Proud to have a friend who is putting their newly learned Arabic to good use, scribing “Jewish solidarity with Palestinians” alongside “Jewish anarchists for a free Palestine” on a banner for a demo today in a city many hundreds of miles away—and circling their A (“alef” for us Jews) with a pomegranate, a symbol that could be read as bringing together the beautiful seeds of various diasporic peoples into a wholeness.

Touched, too, to have this friend who lovingly thinks to share their banner creation with me—even if for now, while we’re far apart, it can only be via a texted photo.

Our solidarity can and should know no borders, whether we’re in the streets for each other openly decrying the violence of states, nationalism, and fascism as well as openly proclaiming freedom for all, or sustaining our rebellious connections in innumerable smaller ways, including friendship.

#FreePalestine
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#HateFascismLoveYourFriends
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

Shavua tov: toward a good week, a blessed week, a week of joy, a week of fighting fascism in all its forms.

#HavdalahAgainstHate
#FlamesAgainstFascism
#CandlesNotCops
#CommunitySelfDefense
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photos: #FuckNazis tag spotted on the frigid streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal; this evening’s Havdalah candle and its #BlessedFlame)

Give the gift of solidarity to forest defenders on the upcoming birthday, or new year, of the trees, Tu Bishvat!

Twenty people are now facing charges of “domestic terrorism” for the “crime” of loving trees—a result of state repression against beautifully powerful and ecological efforts by many thousands of people for well over a year now to Defend the Atlanta Forest and #StopCopCity from being built in Weelaunee forest in so-called Atlanta. As part of the state’s attempts to crush this movement and set a chilling example for similar struggles, the injustice system set exorbitantly high bonds, including $350,000 each for two of the defendants.

The do-it-ourselves jail, court, and legal support via Atlanta Solidarity Fund—much of it voluntary—is powerfully beautiful too, yet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars will be needed to resist this wave of statist brutality, get all the charges dropped, and set defendants fully free.

On Tu Bishvat, we Jews (often with our non-Jewish friends) commune with trees as we move ritualistically through four worlds (or seasons or directions), which can be seen as moving through our relationships with land and place, community, the world, and spirituality. We remember on Tu Bishvat that though this world can seem cold and deadening, the sap of warmth, resilience, and life is still moving within us.

What better time to raise much-needed funds for forest defenders?!

You can do a Tu Bishvat solidarity seder and collect donations, or an intimate Tu Bishvat gathering in your home with friends and pitch in some dollars. Or hold self-generated rituals in a forest and pass the hat. Or set up a small or large separate fundraising event during Tu Bishvat, such as tabling with zines and a putting out a donation jar, or doing an art raffle or dance party, including tree themed ones, and raise money. It doesn’t even need to be the main focus of your Tu Bishvat, but you can still donate.

Please direct all donations to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, atlsolidarity.org, for a big Tu Bishvat gift and show of solidarity!

And to that end, i’m hoping to shoutout your Tu Bishvats in a public post! So DM or email me your fundraiser by Feb. 3! 🖤💖🌿

#ForestNotFascism
#RitualAsResistance
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(Photo: green-colored infographic with a drawing of a tree in black, with the words “Forest Defender Tu Bishvat. Call for New Year of the Trees’ Fundraisers for Atlanta Solidarity Fund. This is a call to celebrate Tu Bishvat 5783/2023 as a ritual of resistance, honoring the trees and those fighting to #StopCopCity in Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, and to raise money for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to aid the 20 forest defendants,” and encouraging folks to send their events to cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com to include in a public “solidarity shoutout” post)

On this last, eighth night of Chanuka, I read a blessing written eight years ago by Rabbi Brant Rosen as I lit my candles, seemingly so whole, blazing in strength and solidarity.

“We light these lights
for the instigators and the refusers
the obstinate and unyielding
for the ones who kept marching
the ones who tended the fires
the ones who would not bow down. ...

