Centrist American Jewish discourse is what happens when a too-insular community, connected to a foreign ethnonationalist project, is defined by unrepresentative institutions with artificially constrained political horizons in a country already consumed by its own exceptionalism.

We think the Jewish example, with the loosening of legacy institutions’ undemocratic hold over national and internal discourse and political horizons, offers additional urgency to other diasporic communities with complicated familial and cultural ties to countries with ethnonationalist leaders (India, Hungary, Turkey and so many more). We encourage Leftists to abandon crumbling legacy institutions and the conflicts and hypocrisy they foster and depend on to distract from their lack of constituencies. Instead, let’s construct the institutions we need and strengthen our existing dynamic communities, built over decades and deeply intertwined with those around us. They are not perfect, but they provide sturdier foundations on which to build improved formations.

We know such institutions will come too late for far too many in Gaza. We can only hope they will come in time for the other, ongoing genocides and those that loom. The other side has the arms and the money. We have the practice of solidarity, a fundamental sense of mutual obligation among all people. It powers everything from climate justice to abolitionism, from immigrant justice to a future of expanded freedom — from the land between the river and the sea to the land between two shining, though rising, seas.

Rebecca Vilkomerson and I consider, What if all our organizations were more like our politics – democratic, pluralistic, and beautifully weird? We see the center losing its grip, and then we look away from that mess toward the exciting possibilities visible now in In These Times.

…one reason the Amazon workers’ protests and whistleblowing electrified the United States. To tell the truth, to tell it baldly, to tell it with a clear view of the consequences and to do it anyway — was a shocking and thrilling development in an otherwise deeply anti-democratic moment.”

I was very pleased to contribute a chapter to The Cost of Free Shipping, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese. The volume is available from Pluto Press and on JSTOR

Outside my apartment, essential workers braved the mass transit and the virus and the small paychecks. Inside our two rooms, Ajay would sleep and wake as his body needed, and the Zoom calls proliferated as more workers took action—their courage a bright hope against the sirens and the fog.

I was so honored to be asked to contribute a small essay to The Nation’s Scenes from the Pandemic.

The next day a surgeon removed my lentil-sized embryo and the fallopian tube it was stuck in. Left to grow, the embryo I wanted so badly to be my first child would have killed me. As a person of Indian descent, I’m familiar with lentils of many kinds and all sizes: fresh, dried, whole, split. Even now, ten years later, when I wash lentils, I pinch the thin discs between my fingers and marvel that the tiny potential of a person can be packed into such a small package.

 

What God Is Honored Here? is a collection of writings by Indigenous women and women of color on pregnancy and infant loss — the first ever. It is an honor, indeed, to have my essay, Binding Signs, included. The title is from a Lucille Clifton poem, a poem that reminds me of one I rely on often, by Aracelis Girmay, to the sea.

Everyone knows someone who has lost a pregnancy or an infant. The only thing that’s shocking is how little we talk about something so common, but that sort of silence — its violence — is bound into the meaning of the collection. Just like racism, sexual assault, and so much else unspoken in our society. This book part of the power of confronting that silence head-on, directly, refusing to shush or shy away from that which is hard, complicated and provokes ambivalence. This collection is offers a fierce and visionary solidarity – of many experiences, rightly their own, bound together. Whatever I think about God and honor – I do still believe in the power and solidarity that comes from speaking plainly, and from that – and my own unexpected happiness – I remain loudly optimistic.

 

 

Four years ago, my dad died. I wrote about sitting shiva and saying kaddish for him and the solidarity I found in that with Jews and non-Jews alike.

We Jews are a tiny community, full of weird and difficult and sometimes alienating rituals in languages many of us don’t speak. My dad wasn’t Jewish, but that did not diminish his enthusiastic participation in our ritual, even when he didn’t get it “right.” He never missed a seder or a break fast at my house, even when my mother couldn’t come. He showed up, and that was what mattered most. Similarly, while I sat shiva, my friends, acquaintances, colleagues, they showed up.

Solidarity is the idea that we don’t have to be the same to want the best for one another, that we can keep each other safe, we can share what we have, that we can find our way to consensus about how best to be in community together, better known as “democracy.” And that we will fight for it and for one another.”

I write with Maurice Mitchell in Newsweek about there is nothing – no guns, no bombs, no rhetoric – that will shake us from our communities’ commitments to one another.

And this return is one to memoir and creative non fiction, after so long as solely a poet. I’m proud to be multi-genre, multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-everything writer-person, and so pleased that this essay found a home on the Sisterhood blog of the Jewish Forward. Sending hope and strength to anyone facing infertility now, this National Infertility Week, and all year long.

The Jewish imperative to life helped me find air when I felt I might drown in a sea of overwhelming sadness. Without it, I was so focused on what was lost that I nearly lost track of what was not – my own self, my potential, my life full of creativity and friendship. Jewish ritual and teaching, with its unambiguous insistence on the soul of the mother and the not-soul of the embryo, restored that to me. It gave me the courage to grab strong hold of my new partner, my bashert, with whom I now make a Jewish home.

Last year, to mark my exit from these years of sorrow, I ran the NYC marathon. I also hired a Hebrew tutor. At her suggestion, I ran loop after loop in Prospect Park to the v’ahavta, learning the sounds, the rhythm and, in some way, inscribing the might of the prayer into muscle memory.

The rest is here.

 

I’m not Muslim and I’m the right kind of brown and I called my family in Mysore today as I do most Sundays because #daughterofanimmigrant and they asked, as they often do, “when are you coming to visit?” And I said, “now it is so hard” and I could hear the nods in a short silence seven thousand miles long. My uncles and aunt have a long running card game, and I heard the updated tally — my aunt is winning — and I said, don’t cheat, the vocabulary word for cheat — mosa — a pearl, passed to me from my great-great aunt Thayi who did enthusiastically, unapologetically cheat 

[and in her example I am redacting the rest of this poem because I have submitted it! cheating FTW!] but here is the end:

I’ve got a non-fiction piece up at JewSchool about standing strong in my Jewish values in this post-election moment. Any day I get to reference Sparticus  — the second movie credited with ending the Hollywood Blacklist under/after McCarthy —  is a good day!