In the past, Kayla Cohen has written for New Voices Magazine and ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness. Now, capturing the tension between a wide-ranging diaspora and conflict-ridden Jewish state in her new book, “The Full Severity of Our Connection,” author Kayla Cohen returns to New Voices to discuss her writing process, telling stories about the diaspora and navigating questions of peoplehood in a contemporary, global context as a Jewish college student.
What’s “The Full Severity of Our Connection” about?
My book tries to carefully examine our links to the non-Jewish world and its impacts on our own conceptions of Jewishness.
The book has three parts. The first tells the vibrant and fascinating stories of different Jewish Diaspora communities that I had the privilege of visiting in 2017 and 2018 with my gap year program. These stories include my interview with the first-Spanish born rabbi in Spain since the 1492 Inquisition, my meeting with the last remaining Jew in the Moroccan port town of Essouira, whose population used to be half Jewish, meeting a Muslim man who had been entrusted as the keyholder to a synagogue in Arazan, Morocco before its entire Jewish community left for Israel in the 50’s, my gap year program’s meeting with the Dali Lama in a community of Tibetan exiles in Dharamsla, India, and my visit to once illustrious centers of Jewish life that have been forgotten by the Jewish world, including Thessaloniki. The book’s second and third parts attempt (ambitiously) to synthesize and contextualize these stories within questions about Israel’s centrality to Jewish life, my travels to the Palestinian territories with a non-Jewish group and the experience of seeing Israel through non-Jewish eyes, and the anti-Israel culture on my college campus in Berkeley, California.
Jewish life looked vastly different in the places I visited: Prayers and piyutim, liturgical melodies, translations of the Bible, folklore, customary foods, clerical garb and even interpretations of Halakah differed incredibly between communities. The architecture of some synagogues resembled iron-beamed Gothic churches or marbled Greek Orthodox Churches; others looked like Moorish mosques or Hindu temples. Everywhere I went, centers of Jewish life reflected their host cultures and modern fashions.
Some Jewish communities have defined Jewishness as strong resistance to a foreign “other” (and this “other” takes many different forms). But in every place that I visited, I found it difficult to define a Jewish essence separate from the “foreign” elements of Diaspora host cultures. “The Full Severity of Our Connection” offers a new way to understand Jewish history and identity. Yes, the Diaspora spanned a two-thousand year period of existential threat, expulsion, and genocide that I do not dismiss. But the Diaspora, paradoxically, also created and shaped the diverse tradition that we celebrate today — and we, as American Jews, know very little about it!
The book explores this fundamental question: what defines Jewish peoplehood/personhood, if, at different places and points in time, it couldn’t so clearly be defined in resistance to an “other?” As my travels progressed, the meaning of home, the idea of a Jewish center, of a single people that had to preserve itself against the intellectual and cultural currents of modernity and majority culture began to dissolve as the meaning of “self” was constantly defined and redefined in the different communities I visited.
I figured the book would be a great starting point to undo this dichotomy between the Jewish self and other, to consider the effects of Jewishness’ own porosity, to try to discuss the cultural tensions that bind Jewish identity. At the same time, this book talks about our current moment and experience for American Jews — how we understand and make sense of or dismiss the occupation, its misrepresentations and misunderstandings and the politicization of Jewish identity and history on college campus, what it feels like to be caught in the crosshairs and what this moment seems to be demanding of us, a people spanning a global history and bearing multicultural traditions, if we point to our identities for direction.
Where did you grow up? What’s your background like? How do you think these things have influenced your work?
I was born and raised in LA and attended pluralistic Jewish day schools my whole life. This book is more a supplement than a rebuke to the limited curricula I received in day school about Jewish history and identity. I’m grateful to the schools that raised me and feel privileged to have even received a Jewish education in the first place, but Diaspora education has been lacking for generations, so many of my own teachers were raised in similar educational systems that did not teach about the diversity of the Jewish world or experience.
More personally, the diversity in the history of my patrilineal and matrilineal lines definitely made me more sensitive to questions about identity before identity itself became a sort of cliche or political drumbeat. (And I don’t think that’s unique — questions of self are common for mixed kids.) So I was interested in questions about othering, identity conflict, internal multitudes — things that ruptured the clean dichotomy of “self” and “other” and questioned the self’s singularity altogether —because they felt deeply personal. This definitely influenced my book because I explore similar questions in Jewish identity on big and small scales, sans the angsty melodrama.
As a student at UC Berkeley, I imagine your campus community has a wide range of opinions and attitudes with regard to Israel and Diaspora. What’s it like to be a student there, asking these questions about Jewish interconnection?
UC Berkeley is considered a bastion of antisemitism to my community in LA. When people find out I go to Berkeley, I feel like they’re referring to the same script (a “how to not let your kid fall through the anti-Zionist communist wayside”) that I have yet to discover: “I heard there are so many antisemites there!” “Everyone hates Israel!” “Is it really that bad?” “How do you do it?!” “You know, I heard….”
It’s definitely divisive. And there definitely is antisemitism. And most non-Jewish groups are unaware of it. I think I’ve become more aware of these things as I’ve grown in the institution. It’s painful and definitely colors many students’ college experiences for those who choose to engage in conversations about Jewish representation, Israel, and antisemitism.