“These lights we light tonight
will never be used for
any other purpose but to proclaim
the miracle of this truth:
it is not by might nor by cruelty
but by a love that burns relentlessly
that this broken world
will be redeemed.”

Love, of course, won’t stop fascism. The murder of three Kurds in Paris this past Friday, inseparable from the fascism of the Erdogan regime in Turkey, is but the latest cruel example.

Yet smashing fascism demands that we love each other, expansively, whether across their borders, or our beloved identities and cultures.

We need such relentlessly burning love in order to sustain our fight for a world without fascism. We need it to protect and defend each other in ways that reflect the best parts of ourselves and our humanity. And we especially need that love when all seems lost and bleak—feelings that have marked this Hanukkah 5783 for me.

Our rebellious love—which I saw in the blessed flames of my candles this eve—is why we mourn our dead and fight for the living so fiercely, with such heart and chutzpah, even when we’re hurting or weary. And it’s why—when and if that day comes, and only because of our relentless, loving rituals of resistance—we’ll dance joyously together on the grave of fascism. May it be so!

I mouthed Rosen’s blessing tonight as a love letter to my chosen, beloved rebel ancestors, and for all of you beloved rebels, who might need it too, but also to try to make myself feel—or rather trust in—some of the wholeness of my candles, full of fire for the hard, maybe even harder, days ahead.

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance
#HateFascismLoveYourFriends
#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#Mazeldon
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(photos: my brightly colored, night 8 candles with a red-and-black flag on an “antifascist action” sticker; despite our brokenness and all the messiness around us, “love more,” as this tag in white ink on a black utility box suggests, as seen on the streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in June 2022)

For the full Brant Rosen prayer:

https://connectere.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/we-light-these-lights-a-new-hanerot-hallelu-prayer-for-hanukkah-by-rabbi-brant-rosen/

Tonight, as the last of my Hanukkah candles burned down, it kept flickering out, and then multiple times, burst back into flames.

It offered, quite literally, ritual as resistance, refusing to give up, despite the odds of tonight’s configuration of a sacred time-space lasting.

But ritual as resistance has many other radical, life-giving roles. Among them, our rituals let us deactivate from the stress of what they (e.g., cops, courts, and the state) do to us; instead of reacting to them, we pause. We coregulate. We reignite the sacred fires inside us, and from there, self-determine how to proactively direct our actions and practices.

Indeed, the small act of knowing that we can always light a candle, that we can gaze into its glow and find warmth, find effervescence, is huge in terms of rekindling our spirits, especially when we’re up against the worst.

For instance, that our Hanukkah candles increase day by day isn’t a mere numbers game. What’s illuminated is the growing solidarity between the candies, burning in concert, supplying a felt sense of interconnection and collective possibilities.

This Hanukkah has brought some of the worst to @defendATLforest and @stopcopcity. Six people were arrested, are now being held without bond, and face charges of “domestic terrorism” for caring about a forest. A years’ worth of infrastructure related to mutual aid and forest defense was destroyed by cops and capitalists, as was a paved walkway and many trees in this public park.

But last night, about 100 people “gathered in the rubble of our beloved park to celebrate the solstice, … to build altars in the debris,” as @kezleyseeslife put it. “A crater in the ground was turned into a fire pit. A menorah was lit to celebrate Hanukkah,” added @atlpresscollective. Everything we build, and will keep building, “is born from our already broken hearts. … The forest will heal. We will heal,” Kezley asserted.

(photos: my brightly colored night 5 candles next to @desrevol’s brilliant painting of a possum, mouthing “Abolish the police,” surrounded by brightly colored flowers; picture of the rubble turned into an altar, including the tagged words from some anonymous forest defender, “You won’t win,” in the Weelaunee forest from @atlpresscollective; brightly colored hand-painted sign reading “Let us love and be loved by the forest,” which I photographed pre-rubble in October 2022)

#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#RitualAsResistance
#CandlesNotCops
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

Tonight, as the last of my Hanukkah candles burned down, it kept flickering out, and then multiple times, burst back into flames.

