Hanukkah 5784: Flames of Resistance (Night 3)

Perhaps it is just my social media feeds and Signal text threads, but I suspect not—I hope not. In only three nights of this year’s Khanike, with still so much fire to go, rad Jews have shared thousands of photos and artistic renditions of their chanukkiahs ablaze with solidarity for Gaza.

We rebel Jews have faithfully followed the sensibility underlying this Festival of Lights, in a time of genocide that feels anything but festive, or for that matter, light, by visibly bringing forth the light of resistance. We’ve extended the practice of bravely and defiantly lighting our Hanuka menorahs in windows at moments when antisemitism has threatened our lives and indeed the whole of Jewish existence, to now bravely and defiantly lighting these same menorahs in all sorts of public places, often communally, as Zionism (including Christian Zionism) and Islamophobia threaten Palestinian lives and indeed the whole of Palestinian existence.

For us anarchist Jews in particular, we see this as inseparable from our antifascist practice, our antifascist duty, including to all the ancestors—Jewish and others—who were exterminated by fascists in other times … and now. As the Fayer Collective notes in the zine illuminated by my candles tonight, “For us, the fight against fascism … is a personal and direct fight for our lives,” for others’ lives, … “for the earth, the good life, and total liberation” for all. “And that knowledge has put a fire in our hearts, as anarchists and Jews.”

I’ve been proud of my fellow anarchic Jews—more so than ever—for bravely and defiantly resisting fascism, including in our Zionist kin, every single day since October 7, unceasingly, with public actions ranging from banner drops to Mourners Kaddish, mutual aid to blockades, disruptions, and other direct actions, collective care to rebellious rituals. And we’ve no intention of letting that fire go out, #UntilAllAreFree.

May Xanuka bring the miracle of the light of our solidarity never extinguishing.

#SolidarityNotStates
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(For a PDF of this Palestinian solidarity zine and many others, DM me your email; photos: my candles tonight; a Jewish friend painting a #JewsAgainstGenocide banner in October for a public grief ritual held a couple days later by a bunch of us anarchistic Jews in so-called Asheville, NC.)

It feels truer than ever that “diaspora” means being forcibly, brutally, and often genocidally scattered, time again over the millennia, broken open like a pomegranate that then can’t help but bleed red, and yet equally means we’re scattered like seeds, bringing along our full bittersweetness (rage, sorrow, joy, beauty, and more) to fight those who would destroy us and this earth while rebelliously sprouting liberatory possibilities, lush and delicious. Unstoppable. Communities and peoples who can hold together against all odds, without states or cops and other deadly enclosures, because of the fruits of our cultures, languages, ethics, teachings, rituals, and so much more that we tend to with sacredness and care. Unassimilatable.

I’m proud to be part of a diasporic peoples and its anarchist(ic) branch—part of a generative, mutualistic ecosystem of other diasporic anarchist peoples—especially as we move with twilight and the moon into the Jewish new year, one of many calendars that defies Christo-fascist hegemony and white supremacy by its very being, supplying time-space outside and against their logics and violence, from capitalism to patriarchy to heteronormativity and more.

On this new year, I want to hold the pomegranate in my hands, with all of its power to explode what isn’t serving humans and nonhumans, life and freedom, remembering in my bones, through the spirit of my Jewish anarchist ancestors, that we’ve been fighting fascisms in myriad forms and by numerous names for 5784 years, and will neither forget nor forgive, nor desist. It is, as a rabbi noted long ago, neither a task we can reject nor one we alone can finish. So like our calendar, we persist.

On this new year, I want to reclaim our words, our stories—so essential to us Jews, for every word can make or destroy a world—words not merely stolen from us by the Christian church and Papal state, but rewritten into documents and doctrines that set the ships a sail of the slave trade, colonialism, witch hunts, the Inquisition, and the list continues.

We must and will outlive them.

Shana tova! 🖤🍯🏴🍎🪬🔥

#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(photos: sticker from a new Jewish anarchist pal; art by @wendyelisheva)

On this day of blessed memory—the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—let us honor those rebellious Jews who fought back against the Nazis, because “we have always fought back.”

