Speaker A:
Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I’m your host today, Inman Nerwin, and today we are once again talking about Jewish anarchism. And I’m really excited to have some folks from the new publication Circle Aleph, uh, and we’re gonna talk about some really fun and cool stuff, I think, and a weirdly humorous article that I’m personally excited for everyone to hear about. But before we get to that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts, and here’s a jingle from another show on the network.
Speaker B:
Where did you get this?
Speaker C:
Your friendly neighborhood anarchist.
Speaker B:
More of an anarchist militant.
Speaker D:
People involved in social struggles and then everybody else.
Speaker C:
People have been waiting for some content.
Speaker B:
Radio show, The Final Straw, and I’m William Goodenough.
Speaker D:
I’m Percy Goodness.
Speaker A:
TheFinalStrawRadio.NoBlogs.org.
Speaker D:
If you’re listening, you are the resistance.
Speaker A:
And we’re back. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, y’all. Could y’all introduce yourselves with your Names, pronouns, and I guess a little bit about either your roles in this publication or anything that you want to say about yourself as a person outside of the publication, or not. Be mysterious, anonymous, whatever.
Speaker B:
Cool.
Speaker C:
Yeah. Hi, my name is Shmuley, pronouns he/him, based in the US Southwest. And For this project, for at least issue 1, I’ve been doing a lot of the printing and distributing and things like that, as well as general input.
Speaker B:
Hi, I’m going by Shadow. I use they/them pronouns mostly, and I also am currently in the US Southwest. For the first issue, I did a lot of editing and the layout and graphic design work, obviously with the input and help of my friends. But yeah, also been doing some communications stuff.
Speaker D:
Hi, I’m Matt. I go by any pronouns, and my focus is really on the editing of the issue, and I like to write. Yeah, not much else to say, I think.
Speaker A:
Awesome. So I want to start out with, I guess, just what is this publication and what are kind of its goals, missions, curiosities, etc.?
Speaker B:
Yeah, so Circle Oliph is an offline publication. We all felt the need for a forum or platform to develop Jewish anarchism further than where it’s at now, and looked back on the history and traditions of other Jewish anarchists and felt that a publication was something both within our skill sets to produce and also something that aligns really closely with the day-to-day lives of Jewish anarchists in the past as well. Oh yeah, I guess the other thing to add is that ideally it’s a periodical, so we’ll be coming out with more issues of it. It’s not just like a one-time situation.
Speaker C:
Yeah, I guess I’d say it was heavily inspired by both the current offline anarchist newspapers that you come across, as well as the OG Yiddish anarchist newspapers of the late 1800s, early 1900s. And kind of the combination of that is where I guess we sort of created Circle Aleph.
Speaker D:
Yeah, I think for me, like, I don’t really know what Jewish anarchism is anymore because I think that, you know, there’s a lot of debates about whether, like, what place religion has in, like, anarchist politics. And so I think a big goal for me with doing this publication, working on this publication, is just trying to figure that out. Like, is Jewish anarchism anything? Is it, is it just Jewish people being anarchists? Like, what does it mean to be Jewish? Like, these are all questions I think we’re trying to explore with Circle Aleph.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah. That does kind of supplant what was going to be my next question, which is, what does Jewish anarchism mean to y’all? Which is like, I don’t know, a topic that we’ve explored a lot on this show and a lot within Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, but that could just be your answer.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s worth a more direct answer too, though. And I think the main answer is Jewish anarchism is different to every Jewish anarchist, and most of us probably have some competing ideas within our our own understandings as well. But yeah, I think historically Jewish anarchism was not completely, but largely a secular movement. And that’s really been changing in the last 10 to 15 years, spirituality in Jewish anarchism than in the past. And a lot of what I’ve been kind of thinking of as alternative orthodoxies emerge. And I think Anarchism allows Jewish anarchists to be religious in the current moment. I think that’s what’s happening.
Speaker A:
Cool. Yeah, yeah. I had this— this is a little bit of a funny, embarrassing moment, but I’m going to say it because it happened. I was talking to— I’m not Jewish, but I was talking to a friend sort of about Jewish anarchism, but it was more about religion. And I had this funny question where I was like, okay, I’m going to ask this embarrassing question, but I’m just curious. I know a lot of Jewish anarchists. Do y’all believe in God and religion? And it’s like the answer that I got was like, I don’t know, and varies.
Speaker B:
And yeah, it’s sort of like if you get an answer that’s anything other than like, eh, it depends, I think that person is wrong, but that’s the best I can do.
Speaker A:
Totally, totally. What, I guess, like, what are some of the, I guess, like, historical aspects of Jewish anarchism that really stood out to y’all as, like, things that you wanted to continue to explore, either within, like, Jewish anarchism as, like, an identity, a cultural movement, or just, like, how publications were I’m really inspired by, like, the distroist aspect of, like, the early anarchist movement and how they were always just, like, slinging pamphlets and newspapers to just get the word out and further the discussions and argue with each other in the margins of this weekly newspaper.
Speaker C:
Or they would print pictures of their homies who were locked up and sell them as a bail fund strategy and things like that and just Anarchists and printers, it’s a great relationship. And when I was reading about the early Jewish anarchist movement, I just saw them all as distros, ’cause they’re always just complaining about their printer’s broken, or they need to raise money to get a new space to keep their printing press. So yeah, that’s just my personal inspiration from it.