It offered, quite literally, ritual as resistance, refusing to give up, despite the odds of this evening’s configuration of a sacred time-space lasting.

But ritual as resistance has many other radical, life-giving roles. Among them, our rituals let us deactivate from the stress of what they (e.g., cops, courts, and the state) do to us; instead of reacting to them, we pause. We coregulate. We reignite the sacred fires inside us, and from there, self-determine how to proactively direct our actions and practices.

Indeed, the small act of knowing that we can always light a candle, that we can gaze into its glow and find warmth, find effervescence, is huge in terms of rekindling our spirits, especially when we’re up against the worst.

For instance, that our Hanukkah candles increase day by day isn’t a mere numbers game. What’s illuminated is the growing solidarity between the candies, burning in concert, supplying a felt sense of interconnection and collective possibilities.

This Hanukkah has brought some of the worst to @defendATLforest and @stopcopcity. Six people were arrested, are now being held without bond, and face charges of “domestic terrorism” for caring about a forest. A years’ worth of infrastructure related to mutual aid and forest defense was destroyed by cops and capitalists, as was a paved walkway and many trees in this public park.

But last night, about 100 people “gathered in the rubble of our beloved park to celebrate the solstice, … to build altars in the debris,” as @kezleyseeslife put it. “A crater in the ground was turned into a fire pit. A menorah was lit to celebrate Hanukkah,” added @atlpresscollective. Everything we build, and will keep building, “is born from our already broken hearts. … The forest will heal. We will heal,” Kezley asserted.

(photos: my brightly colored night 5 candles next to @desrevol’s brilliant painting of a possum, mouthing “Abolish the police,” surrounded by brightly colored flowers; picture of the rubble turned into an altar, including the tagged words from some anonymous forest defender, “You won’t win,” in the Weelaunee forest yesterday from @atlpresscollective; brightly colored hand-painted sign reading “Let us love and be loved by the forest,” which I photographed pre-rubble in October 2022)

#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#RitualAsResistance
#CandlesNotCops
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

On this fourth night of Chanukah, auspiciously falling on solstice, I thought that by now, the increasing candlelight and promise of increasing daylight would have worked their somatic magic. That I would feel as if I’m on the other side of the darkness of these times, even if only a bit.

Yet I’ve noticed that my body isn’t responding, like it always has before, to the candles. I feel frozen, stuck, not able to offer or take in light.

It’s not just the accumulated trauma of loss and isolation, from and during the pandemic, though it is that too. It’s the shift that seems to have happened from a protofascist USA into, increasingly, everyday fascism. The fascistic horrors didn’t—and still don’t—come at once, but get added one at a time, strategically, like the methodical addition of a Chanukah candle daily, acclimatizing people little by little—until it’s too late to turn back from the conflagration.

So instead of journeying toward the growing light, I can’t stop thinking of anarchistic author Daniel Guérin (1904-88) traveling into what he called “the brown plague”—Nazism—in 1932 and 1933. For those two years, as a young closeted gay man, he wandered around Germany—just prior to and, a year later, just after the seizure of National Socialist power. What he noticed was not geopolitics but rather the minutiae of cultural politics, the stuff of everyday life. He wrote of the little things that added up to the “tragedy unfolding” and people’s “inability to recognize danger,” including because of the “seductive rituals” Nazis employed to win over the populace.

One year he’s staying at youth hostels, likely acting on his sexual desires in a place, Weimar Germany, that was the hub of gay life. The next, many of the same youths he might have comingled with are burning books by the tens of thousands across thirty-four cities, including trashing, looting, and burning the extensive library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s (in)famous, and (in)famously gay, Institute of Sexology.

Those books, once lit, grew quickly into flames that consumed people.

I want to see light this Chanukah. But all I see are ashes.

