Iwas born in Washington dc, in 1984, but from the age of three I grew up in Miami. My father’s family was from Thessaloniki, Greece. They were Holocaust survivors—and Ladino speakers; my grandparents spoke mostly Ladino until the day they died. They eschewed anything religious; they really retreated from the world and suffered from lasting trauma and mental illness. My mother’s family exemplified the American-Jewish experience in a way that my father’s family didn’t. On my mother’s side, my grandmother’s family came from Lithuania and my grandfather’s from Palestine—they were Arabic-speaking Jews from Haifa; my ancestors on that side are all buried there. They emigrated to Columbus, Ohio, in the 1920s or 30s. They were destitute when they arrived and they hit the Depression head on. My maternal grandfather trained as a doctor; he moved to Miami to do his medical residency, so my mother grew up there. And Miami, as you can read in the latest issue of Currents, has the most conservative Jewish community in the country, by leaps and bounds. So I grew up very Zionist. I really drank the Kool-Aid on that.
Absolutely. I did all that. I went on the March of the Living, a trip to the camps for young adults that culminates on Independence Day in Israel. I did a summer in Israel. I went to a summer camp that wasn’t initially Jewish, but then was bought out by the Union for Reform Judaism, which is very Zionist. And I did my own synagogue youth-group stuff.
This was not an Orthodox religious community. The misogyny I encountered came from American culture; I don’t think it came from the religious element. Many Jewish communities have more of a feminist bent because the female personalities are, at least stereotypically, more assertive. My mom started the first abortion fund in Florida and was very involved in reproductive-rights activism; she still is. So all that was present when I was growing up. The messaging that I absorbed on sexuality and gender issues just from being in Miami—with all its machismo and toxic hypersexuality—was pretty bad, though; it took a long time to unlearn that.
I came to New York a year after 9/11, to study visual art at nyu. I was against the Iraq War, but I wasn’t interested in organizing, both because I wasn’t an activist—I didn’t know what that meant—but also because when I went to rallies, there were signs like ‘Down with the Zionist state’. I didn’t understand what they were doing there, and I felt threatened by having to confront the Israel issue in the context of Iraq. So I went on the big marches, but otherwise that moment passed me by. After college, I worked in arts non-profits; I worked for the Pierre Matisse estate for a couple of years. I did an artist residency for a year in South Carolina. I bounced around a lot, but I was basically earning my living at these non-profit organizations while trying to write a novel.
And then Zuccotti happened—Occupy. That was a moment of politicization that meant something to me. I was in grad school getting my mfa at the time and commuting uptown, so I wasn’t there all the time. But I went a lot, and responded to the calls for mass mobilization, when the police were going to come and sweep the camp. I had a lot of friends who were very involved. It was a formative experience. Israel didn’t really play into those politics—today, it would be completely different. There was a guy, Daniel Sieradski, who was organizing an Occupy Judaism strand, which was quite important for some of us, to see somebody bringing visible Jewish politics into these spaces. There was a Yom Kippur service at Zuccotti that was probably one of the most meaningful Jewish experiences of my life. And I left it at that; I wasn’t super politically involved.
What really radicalized me was Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. I was paying close attention to the chain of events, and the story I’d been told—the idf as the most moral army in the world, and how Israeli society relates to that kind of militarization—just didn’t hold anymore, with that scale of civilian casualties. I remember seeing an article in the Times about Israeli citizens carrying a couch up to a hilltop overlooking Gaza, to cheer as the bombs fell. And the famous image of the little boys on the beach, essentially decapitated, exploded. And I just broke. I mean, it fell all at once. I spent weeks just weeping by myself. It was a hugely destabilizing event. I didn’t have any friends who were going through this. I didn’t have a Jewish life or a Jewish friend group and certainly not a left-Jewish one. I went to a Jewish Voice for Peace rally by myself and met some people there; they told me about IfNotNow, which was just getting started. That was more my speed at the time, because I was moving out of Zionism, I wasn’t an anti-Zionist at that moment.
Today, I’m not sure there’s as substantive a difference, but at the time there was a much larger one. jvp is really a solidarity organization, they mobilized for all the big Palestinian rallies. IfNotNow was more inward-looking, focused on intra-communal politics, and on protesting against the American-Jewish establishment itself—aipac, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the adl, Jewish Federation and so on. In its first action, IfNotNow activists blockaded the lobby of the Conference of Presidents and got arrested. These days, IfNotNow also does more solidarity work and jvp also does intra-communal work; some people act with both organizations. I got really involved at IfNotNow for several years. I was turning thirty at the time, a generational outlier; most of the organizers were much younger—people who, in light of Gaza, were processing for the first time that the things that they had been told were not true. A lot of the meetings in the beginning were like group therapy, asking questions like, ‘What are we going to do now?’, ‘What do we do with our families?’, ‘How do we move forward?’.