It’s doubly impossible tonight to lean into the practice of Shabbat as a time-space of inhabiting “the world to come,” the world we dream of and deserve—Jews and non-Jews alike.

For one, this is the first Shabbos in the new Jewish month of Adar, which holds out the notion that joy will increase. But what joy can one find in Christian fascists, neo-Nazis, and their fellow brethren calling for a “Day of Hate” against Jews tomorrow, on our Shabbat, with its joys?

And second, how is one to disengage from the world of work—as we’re “commanded”/invited by Shabbat—and instead rest in light of this? How is one to dwell in the sacred, leaving behind the profane, the common (like, say, the hegemony of Christian patriarchal white supremacy), for the 25 hours of Shabbes when a Day of Hate against Jews is unrestfully launched and thus there’s so much antifascist work to do, including community self-defense?

Of course, every day under fascism—and the United States is already there—is a day of hate, a day of targeting, a day of no rest for the weary antifascist.

Yet just as we rebels call for “days of action” to direct our love and solidarity toward the direct action of dismantling various forms of hierarchy and domination, the fascists are likely putting special effort into their Day of Hate. And even if their direct actions fall short of their aims, which include, as one flyer asserts, being “loud and clear” that “the one true enemy … is the Jew,” like our days of action, such moments can have many impacts, from visibility for a message to bolstering one’s ranks to causing a certain amount of trouble. And in this case, not the good kind—toward liberatory lives for all—but the kind that hurts and even kills people, and for sure is already paining Jews.

This Day of Hate isn’t “just” a Jewish concern—though please check in on and offer solidarity to your Jewish friends. Their conspiracy theories and genocidal fantasies tie us all together—all of us in fascism’s crosshairs. But so, too, should our common dream of a world to come—and without fascism.

(photo: hot pink and black “antifascist action” sticker seen on my #FuckFascism walk in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal today)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#CommunitySelfDefense
#BeTheGolemYouWantToSee
#SolidarityOnShabbat
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

Books take a long time to put together, from idea to writing and editing to design and then print. And it’s often unclear when one first ventures to put pen to paper whether the finished book will make sense when it’s done.

Sometimes, though, a book comes into the world at precisely the moment when it’s not only extra relevant but also extra essential. Such is the case with “We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action” (PM Press), coauthored by Shannon Clay, Lady, Kristin Schwartz, and Michael Staudenmaier, with foreword by Gord Hill, published after some three years of labor of love.

Not that it’s good that fascism is so bad, we sorely need books like this. But given that fascism must be fought yet again, it’s imperative to understand how others in the recent past practiced in communal defense and solidarity, and take seriously—as this book does—their successes and losses.

I was honored a year or so ago to be asked to blurb this book, so got a sneak preview of its contents via a rough draft manuscript. Yesterday, the book itself arrived in my mailbox, and it’s even more impressive and compelling, including because its pages are overflowing with images of historical documents like posters, newspapers, flyers, and other DIY, antifascist propaganda (sample page pictured here).

As encouragement to get the book as part of your own antifascist arsenal, here’s my blurb:

“‘History,’ as ‘The Story of Anti-Racist Action’ observes, ‘is a weapon.’ Yet in this timely, much-needed book, set against the backdrop of today’s resurgent fascism, it is far more than that. History is a teachable, or learnable, moment. History is remembrance, or never forgetting, and honoring our dead. Most important, history is possibility. Because as the authors and many ARA participants so ably demonstrate on these pages, and with such clear-eyed insights, those who collectively self-organize and take direct action can make history—a people’s history of courage and solidarity. And thus this engaging history is a compass, guiding us away from unnecessary perils and pitfalls, and toward potentialities for not only community self-defense but also community care.”

(photos: black-and-red book cover featuring a photo from an ARA demo; interior shot of chapter on “Our Bodies, Our Choice” with an image of the cover of an ARA bulletin, 1997, with a drawing of a person with a baseball bat and the words “girls kick ass!”)

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1295

#FuckFascism
#WeMustOutliveThem
#AntiRacistAction
#FightFascism #SmashFascism

Two years ago, on January 6, extraparliamentary Christian fascists stormed the US Capitol, dressed up in an assortment of antisemitic, anti-Black, and racist “live-action role play” attire—looking both ridiculous, thuggish, and euphorically full-of-themselves in their attempted insurrection.

This January 6, in expensive suit-and-tie and other high-powered professional attire, surrounded by neatly dressed aids, and with no need to breach their own office building, the US Capitol, parliamentary Christian fascists are engaging in an attempted insurrection too—refusing to install a Speaker of the House until they have someone in their pocket.

If January 6, 2021, felt unnerving and even scary, this January 6, 2023, seems much more frightening. As antifascist organizing has demonstrated in the past, such as via efforts like Anti-Racist Action, and more recently, in support of drag shows, it’s possible to get fascists off the streets—the kinds of fascists that went to DC two Januarys ago. Our #CommunitySelfDefense works!

