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