Speaker E:
Relatable.
Speaker A:
If anyone who’s listening is familiar with Eberhard Press, they print a lot of our fancy zines, and they’re of constantly having crazy press problems and people should go buy things from them right now to support that press. But it is funny, kind of like what we— on the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast, we just did our monthly feature for February was about this Russian anarchist newspaper called Delatruda. And it was funny to these people, Oksana and Ben translated a bunch of segments from it, and it was published in exile in Paris by Nestor Makhno and his homies. And reading some of the things, it was like nothing has changed. We’re still writing the same things. It’s like we have to destroy the prisons. We’re not anarchists if we’re not supporting anarchist prisoners. And we need to raise this money for bail or for commissary. And if you give us 17 cents, then we will put your initials at the end of the next article. And I’m like, nothing has changed, and that’s comforting.
Speaker D:
Yeah, I think that kind of leads into our next issue topic, which is going to be spiral time, which I don’t want to you know, talk out of turn, but, uh, it’s— that is definitely something that’s really like fascinated us and has like motivated us in terms of, you know, our future work with Circle Off and just like trying to explore like how do we deal with the past, like how do we deal with, uh, you know, what Jewish anarchism used to be in this like sort of, uh, you know, I think as someone maybe mentioned before, like this golden age of Jewish anarchism. And, uh, I found it interesting that You know, I think you brought up Jewish history and Jewish identity in your question, and it’s just those things are so intertwined because unless you are really passionate about, like, uh, Jew— the linkage between Jewish anarchism and religion, it does become an open question of, like, what is Jewish anarchism. So a lot of people return to that history and they say, like, well, look at Emma Goldman, look at, you know, Alexander Berkman, or even, you know, other figures who people might not even know who are Jewish, like Murray Bookchin or David Graeber or somebody like that. And I think it’s an important question for us to answer is, how do we deal with that history? Do we just sort of say, let’s do that again? Do we say, let’s do something totally different? How do we grapple with that? And I think that’s what we’re trying to answer with our next issue, but we can talk about that more later.
Speaker B:
Or even not necessarily answer so much as ask in more details. I think it’s how it’s gonna go.
Speaker D:
Totally. Yeah, totally.
Speaker A:
To back up just a tiny bit, I wanna talk a little bit about the title of the publication, Circle Aleph. What is the significance of the title? What is an aleph? Is it just like a—
Speaker E:
Is this just—
Speaker A:
is it convenient, fun wordplay, or is there more going on?
Speaker C:
Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, equivalent to A, I guess. So I think we all, in discussing what we wanted the title of the publication to be, wanted something explicitly anarchist, but not edgy or what have you. So we kind of just settled on Circa Aleph, since the audience being a Jewish audience would sort of make that connection, we all decided that I think that would be a good, simple title moving forward.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think similarly to how the circle A is a symbol for anarchism internationally, the circle aleph has become the equivalent for Jewish anarchism.
Speaker D:
Something else we really thought about was also how we create new symbols and we really settled on the pomegranate as a new symbol that was kind of shorn of its associations with Zionism, where we were very adamant, we’re not going to have a Star of David there because even though it’s not necessarily Zionist, there’s just too much baggage associated with it. And I think we set out to really create something new with this. And I think that using the pomegranate as a symbol with the olive inlaid with that really states something about what we are doing aesthetically and how that links with our politics.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it also speaks to the growing movement of Jewish anarchism that has blossomed, especially either evidenced by or with Cindy Milstein’s book, Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart. That symbol of the pomegranate, circle, olive is— I think someone came up with it and submitted it to that book, and it has become a really popular, or growingly popular symbol of Jewish anarchism. I think in the submission in that book, it was in order to represent the varied and sweet differences within our Jewishness, but also within our anarchism. I think it was something like that.
Speaker A:
Yeah, what is up with pomegranates as, I guess, a symbol? I see it all the time within radical Jewish imagery and publication. I feel like the only significance I really have for pomegranates is about Persephone and some funny cult in Sicily.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it’s Yeah. It’s one of those things that’s like a symbol for many cultures that originate in West Asia and the Mediterranean broadly. But I think for Jews, we don’t have a lot of visual symbols, but the pomegranate is one that’s been in our art and visual culture for a really long time, and it’s one of the few that doesn’t have— that’s really recognizable that doesn’t have an association that has been completely co-opted by Zionism. For example, in a lot of really old Jewish art, there’s the Lions of Judah, and from Jewish art in the Russian Empire, there’s the 2 eagles. And there’s all of these symbols that either are really part of these systems of domination that Jewish anarchists don’t support, or that have been actively co-opted by Zionism as something that can only represent the colonization of Palestine to us now, even if that’s not what they were kind of about in the first place. So I think it’s both a, we’ve had it forever, and now that these other symbols are kind of burnt, let’s develop a new visual language to connect us with our past, but also set a course for the future.
Speaker D:
Yeah, I think for me, just another small thing is that a pomegranate as a plant, the tree is a very hardy plant. It grows in environments that other plants might sort of struggle to. It can grow in a kind of low moisture environment. And so I think that also symbolizes a sort of resilience that I think we aspire to as anarchist Jews. I mean, it’s very difficult to be anarchist, and it can be difficult at times to be Jewish, and that symbol means a lot to me personally for that reason.