#FightAntisemitism
#DestroyFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

Proud to have a friend who is putting their newly learned Arabic to good use, scribing “Jewish solidarity with Palestinians” alongside “Jewish anarchists for a free Palestine” on a banner for a demo today in a city many hundreds of miles away—and circling their A (“alef” for us Jews) with a pomegranate, a symbol that could be read as bringing together the beautiful seeds of various diasporic peoples into a wholeness.

Touched, too, to have this friend who lovingly thinks to share their banner creation with me—even if for now, while we’re far apart, it can only be via a texted photo.

Our solidarity can and should know no borders, whether we’re in the streets for each other openly decrying the violence of states, nationalism, and fascism as well as openly proclaiming freedom for all, or sustaining our rebellious connections in innumerable smaller ways, including friendship.

#FreePalestine
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#HateFascismLoveYourFriends
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

Shavua tov: toward a good week, a blessed week, a week of joy, a week of fighting fascism in all of its forms.

#HavdalahAgainstHate
#FlamesAgainstFascism
#CandlesNotCops
#CommunitySelfDefense
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photos: #FuckNazis tag spotted on the frigid streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal; closeup of this evening’s Havdalah candle and its #BlessedFlame)

Give the gift of solidarity to forest defenders on the upcoming birthday, or new year, of the trees, Tu Bishvat!

Twenty people are now facing charges of “domestic terrorism” for the “crime” of loving trees—a result of state repression against beautifully powerful and ecological efforts by many thousands of people for well over a year now to #DefendTheAtlantaForest and #StopCopCity from being built in Weelaunee forest in so-called Atlanta. As part of the state’s attempts to crush this movement and set a chilling example for similar struggles, the injustice system set exorbitantly high bonds, including $350,000 each for two of the defendants.

The do-it-ourselves jail, court, and legal support via Atlanta Solidarity Fund—much of it voluntary—is powerfully beautiful too, yet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars will be needed to resist this wave of statist brutality, get all the charges dropped, and set defendants fully free.

On Tu Bishvat, we Jews (often with our non-Jewish friends) commune with trees as we move ritualistically through four worlds (or seasons or directions), which can be seen as moving through our relationships with land and place, community, the world, and spirituality. We remember on Tu Bishvat that though this world can seem cold and deadening, the sap of warmth, resilience, and life is still moving within us.

What better time to raise much-needed funds for forest defenders?!

You can do a Tu Bishvat solidarity seder and collect donations, or an intimate Tu Bishvat gathering in your home with friends and pitch in some dollars. Or hold self-generated rituals in a forest and pass the hat. Or set up a small or large separate fundraising event during Tu Bishvat, such as tabling with zines and a putting out a donation jar, or doing an art raffle or dance party, including tree themed ones, and raise money. It doesn’t even need to be the main focus of your Tu Bishvat, but you can still donate.

Please direct all donations to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, atlsolidarity.org, for a big Tu Bishvat gift and show of solidarity!

And to that end, i’m hoping to shoutout your Tu Bishvats in a public post! So DM or email me your fundraiser by Feb. 3! 🖤💖🌿

#ForestNotFascism
#RitualAsResistance
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(Photo: green-colored infographic with a drawing of a tree in black, with the words “Forest Defender Tu Bishvat. Call for New Year of the Trees’ Fundraisers for Atlanta Solidarity Fund. This is a call to celebrate Tu Bishvat 5783/2023 as a ritual of resistance, honoring the trees and those fighting to #StopCopCity in Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, and to raise money for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to aid the 20 forest defendants,” and encouraging folks to send their events to cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com to include in a public “solidarity shoutout” post)

On this last, eighth night of Chanuka, I read a blessing written eight years ago by Rabbi Brant Rosen as I lit my candles, seemingly so whole, blazing in strength and solidarity.

“We light these lights
for the instigators and the refusers
the obstinate and unyielding
for the ones who kept marching
the ones who tended the fires
the ones who would not bow down. ...

