The role of the Jewish artist, as Sasha Jonah Lazer once wrote, is to make diaspora irresistible. Onward.
I wouldn’t come to know entirely what this meant until my junior year of college when I enrolled in a Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) language course at Penn, my home institution. I had already grown my fervor for Yiddish throughout college — in the throes of Western Massachusetts, online, at school, and in the Borscht Belt — but became extolled and, in ways, disillusioned with the often singularized meaning of “the diaspora.” What is the use of a diaspora if you cannot love it evenly? If “Ashkenormativity” is somehow the pursuit of intellectual isolation, then I needed to be curious. I decided: There would be more to me than a singular Jewish familiarity. I would learn more diasporic Jewish languages than just the one to which I could claim heritage. Onward.
I was the only student in that Ladino class that semester. My instructor, an older Sephardic woman from the Upper West Side, would gab about the shortcomings of Ashkenazim — their avoidance of kitniyot, somewhat gauche mannerisms, and their hold on American culture. She would tell me, often, about the lack of comprehensive institutional supports for Ladino in North America. (As of writing, there is no such thing as the “Ladino Book Center.”) It’s a joyous blessing to learn so intimately but an even sadder thing to know that the Jewish–American heritage language space is straked in this way from the more major revitalizations of the Yiddish imaginary. Onward.
This past semester, I enrolled in Juhuri (Judeo-Tat), the language of the Jews in the Caucasus, taught by a graduate student in the comparative literature program. This came at a time of deep rifts in the Jewish community on campus, as the Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT) chapter came at odds with Hillel-aligned students, particularly in the context of the now-defunct Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Jewish learning in the classroom was more distraught and fragmented than ever. We came to class tired, almost with no reflex to learn, as the world would continue to unravel. Onward.
I didn’t know that four years ago my learning of Yiddish was soon to become my life. I didn’t yet know that to be a writer, or a journalist, or an artist, fighting for the spirit of Ashkenaz, a communion with non-Yiddish or un-Yiddish ways of understanding was necessary. We are more than just us. We need to remember this. Onward.
Diasporic Jewish language is a site of suffering and collective memory. Sometimes, even in the study of the language, it becomes paralyzing and engendered that this is the culture in which to philosophize. But those sites of discussion are more than their anguish or their inwardness. They are moments of communication outward — evidence that Jewish cultural reclamation can transmit alongside profound non-Jewish movements. That is solidarity, as much as it is a oneness with the treatment of the self. Onward.
My first article for New Voices detailed my (and my friends’) experiences at The Workers Circle’s annual trip to the historical Camp Kinder Ring, where the progressive Jewish organization’s College Network would arrive for the first time. My second chronicled the last century of Jewish masculinity, male fashion, and American and Zionist folk histories, and discussed the proclivity — often unfairly — for the Ashkenazi man to be deemed the hottest. Onward.
My work at Ayin Press, the small Jewish publishing press perhaps most known right now for Shaul Magid’s critical The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, saw me working with the team on digital publishing, social media design, and publicity. I greatly enjoyed consuming Ayin media — whether Devin E. Naar’s Ayin column, Moabet, on Sephardic Jewish legacies and cultural creation, or excerpts from up-and-coming books from a range of Jewish-informed authors. Onward.
The role of New Voices and Ayin Press, as I’ve learned, is to make the diaspora irresistible. And I’m grateful to have been there for the ride. Onward.
Working with the other New Voices Jewish Media Fellows has been refreshing. The accordion-playing ranch hand Ashton, with a love for Jewish apocrypha, was an oracle, blessed with the ability to know. Victoria, combining her background in astrophysics and journalistic writing, was a thinker, concerned with the ways of connecting. Gila, our impassioned editor, led us to commit ourselves to a new Jewish journalism: how to see the spiritual depths within ourselves, though also how to extend those efforts beyond our direct communities, in all forms of writing and creating. Onward.
Diaspora. It is irresistible. It is important. That, as a Fellow, I have successfully actualized.
Onward.
As much as I am a learner of Jewish languages, I have also come to understand that the Jewish journalism is in every sort of practice: in our self-made designs and zines, in our translations of unknown writers, in speaking and analyzing the words of bygone Jewish leaders and ancestors. As we convey every modality of being Jewish in the diaspora, we create a multitude of livings that knows only how to storytell: how to advocate for an unnamed voice, in the pursuit of voicing it totally.
The diaspora is that very thing that we might trust, even in its most refracted sense, to balance the Jewish world. It is — after all that we have done to wane it to the flungness of a people — still a totalizing constant. Those shared histories, converging, as always. May they take more shape.
I have always wanted that thing itself. I hope a part of me has found it here.