(photos: my night four candles in my menorah; a sign and me reflected in it at the Tucson Jewish Museum, 2019)

#RitualAsResistance
#MourningOurDead #FightingLikeHellForTheLiving #FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful

Hannuqah is gay! Maybe Chanuka is even “be gay, do crime,” because back in the day, we got to steal seven extra days out of a one-day supply of oil.

But its queerness shines on many levels.

For instance, you get to pick your own name, or at least its spelling and pronunciation, and be fluid about shaking it up when the Xanikah spirit moves you. You can play with the candles, creating fabulous or sensual combinations of colors, or lighting them in all sorts of transgressive orders—left to right or reverse, few to many or reverse, or pure chaos. You can dress up your menorah(s) for each night out, or self-determine what to top (or bottom) a latke with.

More than anything, though, Channuqa urges us to resist assimilation in the queerest of ways, smashing binaries. It blesses the light and dark, but especially the liminal spaces that let us see all the myriad possibilities between light and dark, such as when the radiant light of a candle flirtatiously embraces the now-radiant darkness.

Yet a shadow has been cast on that fabulousness this 5783 year—a shadow that isn’t new, but has gotten more ominous.

We see in Hanuka’s flame what US Christian fascism 2022 is trying to extinguish, and in heartbreaking moments, succeeds at extinguishing: drag shows, queer books, gender-affirming surgery, trans and queer life, and so much more. We see Club Q, and mourn our dead there. We surround our menorahs with DIY altars to our many other dead, who too often are Black trans women and queer youths—murdered, directly or indirectly, by fascism, which demands rigid binaries and heteropatriarchal bodies.

We see our fire too. The ways we bash back with, say, community self-defense, vigils, wound-care trainings, and huge dance-party-antifascist-demos in the streets—gay fucking pride versus proud boys and their ilk.

This Xanukah, may we rededicate ourselves to queer joy, and all the nonbinary ways that gender, sex, and sexuality light up the world, even as we know we’ll need many miracles to outlast the fascists.

(photos: my night three rainbow-colored candles in front of @elijahjanka’s art depicting early 1900s’ queer+trans joy via a drawing of five people borrowed from an ethnographic photo for the @radicaljewishcalendar; “queer or nothing” wheatpaste, drawn as a black+white heart with a splash of pink, seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 5782)

#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful
#FreilachHanukkaNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

One way we diasporic people survive is by telling and retelling stories. Stories that carry culture and meaning; bind community; make us laugh and cry, or cry via humor, to get through trauma; warn as well as inspire, but nearly always, stories that make us proud of who we are, quirks and all.

So much of Jewish holidays (besides food) involves storytelling—on repeat. Yet like all good stories, those tales are constantly reinterpreted and repurposed for specific times and contexts. When you think that we Jews are at 5783 on our calendar and are dispersed around the globe, spanning all races, genders, etc., that’s a whole lot of embellishment on each and every story (and we have a lot of stories)!

Yet it really is crucial to be compelled each holiday to spin new yarns from old stories. We’re being asked to reflect on the dilemmas we find ourselves in, and what we’re willing to do to struggle toward freedom in the here and now.

One Hanukkah story that’s gotten repeated over the past several years is captured in the second photo: Rachel Posner, a rabbi’s wife, put a menorah in their window in Kiel, Germany, in 1931, visible to the Nazi headquarters across the street. We share this photo each year as prompt to, say, retell family tales or wider histories of that era, revisit our values in relation to the past, or affirm that “never again” applies to all peoples.

This year, I saw it in a new light: 2022 Christian fascism. The Nazi flag morphed into a US one, and counterintuitively, I only want to be more loud, proud, and out as a Jew as today’s fascism takes hold.

It also reminded me of visiting Theresienstadt years ago—a city turned into a death camp in the Czech Republic in Nazi times. A guide, knowing I was Jewish, showed me a small room, dark and dusty, saying it was a space back then where each week, a few Jews would gather secretly to light Shabbes candles for all. They risked death to light candles. Rachel, too, risked death to light candles.