Not that they don’t reappear at times, and not that they aren’t dangerous and sometimes deadly (increasingly so these past two years). And not that they don’t have relations with some of the trappings of the state, like cops. Yet they don’t hold the levers of a world power, with its vast resources and vast apparatuses of state violence/might.

As has been long argued by some antifascists, and rightly so, we are in a three-way fight.

As part of that, we are also far, far past “the fascist creep.” Two January 6ths ago, fascist ran up the Capitol steps and climbed over fences, but then walked around the building taking selfies and confusedly occupying the Senate chambers, unsure what to do—other than pray to their white Christian male supremacist god. Now, fascist congresspeople, having won their race, are confidently in those legislative chambers (not to mention Supreme Court) as superpower powerbrokers.

All to say, suit-and-tie fascism may prove to be much more successful at insurrection, bringing down the state from within.

#FightFascism
#DeathToFascism
#WeMustOutliveThem

(photo: sticker by Municipal Adhesives on Anishinabeeg lands)

The last eight evenings, so long, so dark, were a practice in attempting to trick my despairing mind into seeing some light by writing 8 Hanukkah stories as I lit my candles. Fire as muse, words as fire.

(For those who’d like to read or share them as a whole, the 8 posts are “Hanukkah 5783: Ritual as Resistance” at https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/hanukkah-5783-ritual-as-resistance/.)

In the end, as the last of my 44 candles went out, I came away with illumination but not light. Or to borrow words posted by Kathy R. Bunny on FB, “I don’t actually believe that light will return, but I’m acting as if it could.”

I tried acting “as if it could” because usually that works, and I almost felt a bit of the promise yesterday. It’s hard not to be warmed by the brilliance of a full menorah! Sometimes, though, the reality interrupts our acting, and what gets illuminated is exactly the darkness, the danger, we fear and abhor.

On the one hand, there was the light of the many kind responses to my Hanukkah posts here. So unexpectedly many—enough that it should have overshadowed the small number of fascist responses. But on that other hand—the hand that does a Nazi salute so publicly now—someone called me a “kike” in the comments (an antisemitic insult, which I deleted and blocked). And two fascists started “following” me, with one proudly listing a neo-Nazi code number in his profile; I blocked them too.

It’s not that I fear three cyberspace fascists. It’s that they, more than we, define and shape the present, and I despair for what that means, now and ahead.

My friend Ami Weintraub’s words (in my “There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart” anthology) keep returning to me:

“Our practice teaches us to fill our cemeteries with rocks.

“I want to take the pebbles that we set on graves and join the children who throw stones at the men who murder in my name. I want to throw them at the men who want to murder me too.
We arm our dead with weapons of resistance.

“I imagine running into Jewish graveyards, fleeing from the hatred that haunts me. And even when death surrounds me, I find the tools I need to stay alive.”

We must resist, but there’s no light in the reasons why.

(photo: Jewish grave, Pittsburgh, 2020)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#FascismKills #SmashFascism
#RitualAsResistance

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/

I haven’t seen the moon in ages. Gray days blur into overcast night skies. Instead, I relied on written pages to tell me what I want to trust is out there this Hanukkah eve: the new moon, and thus a new month, Tevet 5783.

That, in turn, meant turning the page on my @radicaljewishcalendar to find the art of my friend @alias_alice, who’s across oceans, but lighting candles under the same moon that’s hard to see and so from the looks of this drawing is relying on books too.

That makes sense. Jews are “people of the book,” and some believe that the book preceded the creation of the world and was written in fire. Books can shape, reimagine, and transform the world, and make new ones. Books can save lives in this one.

Many, many new moons ago, when the pandemic was new, I felt beyond lifeless. Each morning, I woke startled anew, wondering why I was still here, and only wanting to sleep again. And walk, obsessively, for hours. For some reason, one day I tucked a big book of speculative fiction under my arm and set off on foot. I’d never read the genre, and as it was, my broken heart had no ability to read at all. Yet I sat by a lake and somehow got through one chapter. Then another chapter the next day, and so on, until I had something to look forward to, even if I still couldn’t clearly see it. I got lost in trusting the written fire of the other worlds and other moons created in this book.

Perhaps we Jews light candles with such ritual persistence because colonialism, christianization, and capitalism have stolen the moon—our illumination—ripping apart our lunisolar calendar, bloating out the skies with climate catastrophe, letting trillionaires like Musk make it their playground. Perhaps we write and read books as our weapon against them, and fiery promise of other worlds to and for each other.

So while we have to trust, hopeless as that feels these fascist-gray days, that the moon will reappear, new and maybe even whole, let’s always carry a book of our rebel wisdom and use its fire to the fullest.

Come, watch the moon with me, even if we can only imagine its guiding light, now obscured by all that pains us.

