warsaw, he talks about these summer camps that they set up, and these hiking groups. Formerly, Jews didn’t have a lot of access to rural spaces, and they didn’t have a culture that made them feel comfortable hiking around in the Polish mountains. And the Bund was like, No, these are your mountains; this is your nature; these are your wildflowers and your hills and your rivers. This Earth belongs to you just as much as it does to anyone else, and it’s yours to love.

The same with the cities. They had a whole geography of schools, theaters, poetry readings, cafes, and social clubs where they would deliberately piss off religious Jews. They had a whole architecture they loved; they were rooted in these places. One of the most gut-wrenching things about writing my book was writing about how this whole architecture, this whole world that they built out of love and grit, was systematically murdered by the Nazis, who murdered three million Jews in Poland alone—half the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were killed in Poland.

However, the Bund was not just crushed by the Nazis alone. The Stalinist regime that took over Poland after the war forced the Bund to liquidate itself. Ironically, one of the Bund’s last acts in Poland before it was forced to liquidate, but when it was still pretty controlled by the Stalinists, was that they congratulated Israel on its creation. They did that because Stalin backed Israel, and Stalin armed the Haganah to do the Nakba. Because of that, the Polish branch was forced to congratulate this group that had always been their enemies.

But it wasn’t even just the Stalinists or the Nazis that killed the Bund in Poland. It was also the fact that after the war, over a thousand Polish Jews were murdered by their Polish fellow citizens because of a conflation between Jews and Communists, and because Poles had moved into their houses and didn’t want to give them back. These three things crushed the idea of Doikayt in eastern Europe, in the most hideous and brutal possible way.

I wrote about how after the war, and after all these murders by nationalists, there were all of these Bundist survivors begging the American Bund for visas to America—they wanted to move to New York after the war. There’s a quote by Jacob Pat, who was a Bundist who had spent the war in America and went back in 1946 to give aid, and one of his interlocutors tells him, “In Poland you can smell the ships,” and it doesn’t matter whether they’re going to America or to Palestine; people just want out.

Because I am Jewish, and because I grew up with the pathologies of my community, just as we all grew up with the special pathologies of our own community, I had grown up thinking about the Holocaust almost like an argument: The Holocaust proved this group right, and this group wrong. It was only much later, and only after going to the genocide museum in Armenia and feeling real kinship with what Armenians had been through, that I realized: No Armenian says their fellow Armenians were stupid for being murdered by the Young Turks. No Armenian spits on their ancestors like that.

Then I started talking to my friends who are Black Americans, and no one would say that a Black American was stupid or wrong because they didn’t go to Liberia and their ancestors endured lynchings. This is pathological and insane. And yet this logic is so imbued in Jewish communities! And the more I read about this history, the more I realized what I lie it is.

The first thing was that the vast majority of Jewish refugees from Hitler were able to survive because they went to the Soviet Union. They often were thrown in gulags and forced labor camps—this is not an argument for the moral greatness of Stalinism, it’s just the truth; people who are refugees go wherever they can to survive. It’s also the case that Palestine was not safe because of the brilliant fighting prowess of the Haganah, it was safe because the British army stopped Rommel in Egypt. If the British army had not stopped Rommel in Egypt, then the Jews in Palestine would have been slaughtered just like the Jews in Poland.

So the whole idea of using the Holocaust as an argument over who was right and who was wrong is an attempt to slap some pat moral lesson on the hideous contingencies of a genocide.

EA: No one would argue that because so many found refuge, and were—compared to being under Nazi rule—safer under Stalin, therefore the Stalinist model was the best-suited one for Jewish liberation. And yet that’s kind of the argument that is used to retroactively justify Zionism.

Again, I don’t have this heritage, but I have seen Doikayt being used more and more, in a broader sense, beyond Jewish communities. In fact, in a recent essay by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (who will be on the podcast in a month or so), they end by citing you and talking about Doikayt. There is something about Doikayt, not just as a concept but in and of itself, that is powerful. Hereness is something that, whether you’re part of a diaspora or not, there’s something powerful about it. Fundamentally, it means community, it means rootedness. It’s a very human desire.