Speaker C:
Yeah, for me growing up, um, in— I grew up Chabad, and there’s always a bunch of silly stories that they tell kids, uh, like about the reason for things. Yeah, the tunnel cult.
Speaker A:
Uh, sorry, sorry.
Speaker C:
But I— in Chabad, I was taught that the pomegranate is the represents Judaism because— or is a Jewish fruit because it has 613 pomegranate seeds, and that represents the 613 mitzvot, or good deeds, things you can do that are good. And growing up, I just believed that, like, didn’t think twice. I was like, yeah, there’s 613 pomegranate seeds. But later, just learning it’s one of the many symbolic fruits from Judaism. I think it’s really nice to sort of start creating our own symbols and go from there.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah. I wanted to ask y’all a little bit about the editor’s foreword in this first edition of— I’m gonna say it right this time—
Speaker E:
Circle Aleph.
Speaker A:
And yeah, I don’t know, tell me about the foreword and tell me about— this is my very articulate question— tell me about the foreword or what did y’all set out to do with this?
Speaker D:
Yeah, I think for me at least, because we all contributed to the foreword, so I can’t speak for everybody. It’s a collaborative project. But I think for me, I really wanted to just justify not only the existence of the magazine, but also some of the choices that we made. And I think that, Shadow, for example, we were really aligned on that. For example, really explaining why it is it’s print only being a big part of that. But also, I think, for example, the prompt that we went with for the first issue in our call for submissions, we just said, what is Jewish anarchism? Can people address this? Can we explain this? And I think that we sort of wanted to tease out like what— why that’s even a question. Like maybe to some people it’s obvious why that’s a question. And I think to other people they would say, well, why can’t you be Jewish and anarchist? And I think that you need to explain both sort of what you think Judaism is and what you think anarchism is in order to answer that question. And I think that although we might have our opinions about it, like it was really interesting to me just to see how other people felt Uh, and to really like, uh, stimulate that sort of discussion. Because I think that, as we mentioned, this is like one of the first things that we mentioned is just like, it’s— it is crazy how we would go around, we try to, you know, travel and to meet other anarchists, and we would just always keep running into other Jewish people. And I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’s anything about anarchism that is inherently Jewish. It’s just It’s just an interesting thing that there are so many Jewish anarchists, and I think that that prompted some degree of thought or reflection about, like, why that might be.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think this is an experience a lot of us share as well, where we would be in various, like, anarchist projects or settings, and then all of a sudden we would be, like, trying to plan something and, oh, we can’t do that week because it’s the first day of Passover or something like that. So just over and over it comes up, and I guess we just wanted to turn our attention to that rather than just being like, huh, that’s interesting, and moving on. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker A:
What is kind of the importance to y’all of it being an offline versus online publication?
Speaker B:
I think part of it is that we don’t have a ton of people Working on it. So one thing is just really no one wanted to run a website, and then we sort of ran with that and we were like, yeah, print-only is actually also pretty cool. And there’s a lot of reasons that we can think of that make it both more interesting and that have a little bit of an insulating effect on the distribution and— discussions that happen within the magazine. And yeah, I think we also are all really into the material culture aspect of having a print-only magazine where you have something and engage with it in the physical world before anything else, in the physical and also the social world. And most people probably aren’t hearing about the magazine and then reading it without talking to anybody.
Speaker C:
Right.
Speaker B:
Because you can’t just download a PDF at this point, but you either have to talk to someone you know has a copy or go to a local bookstore or info shop, or at the very least request a copy from us through our email. And so, there’s some social interaction that happens, and we’re really hoping to not just have it as a side effect, but as also a really prominent goal of putting this magazine out. We’re trying to strengthen and build not only the ideas around Jewish anarchism, but the people who have them. And yeah, offline seemed like a good way to facilitate that growth.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah.
Speaker D:
Yeah, I think that it also, for me, there is definitely an aversion on our part as well, just to the sort of culture of online, like the culture of social media and the way in which it sort of cheapens everything and things just sort of like, it’s like this continuous stream of information with no real sort of breaks or differentiation at some point. And I think that we really wanted this to stand out as something unique and also to sort of encourage a level of investment that goes beyond just sort of reading something. Like, it’s beyond just reading something on your phone. It’s It’s a level of investment where you have to, as Shadow was saying, you have to talk to people, you have to go somewhere in person. I think that that feeds into our preference as anarchists for action in the world, not just saying things but doing things. Even though at the end of the day, it’s a magazine, this is not a direct action, it is just words, but at the same time, I think it lends itself to action in a way that an online publication would not, because I think it’s attached to something. It’s attached to a culture. It’s attached to a real-world practice of going to anarchist spaces.
Speaker A:
Totally.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it also conveys to people who might be our readers a certain commitment to the bit of being anarchist, not only in the ideas we have, but Yeah. The way that we do them and the ways that we live our lives. And yeah, I think we’re in good company with other offline publications. And it is also something that’s really different from other Jewish publications, even ones that are on the left or whatever. A lot of those are online only rather than offline only if they have an offline component at all. So I think there’s like the content part of it we thought would be affected well by being offline, and we wanted to convey a certain level of commitment to our audience as well.