(photos: my night 7 candles in front of a drawing of a book, set against a pink floral background, with a 1940 Walter Benjamin quote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” and the words #AlwaysCarryABook, or #ACAB; red spray-painted outline of a heart on a gray wall with the tagged words inside it, “If you want, we can watch the moon?!,” spotted in an alley in Montreal, May 2022)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance
#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#TryAnarchismForLife

“When the world is sick / can’t no one be well / but I dreamt we was all beautiful and strong.”
—lyrics by Silver Mt Zion

I spent the whole of this “feels like” minus-17-degrees day resisting, including when I lit my candles on this sixth night of Xannukah+Shabbes.

Yet it wasn’t the kind of resistance that feels generative.

In the same song that contains the lyrics above, Silver Mt Zion observed that “the world’s a mess and so are we.”

I’m often able to resist the latter part of that claim by holding to the belief that we are “messy beautiful,” in profound contrast and contestation to a social order that’s “messy ugly,” “messy brutal,” “messy deadly.” And that belief in turns sparks a resistance in me to want to transform this world, side by side with others.

But this day, this Xannukah, the third under a palpably sicker world from the tridemics of COVID, ecocide, and fascism, it’s hard not to feel that “everything has gone crazy,” and we are simply a mess. Or at least I am.

So today, it was all I could do to resist on the most micro of levels.

I had to resist with all of my might the impulse to not go for a walk, and instead somehow force myself outdoors, if only for 30 frigid minutes of a heavily bundled-up trudge. I had to resist the impulse to eat badly, to sink deep(er) into depression, to see today’s bleakness and “going crazy” as how I always feel, or always will feel. I had to resist a feeling I’ve never had before: that I didn’t want to light my Xanukkah candles.

That resistance—to all of that and more—took everything to so-so accomplish. Especially to resist being hard on myself.

I know that none of us can be well in this sick world, and that makes days like today a struggle. For I know that resistance can and has to be much larger than me “resisting” the impulse to eat a cookie or feel stuck if we’re going to mend this world. Still, what makes us “messy beautiful,” to my mind, is that we try to resist on every level, down to the cellular level, in service of life, ours and everyone else’s.

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance

(photos: my night six, brightly colored and lit Xanukkah candles and a @breadandpuppet postcard that says “resist” alongside a drawing of red poppies; tag in black spray paint saying “everything has gone crazy” on a gray concrete-block wall, seen in April 2021 on stolen Anishinabeeg lands)

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

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

A list of 5,000 “antifa” accounts on Twitter has been circulating today, with the fascist aim of purging these voices—an eclectic mix including liberals and even some conservatives, but mostly made up of anarchistic folks of many genders, races, cultures, etc. The responses on our side—the side firmly against fascism—are varied, but overwhelmingly, there’s been palpable and tangible solidarity. That’s crucial. We’ll need more and more of that—fierce, empathetic, unflinching solidarity. Taking the side of antifascism, and sticking side by side together.

What struck me more than anything was the shift this seems to mark. From such “antifa” lists being shared on shadowy, “fringe” platforms, or ones that mostly attract fellow fascists, to now being mainstreamed on one of the world’s biggest and oft-turned-to news platforms, owned by one of the world’s wealthiest people. This, in turn, mirrors what increasingly feels like the mainstreaming of the most explicit, virulent, violence-inspiring racist, transphobic, anti-Black, antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic, etc., sentiments on purportedly/formerly liberal, progressive, and/or “neutral” platforms, whether in the form of Chapelle’s jokes on Saturday Night Live or the vacuous “condolence” statement by Biden after the Club Q murders.

When it becomes “controversial” or scary or dangerous in a society to say one is against fascism; when it becomes “common sense” to see and treat antifascists as scary or dangerous, or more plainly, the enemy to be eradicated—we are already in fascism. It is the sea in which we must swim, or sink, as antifascists, not some surface or even subterranean phenomenon now.

Whether Twitter survives or not isn’t the issue. It’s whether whole categories of us—all the beautiful, varied identities, traditions, and experiences, and their rich and frequently millennia-long practices of communal care, mutual aid, and life-giving rituals, that are represented on that list of 5,000—will survive Christian fascism in the States and other fascisms globally.

#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon, in all of its beautiful diversity of forms.

#FascismKills #FuckFascism #SmashFascism #CommunitySelfDefense #WeMustOutliveThem
#TowardAWorldWithoutFascism

(photo: #AntiAntiAntifa sticker seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal’s anarchist bookstore, 2021)

这两天看时间线上不断有人提政治抑郁了，其实我前两天也是，就，毛象怎么可能是世外桃源呢？我们的母语世界烂成那样，我们的同胞被消失被戕害，毛象怎么可能岁静呢？

但是大家也得想尽办法让自己换口气，努力下去，断断网，看看小说，追追剧，出去散散步看看风景 #WeMustOutliveThem

@Kartooon #WeMustOutliveThem