Crawling Through Glass

Work by Armando Román

On View March 4th - 26th, 2023

Opening Reception: POSTPONED
Saturday, March 4th, 4 - 7 PM

I am an artist who makes work on paper. The paper varies: colored construction paper, rice paper, canvas. My work combines digital brushstrokes with physical marks made often with crayon, colored pencils, and washable marker. There is no cultural specificity in my palette, or the patterns I employ to remove white space from my compositions. The colors are ambiguously placed, referencing what could be a specific identity-based aesthetic. I think about my compositions in terms of border and center. The center, typically drawn digitally, often does not interact with the border. There is a clear distinction between the two. The surrounding borders are drawn by hand, using a similar palate than its digital counterpart in the center. The relationship between border and center, and its eventual collapse in the work, reflects the competing narrative that exists within my own relationship to Mexican culture.

Color, pattern, and abstraction ; I consider these to be weapons in the aim to disrupt the systems of order I was raised to believe were right. Color is bodily. It is a deeply sensorial tool that, while able to occupy the mind, is felt most deeply in the bones. Color is what allows me to create the work that I do - it dictates the work. Color is both rational and non-rational. While rationality, itself a subjective Western concept, order is still necessary in understanding how colors relate to one another. Colors are sublime, and the act of coloring is a deeply devotional one. In my compositions, I consider white (space) to be an enemy. I fill my drawings with as much color and patterning as I can. The paper I use, however, works against me. The canvas I work with renders digital ink well, but because of its tooth, small crevices of uncolored white space remain. In a drawing full of color, a visible layer of untouchable white space remains.

Armando Román is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in the Midwest. He received his BFA in Studio Arts from Denison University and his MFA in Visual Arts from The Ohio State University. His drawings traverse themes of religion, homosexuality, community, and the self. The Mexican landscape, both cultural and literal, is of particular interest to him. He creates work to better understand his own relationship with Mexico, which is simultaneously familiar and foreign to him. Familiar, in that countless stories have been retold to him of this place, where his mother and father were born. Foreign, in that he has no permanent relationship with it. Hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration are used in his practice as tools of resistance. Román currently works at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Unit #1505

Work by Janhavi Khemka

On View April 1st - 30th, 2023

Opening Reception:
Saturday, April 1st, 4 - 7 PM

As a hearing-impaired person, I have found it difficult to express my innermost reflections through spoken language. At the age of 15, my mother passed away from cancer. She was my link to communicating with the outside world. Her technique created limits, barring me from learning sign language while emphasizing lip reading. I had to learn to negotiate the world around me on my own. Art has helped me search for meaning in more intimate acts—my hands, their relationship to the world, my sight, and my ability to touch.

As a cross-disciplinary artist, I create paper sculptures, prints, animation, and performances based on my life experiences. My practice is focused on finding ways to translate my perception. Therefore, most works are rooted in the personal, both mental and physical. Most recently, my practice has extended to environments-based installation and vibrational materials. I invite the viewer to experience my perception of the world, devoid of aural stimulation.

Born in 1993 in Varanasi, Janhavi Khemka is an interdisciplinary artist in India and Chicago. She attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in pursuit of a Master of fine arts degree in print media. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting and printmaking from the Faculty of Visual Art, Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India (2015) and a Master of Fine art in printmaking from Graphics Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan (2017). Her current artistic research has an intersection of traditional printmaking, animation, vibration material, and performance. She has exhibited her artwork in regional, national, and international galleries and institutions throughout the United States, India, Norway, Korea, and the United Kingdom.

Khemka has participated in national and international exhibitions, and artist residencies, given lectures, attended national printmaking conferences and taken the workshop. She has received a Graduate Award from Printmaking Today Magazine for the Winter Issues in December 2022. Most recently, she has been invited to attend several residencies including Kala’s Artist in Residence Program at Berkeley, CA, and Bodies of Work, at the University of Illinois Chicago at Chicago, IL.

Learn more about the artist
@janhavi_khemka
janhavikhemka.com

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

Work by Lydia Cheshewalla and Jessica Price

On View June 3rd - 25th, 2023

Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 3rd

Drawing from their experiences working in land management and prairie restoration, with special interest in prescribed burning practices, Cheshewalla & Price work in complementary and overlapping mediums, genres, and timelines, bringing together multiple perspectives and experiences to create a room for conversation, curiosity, and action around the land and spaces we occupy within the Midwestern ecological landscape of the Great Plains.

