דאָיִקייט

☆ Essays and longer poems from zine contributors ☆

Shefa (שפע) and the transcendental undercurrent of Judaism by hoyah חיה

Shema Brokhe 2, or Loving God at a Zionist Minyan by Zisl
(excerpt from God, The God of Unmet Desire)

Reflections on the Yiddish novella In Edenia by Daniel Roche

Diasporism: A Radical Vision for Jewish Self-Determination by Isaac Gendler

Zionism 101 Teach-in Agenda by Maxwell Greenberg

Ceasefire - Enough by The Brothers Sick

I began working on this zine in a moment of immense personal loss, right on the precipice of my mother’s death. As her passing became imminent, I spent many, many hours scrolling on my phone — attempting to distract myself from the impending certainty of loss, and finding myself, instead, caught up in a different kind of grief: sadness and anger at the mounting death toll of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Grief at an inconceivably vast scale. Daily heartbreak for all the children losing parents and the parents losing children. In parallel with my own mourning process, I have been moved by the weight of collective grief — and the action it has inspired.

Now, as I carry out the Jewish ritual of saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for my mom every day for the 11 months following her passing, I also say Kaddish for the lives lost in the genocide in Gaza, which is ongoing as of this writing. (If a child in Gaza lost their parent in the first month of the war, they would be more than halfway through the 11-month Kaddish period by now.) I am grateful to Amanda Gelender for writing this beautiful Kaddish for the Soul of Judaism.

I have sought to make this a space for collective grief as well as collective learning and belonging. This project was undertaken in the spirit of the Jewish Labor Bund, as well as contemporary activist lineages such as Sasha Costanza-Chock’s philosophy of Design Justice, which points towards the crucial importance of non-state autonomy, especially for marginalized groups. Namely, do’ikayt and neo-Bundism embody Design Justice’s ethos of “building the new world in the shell of the old, rather than attempting to institute systems transformation from above by seizing state power” (168).

Finally, this zine is deeply indebted to Nathan Schneider’s wonderful Media Activism course at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for which it was initially conceived as a final project (although I hope that it will continue to live and grow beyond the walls of the University, as perhaps it already has). In his 2024 book Governable Spaces, Schneider nods to bell hooks’ notion of a "homeplace" — a space of care and resistance, in contradistinction to the “homestead” (or the centralized platform, or the nation-state).

This, to me, echoes with the Bundist notion that “wherever we are, that’s our homeland.” My sense of what constitutes "home" has shifted substantially in the past few months, as grief transmutes into an invitation to, as my mom would say, "bloom where you're planted." I hope that this zine, built in the legacy of DIY publishing and handmade, human-scale online spaces, constitutes something of a "homeplace," a place to bloom, a site of resistance.

Thanks for reading. May we hold one another's hearts with tenderness, welcoming each other into new spaces of resistance and reprieve as we continue to build a new world in the shell of the old, one prayer, poem, or slow website at a time, together.

- Adina Glickstein