What stories do we want to keep alive via our retelling—as the light of our defiance, resistance, and aspirations—to keep more of us alive and even thriving?

(photo #1: my #AllChanukahsAreBeautiful candles on night two of Xanika, in orange, yellow, and purple colors, set in a metal menorah with an #ACAB sign in the background)

#SmashFascism #WeMustOutliveThem

#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

There’s nary a Jewish holiday or ritual that isn’t about sorrow as well as joy. They are as inseparable as the braids in a challah loaf or havdallah candle, or during Hanukkah, the shredded potatoes in latkes.

It is this interwoven quality that makes Jewish rituals so life-giving, because to live a whole life means embracing the sorrows and joys that are part of the human condition, yet in ways that aid us in journeying side by side with others through the darkness and light.

In this third pandemic Chanuka, 5783, in the deepening fascism, Christian supremacy 2022, it is difficult to see that balance, to see blessed light. Tonight’s menorah is so far from even “a cup half full” of lightness in this world, in these bleak times. There is more emptiness, more darkness, than feels possible to hold.

There are the small, blessed darknesses still—like seasonal cycles, which even if they steal away the daylight now, are essential for life, or this menorah, which my parents used from my earliest memories, and was the only object, as material remembrance, that I wanted when they died, yet when the candles flicker out each night, I miss my folks all over again.

Those are easy, even comforting to bear.

It is the big, cursed darknesses that are making it feel, well, dark—as if the gray skies blotting out sun and moon daily this winter are mirroring all the fascistic, wholly unnecessary sorrows—violences—swirling around us.

It feels impossible that the light of promise, much less hope, will return. We must sit with that uncertainty.

And while we do, Hanukkah will somatically exercise our capacity to notice—and maybe reweave—blessed dark and blessed light, to rededicate our fighting spirit for them, by easing our bodies over the next eight nights into “fuller cups” of sparks, of flames. Literally, with our hands, we will bring more light to life each evening—light that’s only visible because of the darkness; an inseparable illumination of what, by the eighth day, gestures at the worlds we dream of, the worlds we conjure via rituals of resistance so as to inhabit them now, if only for the length of candles burning brightly over this Kanika.

(photos: one purple and one orange lit candles set in a metal menorah, with the other seven candleholders empty, against a tan-colored wall; black-and-white art by @wendyelisheva featuring two crows, each holding one candle in its beak, toward a branch/treelike menorah with the words “bless dark” and “bless light.)

#Mazeldon
#RitualAsResistance
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

It feels pretty special, blessedly so, to be able to do my first in-person talk and schmooze with others about an anthology that I started curating in the “before” times, which “routinely” included lots of book events at many beautiful spots, and finished in the early hellish pandemic days, and was birthed into print as the pandemic began to shift into another “new normal” part of the fascist social fabric. Like so many of us, I’ve been profoundly separated from so much I love these past 2.5+ years, including the delight of bringing the books I do—as labors of love—into the world among others.

But Jewishness, and especially queer anarchist Jewishness, is used to inhabiting liminal spaces, spaces of betweenness. Twilight is the par excellent moment—ecological and one could say trans or nonbinary sacred—that eases us into new months and new years, rituals and holidays, grief and transition. We also have millennia-long experience with separations, both traumatic and joyous, both forced on us and self-determined, whether in diasporic motion or through the separation between Shabbat (25 hours a week of dwelling in the world to come, as ongoing dress rehearsals of sorts) and havdallah, when we move out of the sacred into the mundane until the next Shabbos.

That ancestral legacy offers a palpable resilience, or perhaps fierce fighting spirit to survive, with many contemporary Jewish anarchists feeling affinity for the refrain sung by a village of Jews many moons ago as they were about to be slaughtered: “we will outlive them.”