Through projected imagery and data visualizations, they explore how humans interact with and impact ecosystems, inviting examination of relationships with our more-than-human kin in a time of climate change. Using music, poetry, and collaboration with the more-than-human, they draw attention to deep time and kinship pedagogy, examining current practices and thoughts about land and imaging futures where we exist in more sustainable, symbiotic, and celebratory ways with the world and beings around us.

Bonding over their Great Plains roots, rural Midwestern sensibilities, prairie love, and artistic proclivities, Lydia Cheshewalla & Jessica Price became collaborative co-conspirators in 2016.

Lydia Cheshewalla is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation with Cherokee, Modoc, Dakota, and Xicanx descendancy. She is a visual artist who creates ephemeral, site-specific land art and installation accompanied by poetic factualism and grounded in Indigenous kinship pedagogy.

Learn more about the artist
@goodwithcoffee
lydia-cheshewalla.com

Jessica Price is an accomplished musician/songwriter, currently fronting Chicago-based band Doom Flower, as well as a videographer with work spanning documentary, short film, archival, music video, and education in both digital and film. She works most frequently with a Digital Harinezumi camera, which underscores her signature style of photography.

Learn more about the artist
@doomflowerband
doomflower.com

Manifesto for Mutualistic Tendencies

Work by Kayla Anderson and Dao Nguyen

July 1 - 30, 2023

Opening Reception:
Saturday, July 1st
4 - 7 P

On View Sundays in July
11 A - 2 P
*Additional hours by appointment

In Manifesto for Mutualistic Tendencies, Dao Nguyen and Kayla Anderson attempt to find intimacy with and build care for synanthropic creatures. Prodding at the miniature worlds nested alongside ours, the artists create playgrounds, sanctuaries, and narratives as bridges between human and non-human experience. The exhibition explores the erotic landscapes of others, and our unruly impulses towards sympoesis, or “making with”.

Dao Nguyen is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist. Their name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife. They are the compact, red Leatherman multi-tool your aunt gave you for Christmas ten years ago. On sale at Marshall’s. Versatility and hidden strength in a small package at a discount. Stealthy enough to pass through security checkpoints on three continents on four separate occasions. They can cut, screw, file, saw, and open your beer. Bonus applications include carving miniature graphite figurines, picking locks, and sculpting tofu.

They have exhibited and performed in backyards, bathrooms, stairwells, highways, white cubes, and black box spaces, including Sector 2337, Defibrillator, the MCA, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center. They received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Artist-in-Residence at ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, Elsewhere: A Living Museum, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Learn more about the artist
@bluepupae
daonguyen.com

Kayla Anderson participates in the art world as an artist, a critical writer, an uncompensated curator, a precarious administrator, and a roaming educator. Their name sits somewhere between the Hindi word for Banana (kela) and the Arabic word for "let's go" (yallah). In Hebrew it means slim, slipping through the cracks like that stubborn blade of grass now in bloom after repeatedly being missed by the lawnmower.

Their work has been shown at festivals including Onion City Experimental Film Festival (Chicago), HTMlles Festival (Montreal), ART+FILM Festival (Australia); cultural spaces including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), The Chapter House (Los Angeles), Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography; and published by platforms including Art & Education, Temporary Art Review, Leonardo Journal.

Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, where capitalism and disenfranchisement are more relentless than the sun, they value art as an arena for non-strategic modes of thinking, feeling, and communing with others. They spend their spare time staring lovingly into the eyes of insects.

Learn more about the artist
@kaylanderson12
kayla-anderson.com

There are Ghosts in These Walls...

Work by Isaac Couch

August 6 - 27, 2023

Opening Reception:
Sunday, August 6th
4 - 7 P

On View Sundays in August
11 A - 2 P

We are all haunted, whether it be our own personal or familial past or the systematic history of the country and beyond. The GHOSTS that occupy the gallery space are embodiments of ideas from the past that manifest themselves in the present. Take racism. Racism is built within the walls of the United States. It will never disappear but rather take new forms of being. It will manifest as a malicious poltergeist to terrorize us in our own home. Hauntings are not limited to systemic issues. You can look within yourself to find many of these occupants. What haunts you? Who haunts you..? These plaster bodies are empty vessels made for your projection. Recognize the ghost, call its name and exorcise it.