At the same time, it’s also a rejection of this narrative that because the Holocaust happened, therefore the fundamental principles of the Jewish Labor Bund can be discarded alongside it. That is what you’ve written: towards the end, you say, “Why do I write about the Bund who lost, who failed, and not about the victorious killers?” and then you reject the very premise. Just because a movement was crushed—quite literally, physically crushed by the Nazis, by an empire—does not mean the ideas behind the movement themselves are not worth surviving and enduring and growing and thriving.

MC: Exactly. The concept of Doikayt is probably the Bund’s greatest intellectual contribution to the generations that came after. I absolutely think it’s for everyone; I don’t think it’s a concept for Jews alone. It’s especially relevant to every persecuted minority; it was a concept written by members of a persecuted minority, by people who believed they had the right to stay in their homes, even if the whole country wanted them dead; that they had a right to glory in their culture and develop their language, even if everyone said it was “jargon;” that they had a right to flourish, and to live, and to love in their own country of their birth.

As a Puerto Rican woman as well, I see Doikayt as something that the Young Lords were doing. The Young Lords was a Puerto Rican radical Marxist group in New York and Chicago that fought for the dignity of poor and working class Puerto Ricans in deeply racist and fucked up times. I see Doikayt as something enacted by the Black Panthers, who were fighting not to make an ethno-state in Africa, but to fundamentally transform and liberate America—and not just for themselves but in coalition with others. I quote Fred Hampton in my book extensively, and I compare what he was saying to Bundist thinkers.

Most of all, when I think of Doikayt, it has two parts. The first is a rejection of the idea that you have to go elsewhere and sort yourself into your perfect little ethno-state, your perfect little god-given piece of land, in order to be whole. On the other hand, it’s an assertion of your right to stay and make home where you are. It’s a deeply cosmopolitan view; it’s a view that acknowledges people’s right to move. It also rejects the stupid American nativist idea that we have now, and the blood-and-soil idiocies that are happening in places around the world.

It says, No, here where you are, you have the right to have home.

EA: It’s really worth emphasizing: what you just said is applicable to so many contexts. You mentioned the Black Panther Party, of course. But even if we limit ourselves to cultural production: you wouldn’t have music like jazz if you didn’t have a strong community in New Orleans despite the challenges of being African-American in New Orleans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You wouldn’t have the blues for similar reasons in the deep South, were it not for a recognition by those who participated that It’s worth fighting for where we are.

It has a value, our connection to the land, our connection to our history, our connection to our lineage and heritage. Even if that lineage and that heritage is riddled with trauma—as basically three or four generations of my family is all about forced migration and displacement due to war and famine—it doesn’t mean there isn’t something that can still be preserved, that’s worth preserving.

In the context of our conversation now, since I started researching this topic in 2015, we’ve seen so much changing, politically, mostly for the worse in terms of global trends, moving more and more towards this nativist, ethno-purist, anti-diversity politics. At the same time, as we’ve seen in the US, Hungary, Russia, India, and so on, they all have something positive to say (to put it mildly) about Israel. They are projecting their desires for an ethno-supremacist state by looking at the Israeli model, at what Zionism has accomplished in Israel-Palestine, and they clearly want to apply this where they live as well.

There’s something there. There’s a reason why the Trump administration has so many Christian Zionists like the US ambassador to Israel, and why Orbán is such a close buddy with Netanyahu, and why Modi has never had anything bad to say about Netanyahu, and so on. They see themselves in what the state of Israel has become.

MC: I agree with you. A lot of it, especially in the case of Modi, comes from a deep hatred of Muslims, and the idea that Israel is persecuting Muslims is what is so attractive to countries like India, and Orbán’s Hungary as well. But the other thing that attracts them about Zionism, or their idea of Zionism, is it has a dual cleansing and erasure to it: Zionism both involves the ethnic cleansing of the Other, the murder and expulsion of Palestinians—which all of these regimes fantasize about, the ethnic cleansing of the Other—but Zionism also involves the cleansing of the in-group, of the self, the cutting off of dissident, solidaristic, impure parts of its own people’s history to create (to use Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words) a corny-ass narrative that’s simple and pure and stupid.