“These lights we light tonight
will never be used for
any other purpose but to proclaim
the miracle of this truth:
it is not by might nor by cruelty
but by a love that burns relentlessly
that this broken world
will be redeemed.”

Love, of course, won’t stop fascism. The murder of three Kurds in Paris this past Friday, inseparable from the fascism of the Erdogan regime in Turkey, is but the latest cruel example.

Yet smashing fascism demands that we love each other, expansively, whether across their borders, or our beloved identities and cultures.

We need such relentlessly burning love in order to sustain our fight for a world without fascism. We need it to protect and defend each other in ways that reflect the best parts of ourselves and our humanity. And we especially need that love when all seems lost and bleak—feelings that have marked this Hanukkah 5783 for me.

Our rebellious love—which I saw in the blessed flames of my candles this eve—is why we mourn our dead and fight for the living so fiercely, with such heart and chutzpah, even when we’re hurting or weary. And it’s why—when and if that day comes, and only because of our relentless, loving rituals of resistance—we’ll dance joyously together on the grave of fascism. May it be so!

I mouthed Rosen’s blessing tonight as a love letter to my chosen, beloved rebel ancestors, and for all of you beloved rebels, who might need it too, but also to try to make myself feel—or rather trust in—some of the wholeness of my candles, full of fire for the hard, maybe even harder, days ahead.

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance
#HateFascismLoveYourFriends
#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#Mazeldon
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(photos: my brightly colored, night 8 candles with a red-and-black flag on an “antifascist action” sticker; despite our brokenness and all the messiness around us, “love more,” as this tag in white ink on a black utility box suggests, as seen on the streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in June 2022)

For the full Brant Rosen prayer:

https://connectere.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/we-light-these-lights-a-new-hanerot-hallelu-prayer-for-hanukkah-by-rabbi-brant-rosen/

Tonight, as the last of my Hanukkah candles burned down, it kept flickering out, and then multiple times, burst back into flames.

It offered, quite literally, ritual as resistance, refusing to give up, despite the odds of this evening’s configuration of a sacred time-space lasting.

But ritual as resistance has many other radical, life-giving roles. Among them, our rituals let us deactivate from the stress of what they (e.g., cops, courts, and the state) do to us; instead of reacting to them, we pause. We coregulate. We reignite the sacred fires inside us, and from there, self-determine how to proactively direct our actions and practices.

Indeed, the small act of knowing that we can always light a candle, that we can gaze into its glow and find warmth, find effervescence, is huge in terms of rekindling our spirits, especially when we’re up against the worst.

For instance, that our Hanukkah candles increase day by day isn’t a mere numbers game. What’s illuminated is the growing solidarity between the candies, burning in concert, supplying a felt sense of interconnection and collective possibilities.

This Hanukkah has brought some of the worst to @defendATLforest and @stopcopcity. Six people were arrested, are now being held without bond, and face charges of “domestic terrorism” for caring about a forest. A years’ worth of infrastructure related to mutual aid and forest defense was destroyed by cops and capitalists, as was a paved walkway and many trees in this public park.

But last night, about 100 people “gathered in the rubble of our beloved park to celebrate the solstice, … to build altars in the debris,” as @kezleyseeslife put it. “A crater in the ground was turned into a fire pit. A menorah was lit to celebrate Hanukkah,” added @atlpresscollective. Everything we build, and will keep building, “is born from our already broken hearts. … The forest will heal. We will heal,” Kezley asserted.

(photos: my brightly colored night 5 candles next to @desrevol’s brilliant painting of a possum, mouthing “Abolish the police,” surrounded by brightly colored flowers; picture of the rubble turned into an altar, including the tagged words from some anonymous forest defender, “You won’t win,” in the Weelaunee forest yesterday from @atlpresscollective; brightly colored hand-painted sign reading “Let us love and be loved by the forest,” which I photographed pre-rubble in October 2022)

#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#RitualAsResistance
#CandlesNotCops
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

On this fourth night of Chanukah, auspiciously falling on solstice, I thought that by now, the increasing candlelight and promise of increasing daylight would have worked their somatic magic. That I would feel as if I’m on the other side of the darkness of these times, even if only a bit.

