For our last episode of the season, we asked you what you think of diaspora. listeners offer their thoughts on land, spirituality, settler colonialism and food. and Tallie and Nava say good bye for now!
Music in this episode is by Kevin Macleod. Our theme music is by decibelists.
You can find Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel here. May her memory be a blessing.
You can find Nava's chapbook, "Fortunately," here.
You can join JVP for just $18 a year, and do so here: jvp.org/join
Thank you. We love you.
S1: 00:00
Hello, JVP Podcast Idols.
S2: 00:04
Hi, Tallie and Nava.
S3: 00:05
Hi, Diaspora Podcast.
S4: 00:07
Hi guys. It's Maya. I am loving what you're doing with this show, so I decided to send you a story.
S1: 00:14
I'd like to share with you what diaspora means to me.
S5: 00:25
[music] Welcome to Diaspora Podcast. I'm Nava EtShalom, poet and educator in Philadelphia.
S6: 00:30
And hi, I'm Tallie Ben Daniel. And I'm a political educator with Jewish Voice for Peace, recently moved to Sacramento. We've been talking on this podcast about Zionism. Its history. The harm it's caused to Palestinians. How we unlearned our allegiance to it. And how we both found a sort of home in the concept of diaspora.
S5: 00:51
So we asked you to tell us what you think about diaspora. And we heard so many good stories that we can't wait to share with you.
S2: 00:59
The word diaspora immediately makes me think of origin of people and origin story. I like the word because it reckons with the past.
S6: 01:08
I can't wait to hear more. But before we do, we have to share some news.
S5: 01:15
Sad news.
S6: 01:17
Yeah. This is the last episode of Diaspora. For now at least.
S5: 01:23
No, Tallie.
S6: 01:24
There's a global pandemic that really changed everything, including the JVP budget, so we need to take a break from production for now. My job is going to be more focused on fundraising and organizing and other areas of JVP's work.
S5: 01:41
And I'm focused on putting out two new books of poetry. The first one was just released by Button Poetry. And the second is coming out from Carnegie Mellon University Press in February. And you probably won't be surprised to hear that they're both queer and dewy and full of language about diaspora and home.
S6: 01:59
Seriously, buy these books. We'll put the links in the show notes.
S5: 02:04
But all of this means that this version of the podcast is ending.
S6: 02:08
But this conversation is still going on in our communities, and we hope you'll stay involved. Stay tuned to the end of this episode for ways you can stay connected and keep talking. But for now, we want you to know how much we've loved sharing these ideas and stories with you.
S5: 02:25
You've been such a delight to talk to. And now it's your turn to speak.
S6: 02:29
Yes, you called from all over the country.
S3: 02:36
Hi Diaspora Podcast. My name's Tyler Dermer. I'm a Jewish college student at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
S2: 02:45
I live in Minneapolis in Dakota Territory.
S7: 02:48
Central Ohio in Columbus, Ohio.
S4: 02:51
New York City.
S1: 02:53
And I'm a member of JVP-Bay Area.
S4: 02:56
Living in the United States.
S7: 02:58
From the Diaspora.
S6: 03:00
What a good voice.
S5: 03:02
What a good voice.
S6: 03:07
Some of you agreed that diaspora can be a way to find and create home. Here's Jade and Jessica.
S8: 03:17
What diaspora means to me is that I carry home with me where I go. And that I make and remake my connection to my people, my ancestors, my beloveds each day like bread by practicing the rituals that my ancestors created that were meaningful to them and are meaningful to me wherever I am.
S9: 03:45
I think I first learned diaspora as a code word to help me find the Jews who I want to hang out with and be in lifelong conversations with. And we used it to mean oriented towards the places where we're in, where our bodies are and not beholden to or trying to get back to a different place or time. We used it to show Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz raised us to be diaspora-loving Jews not trying to return. And we tried to demonstrate, I think critically about my Jewishness, my ancestry, my relationship to land, and the political implications of these histories, and my relationships to them.
S8: 04:25
And diaspora to me is about the magic and mystery of finding connection to other Jews, to other diasporic anti-Zionist Jews in particular wherever we can make it. Making a schul on a porch, over cups of red wine, making a cedar table outside under the southern spring rainstorm, teaching each other's songs, recognizing songs we knew from when we were kids, and remaking a world every day. [music]
S6: 05:02
That's so beautiful.
S5: 05:04
I'm so glad we're listening to our listeners, Tallie.