All of these countries would like to be able to do that about their own people, whether it’s Modi trying to create a Hindu rashtra, as he’s said, or whether it’s the weird image of (apparently) 1890s America that Trump is pushing. They all like the idea of kicking out the ethnic Other and violently suppressing and eliminating the intellectual Other that Zionism represents to them.

EA: The fact that the Israeli state has firmly allied itself with the far right around the world—that same far right that is deeply antisemitic—must have served as a catalyst to accelerate this trend that we’ve been talking about, of more people (especially if they’re Jewish themselves, who might have this Zionist Realism), questioning how it could possibly be that a notorious antisemite like Orbán is cozy with Netanyahu, or how it could be that someone like Trump, who has a long history of antisemitic statements, and who is very comfortable being around antisemites in addition to Steve Bannon…this must have accelerated the need for many people to start looking elsewhere.

The more there are stories like the ones you are platforming, telling, and retelling in your book, the easier it will be for this emerging trend to become more and more normalized. Because fundamentally, Zionism is a story—multiple stories, but fundamentally a story. And the way it tells itself that story is very different than how myself, or a Palestinian in Israel-Palestine, especially Gaza or the West Bank right now, have experienced Zionism.

It’s very much We were oppressed but now we have a strong army! But instead of seeing what happened in the Holocaust and applying a firm Never Again to Anyone Anywhere, the lesson that was embodied in the state of Israel, and practiced and rendered hegemonic, is that We need to be extremely strong, have no empathy, no kindness; human rights do not apply to our perceived enemies; the Palestinians are a homogeneous group and it doesn’t matter if they’re children; there is no room for nuance, no room for empathy.

And the moment we’re currently experiencing has been prophesied by multiple anti-Zionist intellectuals.

MC: I want to de-exceptionalize Zionism, and talk about why these violent, supremacist ideologies come after genocides. Because Zionism is hardly the only violent, supremacist ideology that was embraced after horrific violence was inflicted on people.

The Bund’s whole attitude of Hereness, of Doikayt—and not just the Bund’s but that of socialists, of humanistic intellectuals in general—depends on the idea that there is the possibility of human solidarity with people who are not in your group. The Bund in Poland worked alongside the Polish socialist party. They did not believe that Poland was an undifferentiated mass of racists that they were doomed to be stuck with; they believed there were some Polish people who were progressive, some Polish people who were assholes, and some Polish people who were indifferent, and that it was a society you could work within, in alliance with Polish people, to make better.

This sort of thinking depends on the belief that human solidarity is possible. I think about Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition as well, where he was organizing white, poor Appalachian kids who formerly flew the Confederate flag—the Young Patriots, they were called. There was an idea that you’re not just stuck in your own group, but there’s a larger human solidarity you can contribute to and rely on.

During and after the Holocaust, and before the Holocaust as well, the western democracies—who have always held themselves out as the bastions of human rights, freedom, and democracy—were, as they are now, revolting hypocrites. They did not accept Jewish refugees in any numbers; they were incredibly cruel to them. When they did accept people, they did it in weird ways like the orphan-manufacturing aid program called Kindertransport, which forced every German Jewish parent to make a Sophie’s choice of which kid they would save. The western world betrayed the Jewish people of Europe.

After the war, they continued to betray them by not taking in refugees and by letting people rot in displaced persons camps. And when the supposed apostles of freedom and democracy turn out to be violent and bloody hypocrites, this creates an opening for groups that promise strength through violence themselves.

When I think about the Bund and all of the brilliant Jewish humanist intellectuals who kept that humanism through the genocide, and afterwards through these displaced persons camps, I only think about how the world failed them, and I think about how, if we as a world wish to deserve humanists like that, we can never fail our basic obligations of solidarity. I don’t think of it as The Jews failed to learn from the Holocaust, I see it as The world, especially the western world, the western democracies, failed to provide basic human solidarity upon which any humanism by the victim rests.

