Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple is an award-winning artist-journalist whose haunting illustrations provide windows into the lives of the oppressed, repressed, and overlooked. She began as the house artist for New York’s most notorious nightclub, and she soon leveraged her art into a journalism career, sketching the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lebanese snipers, Guantanamo Bay, the US-Mexican border, Pennsylvania prisoners, New York cabbies, Greek refugee camps, and the ravages of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated journalism, collaborating with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jay-Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Her animations are on permanent display at The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

Molly Crabapple’s latest book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, is the first popular history of the Jewish Labor Bund. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Crabapple’s great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, Molly Crabapple discovered these paintings, and one stood out: a girl hurling a rock through a cottage window titled “Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.”

Itka is how Crabapple meets the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.” Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades, raising the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?

Crabapple is also co-author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a New York Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award, and a memoir, Drawing Blood. Her animated films have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Crabapple’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, and the winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022. In 2023, she was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Crabapple has spoken to audiences around the world, from Jakarta to Beirut, São Paulo to Ramallah, Mumbai to Paris, at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and The London School of Economics, and at museums including The Brooklyn Museum and The Guggenheim.   Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, Columbia University, and the New York Historical Society. She currently resides in New York City.

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