On 19 April, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I learned two new things from my beautiful circle of Jewish anarchist friends. I learned that the state of Israel, in one of its many moves to consolidate power-over (including over many of us Jews) through rewriting history and bending language to its will, changed the name of the Holocaust from what many survivors were calling it: “churbn” (“catastrophe” in Yiddish). I already knew that the Israeli state changed “Holocaust remembrance” to a different date than April 19 to erase the anti-Zionist sensibility of the uprising’s key ..read more

On this last day of Ramadan and first day of the new Jewish month, Nisan, genocide takes no holiday. The profane—colonialism, capitalism, statism, and fascism—eclipses our moon, our timekeeper of days and nights that don’t obey a white Christian supremacist calendar. This may seem a minor indignity. Yet this Gregorian disciplining of our cycles of life, as deadly as any military hardware, cuts us off from our intimate relations with ecosystems and each other—both of which, unlike the profane, thrive on a heterogeneous abundance of mutual aid and interdependence. The sacred, in contrast, is a ..read more

Someone asked me recently if I have hope. I have rage. Fear. Despair. Sorrow. Depression. Impatience. Anger. Worry. Grief. Horror. Heartache … Not hope. But I do hold out promise. The promise held in the most minuscule bud on a branch way before leaf out begins. The promise of tiny clusters of blossoms that just might open up into flowers if the conditions are right. The promise of a pink-purplish sky embracing the skeletal outlines of trees at the end of a long day just before darkness descends. The promise in that dark night of seeing the faint glimmer of the first star, and then maybe a se ..read more

Aaron Bushnell’s act touched me in profound ways as a fellow anarchist. Foremost was the intricate way he self-organized the numerous details to be sure to care for the beloveds he left behind while also assuring his self-immolation was precisely and unequivocally read as care for Palestinians, and how he took a strategic direct action based on a clear-eyed anarchist understanding of hierarchical power and side-by-side solidarity in a time of fascism and its genocidal logic—and it succeeded, perhaps beyond his own hopes. I needed to process and honor his death, and without thinking it through ..read more

Years ago, in the run-up to the 2004 election of George W. Bush, my then-Free Society Collective helped initiate the anarchist “Don’t Just (Not) Vote” effort (alas, Crimethinc, while part of, stole credit for something that should have belonged to no one). The idea was: whether you spend a few pointless minutes in a ballot booth or not, what do you do to fight hierarchy and transform the world the other 364 days, 23 hours, and fifty-five minutes a year? It was meant to encourage and highlight self-organization, and to a limited degree, did just that, including as we headed into an era that sa ..read more

“Happy New Year!,” the lifeguard yelled across the pool at me with chirpy enthusiasm after I’d finished swimming laps—at the precise instant when the endorphins had kicked in to offer me a momentary reprieve from the pain of these times. His optimism shattered that. If you know me, you know I’m not good at hiding my feelings, with my facial reactions always betraying my inner emotions even if I say nothing. I looked thoroughly annoyed; he looked bewildered. The stakes feel starker than ever, and so do the contrasts: between those who see and those who choose not to. Maybe it’s only us rebels ..read more

All I want for Christmas is the abolition of Christmas. Not just this year, 5784, or so-called 2023, but especially this year. There is no separating Christmas and its symbols from white Christian supremacy, Christo-fascism, and Christian Zionism, among other names for a logic that brutally reshaped the entire world since 1492. It is a supremacy that’s so powerful, so hegemonic, it can appear invisible. It structures everything and yet makes itself seem like the air “we” breathe, or as if parts of it can be benign or used in solidarity for “good will and peace” among those it has dispossessed ..read more

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 ..read more

Today I did nothing. Yesterday I did almost nothing. In between, I barely slept. I want to say that I’ve been catapulted back ten years. Maybe because I feel so suddenly unmoored. But it feels more like falling through a wormhole and inhabiting another time-space, as if I’m there and a shadow of myself is (not) here. Maybe that’s why I’m doing nothing here, these past vacant two days of a yahrzeit. Because I’m sitting with grief, there, a decade ago, feeling my every movement slow to somehow match the slowing breaths of my mom until I could no longer compete with death. But yesterday, I had t ..read more

It’s taken an unusually long time to get here, but today I signed a contract with Pluto Press to publish my next edited anthology, “Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice.” Yay!! It’s an honor and already a joy to be working with Pluto and editor David Shulman at this press, and I look forward to seeing this collection in print in spring 2024! When I say “unusually long time,” I’m referring to both pandemic (and inseparably, fascist and ecocidal) time and heteropatriarchal time, or should I say the impacts of toxic masculinity and misogyny. All have made it so much more impossib ..read more