EA: We’re seeing today that there are ghosts of history, ghosts of the past, in the sense that the way white supremacy manifested in the thirties and forties—we’re seeing that impulse, in a percentage of the white population of America today, coming back and being increasingly comfortable, following a period (decades now) in which it was not politically smart (including if you were Republican) to be that vocally open about it. Now their need to pay lip service to stuff like human rights, democracy, and freedom of speech is going away very quickly. At some point they won’t even bother using these terms at all.

If the systems of oppression, and those who participate in those systems, clearly see that the past can be recreated in the present, regardless of whether that will happen or not, and they are acting as though that is a reality, that also means we will suffer the consequences, because they are the ones with the power. So why not recognize that if they are doing that, doesn’t that also mean that the ways we resisted in the past—or at the very least the ideas that underpinned those resistance efforts in the past, including Doikayt—shouldn’t they also be revisited and adapted to the modern world?

They were able to conjure up and imagine a much better future than the one that befell them. But they were still able to do that work of creating something, and fundamentally those are stories in the same way that fascism has its set of stories—usually around the hero arc, and the male thing (it’s very gendered), and there has to be hierarchy, and if you have money or you are powerful that must mean you have some kind of divine providence. Those are stories! What we need to be better at (and this is the message of the essay that Taylor and Klein wrote) is having stories that are not just able to resist the fascist stories but that are able to create something in their own right.

We absolutely need that horizon; we need that vision; we need to know that what we’re doing is worth fighting for, that there is something that is good about this world that is worth fighting for. That is a story, or rather stories. I think Doikayt, in the twenty-first century—not even just a hundred years ago; in the here and now—has a role to play.

MC: I loved Naomi and Astra’s piece about the technofascist doomsday bastards. I love when Naomi calls them “traitors to this world.” People who are willing to burn this Earth in order to make AI that will churn out big-titty anime girls and make spaceships that will help us colonize Mars with video-game-playing AIs—these are people who hate the physical world. The most basic thing about Doikayt is, I am Here; you are Here; we are on this Earth with this Land beneath our feet, and this is what the World is.

The Thiels and the Musks and the Altmans of the world have no love for that. They have no love for the crooked streets of a city where everyone knows each other, and they have no love for the natural world, either. All they can imagine is the Messianic transcendence of the body, and some sort of uploading of the mind to the cloud, and forsaking the planet itself for a weird interplanetary fever dream. They have no love of the world.

The basic thing that underpins everything that makes me a leftist, or that underpins how I think, is that I love this world. I love the fucked-up streets of New York City and its rickety-rack fire escapes—the city I was born in. I love all the messed-up people I see every day; the guy who hollers at me in front of the bodega, or the old lady who feeds the cats. I love this flawed, fucked-up world full of beauty and multiplicity and weirdness and humanity.

The idea of burning all of that for some tech dystopia, some AI-fueled, ultra-controlled, ultra-privatized hellhole—which is what Musk and Thiel want—is so anathema to me. The story that we need to tell is the one of loving this world.

EA: Absolutely. Maybe we can slowly wrap up on that positive note.

Klein and Taylor describe it as “end times fascism,” and what I find fascinating is that it’s not even the fact that they are declaring what they want—uploading their mind and being part of some generative AI to somehow live forever, or having a colony on Mars—if we just stick to the facts, there’s actually no path forward that makes that likely at any point. There’s no technology that allows the mind to be uploaded; they don’t even seem to understand what the mind is. They think we are computers and we have data and our brains work like a computer does, which is how they apply that stereotypical “engineer brain.” At the same time, Musk is undermining basic science, which is what you need to go to Mars—so he’s not going to Mars, at least not in the near-term future.

There’s something hopeful about all of that. If they were cold-hearted geniuses that are only focused on the long term plan of things, they would have understood something that elites of past generations understood—I’m thinking of the industrialists of the UK, for example in Birmingham: despite the fact that they made a lot of money out of the exploited labor they profited from, they somehow understood it would benefit them to have a population that has decent libraries that are publicly accessible. They somehow understood that If my workforce is happy and they like to work for me, that’s good for me. They had this bare understanding that I’m from this place; I made a lot of money and now I want to give back (this liberal framework is not mine, but it is one that exists).