Originally from Western KY, where corn is farmed and coal is mined, Isaac Couch has brought his southern perspective to the northern city of Chicago where he lives and works. After receiving a Bachelor's degree in Merchandising Apparel and Textiles in 2019 from the University of Kentucky, he went on to earn his Masters of Design at SAIC in 2021. Following graduation, he was awarded the 2021 Luminarts Fashion Fellowship, the 2021 Fashion Council Fellowship, and is currently the 2023-24 Arts Club of Chicago Fellow.

Learn more about the artist
@icouch.work
icouch.work

When Souls Stick

Work by Jess Bass and Gabriel Chalfin-Piney

September 1 - October 1, 2023

On View Sundays
11 A - 2 P

Opening Reception
Friday, September 1st
6 - 9 P

with Performance by Zachary Nicol, Jasmine Lupe Mendoza Carrasco and Hannah Mira Friedland. Costumes by Liz Mortensen of Laila Textiles.

דאָיִקייט - doikayt - “hereness”

Here and then exists simultaneously in the present as it is retold, rehearsed, reshaped. Through archiving Jewish folktales, studying incantation bowls and Jewish households from the Aramaic period to now, When Souls Stick collages and interprets Jewish history and mysticism to discuss the human impulse, throughout time, to imbue matter with souls and purposes.

The exhibition, corresponding performances and workshops explore how non-conscious objects come to life through mystical encounters, making bonds through human attachments.

In our tale, the Dybbuk (the vengeful ghost), Golem (the savior and destroyer), Ziz (sky and ruler of all birds) and Leviathan (the primordial sea monster) join in a familial affair, connected yet estranged, woven through the sharing of space. Through activated encounters, demons and angels appear.

The audience is asked to engage and move with the performers, following the Anti-Zionist diasporic concept of Doikayt, translated from Yiddish as “hereness.”

Jess Bass has exhibited at SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020, 2022), PLAY/GROUND (2022), Hyde Park Art Center (2022), Terrain Biennial (2021), SITE Gallery (2020), and Detroit Art Week (2019); and featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, ArtNews, PASTE, Fader and MTV.

jessicabass.com
@partly_spring

Gabriel Chalfin-Piney has exhibited at Bird Show (2023), Speedwell Projects (2022), Buoy Gallery (2022), Chicago Artists Coalition (2021, 2020), Terrain Exhibitions (2020), High Concept Labs (2019), The Kleinert James Center for the Arts (2017), The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (2017); and featured in New City Magazine, Spaces Archive, and Chicago Reader.

chalfinpiney.com
@citrus.history

Related Programming and Events

Friday, September 1
6 - 9 P 
Opening 
with Performance by Zachary Nicol, Jasmine Lupe Mendoza Carrasco and Hannah Mira Friedland. Costumes by Liz Mortensen of Laila Textiles.

Sunday, September 3
12 - 2 P 
Shpanyer Arbet: Shtetl Lace
Lecture and Workshop with Lily Homer

Sunday, September 10
12 - 2 P 
Hiddur Mitzvah: Collaging the Senses
Candle Making Workshop with Gabriel Chalfin-Piney

Sunday, September 17
12 - 2 P
Un’Taneh Tokef: Sending and Receiving Through the Gates 
Workshop on the High Holy Days with Adam Gottlieb

Sunday, October 1
11 - 2 P
Closing 
with Moon Readings by Rebecca Beachy 

and Performance by Zachary Nicol, Jasmine Lupe Mendoza Carrasco and Hannah Mira Friedland. Costumes by Liz Mortensen of Laila Textiles.

Special thanks to the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce for sponsoring our September exhibition and related programming.

Black and Indigenous Futures

work by Akira Iyashikei, bee rodriguez and Keshia Talking Waters De Freece Lawrence

October 5 – 29, 2023

featuring guest artwork by Kathleen Spirit Dancer Mann Crippen and Janey Hecht

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception

Saturday, October 7th
5:30 – 8:30 P

featuring opening prayer by Akira

6:30 P – Performance by Akira + Sinica

7:00 P – Artist Discussion on the exhibition and the Winnemucca Indian Colony hosted by Akira

The future of Black and Indigenous people is one of healing through the liberation of the land.

