This year’s Writing as Resistance Festival details are here.
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We started WaRfest it because we believe know stories are powerful, that they are the vehicle by which we make and remake the world.
This year in particular is important, or at least it is particularly meaningful to me. Let me explain, and as ever bear with while I chat about some stuff and wind my merry way around to the bit about writing:
The theme of the festival, Here Where We Live, is directly inspired by Molly Crabapple’s 2026 book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a history of the Jewish Labour Bund.
A radical Jewish workers movement in Russia and Poland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Bund were optimists in a time and place that did not lend itself to optimism.
What started as a bunch of scrappy upstarts and intellectuals created as a response to the antisemitism of the time and fighting for freedom and dignity eventually become the largest left wing Jewish organisation in the world. They mobilised neighbourhoods to defend themselves against ultraviolence, they faced down pogroms and empires, brought down Governments, and were eventually, finally, crushed fighting the Nazis.
Their story might have become subsumed in the great tragedy of the time, but it is also a vital story of resistance, utopianism, creativity and a refusal to compromise on principles and humanity, even in the most extreme situation.
The fundamental principle of the Bund was doikayt, a Yiddish word which means ‘hereness’, and is best defined by the title of the book: here where we live is our country.
They fought for the right for the existence of Jewish culture without fear of persecution or oppression. They were staunchly anti-nationalist, vehemently opposed to the formation of a new nation-state for the Jewish people. They believed that it could only ever turn the oppressed into the oppressor and that we should fight for the rights of people where they are.
It is a book that has radically redefined my own relationship with my family history. I never really understood what my Judaism was for. Sure, I’m into latkes and arguing, but there are approximately three Jews in the whole world who actually believe in God, so what does any of it even mean? But here, finally, were my people. The agitators and activists, the pathological thorns-in-the-side of authority. The ones who said ‘absolutely the fuck not’.
Our world is very different to their world, yet so many of the lessons of the Bundists remain relevant now. We all live in some here. But very few of us are truly home – we are unmoored by the climate, by war, by pandemic, by politics, by algorithm.
We are constantly fighting a rising tide of dispossession on so many fronts. But this world belongs to us all – not the billionaires or the technocrats or the religious fundamentalists or anyone who would have us believe they have more right to it than anyone else.
The place you live is your home, and you deserve freedom and dignity.
In this context, a contemporary doikayt is perhaps something like: here where we live is our world.
All of this belongs to all of us. We all have the right to exist. No one is illegal. This is a place worth fighting for.
We carry our histories with us, our stories. Who we are, what we stand for, what matters. Our hereness is rooted in those things. We all live in this world. This is our home. Our stories are here for the taking.
That’s what this year’s festival is about. Stories of belonging, of diaspora, of home. You. Me. Here. Now.
Okay do(i)kay(t).
Sarah & Team WHQ