MC: They knew that if they didn’t do basic maintenance of the social contract, a mob would come with the fucking pitchforks. These dummies now are so unempathetic they can’t even imagine that.

EA: After several years of not being incentivized to do so, they are currently unable even to understand why a public library exists. Something in their brain just doesn’t compute. This is the strength that we have: we do understand this. We do have a heritage; we do have the knowledge that most humans on this planet have: that there is a reason we have public libraries, there is a reason we have the NHS (which is now being privatized), and so on. There’s a reason why there is such a thing as the social contract.

There is a reason why we’ve reached those basic conclusions, that most people, regardless of how they may identify politically, have an instinctual understanding of: that If my neighbor is not miserable, if my neighbor is also happy, I’m probably better off. People who go into the suburbs usually will not be on the progressive side of things, but what they are seeking is supposedly stability, and they cannot have that if the neighbors around them are not also stable.

Which is why it becomes a privilege thing; most of them have some amount of money, so they go to an area where other people have a certain amount of money. What does that actually mean? It means the other people don’t have any reason to go after you, to want what you have, because they also have the basics. In that case it’s like a gated-community version of security, and that’s very much how the Thiels and the Musks view the world.

That’s why they think all they need is to buy an island or an underground bunker in New Zealand, or Zuckerberg’s island in Hawai’i—they think they don’t need the society around them, they don’t need the human beings who made them what they are…because they don’t believe this is the case! They don’t believe this is the factual story that led them to where they are; they believe there is something inherently great about who they are.

There is a weakness there. It means they’re not anticipating certain scenarios. They’re not anticipating that if they continue worsening everything for most people, at some point this can come at them.

That’s not what matters to me necessarily; that’s not my horizon. Let’s say it’s step one. What I would like to be step two and three, five and ten, is how we get to a point where people like that are rendered irrelevant; there’s no structural basis for them to exist in the first place. That’s the challenging bit, but we need stories to help us get there.

MC: When you talk about vulnerabilities, you had a term I really liked, “engineer brain.” Engineers, we need you, obviously. But there is a book by Kate Crawford called The Atlas of AI where she talks about the physicality of AI: the training data, the data centers, the minerals, all of that. She was talking about the software that’s supposed to recognize people’s emotions: the training data for this software was based on the idea that people only have five emotions, that emotions are never mixed, and that if you’re feeling the emotion you will display it (if you’re happy you’ll smile and if you’re sad you’ll frown). These AIs were trained by feeding them photos of actors doing big, silly smiles and big, theatrical frowns.

I was reading this, and thought: This is by people who don’t understand humans. Only someone who deeply doesn’t understand and probably has contempt for humans thinks that the stripper really likes you because she’s smiling. Of course, actually what these AIs are used for is not to detect people’s real emotion, it’s to force employees to put on smiles all the time lest the camera catch them frowning and ding them.

I was reading this, and I was like, My god, I know these people are smart, but god they are fucking dumb. That’s the weakness. If people are so dumb that they believe the stripper really likes them because she’s smiling, and they believe there are only five emotions, and they believe that everything in the world is reducible to ones and zeroes…

EA: The most emblematic thing is the trend of Ghiblification—using the aesthetics of Studio Ghibli (Miyazaki, of course) to create various scenes: the white house had this horrible image of a Hispanic woman being arrested by an ICE agent, and Sam Altman changed his profile pic, and the IDF joined in on the fun of course. People responded online, there was lots ot talk.

The Miyazaki movies were a huge part of my childhood and they remain so to this day, and as someone who has an eighteen-month-old kid I see them having use for years to come. I saw something very powerful in what happened, because Miyazaki is on record saying he is anti-AI. He described it as, We humans have lost faith in ourselves. This was ten years ago, when it was still very primitive. He said something along the lines of, This is an insult to life itself. There was someone who took him saying that and turned it into a Ghiblified image, which says so much.

Ultimately, they don’t believe there is such a thing as art. They genuinely believe that all they need is a technology that can replicate a simulacrum of the thing they want to be able to do but they’re unable to—they don’t want to make the effort, and they fundamentally don’t believe that they should. Brian Merchant described this as AI becoming the aesthetics of fascism, because fundamentally they get to bypass the worker who creates the art in the first place, and they get to have the superficiality of it all without anything beyond that.

The reason I’m not as doom-and-gloomy about that ridiculous trend is: it says that fundamentally, the only thing they’re able to do is copy what their betters have done. Miyazaki famously did most of this artwork by hand. They can’t comprehend why you would “waste” hours and weeks and months on this one scene just to perfect how Chihiro in Spirited Away puts on her shoes. Why would you waste your time for something like that?

The answer, obviously, is because then you’ve created something beautiful that other people also get to enjoy for its own sake. Those are the things that endure. So the hopeful thing for me is that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel; of course there are certain things we’ll have to learn because they are new in 2025, but not everything is completely new. There are certain things that, as humans, we’ve already done that are perfectly fine and we already enjoy. Like art, literature, having a nice movie, meeting together for a barbecue or picnic, or camping, or whatever it is. There are certain things we’ve been doing through the ages for a reason: because we genuinely enjoy them.

And there’s something to be said about the concept of Doikayt: the power of Hereness isn’t to say that Here is perfect, or There’s no problem; as you said, we live in fucked-up contexts. But despite that, there is still the beauty of humanity that is worth fighting for. For me, that is the power of Doikayt. The best thing that Sam Altman offers the world, after billions and billions of dollars invested in ChatGPT, is to do something that only approximates what a bunch of animators in Japan did by hand. For me that’s very powerful.

MC: They hate artists, because we have the music, we have something beyond ones and zeroes, beyond the reduction of all the world to the digital binary. They hate it, and they envy it, and they take a vindictive love in ripping us off and in thinking they can destroy our incomes and our status. They hate us because they can’t be us.

Theirs is an entire philosophy built by people who don’t know what it’s like to do anything for its own sake, out of love for other people or out of love for the thing itself. You’re right; the most profound act of resistance we can do is go out into the physical world with our people and conspire—in the old meaning of the term, which is to share breaths with one another.

EA: Challenges notwithstanding, it is important to remember that if they say this is their vision of the world, this techno-dystopian future, it doesn’t mean that they will get it. What it might mean is that they cause a lot of damage in the process. We will not get generative AI as they are imagining, but what we are getting is ChatGPT spending as much energy on a yearly basis as a hundred-plus countries around the world.

It is the existing structures of income inequality, of disparities (energy disparities among them), of richer countries polluting more than poorer countries and richer people within the richer countries polluting more than the poorer people within those richer countries—those are the existing problems of our world. What they are doing is accelerating the negative aspects of that; they are accelerating the income inequality, they’re making it more difficult for people to live. But they’re not creating new stories that can endure in the long term.

The caveat to that is the big If: if we let them. We have the tools to not let them win, not let them get away with what they think they’ll get away with. That is a very feasible scenario, because there are way more of us than there are of them, and at some point we will realize this. Again, the caveat being we have to actually work for it; it won’t happen naturally.

Molly, thank you so much for coming on. Talk about your upcoming book; where can people find it? What’s happening?

MC: My book is currently with my editor in endless-edits hell. Supposedly it will be out in spring 2026—I know that’s way too late, but such is what the gods of publishing say. It is called Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund.

People can find me at my website or my Substack, where I shoot off my mouth. Also you can find me in the real world every once in a while; come to my events, bring me some cigars and whisky.

EA: Molly, thanks so much for being on The Fire These Times.

MC: Thanks so much.

2 responses to “Doikayt (‘Hereness’) Now! w/ Molly Crabapple”

7 γενιές – Black Cat ★ Red Cat

July 6, 2025 at 2:59 am

[…] έχουμε τον Κόσμο τον Καλό του Ανδρεόπουλου, την Αρχή του Ντόικεϊτ (το “Εδώ” των Σοσιαλιστών Εβραίων) , έχουμε […]

Loading…

The Rise of End Times Fascism w/ Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor – The Fire These Times

July 10, 2025 at 6:18 pm

[…] bunkers, that should push us to think about what our grand narrative is about. I’ve found the Bundist idea of “hereness” a really powerful one. We quote friend of the pod Molly [Crabapple] in the […]

Loading…