At many points in this binary, brutal pandemic time of “masked” vs “unmasked,” mutual aid vs abandonment, I didn’t know that I would outlive it. The same may be true for you. Many folks we love didn’t outlive it. And that feels so much truer for so many of us in the days ahead, as fascism increasingly acts out and acts on its transphobia, misogyny, antisemitism, racism …

My Jewish anarchism teaches me so much, crucially right now that joy and sorrow are always intertwined, and that it is our task to not complete the task of mending the world, but not desist from it either.

💖🖤 to @scottbransonblurredwords for setting up this event!

Event description:

Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists

Using the anthology “There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart” as a jumping-off point, editor/writer Cindy Barukh Milstein will sketch a picture of contemporary Jewish anarchism and then facilitate a conversation. Today’s Jewish anarchists pull from ancestral wisdom, within Judaism/Jewishness and millennia of diasporic rituals and communities (without states). Yet they are also remaking Jewish anarchism, especially via anarcha-feminist and queer+trans practices—cultural, political, and spiritual—building bridges from bittersweet grief to rebellion and joy. Milstein will touch on ways that Jewish anarchism is being utilized in organizing and movements as a weapon against, to name a few, colonialism, capitalism, fascism, and ecocide. Yet they’ll also explore what it means to embrace Jewish anarchism as the ground for communal solidarities that sustain and “mend” us while cultivating visionary forms of liberation—and life—all with the aim of getting better and better at living “the world to come” in the here and now. Whether you’re Jewish or not, an anarchist or not (yet), come share in reflecting on the promise of Jewish anarchism.

Notes: At Oberlin on Friday just before Shabbat begins. To embody our collective care, masks are required at this event—with N95s and KN95s strongly recommended—and we urge everyone to rapid test before coming, and don’t come if sick or COVID positive. There will also be copies of the anthology and other books by Milstein for sale, at a sliding scale (cash or PayPal). Lastly, Milstein encourages everyone to bring along a small offering/memento to place on a temporary grief altar.

#AnarchismOrFascism
#WeMustOutliveThem
#MourningOurDead #MendingTheWorld
#TryAnarchismForLife
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

In a time of rising and “more successful” fascism around the globe, not to mention its white Christian supremacist version in the so-called United States, along with fascism’s virulent and violent conspiracy theories that weave antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant, and other racist, ableist, queer/transphobic, misogynistic (etc.) worldviews into an always-genocidal worldview/practice (aka they hate and want to eradicate everyone who isn’t them)—it feels extra sweet to be among anarchist(ic) friends and accomplices here on Mastodon, including feeling to wholly/holy seen by Kolektiva’s emojis :anarchismhebrew: :anarchoheart3: :queeranarchy: :antifa: :anfem: :anarchoheart2: (to share only a few)

#TryAnarchismForLife 
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#TryQueerAnarchismForLife
#TryFeministAnarchismForLife
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon 
#TryAnarchismForLove
(photo: proofreading a picture-prose piece about a month ago from my just-birthed new book, “Try Anarchism for Life: The Beauty of Our Circle” [published by @tangledwild and available via @akpressdistro], with circle alef here by Naomi Rose Weintraub)

In a time of rising and “more successful” fascism around the globe, not to mention its white Christian supremacist version in the so-called United States, along with fascism’s virulent and conspiracy theories that weave antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant, and other racist, ableist, queer/transphobic, misogynistic worldviews into an always-genocidal worldview/practice (aka they hate and want to eradicate everyone who isn’t them)—it feels extra sweet to be among anarchist(ic) friends and accomplices here on Mastodon, including feeling to wholly/holy seen by Kolektiva’s emojis :anarchismhebrew: :queeranarchy: :ancomheart: :anfem_star: :af: :blob_anar_raccoon: :anarchoheart2: (to share a few)!

#TryAnarchismForLife
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#TryQueerAnarchismForLife
#TryFeministAnarchismForLife
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#TryAnarchismForLove

(photo: proofreading a picture-prose piece about a month ago from my just-birthed new book, “Try Anarchism for Life: The Beauty of Our Circle” [published by @tangledwild and available via @akpressdistro], with circle alef here by Naomi Rose Weintraub)