Yet I’ve noticed that my body isn’t responding, like it always has before, to the candles. I feel frozen, stuck, not able to offer or take in light.

It’s not just the accumulated trauma of loss and isolation, from and during the pandemic, though it is that too. It’s the shift that seems to have happened from a protofascist USA into, increasingly, everyday fascism. The fascistic horrors didn’t—and still don’t—come at once, but get added one at a time, strategically, like the methodical addition of a Chanukah candle daily, acclimatizing people little by little—until it’s too late to turn back from the conflagration.

So instead of journeying toward the growing light, I can’t stop thinking of anarchistic author Daniel Guérin (1904-88) traveling into what he called “the brown plague”—Nazism—in 1932 and 1933. For those two years, as a young closeted gay man, he wandered around Germany—just prior to and, a year later, just after the seizure of National Socialist power. What he noticed was not geopolitics but rather the minutiae of cultural politics, the stuff of everyday life. He wrote of the little things that added up to the “tragedy unfolding” and people’s “inability to recognize danger,” including because of the “seductive rituals” Nazis employed to win over the populace.

One year he’s staying at youth hostels, likely acting on his sexual desires in a place, Weimar Germany, that was the hub of gay life. The next, many of the same youths he might have comingled with are burning books by the tens of thousands across thirty-four cities, including trashing, looting, and burning the extensive library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s (in)famous, and (in)famously gay, Institute of Sexology.

Those books, once lit, grew quickly into flames that consumed people.

I want to see light this Chanukah. But all I see are ashes.

(photos: my night four candles in my menorah; a sign and me reflected in it at the Tucson Jewish Museum, 2019)

#RitualAsResistance
#MourningOurDead #FightingLikeHellForTheLiving #FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful

Hannuqah is gay! Maybe Chanuka is even “be gay, do crime,” because back in the day, we got to steal seven extra days out of a one-day supply of oil.

But its queerness shines on many levels.

For instance, you get to pick your own name, or at least its spelling and pronunciation, and be fluid about shaking it up when the Xanikah spirit moves you. You can play with the candles, creating fabulous or sensual combinations of colors, or lighting them in all sorts of transgressive orders—left to right or reverse, few to many or reverse, or pure chaos. You can dress up your menorah(s) for each night out, or self-determine what to top (or bottom) a latke with.

More than anything, though, Channuqa urges us to resist assimilation in the queerest of ways, smashing binaries. It blesses the light and dark, but especially the liminal spaces that let us see all the myriad possibilities between light and dark, such as when the radiant light of a candle flirtatiously embraces the now-radiant darkness.

Yet a shadow has been cast on that fabulousness this 5783 year—a shadow that isn’t new, but has gotten more ominous.

We see in Hanuka’s flame what US Christian fascism 2022 is trying to extinguish, and in heartbreaking moments, succeeds at extinguishing: drag shows, queer books, gender-affirming surgery, trans and queer life, and so much more. We see Club Q, and mourn our dead there. We surround our menorahs with DIY altars to our many other dead, who too often are Black trans women and queer youths—murdered, directly or indirectly, by fascism, which demands rigid binaries and heteropatriarchal bodies.

We see our fire too. The ways we bash back with, say, community self-defense, vigils, wound-care trainings, and huge dance-party-antifascist-demos in the streets—gay fucking pride versus proud boys and their ilk.

This Xanukah, may we rededicate ourselves to queer joy, and all the nonbinary ways that gender, sex, and sexuality light up the world, even as we know we’ll need many miracles to outlast the fascists.

(photos: my night three rainbow-colored candles in front of @elijahjanka’s art depicting early 1900s’ queer+trans joy via a drawing of five people borrowed from an ethnographic photo for the @radicaljewishcalendar; “queer or nothing” wheatpaste, drawn as a black+white heart with a splash of pink, seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 5782)

#Mazeldon
#RitualAsResistance
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful