There is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists

211 Pages·2021·2.099 MB·English

by  Cindy Milstein (Editor)

There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart is a breathtaking kaddish to
everyone living the revolutionary vision that Jewish radicals dreamed was
possible. It drives to the heart of a tradition that we must rediscover, a story
that is simultaneously particular and universal: we can survive if we do it
together.
SHANE BURLEY , author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance,
and Surviving the Apocalypse
In this moment of resurgent fascism and authoritarianism, the foundational
relationship between antisemitism and anti-Blackness is more stark and
apparent than ever. The vibrancy of this collection articulates not only a
foundation for solidarity in shared struggles against white supremacy but
also the vast imaginaries and world-making potential in the diversity of
Jewish cultural expression and radical—specifically anarchist—thought. As a
Black anarchist, I could not be more grateful for the generosity,
vulnerabilities, and fierce, unwavering love for humanity shared within these
pages.
ZOÉ SAMUDZI , coauthor of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions
for Liberation
A poem and a love note, a prayer song and a protest, an attempt to mend a
burning world with the best of Jewish, anarchist, and Jewish anarchist
traditions.
DAN BERGER , author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the
Civil Rights Era
As leftist Jewish thought and organizing today witnesses a resurgence, this
collection provides an important document of its anarchist current.
TREYF PODCAST
This book asks how modern generations of Jewish anarchists are wrestling
with rising fascism, white supremacy, and antisemitism, and lifts up the
specific cultural tools we bring to the work of mending (or maybe
reimagining) the ever-shattering world. Today the book is a mirror;
tomorrow, a new window into the archive of Jewish anarchists throughout
history.
EZRA BERKLEY NEPON , author of Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue: A
History of New Jewish Agenda
In these times of woe, our solidarity and creativity are more urgent than
ever. The texts collected here are striking in their literary richness and
emotional openness, awakening both pain and solace, insights and further
questions. In the often-fraught encounter between living tradition and
radical commitments, each of these voices bravely and sensitively negotiates
its unique struggle for meaning. Together, they offer a highly rewarding
reading experience that will appeal well beyond the Jewish-anarchist
intersection.
URI GORDON , coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics
There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart offers an ardent new archive
of Jewish anarchism. These voices expand a defiant tradition: they speak of
the disruptiveness of care, the labor of grief, and the pleasures of survival.
As fascism and antisemitism rise, these poets, rabbis, and organizers
urgently reach for another world through this one.
AE TORRES , author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and
Yiddish Literature
THERE IS NOTHING SO WHOLE AS A BROKEN HEART
THERE IS NOTHING SO WHOLE AS A BROKEN HEART
MENDING THE WORLD AS JEWISH ANARCHISTS
EDITED BY CINDY MILSTEIN
AK PRESS
There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish
Anarchists
Edited by Cindy Milstein
All essays © 2021 by their respective authors
This edition © 2021 AK Press (Chico/Edinburgh)
ISBN 978-1-84935-399-1
EBOOK ISBN : 978-1-84935-400-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933560
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Cover and interior design by Crisis
Printed in Michigan on acid-free, recycled paper
TO OUR ANCESTORS
CONTENTS
Prologue: Shadows and Moonlight
Cindy Milstein
PART I: REMEMBRANCE AS RESISTANCE
HOW TO SCREAM, HOW TO SING
Ami Weintraub
TEN NIGHTS SINCE THEY KILLED GEORGE
Mark Tilsen
THE MILK POT
Xava De Cordova
GHOSTS OF LUBLIN: MEMORY AND GRIEF
Ali Nissenbaum
ON BEING A DECENT PERSON
Matylda Tzvia Jonas
DIALECTICS OF MOURNING, DIALECTICS OF BRICKS
Moira Leibowitz
AND YOU SHALL LOVE
Alice Ross
I WILL NOT FINISH GRIEVING
