Next Sunday we're inviting you to join authors Ben Lorber and @Shane_Burley for a virtual conversation on their new book "Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism," which uses personal stories, historical deep-dives, front-line reporting, and interviews with activists, to explain how antisemitism works.

In conversation with author @cbmilstein, Ben and Shane will address the highly polarized climate around the war in Gaza, tackling difficult questions, including: how can we stand in solidarity with Palestinians seeking justice, while also avoiding antisemitism—and resisting those who seek to conflate the two? and how do we forge the coalitions needed to overcome the politics of division and fear?

Register for the event and find your copy of "Safety Through Solidarity" at https://firestorm.coop/events/3215-safety-through-solidarity.html.

#Antisemitism #WeWillOutliveThem #FeministBookstore #JewishBooks #JewishAnarchism #Antizionism #SafetyThroughSolidarity #FirestormCoop (- L)

Hanukkah 5784: Flames of Resistance (Night 1)

So the counting begins. Nights and candles. But which nights? The eight (now seven) evenings ahead? The more than two thousand years past of this celebration of revolt and miracles (some six hundred years before anyone had even heard of Jesus, a Palestinian Jew)? And/or the last seventy-five years of Nakba, itself only three short years after the catastrophe of Nazism.

It’s not just what to count. It’s who counts, or doesn’t, and when.

And how to count at all when our eyes are blurred by tears that won’t seem to dry—perhaps another Chanuka miracle, expanding our hearts enough to keep mourning and raging against the some seventeen thousand dead and over forty-two thousand wounded in Gaza the past sixty-one days of genocide?

We should all count, of course. That seems as clear and bright as even my two small candles can illuminate on this first night of Xanuka.

How many more flames of resistance must we put into this world to finally mend it?

When I lit my candles, I saw ancestors in the glow—innumerable ancestors who held fast to celebrating holidays of lights and moons and gifting each other time-space, even when they knew their days or hours were numbered by not-too-dissimilar fascistic regimes centuries ago, decades ago, now. They made life count, even when they had to practice rituals in secret as their antifascist action. They danced rebelliously in the flames of solidarity, knowing that whether Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, or Arabic, their safety and liberation were and still are inseparably braided together—a force that combined, could smash borders and states into countless pieces, because we’ve felt the same pain, the same trauma, and refuse to weaponize it against each other now.

Our resistance counts, as does our solidarity—particularly when barbarism tries to shred any sense of humanity or light.

#WeWillOutliveThem
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#UntilAllAreFree

(photos: my candles; wheat-pasted Palestinian solidarity posters, fresh torn asunder by those we must keep battling, as seen around so-called Asheville, NC)

Had an anxiety dream about being persecuted for being Jewish.

Involved an obvious Jewish surname (not mine; “Weizmann”) & passport/entry problems. Had to go to a “testing and processing center.”

So that’s nice. #antisemitism #AnxietyDisorder #PanicDisorder #WeWillOutliveThem