This photo document series is reflective of the awakening power that emerges from Black and Indigenous resistance movements that I have witness to, alongside my journey of deepening my relationship with land and using philosophies of the land to build a world outside settler colonialism.

In this second iteration of my largest body of work, I look at the lessons from the Winnemucca Indian Colony Frontline, in Winnemucca, Nevada, taking a further look into ego and trauma.

How does ego and trauma affect us in the way we show up to resistance spaces?

How can land help us heal and build a world outside of settler colonialism?

What is your relationship to land?..

- Akira,
Light that heals

Home Not Home

How far I am from the land I was born.
Immense nostalgia invades my mind.
Oh land of the sun, I sight to see you.
How far I live, without light, without love.
I would like to cry, I would like to die of feeling.

In 1994, My mother and I were forced out of the lands (Mexico) of my grandmothers, to be raised in the shadow of illegalization in the north (U.S).

To be a person without a nation, liberated me to seek the land and its truths.

Akira is an undocumented native from south central Mexico, whose work focuses on healing our relationship with land and our fight to liberate it from the power of coloniality.

At the age of three, Akira was brought to the states to escape the poverty of their village brought upon the economic devastation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

After attending college in Chicago, 2015, Akira left the city to work at farms in the Midwest to further their connection to the land that had been severed by colonialism. Returning to the city in 2019, they started to use photography to capture the truths that came from witnessing frontlines in person. In the city and in the rural parts of the country, Frontlines mark the border between reality and illusion, and the connection modernity has to settler colonialism. 

@_indio___

Related Programming Presented by Akira

Akira – Art Talk and Slideshow Screening

Friday, October 13th
4 – 7 p
Featured artist discusses their largest body of work, Black and Indigenous Futures – starting from the beginning and spanning four years of frontline documenting.

Akira + Anysquared Performances

Saturday, October 14th
4:30 – 7:30 p
Join Akira and members from Logan Square's art group, Anysquared, for a night of joy and dancing, celebrating the land and our existence!

Building Relationship with Land

Sunday, October 22nd
3 – 7 p

RAMAPO, GOOD RELATIVES

work by Keshia Talking Waters De Freece Lawrence

RAMAPO, GOOD RELATIVES is the liberating visual of under recognized New Jersey, New York and Connecticut tribal peoples, The Ramapough. The photographs and microfilm imagery has been rematriated and liberated from the Vineland NJ residential school archives, while the vibrant depictions of land and water are exactly that. RAMAPO, GOOD RELATIVES is placing relatives back in good relation with one another and space. August 15th, 2023 lead Ramapough Clan Mother and Cultural Knowledge Bearer passed away at 72 years of life. Kathleen Spirit Dancer Mann Crippen's famous beadwork and baby moccasins (which she would make for every new child of the tribe), are included in this exhibition as an honoring.

Keshia Talking Waters De Freece Lawrence is a Ramapough Lenape Munsee, Deer Clan member. De Freece’s academic and professional background is in International Law and Conflict Negotiations. Over the past four years, Talking Waters has been involved in rematriation efforts for her tribe through artistic expression. Reclaiming artifacts and photographs, by reclaiming Elders and Ancestors, and placing peoples back on land and in community. De Freece’s artwork is to evoke ecosystem, community and self- negotiation through lively positioning, colors and more than human relatives.

@sakimaxkwe

Archiving Memories

work by bee rodriguez

bee's archives attempt to preserve memories of ancestors, traditions, and changing landscapes. they draw inspiration from the different ways their kin relate stories of land, movement, and resisting colonialism: oral, recipes, cook-outs, vhs and disposable camera archives. 

bee is a land-based creative archiving personal stories and experiences using mediums like poetry, photography, and black-book sketching.

@abeja.explorando

Wounded Territory

work by Leticia Pardo

November 11 – 26, 2023

Opening Reception
Saturday, November 11th
4 - 7 P

Final weekend for viewing –
Saturday and Sunday
12 – 4 P

In her book Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the US/Mexico border as an open wound that is still bleeding. Expanding on this metaphor, this installation, composed of groups of ceramic tiles, reflects on territories divided and oppressed by borders and by those who impose them. 

The tiles presented in the space have been made by massaging clay slabs to create forms that evoke landscapes, mounds or anthropomorphic forms, grouped together to form territories – understood here as lands that were originally part of a whole, topographies of collectivity that share wildlife, peoples, languages and cosmologies. Entangled with this idea of continuous geographies is the idea of our individuality, and the body as the smallest territory that we inhabit.

Responding to the architecture, the arrangement of tiles generates an invisible grid, suggesting a notion of continuity and allowing the viewer to construct the landscape beyond the physical space where the installation takes place. This grid also acts as an element that grounds a conceptual play between different scales: the geographic territory, the architectural space and the human body, suggesting that one module might represent a scaled down portion of a landscape as a fragmented map, or an enlarged depiction of a minuscule area of skin or body tissue. 

Despite our physical distance or proximity to borders, Wounded Territory invites reflection around the ways in which oppressive systems impact us at individual and collective levels, and poses the question: how are we perpetuating them in the societies that we participate in?

Leticia Pardo is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City, based in Chicago, whose practice lies in the boundaries between architecture, research & art. Her work reflects on stories about migration, place-making and citizenship across borders, and how these manifest in the built environment. Her background in architecture and exhibition design largely informs the way in which she works as an artist. Pardo’s most recent work ponders on the impact of political borders in our cities and societies – in recent explorations and trips to cities along the US/Mexico border, she’s captured impressions, fragments, photographs and stories related to the presence of a dividing wall in an originally continuous territory. Leticia has also largely focused her work on documenting ways of placemaking by the Mexican community in Chicago through her ongoing project, Greetings from Chicagoacán.

@leticiapardo_

Read review of show – NewCity

Crossing the Borders: A Review of “Wounded Territory” by Leticia Pardo at Comfort Station

by Frank Geiser | November 22, 2023

Lights and Perfections

work by Casey Carsel

December 2, 2023 – January 14, 2024

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception

Saturday, December 2nd
4 – 7 P

Join us in celebration of the opening of Casey Carsel’s solo exhibition, Lights and Perfections. 

Lights and Perfections emerges from and expands upon the images, objects, and words that Jewish communities have historically designated as protective and powerful, and the stories invoked therein. How do the symbols and the amulets that house such stories hold and move a people’s identity, and what histories might they reveal here and now? How do they envelop a community’s fears, its resources, its wider world? 

Casey began this series while they were a Fulbright Creative Writing Grantee (2021–22) in Ukraine and, subsequent to the full-scale invasion, in Poland. During that time, they were preoccupied by the shapes in which Jewish histories remain present despite the death, destruction, and forced disappearances of the past centuries. Moved through and around by contemporary inhabitants, they sought to discover how those histories inflect the stories we (us, them, everyone) tell about ourselves, and how they are rewritten in the telling. 

The exhibited works were made possible with the support of the Fulbright Program as well as a New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship.

Casey Carsel is a Jewish maker and writer drawn to the sharp beauty of the fragments of history that tumble down to the present moment. In their experimental and craft-based practice, they seek to untangle the ways in which cultural narratives have been woven in  the Jewish diaspora. How do the stories conveyed by traditions, artifacts, and landscape shape identities and create communities? What is cherished and how? In their work, they look to open a space where, as for the generations that came before and for those who will follow, stories become homes. 

Through such socially inflected objects, histories, and materials of communication as garlic, the Holocaust, and jokes, Casey’s works have unraveled the intentions and implications of storytelling practices both overt and covert. They find in fiber an especially rich field for these investigations, as a medium that is so much a part of everyday life—a medium that is almost always near us, touching us. They seek to discover how such surfaces absorb and reflect the events that occur around them, and how the history of the medium alters the stories that they decode and recode.

Casey’s textiles have been presented by Co-Prosperity (Chicago), RM Gallery (Auckland), and Blue Oyster Gallery (Dunedin), amongst others, and their texts have been published by magazines and galleries including Ocula Magazine, The Seen, West Space, and Clark House Initiative. Recent grants, fellowships, and residencies, including a New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship, a Fulbright U.S. Creative Writing Grant, an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and a StudioWorks residency with the Tides Institute & Museum of Art. 

In conjunction with Lights and Perfections, you can read Casey's short story/essay For the Healthy and For the Dead here. This text and the eponymous excerpt available IRL at Comfort Station were typeset with love by artist and graphic designer Unyimeabasi Udoh.

Note: the right-hand column scrolls independently. If you're having trouble, make sure to hover or tap on that side of the page.

Related Programming presented by Casey –

Bring your current project in during this sewing circle time for social making. Whether you’re starting a new project, putting the finishing touches on an old one, or somewhere in between, drop in for some collective accountability, shop talk, and counsel (as requested). 

The session will begin with a small technical walkthrough of the current Comfort Station exhibition, Lights and Perfections, with the artist, Casey Carsel, and then shake out into open making time. Communal dye pot and small nosh provided.

CRAFT NITE is a queer exhibition and event space run out of a two-car garage in Ukrainian Village. Expanding on a history of queer and feminist craft circles, CRAFT NITE aims to be a conduit for support and connection for up-and-coming artists and craftspeople in Chicago.

At this gathering, attendees will work together with the leaders of the Jewish Museum of Chicago to envision the Museum’s ideological and practical framework, exploring questions such as what it means to build an institution while upholding a core set of liberatory, anti-zionist, and non-hierarchical values. 

This session, held in conjunction with the current Comfort Station exhibition, Lights and Perfections, is open to all and will begin with a candle-lighting for the 7th day of Hanukkah. Small nosh provided. 

Please RSVP to jewishmuseumchicago@gmail.com to confirm participation.

Statement of Solidarity with Palestine

This show was, mostly, created before October 7. It is impossible now to look at the works, to think of these amulets—of fear and the kind of power born from fear—without seeing the events of the past month and since 1948. That is why, here, now, I call for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.

I refuse to support the weaponization of my community’s grief and fear. I refuse the enactment of a genocide in my name—a genocide that is a culmination of a mountain of loss experienced by Palestinians across decades of dehumanization, dispossession, and displacement. 

The 75-year-old settler-state of Israel is an artifact of antisemitism—a colonial project founded by the West to shrug off the burden of the millions of Jewish refugees from the shoah and to bolster their own interests in the region. It began with violence and at the expense of Palestinians, and has continued that way for nearly a century. Many Jews, traumatized by millennia of persecution, nevertheless staked their faith on it. They believed that safety meant being a nation among nations, and that landlessness was weakness. But if this is strength, if this is tzedek (justice), I want no part in it. 

It is not a coincidence that the most Jews killed in one day since the Holocaust were killed in this supposed safe land. These attacks wouldn’t have occurred without the social conditions of Israeli apartheid. The safety of one group will never be permanently gained at the cost of another. The state’s violent actions, as per Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin, “threaten to empty Jewish existence of all meaning, to make hollow the resistance for two thousand years to being dissolved into the majority.”

I am a diasporist Jew, a jew of doikayt; for me, the home of Jewishness is in diaspora. Israel is not the Jewishness I believe in. I love my people. It is out of love that I make this statement against the forces of our own self-destruction—even as I risk having many in my community turn their backs on me, or worse, as a consequence. I do it because I see that the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle for a free Palestine are intertwined. 

Tikkun olam (to repair the world) must begin with working to repair what our own have shattered. Teshuvah (repentance/return) must begin with returning what was wrongfully taken from the Palestinian people in our names. I call on you, my readers, my fellow Jews, to join the fight for Palestinian liberation.

No one is free until everyone is free. 

GET INVOLVED –
Follow Jewish Voice for Peace for updates and calls to action. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks, Mum :') Additional infinite gratitude to my belovèd Tāmaki-Kepa bitches: Jasmin, Niamhy, Matavai, Quishile, Fe’ao, Bronte, and Kini. To Pierce and David. To Phillip and David. To Unyime and Addy. To Jack and Lorenzo. To Anne. To Sasha, Olha, Clemens, Lucy, Andrii, and all of my Ukraine loves. To Lyudmila at the New York Public Library. And, of course: 

To the remote sources of life and death revealed. 

To the dust of the well. 

To the rabbi-poets in whose mouths I put my words and whose names have, over the centuries, become mine. 

To Sarah and Yukel. 

To those, finally, whose roads of ink and blood go through words and men. 

And, most of all, to you. To us. To you.