Speaker A:
Yeah. And it’s a good lineage to be in. I mean, whatever. I feel like maybe it’s nostalgia, but there is a certain beauty to being only able to find things by going out and seeking them in the real world. And I like that. I don’t know. The endless content spew is not— I don’t like it. It’s not a good look. I wanted to talk about some of the pieces in here, which Dear listener, you can read by going out and finding this publication.
Speaker B:
If you really can’t find one also though, you can email us at [email protected], and we’ll mail you or you and your friends copies to read together and discuss and write about and send us your submissions for whatever issue we’re working on at that point.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah. Yeah, I want to talk about this piece, We Were Never Meant to Assimilate. And I feel like it tugs at something that I’ve been really interested in since I was a teen or something, where it was like we were assigned some kind of annoying essay task that was defending or attacking some kind of opinion, and we were supposed to write a dumb essay about it. But it was like about the legality of like queer marriage. And it brought up this really strange thing for me, which was like this idea of assimilation where like, like as a young queer, like I did not understand the desire to assimilate. I did understand the practicalities of like having to deal with like legal structures that we’re involved in and we’re forced to be involved in. But like this idea of assimilation, I was like, this feels funny. This doesn’t feel like what we’re supposed to do. And I’m curious kind of how the idea of assimilation comes up for y’all or in this piece.
Speaker B:
I think something to be said as a reflection of what you just said about being a young queer and considering assimilation from that standpoint is that, yeah, the law is an assimilating force. It exists so that we are sublimated into mainstream culture. That’s the point of it, and how it works is making life a lot easier to live if you do.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
And so I think assimilation often doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like something you either have to do or that you can try to avoid in one or another way through a lot of effort. And, yeah, I think this piece is a great reflection of The push-and-pull dynamic of both not wanting to assimilate, but also not wanting to be separate from the rest of humanity. And those are the two poles within at least American contemporary Judaism that I really see happening.
Speaker A:
It seems like a pretty rough spectrum. It’s assimilation or extreme antisemitism. And what’s kind of in between or antithetical to both of those.
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker D:
And this is maybe a bit non sequitur to what you were just talking about, but something that I think is a really important part of this article is just sort of the allure of fundamentalism and the way in which people rightfully feel alienated from the society so that where Like you were saying about, there’s really no analog, I think, to this. Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe there’s no analog to this for queer people. But at least in terms of Judaism, there is a certain— there is sort of the option of, well, we will isolate, we will hunker down into this fundamentalism where we sort of reject, as the meme goes, reject modernity and just sort of do our own thing. That’s detached from everything else. And, you know, in many ways, it’s very— it is very misogynistic. It’s very queerphobic. It’s very— it can be very, like, ethnocentric. And I think that for a lot of people, when they see that, they say, well, I mean, if the alternative to that is assimilating into, like, white Christian American or European culture, then, well, I’ll take—
Speaker A:
I’ll take that.
Speaker D:
I’ll take assimilation because, you know, my, my values don’t align with fundamentalism. My values don’t align with that because I, you know, see women and queer people as people or whatever sort of, you know, philosophy they might go by. And I think that something that this piece really explores is, is there, is there a way beyond this dichotomy? Like, is there a possibility to embrace like a Jewish culture that is not, you know, um, that, that is truly Jewish but is not like fundamentalist, that it’s not just trying to be the Jewish flavor of an assimilated whiteness.
Speaker C:
I also find it really cool how, I mean, us here are a small portion of like the whole team that makes Circle Arif, but all of us come from like a different background of Judaism, and, uh, whether it be we Orthodox Chabad upbringing or Reconstructionist or Conservative or Reformed. But all of us have experienced, I’d say, like the same amount of like antisemitism and regardless of where they fall on that spectrum of isolation and assimilation in their upbringing. And we’ve all come to anarchism the same way. So I think the piece itself doesn’t really have a good solution, and I don’t think there ever is going to be one, but it’s just going to be It’s a matter of just, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with that.
Speaker B:
I think also, like a lot of diaspora cultures, Jews in the US have to really decide what their culture is and build a full picture of it for ourselves. And yeah, I know this is an experience that a lot of other diasporic cultures also have because People tell us all the time, like the subtitle on the magazine, it says Circle Aleph: Anarchy in Diaspora. And so when we’ve tabled that stuff or talked to people about it, people are like, oh, what diaspora are you talking about? And then we get into really interesting conversations about the ways that we experience connection and disconnection from our cultures and histories on different historical lines. But a lot of the feelings are like, very mirrored. And I think that’s also really interesting.
Speaker A:
Oh, yeah. There’s one part of this article essay piece that is about how Zionism supplanted internationalism. And I’m curious if y’all could say a little bit about that. How did Zionism supplant internationalism? Also, if no one’s prepared to talk about that, we can skip that.
Speaker D:
Yeah. I think that there’s a notion that there’s a fallenness to contemporary Jewish culture, almost that we chose Zionism, we chose assimilation as this conscious thing where we sold out Palestinians, we sold out the progressive movement, etc., like leftism for— we sold ourselves out for the promise of assimilation. That’s a sort of notion. I think that’s floating around. And I think that the point of this article, it’s just talking about sort of the material changes, the societal shifts that are happening in Jewish culture that lead to Zionism becoming more of the dominant political paradigm within Judaism. And I think that that’s a process that is a lot slower and more sporadic people might think. There might be people out there who think that after the founding of the State of Israel, Jews automatically supported it, and that’s not really true. I think that there’s always been a kind of hesitancy, and it’s sort of, at least until maybe relatively recently, a sort of arm’s distance attitude towards Zionism among a lot of American Jews. And I think it’s important to explain that attitude and explain the the sort of growing embrace of Zionism by a lot of Jews as a function of changes within Jewish culture and not just as a moralistic thing. Because if we try to explain it as a moralistic thing, I don’t think we’re really going to be changing that anytime soon.
Speaker A:
Are you familiar with the— I guess my friend Aurora told me this anecdote or piece of history that I was You know, not surprised by, but like horrified by nonetheless. It’s like after World War II, like, and after like a lot of the like Yiddish like partisan movements were— had wrapped up what they were currently dealing with, that a bunch of wealthy Zionists sort of sabotaged a lot of people’s chances at like either going back to their homes or immigrating to other places like the United States or wherever, you know, specifically to force people into choosing another alternative, which was to go participate in the 1948 Nakba. And I don’t know, it’s like a lot of the partisan movements in World War II felt very internationalist and felt a lot like what internationalism looks like today. And to see a lot of that just get funneled into the part many of the genocide of Palestine is just utterly heartbreaking to me.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people were promised something that could never have existed with the founding of the State of Israel that was advertised explicitly as ending the need for internationalism because Jews would have their own state. Like, I think it’s like a direct thing here. Zionists were trying to tell Jews at large that Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel would make internationalism obsolete because the state would, like, do the job of, like, protecting the nation rather than having to have, like, Cooperation and relationships across borders. So yeah, I think it’s an interesting history, but one that is represented in a lot of different ways, in part because of the really effective propaganda of the State of Israel, and in part because until— basically until the current Gen Z generation, a lot of Jews had so much emotional baggage tied up in the project of the founding of Israel one way or another that it’s hard to tease through all of that and get to something that is clear.
Speaker D:
Yeah, and I think it’s an interesting point because something else I want to flag from this article is just how— this is only mentioned briefly, But it’s just how much of a leftist project Israel was originally. And I think that explaining the appeal of Zionism to a lot of people as a sort of— it’s like a left-wing Jewish national liberation movement at first. And I think that the promise of a socialist Judaism, the promise of peace in the Middle East, it was a very real argument. idea to a lot of people, no matter how fictional the reality of it was in a lot of ways. It was a very real idea until the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in the late ’90s. And I think that it’s only slowly faded. And I think for the new generation of leftist Jews, there isn’t as much of an attachment to the sort of liberatory promise of Zionism anymore. I think that people are more and more seeing Israel for what it actually is, which, you know, bear in mind, it’s, it’s like any other country on earth. Like, there, there are left-wing Israelis, there are right-wing Israelis, but the current political reality of Israel is very right-wing. And I think that a lot of American Jews or Jews around the world don’t necessarily understand that. But I think that younger Jews definitely do.
Speaker C:
Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think it’s I mean, it might be optimistic or naive of me to say, but like, I personally think that we’ll see like the fall of like, like diasporic support for Zionism, like in our lifetimes, because compared to like the sort of origins of Zionism where it was like a utopian, like, like Matt was saying, it was a utopian socialist project where you’re going to be a free worker living on the land that was promised to you and And there’s also the reality of the pogroms people were facing and antisemitism people were facing and not really being presented any viable alternative to sort of escape that. So whereas now people’s appeal to Zionism, you see an active genocide going on to maintain the colonial project of Israel. And I don’t think anyone in their right mind growing up could fall for that regardless of how much brainwashing. But like I said, it might be naive of me, but yeah.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it also— like, the disillusionment that you’re seeing happen, Shmuley, is also really spoken to by how many Jewish anarchists found anarchism through that process, like looking at the state of Israel and what it’s doing to Palestinians and people also beyond its borders makes people examine how states everywhere do similar things. And from there, people often find anarchism as a way to understand that statecraft itself is part of the cause of this evildoing. And unfortunately, the current realities of the State of Israel make that abundantly clear.
Speaker E:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
To sort of switch gears a little bit as we begin to run out of time, I wanted to ask y’all about this other piece that y’all wanted to talk about that was one of the ones that I did not read, so I don’t have any really articulate questions. But I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the serpent Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things that I liked about this piece.
Speaker D:
I think the gist of it is that I think it’s a really good blend of a lot of the different strains of thought we were talking about, like trying to reinterpret Judaism as an intellectual and religious tradition in an anarchist way, but at the same time, I think embracing that tradition of radicalism that you would associate with the more secular Jewish anarchists of the past. And I think that, you know, I won’t spoil too much of it, but there is a really great quote from an anarchist involved in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in the early— was this the late ’90s or the early 2000s? But regardless—
Speaker E:
Late ’90s.
Speaker D:
Late ’90s, yeah. And, you know, regardless, like, I think it really— I think that the writer really captured in some sense, what we had in our minds in some inchoate, intangible way when we thought about what is Jewish anarchism. And that was something I really appreciated about that article.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it captures a lot of things that are undeniably Jewish and undeniably from anarchist traditions. It has a lot of both of these qualities to like a really skilled craftsmanship as well within the writing. It’s by Anastasia Botlillith, who’s a friend of a friend, and she did a really good job bringing all of these things together in ways that felt powerful and also very seamless to a lot of people, including us, and really understood what we were trying to get people to submit to the project without really having discussed it in advance, and that felt really special to us. We won’t read the whole piece on air, but yeah, I hope that you’ll like it if you check it out.
Speaker A:
Are there any quotes or segments that y’all do want to tease? The answer can be no.
Speaker D:
Yeah, I don’t necessarily want to quote from it, but I think In order to summarize, it’s a sort of, if you want, a subversion of the typical narrative of the Garden of Eden story from Genesis or Bereshit. And it sort of sees the snake as the realization of an ideal rather than sort of the negative of the morality of Judaism. And I think that It’s that sort of subversion that is really, in my opinion, necessary in order to define a religious Jewish anarchism. You cannot, in my opinion, just sort of say something along the lines of, well, God said he is king, so there can’t be other kings, there can’t be other rulers, we’re only ruled by God. I think that that, to me, is a bit of a dodge. Now, I don’t want to uh, tell other people who think that, that they’re wrong. It’s just that I think that Jewish anarchism requires like a reevaluation of morality, like in a kind of Nietzschean sense, like that, uh, we can’t, uh, we can’t like operate within the same paradigm. And so I think it’s, it’s like a really interesting reading in, in a Jewish way, um, it like a, uh, almost like a sort of, uh, It’s a traditionally Jewish sort of reading the text in a way that’s creative in order to get at an idea that is really important and essential to who we are as Jews. And yeah, there’s so many things I love about this article, but yeah, that’s sort of how I would summarize it.
Speaker A:
Yeah, I love it. I love the idea, and I love a critique of snakes as evil creatures, and that is one of my extreme interests in it.
Speaker D:
Yeah, no, snakes rock. They’re great animals.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it’s also another opportunity for making our own symbols or adding our own valences to existing symbols where The snake in the Garden of Eden traditionally has been like the force of evil, or in other interpretations, like slightly different things. But really taking a hard look at the snake in one of these foundational stories leads us to like a symbol that we can really like resonate with and like take as our own as well.
Speaker D:
I might be just speaking totally out of my ass here because I’m not an expert on this topic at all, but it almost of feels like an attempt at like a Jewish liberation theology in a way. Like, it’s, you know, like, and I might just be totally butchering this, but just sort of like in a sense of like, no, God wants us to be liberated. Like, it’s not a contradiction or like an apostasy to say, like, as a Jew, you should want like the liberation of all people.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker D:
Yeah.
Speaker C:
I’d be down to read this quote. And like Nachash, we as Jewish anarchists are constantly smeared as outside agitators. Anytime we bare our fangs as accomplices in liberation struggles with our neighbors. The serpent, I would argue, is our tradition’s oldest example of one such outside agitator. Was the serpent deceiver, as the later commentators claim, or liberator? Was the snake not also a neighbor to all other beasts in Gan Eden? Everyone focuses on the snake crawling up from the earth, crawling upon the earth, and losing its limbs, few stopping to consider that it was in exile the snake first learned to molt.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah. There’s this— sorry to bring in some other stories, but there’s this story from Greece about this person Cassandra who was cursed to have the gift of prophecy, but no one would believe her. And one interpretation of her name and her myth is that she was whispered to by snakes. And I’m like, the snakes are whispering truth and prophecy.
Speaker E:
They are not the liars.
Speaker A:
It is people that suck.
Speaker D:
Yeah. And this might be getting a little far afield, but I do kind of feel like, at least how I understand it, the snake encouraged them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. And in some way, I think that You can say that that was like a bad thing, but I think that it’s, it’s like too reductive to say that it was like a bad thing that we have knowledge of good and evil, right? Like, there would be no like Judaism, there would be no like world as we know it if we didn’t have like the ability to make moral choices. So it’s not like, it’s not like the snake is necessarily evil per se. It’s, it’s just like, like the snake is— the snake was punished for disobeying God. It wasn’t necessarily punished for giving humans knowledge of good and evil. I think that it’s in many ways like the meaning of that part of the Torah is, you know, it’s both a blessing and a curse to be able to make moral choices, but we are cursed nonetheless to make those choices. And so we can’t like abdicate that responsibility. At the end of the day, it’s an irreversible thing that happened. And, you know, it gave us the power in some ways to be more godlike. In the sense that we can make those decisions for ourselves. And I think that there’s a lot of people within Judaism who sort of want us to abdicate that responsibility, where we can’t really decide for ourselves what is good and evil, what does Judaism mean. And I think that maybe the serpent wants us to define for ourselves what good and evil is.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think it’s truly an example of an ancient fuck around and find out story. And I think as Jewish anarchists, that’s also something we can really get behind. You really have to try and then you’ll see. But yeah, you can’t know without trying.
Speaker E:
Yeah, cool.
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
As we kind of wrap up, I was wondering if y’all wanted to talk a little bit about just the printing and distribution of Circle Aleph. And I would also love to hear about— there’s so much beautiful art, and it’s just so beautifully put together. I feel like this is questions about how did you put together and actually publish? What was that like?
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think once we got as many submissions in our email inbox as we did, we realized, oh, this is gonna be a ton of work to put together.
Speaker C:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
And because of that, I felt really strongly that the end result should be something that people really value. And I know that how things look and feel in your hands, especially since we’re print-only, would be a really big factor in that. And so, yeah, I think that the aesthetics of the magazine is something that from the get-go I really wanted to highlight and creating Jewish visual culture that feels like something that’s mine has been an interest of mine for a long time. And I feel like I kind of finally got to actualize that with this magazine in that a lot of the familiar symbols and colors and imagery to Jews are still present. So many people can feel that it’s for them to read. But it’s also doing something a little different. And I hope that it also feels aesthetically cohesive. I feel like that’s a challenge that any submission-based publication is always going to have, especially if visual art submissions are a part of that, because people just have such different aesthetic preferences in their own work. But yeah, I think that trying to highlight both what people sent us in while also still trying to make things fit together and flow in an intuitive way was a really big challenge. But also, the first thing that I hear from people who receive copies of the magazine is, oh, wow, this is way nicer looking than I thought it would be. I thought it would be like a wrinkled, zine printed on standard office paper in black and white, but it’s like, no, it’s like a whole magazine. And I do think that that makes people want to sit with it for longer and maybe even value the writing and ideas inside in a way that honors the work it took to put together, but also the work of the contributors in putting forth their ideas and visions for Jewish anarchism into the world, and that feels really important to me. I do think, though, that for our second issue, it’ll look a little bit different. The aesthetic standpoint is something that we want to be evolving, and partially because we’re not online, we have the flexibility to be able to develop our branding in addition to our messaging. And that’s something that I think is really exciting to a lot of people, but also specifically for me, I’m really excited about it. And yeah, I have really high hopes for Jewish anarchism being something that is appealing, not just for the ideology, but also because it looks beautiful. And yeah, I’m not sure if I have really anything more to say about it, but— I’m glad we made the decisions we did about paper quality, even though it’s been a little bit expensive, but it feels like something that does really change how people interact with the publication.
Speaker A:
It is beautiful. And I will say from the reader perspective, it certainly makes it stand out and matter.
Speaker C:
Yeah, I don’t think when we first started we realized the task, the monumental task of bone folding and stapling this thick magazine. So that was definitely a fun experience to get over with some friends. But the printing and distributing aspect, I think we were extremely lucky that some of us are in a city where there’s an abundance of anarchist printing printers and printing projects that we were able to print fairly cheap. So it’s been definitely fun putting it all together and reaching out to all the different info shops and bookstores. And even contributors would like let us know places that they think would be interested in receiving a box and sort of putting them all together and getting them out there has been a super big learning curve on how to— do it efficiently and cheaply. But I think issue 2, we’ve learned a lot and it’s gonna be fun.
Speaker B:
Yeah, I think also our commitment to the magazine being completely free has shaped a lot of these decisions in how we’re distributing, especially. Yeah, because we don’t make money on the magazine itself, we have had to be really specific about where we want them To go, and also trying our best to find people in different, both urban and rural areas actually, who want to receive 20 copies and then have a reading group with their friends to interact with the magazine that way, rather than just delivering 500 copies to every info shop we can pick off the map. We really want to make sure that the people who are getting a box do really actually want to interact with them. And that’s been really fun to get messages that are like, oh, I went to this place that I thought that they would be at and they said that they ran out right away. That’s been a really exciting thing to hear, but it also means that we have a lot of printing to do.
Speaker D:
Yeah, I think another thing we sort of set out to do or envisioned was that we would have the printing itself be a little bit more distributed. And I think that’s something we’re working on in the future, and we’re excited about trying to make that happen and just trying to really make it less centered on us as a collection of individuals and something that’s really more of a collective project going forward. And I think, yeah, it’s just really important from an anarchist perspective that it be as distributed as possible and not centralized in one place or with one group of people.
Speaker B:
Yeah, we did find out though that way fewer people than we expected do not have any access to a printer that prints on 11 by 17 paper. It’s actually quite uncommon and it’s a huge infrastructure gap in our communities. But yeah, if you do have an 11 by 17 capable printer, Please let us know if you’re interested in printing and handing them out to your local Jewish friends because any way we can get people more invested in the project in their own ways, and also, as Matt said, distribute the project further, the better it’ll get over time.
Speaker A:
Yeah, yeah. I feel like there is that funny tension of making a very beautiful thing that and then trying to distribute or have the printing be a distributed situation. But I think it’s doable. Tell me, I guess before we go, what is the next issue going to center on thematically? And are y’all accepting submissions for it?
Speaker B:
We’re accepting submissions. for the next 3 days from now, so they’ll be closed by the time the podcast comes out, unfortunately. But if you’ve got something really good, you should send it to us anyways if it’s under 2,000 words or visual art. And if we can’t include it this time, we’ll consider it for our 3rd issue. We noticed in the first issue that there were a lot of consistent themes in the work that people were submitting. Things like grief, connection and disconnection from the past, visiting our histories but not being able to fully access them, and joy that can only come from success in doing things our way together. And yeah, all of those things reminded us of how we experience time Jewishly.
Speaker C:
One thing I’m excited about for this second issue, Spiral Time theme, is where we as like the whole team are gonna be collecting cool things from the archives to include, whether it be letters of correspondence or, you know, clippings of these old anarchist news— Yiddish newspapers. We’re gonna try and sort of bring all of the— without getting too nostalgic about it, all the sort of histories and traditions of our Jewish anarchist Predecessors and sort of include it in this issue too, to sort of go. We were talking about how like we’re doing the same shit always, and it’s not don’t you shouldn’t be like discouraged or sad about it or anything. You should be inspired by it. And yeah, that’s I’m excited about collecting these cool pieces. One that I want to include is an essay that was in. A tentat that the Black Banner talks about a cool group of friends in Bialystok, Poland, and the sort of shenanigans they got up to. But there’s also you know letters between Berkman or Rose Pesota. Yeah, there’s a and as well as like art to draw from sort of these Jewish folk art traditions. A lot of that was included in like the. The collage that the COVID was made of, a lot of these Jewish folk art and things like that. I’m excited to be going through. And yeah.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah. Well, do y’all have any last things to say before we wrap up? Anything that I didn’t ask you that you really wanted to talk about and you’re like, why didn’t Inmit ask?
Speaker B:
Yeah, I guess I just want to say one thing is that we really aren’t experts, and none of us had done this specific thing before. We just saw something that we thought should already exist, and with the various skills we already had and a lot that were brand new to us and that we’re still really working on, we put something together that has Meant a lot to a lot of people. And yeah, I hope that that is helpful for people to hear. You don’t have to be an expert before you start. You get better at something by doing it. And I think we’ve all really gained a lot, not only from the actual object of the magazine, but through working on a project like this. As a group. And yeah, it’s been a really interesting process and one that I would really recommend. And also, we really hope that someone sends us a huge disagreement with the contents of Circle Aleph at some point and is just like, this was totally wrong and I really disagree with it, and this is why. And we would love to include that in whatever issue we’re working on at that point.
Speaker C:
Or even this podcast episode, if we said something that you hate or extremely disagree with, please write us about it and we’ll throw it in.
Speaker D:
Yeah, we also sought to really radically expand the type of submissions we got. So we’re encouraging people to send erotica, recipes, just the most insane shit that you can come up with. Please send it in.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah. And where can people send send it to one more time. It’s probably like the third time we’ve said it, but let’s say it again.
Speaker B:
That’s [email protected]. That’s C-I-R-C-L-E-A-L-E-P-H at proton.me.
Speaker A:
And y’all currently have an Instagram, but it might be— it might stop existing.
Speaker B:
We’re going to have an Instagram for a little bit longer, but hopefully we’ll be starting a newsletter to replace it so that we can get off Meta at some point.
Speaker A:
Hell yeah, a great thing to strive towards. Well, thanks so much for coming on today and talking about this wonderful publication. And I will very personally be excited to see the second issue.
Speaker B:
Yeah, thanks so much.
Speaker D:
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.
Speaker E:
If you enjoyed this podcast, then you can support it, and you can support it by supporting our publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, Where for a variety of tiers of support, you can get a lot of cool things.
Speaker A:
I preempted this.
Speaker E:
You can get those tiers of things on our Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness, or you can check out our website, tangledwilderness.org, where we have cool books, cool zines. And on our Patreon, you can get cool things like a zine mailed to you every month, or for us to thank or acknowledge a thing of your choosing, or to sign up for our new Friends of Strangers tier where We will send you every couple months everything that we publish, and we’ll shout you out on the podcasts, and you’ll get the zine, and you’ll get access to discounts on physical objects.
Speaker A:
All physical objects everywhere. I can’t promise that, actually.
Speaker E:
And we would like to thank these wonderful people, places, animals, theoretical or fictional concepts, or mutual aid projects, which a lot of people used to—
Speaker A:
for it to shout out, and I think that’s just fucking awesome.
Speaker E:
Thank you, the Chattanooga Free Store, Glenn, Please Fight Anti-Fatness, Arizona Sunsets, Bunny Bionics, Patrick Harnett Marshall, rest in power, all wiener dogs everywhere, Joseph, the first 2 chapters of The Eden Project by James Hollis, the Kiwanis Socialists, the Athens People’s Assembly of Athens, Georgia, Mr. Kraft, your Canadian friend Mark, Tiny Nonsense, Sarah, A Future for Abby, the Canadian Socialist Rifle Association, Hyunhee, Max, Lancaster Chooses Love, Karen, Astoria Food Pantry, Enchanted Rats of Turtle Island, Feral in West Virginia, Blink Cat, the Massachusetts chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, Shulva, Jenny and Phoebe the cats, Jason, Aiden, and Yuki the dog, Alexander Gopal, Sunshine, Opticuna, Portland’s Hedron Hackerspace, Julia, Appalachian Liberation Library, Lord Harkin, Baby A Cab and her 3 great pups, Ephemeral, Princess Miranda, Janice and Odell, Boldfield, Allie, Papa Runa, Milica, Theo, SJ Page, the Pocono Pink Pistols, Nicole and Tikva the dog, David, Towser’s love of bumblebees, Carson, Dana, Chelsea, Amber, Marjorie, the truth that we will outlive them, Kirk, Micah, Chris, the incredible Runner Eye, Micaiah, And Haas the dog.
Speaker A:
Thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