Diana Clarke
AS THE SEA COMES CRASHING DOWN
Stefanie Brendler
THE OTHER SIDE
Binya Kóatz
LOST AND FOUND
Leigh Hoffman
ANTISEMITISM HURTS
Cindy Milstein
OF PERFORMING MITZVAHS AND TOPPLING KINGS
Stephen Gee
HERITAGE AND DISCONTENT
Brezinski Asz
IN THE WORLD AS A JEW
Chava Shapiro
KER A VELT: TURN THE WORLD OVER
Eliui Damm
INTERLUDE: ART OF RESILIENCE
Ezra Rose, Eliui Damm, Daisy Diamond, Andrea Marcos, Ami Weintraub, JB
Brager, Maia Brown, Gem Beila Rosenberg, Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews
(RAYJ) collective, and Wendy Elisheva Somerson
PART II: RESISTANCE AS REPAIR
DIRECT ACTION OF THE AGGRIEVED
Cindy Milstein
ON WASHING THE DEAD
Jordana Rosenfeld
DAILY JOYS AND TINY REBELLIONS
Elias Lowe
RITUAL TECHNOLOGY FOR A LIBERATED FUTURE
Jay Tzvia Helfand
LAST OF ELUL
Mikveh Warshaw
ON MAKING AND HOLDING SPACE
Michael Loadenthal
PESACH SEDER FOR FREEDOM
Yael Leah and Yaelle Caspi
“SPILLING OUT JUICE AND BRIGHTNESS”
rosza daniel lang/levitsky
MAKING TIME: RADICAL JEWISH CALENDAR
Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg with Rabbi Ariana Katz and Elissa Martel
NOW PLAYING IN PITTSBURGH
Gillian Goldberg and Benjamin Steinhardt Case
RADIO613: AUTONOMOUS JEWISH CULTURE ON THE AIRWAVES
Malcah, Shoni, and Avi
JEWISH DRAG IN DANGEROUS TIMES
Abbie Goldberg
LOVE AND RAGE
Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews (RAYJ) collective
FIGHTING FASCISTS WITH FOLK ART
Jay Saper
KLEZMER PLAYLIST FOR A REVOLT AGAINST FASCISM
Aaron Lakoff
FINDING OUR OWN FIRE
Fayer Collective
EVER STIR THE KETTLE
Robin Markle
WE ARE THE GOLEMS THEY FEAR
Zelda Ofir
Together, we will tear it down!
It may take days or weeks or years ,
but the old walls will fall, fall, fall ,
and a new world will be here!
—“Der yokh,” lyrics adapted by Burikes, burikes.com
PROLOGUE
SHADOWS AND MOONLIGHT
CINDY MILSTEIN
On nights like these when the moon’s face is obscured by darkness, much is
illuminated: the stars dance a dance over six thousand years old, and spin
tales, new and old, of our collective and individual futures. Shadows come
alive. —Tohuvabohu zine
Like Jews have had to do many times over the millennia, I’ve been struggling
for months to re-create life on the other side of a border, thrown into exile
against my wishes by a global pandemic, into a landscape so alien from
where I came. There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart , so close to
being done before COVID-19, was displaced along with me, and it too felt
completely out of place. ¹ It was as if its dozens of voices were suddenly
speaking a dead language, killed off, similar to many tongues before, by the
cruel dispossession of a vibrant culture. It was as if its tales of the dynamic
reimagining of Jewish anarchism, distinctively shaped by feministic and
queer/trans sensibilities, were talking not about lived practices in the
present but rather forgotten histories, erased by the cold dispersal of joyous
communities.
I’ve never been at home in this world, though. That’s why I fight so fiercely
for other possible ones. That’s why, as both an anarchist and Jew, I’ve long
dreamed of do-it-ourselves, egalitarian forms of social organization—ones in
which we’re all reciprocally and abundantly cared for, not to mention messy-
beautifully whole. Until that time, until we are all fully free, I would “rather
stay in the Diaspora / And fight for our liberation,” as the punky-klezy trio
Brivele sings, even if that entails much pain. ²
Diaspora has always been bound up with wrenching hardship and yet,
inextricably, tantalizing promise. The word itself comes from ancient Greek
—a language embedded in a period and region that included diasporic Jews
—combining diá- (“indicating motion across or in all directions,” according
to Webster’s ) with speíro (“to sow”), thereby creating diaspeíro (“to
scatter”). As my dear Greek anarchist friend paparouna offered by way of an
expanded definition, it originally meant “to disperse, most likely from the act
of spreading seeds. I think of diaspora as the spreading of seeds across both
space and time. It is a scattering apart, and also a seeding of many places
and moments. It holds pain, loss, and separation, but hope, growth, and
nurturance too.”
This anthology was already witness to both ends of that spectrum even
before the pandemic flung us apart, for how could it not be? A defining
feature of Judaism and the Jewish experience for much of our thousands-of-
years’ history—and to my mind, a core strength—is the necessity and
simultaneous desire to collectively self-organize a rich social fabric,
community , across and when crossed by borders, in all directions around
the globe, without states. ³ Anarchism from the get-go has, of course, shared
that same imperative and aspiration. Both share in the bittersweetness of
what it has meant to hold tight to self-determined communities, as ethic and
ongoing experiments, in the face of empires and monarchies, dictatorships
and republics, Christian supremacies and fascistic nationalisms, and now, a
modern-day plague.
There Is Nothing So Whole took root several years ago. As a wandering
Jewish anarchist, I try to intentionally embrace the double-sidedness of my
diaspora: on the one hand, my ancestral trauma compelling motion/flight as
protection, and on the other, my ancestral resilience weaving routes/
relations of magical, caring spaces as prefiguration. So this curated volume
arose, like so many of my labors of love seem to do, from my own broken
heart and constant quest to build up elastic scar tissue for the next ache. At
the same time, it grew from an increasingly full heart, strengthened by
repeatedly stumbling on a delightful surprise: a resurgent Jewish anarchism,
queered by those who’ve too often been made invisible within or left out of
Jewish traditions and histories, teachings and rituals, cultures and politics.
In city after city, I saw “shadows come alive”—as anarchists in Jewish
spaces, as Jews in anarchist spaces, and as Jewish anarchists reinventing
our own spaces. Collective houses were hosting antiracist, decolonial, and
feministic Shabbat and Pesach dinners; affinity groups were doing Yiddish
and Ladino study groups while also showing up proudly as anarchist Jews at
protests and direct actions with their almost-lost languages on banners;
anarchistic queer folx were creating a radical yeshiva to study Talmud even
as many trans/queer/nonbinary people were going to rabbinical school and
then starting their own alternative shuls; anarchist Jews were researching
and reviving cultural forms ranging from song and art to Purim plays and
drag, or producing their own radical Jewish calendars, radio shows, and
zines; they were resuscitating healing and mourning traditions, or
reimagining a nonhierarchical Judaism and connection to god (or not) as
anarchists, or drawing on the transgenerational transmission of rebel
wisdom to fight today’s fascism and antisemitism. Without abandoning the
necessity of anti-Zionist organizing and pro-Palestinian solidarity efforts, an
anarchist Judaism and Jewish anarchism were blossoming into an expansive
ecosystem—a well-spring of all that makes us whole, politically and
personally, socially and culturally, emotionally and spiritually.
Jewish rituals, frequently shaped and facilitated by anarchx-feminist, queer,
and trans Jews, were pivotal. These sacred spaces, whether in living rooms,
the streets, or the woods, exuded what could be described as the best of
anarchism and Judaism. Rituals—in the form of attending a yearly anarchist
bookfair, for instance, or sharing challah while braided together in blessing
on Shabbat—necessitate and solidify communal bonds; they both demand
and sustain a deep faith in our communities to mutualistically show up for
each other no matter what. They pull from the threads of our
nonhierarchical traditions and rebellious histories, ground us in our current
struggles, and gesture beyond the present, reminding us of what we’re
fighting for. Indeed, they revolve around the unyielding obligation we’ve
inherited to do good in the here and now ( doykeit ), as both Jewish and
anarchist ethos.
Rituals, too, are moments when we honor our ancestors and their teachings,
including by continually revisiting their many legacies within our own
contexts. While there are “rule books” for our rituals, most of them, such as
the Talmud, consist of interpretation on interpretation on interpretation. We
continuously play with the words, knowledges, and other gifts that were
passed along to us, and others will do so after us. Within rituals, we lovingly
argue out the meanings of what we do, for whom, and why—such as how
patriarchy or settler colonialism might be implicated in our practices, or
how we can build on already liberatory and ecological impulses—yet with a
generosity that welcomes others to join in this endless education and re-
creation process.
In these and other ways, our rituals at once prepare us for freedom and set
us free, even if only in pockets of time. They are a pre-condition for and the
condition of freedom.
Part of that freedom is our own healing—a multigenerational process
involving selves and societies. Jewish rituals contain centuries of somatic
practices woven into their very fiber, to borrow an insight from contributor
and dear friend Ami Weintraub. There’s the gentle rocking motion of
davening (prayer), the activating of all our senses during havdalah by, say,
smelling spices and seeing/feeling the warmth of flame, or the Tashlich
ceremony in which stones or bread crumbs are thrown into a moving body of
water as release, among many others.
So it’s no wonder that in a time period eliciting trauma responses in most of
us, this flowering of a queered Jewish anarchism would be inseparable from
collective rituals and/as collective care. After all, for many of us Jews (and
anarchists), we only have to turn to our great-grandparents, grandparents,
or even parents for their own tales of (or silences about) a long list of still-
fresh wounds, including enslavement, forced conversion or conscription,
colonization, rape by invaders, dispossession and displacement, bodily
assaults, cultural erasure, religious and racial persecution, social and
political abandonment, economic exploitation and material immiseration,
ghettoization and dehumanization, genocide, and indignities against our
dead. Such pernicious forms of violence have touched Jews across the globe
—for instance, at least a third of the world’s Jews and over two-thirds of
Europe’s were murdered under National Socialism less than eighty years
ago—and are deeply intertwined with how myriad “othered” peoples have
been and are treated. Today’s rise of fascism and antisemitism, and
centuries-old repurposed “conspiracies” that intimately paint Jews as
“outside agitators” in league with or manipulating other oppressed peoples,
couldn’t help but nudge us Jewish anarchists into collective action.
Pre-pandemic, I was increasingly drawn to participating in and helping to
hold space for rituals that brought Jewish and non-Jewish anarchists and
other radicals together. For example, on the twentieth anniversary of the
Montreal Anarchist Bookfair—a space near and dear to my heart, in a city
that’s long been one of my diasporic “homes”—I decided to add to my duties
as one of the co-organizers of the weekend—itself like an anarchist family
reunion. With the aid of what has become my beloved Jew crew in Tio’tia:ke/
Montreal—noa and daph, whom I initially gathered with for monthly queer
Rosh Chodesh rituals in person, and through that, have grown into trusted
friends—I invited numerous groupings of other friends traveling from far
and wide to all meet up on that Friday night for a potluck, mentioning that
some of us would do Shabbat rituals too. About fifty or so Jews and non-Jews
came to the space we were squatting: outdoor picnic tables under a canopy
next to a romantic, if gentrifying, canal. It felt so beautiful to introduce
various friends from so many other places to each other and watch
connective conversations drift into the night air.
When we began our short ritual, everyone joined us, and then an adorable
queer collective from Pittsburgh leaped into its own weekly Shabbat
practice: circling up to sing a capella songs together for hours. The somatics
of breaths rising and falling, harmonically allowing people to anticipate each
other’s desires, converging joys and sorrows into dissonant unity and fierce
love, cast a spell. Even a few anarchist friends listening from the sidelines,
and who’d long been skeptical of their own Jewish spirituality or the power
of queering Jewish space, were mesmerized—and then added their voices.
The next day, one of them publicly proclaimed, “Many gods, no masters!” It’s
less about whether one trusts in a single or many gods, definitions of god
that center on the mysteries of the earth and life rather than a divine being,
or no god(s) at all, though. We were transformed that evening, a little less
broken and a lot more cared for, and nearly everyone who had been at that
anarchic Shabbat said it was the highlight of the bookfair. Through ritual
and singing, we became a community.
Before the pandemic hit, I danced with the Torah and anarchist Jews in the
streets as ritual/resistance for Simchat Torah, clustered arm in arm on a
cloud-covered night in a forest for a soothing havdalah during a beautiful yet
intense anarchist summer school week, created a banner that displayed our
anarchism, antifascism, and Judaism for an immigrant solidarity demo, cried
alongside hundreds of Jews, Muslims, Quakers, Buddhists, agnostics,
atheists, and others at an outdoor mourning ritual in the aftermath of the
murder of eleven Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, and so many
more life-giving spaces. Through the best and the worst, I felt fully
embraced.
Then lockdown came crashing down like a steel gate, and powerful in-
person Jewish anarchist projects, spaces, and rituals came tumbling down
with it. This anthology felt like a ghost, as did I, unable to be buried, not at
peace, and yet unable to cross the divide into community and thus life again.
As I asked myself in an Instagram post on July 26, 2020/5780,
How does one return from the dead, from the feeling each morning on
waking that one shouldn’t still be here, when one’s bones cry out with the
weary pain of ancestors who already said “no to fascism” and yet were
burned by its fires? How does one grieve in any way—ways that make one
feel whole again, ways that honor the sacredness of life—the mounting ash
heap of losses these many long months of pandemic, when one’s rituals cry