But equally difficult is the school’s size. The campus is big enough for people to cling to their own tribe, and there are many tribes. Interaction between them is very limited. I’ve made individual friends who were very curious about my gap year, who learned a lot about Jews and asked me questions about my family, and, who in turn, taught me many things about my own misconceptions about their respective communities. But overall, moments of interaction are rare — and when they happen, I feel hyper-conscious about my Jewishness since it’s become so politicized. And it’s fascinating because most of these tribes share similar politics and values. There are so many misconceptions and misunderstandings to be undone and they’re usually just weaponized and go unquestioned. This book can maybe foster and supplement future conversations between those tribes.
Tell us a little about the title.
There are layers embedded in layers here. Bear with me: The title of my book, “The Full Severity of Our Connection” is a reference to Yehuda Amichai’s poem, “The Full Severity of Mercy,” which itself is a catachresis, a play on the idiom “The Full Severity of Judgement.”
Traditionally, in Jewish jurisprudence, compassion (rachamim) is seen in direct opposition to strict judgement (din). Compassion is defined by flexibility of feeling, a doing-away of procedure and proof, the blurry and hard-to-pin-down sympathy that sometimes rises within us and is often quieted by a “voice of reason.” The Severity of Judgement, in contrast, is an imperative to see the law through-and through, to defend the truth in an armor of logic and ward off faulty emotion. So Amichai, in describing mercy as severe, essentially links compassion with the same kind of severity, breadth, and analytical strictness as judgement.
My book, “The Full Severity of Our Connection” is an extension of Amichai’s project. His poem ruptures the dichotomy of judgement/compassion. My book ruptures the dichotomy of us/them in how we, the Jewish community (in all of its internal diversity), tell our story and demand justice.
Why do conversations about diaspora matter for young Jews today, right now?
Jewish identity has become kind of diffuse – almost like a Diaspora in of itself – because it’s dispersed into different political and academic corners: in the far left and far right, in conversations and literature in Jewish establishment and anti-establishment groups, on college campuses and JCC’s, and everywhere in between.
The scope of the Diaspora is dizzying, but studying the Diaspora does matter. In fact, I’d argue that the only way out of our current divisive political moment is to study it. Different communities within the Jewish world have localized different “others” (with some even choosing other Jews!) who don’t share the same politics or agree on history, particularly Israel’s history. Campus life reflects that. At Berkeley, non-Jewish groups, particularly social-justice oriented groups and groups representing marginalized people on campus, don’t care to include Jews in their activism and calls for allyship unless Jews revoke their Zionism at the door. Antisemitism, i.e., where something it antisemitic or not, has itself has become a callous debate topic. Conversations between these communities — within and outside of the Jewish community’s own politicized body on my campus — have never felt productive to me, and it feels harder and harder to foster honest conversations as Jewish identity and history themselves become more and more politicized, as they themselves develop into placemakers for kinds of ideologies utilized by both the Jewish establishment and non-Jewish left. I feel jaded, and I’m assuming there are other young Jews on campus right now who are feeling the same way. Some are turning to documenting and reporting instances of antisemitism. That work is critical and important, especially since 67% of this generation doesn’t even know what Auschwitz is, according to a recent ADL report. But there are other conversations to be had. Young Jews need to do some reflecting and re-examine the foundations of our identities, of our own legacies, which I think can better lend understanding of how fragile Jewishness is, wrought with all of these tensions, and how the Jewish world needs to reshape conversations about justice and relation to the other; and, in tandem, I’m hoping young non-Jewish people invested in conversations about political othering and collective healing will read this too to give us a chance to contribute to and advance conversations about our own representation.
In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned that having a “mixed” identity and living on a border (both literally and figuratively) is at the center of this project. As an author, how do you address tensions of identity and politics in your writing or in your personal life?
I think I see a lot of things through a prism of conflict, and I do that on a micro-scale in examining my interviews with interesting Jewish leaders and on a macro-scale in trying to make sense of Jewish identity and Israel’s identity as a whole. But I’m careful to not prescribe or reconcile. I’m interested in highlighting moments of interaction, tension, conflict, and paradox wherever they may be in the book and for what they are. Mixed identity is just an example of internal conflict, and I think most Jews to some extent can relate, considering the many cultures/ethnicities an individual Jew may straddle.
What do you want other Jews of our generation to glean from this book?
I don’t think Jews should stop talking about antisemitism, but we should make efforts to explore the richness of Diaspora culture, be curious about our family’s legacies, and be skeptical of language diminishing the great influences of Diaspora host cultures on Jewish practice, thought, and identity. We need to consider Jewish porosity — and not just antisemitic persecution — as binding characteristics of our experience. Many non-Zionists point to the Diaspora as a way to delegitimize a Jewish state; many Zionists point to the Diaspora to explain the imperative of a Jewish state. I want to push readers beyond the political legacies of the Diaspora altogether to reconsider how it’s shaped a really unique, fragile identity fraught with incredible tensions that are rarely considered beyond the scope of Jewish whiteness/Jewish privilege in America. And all readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, should use Diaspora identity itself as a map to traverse all other related conversations — about Israel, Zionism, the Palestinian plight — beyond politicization and weaponization. ⋄
You can view the Indiegogo campaign for “The Full Severity of Our Connection” here and support the project by buying an advanced copy of the book.