S6: 05:08
Sometimes for Jewish people, diaspora can be messy because it's often associated with well, Zionism.
S5: 05:16
Yeah, Zionist understandings of diaspora see Jewish people as lost in the wilderness, we're homeless, and yearning for a state. But a lot of us are reclaiming the word diaspora. It's not about being lost but it's about being home already.
S6: 05:33
Yeah, I mean for most of Jewish history, there was no Jewish state. So we developed our customs and traditions in ancient Babylon, in Syria, in Lithuania, and in New York City.
S10: 05:47
For me, it really exists as an antithesis to Zionism.
S6: 05:53
This is Sophie from Jewish Voice for Peace in New York City.
S10: 05:57
If we understand Zionism as asking us questions of past and future, as in this thing happened to us in our history so therefore we must do this or we fear what comes next and so we must do this. Diaspora asks the question what does Jewishness, Jewish identity, Judaism mean today and what does it mean to my neighbors? What does it mean to my community, to my organizing, to my city, to my friends, to my family. And understanding those questions as being fundamentally about relationship building and not just about relationship to land, is sort of where I think the heart of diaspora is. Once you decouple or understand that people don't have an inherent connection to a spot where they are, it lets us ask the question, so where can my Jewishness continue to exist in the relationships and the meaning I build with others?
S5: 07:10
These are big questions about being in the present, about home as a question of what's possible right now. But we found it, it does also make us grapple with understanding our family stories.
S6: 07:23
Here's Emmaia.
S4: 07:25
My father came to the US in 1944. But even so because the rest of our family lived in Israel and because my mother isn't Jewish, I thought of my family in Israel as authentic and of my family in the US as kind of irrelevant. And for myself, I did a lot of trying to attach to Israel. I learned to read Hebrew. I listened to David Rosa, I called humus hummus, and stuff like that. But at some point in high school, it started to feel embarrassing, to be reaching like that. And there was one point when a Rabbi in my neighborhood told me that I wasn't Jewish enough to join his classes or something, and I just thought fuck you. And I saw, suddenly-- the scales fell from my eyes. I saw how much gate keeping there was on Jewish identity and that my whole Israeli shtick had been an effort to get past it and get around it. And so when I started to shake that off-- that's when I realized that my history is a Jewish history. My Jewish family fled Europe and Palestine and came to the US and had these experiences and I am the Jewish result. The end. So that's what diaspora came to mean to me-- like the many vastly different outcomes of Jewish migration that collectively are the Jewish experience. To comprehend diaspora you have to look at all the ways that being Jewish has turned out for people. Like no right or wrong ways. Literally, it's just facts-- how it turned out. So for some people that's nostalgia for Jewish food or music or some romanticized version of the shtetl. Even though my grandmother did not find it romantic at all, for some people it's a feeling of having an identity that's distinct from being American, which I think many of us agree is a pretty unsatisfying identity. For some people it's hardened into Zionism and worship of another state and for some it's not about leaning toward other places or times. It's the ethics. So, to appreciate diaspora. you have to let go of the idea that Jewishness is a single identity and it's only valuable in that way. And then you can see that it's kind of an explosion of human possibility and creativity that's anchored in a shared past but not trying to get back there to that little kernel, and instead you can welcome the expansion of Jewish experience. [music]
S6: 09:58
Alfredo is a Puerto Rican Jew whose ancestors were victims of the Spanish Inquisition. He wrote to us and said. "I think it would be important to discuss how those with ancestral connection to the Sephardic diaspora view Zionism as an oppressive, ethnocentric, colonial enterprise that resonates with our own experiences of being born and raised in colonies around the world. In my case, Puerto Rico, an oppressed and neglected US colony. The oldest continuous colony in the world." So Alfredo told us that he became a Spanish citizen under a 2015 law that opens up the path for citizenship to Jewish people whose ancestors were victims of the Spanish Inquisition.
S5: 10:42
That's definitely a different path to an ancestral home from the one that Zionism lays out for Jews. And, actually, my family was expelled from Spain during the Inquisition too, but they went to Vilna and then to Palestine. So they took a different route to a different colony. It means a lot to me to hear Alfredo's version.
S6: 11:01
Absolutely. Diaspora is so tied to conquest. It's such a powerful term for people whose ancestors were expelled way beyond the Jewish experience. The Palestinian youth movement, who we heard from in an earlier episode, organizes in the Palestinian diaspora and of course the African diaspora is a key frame for black stories in politics around the world.
S5: 11:24
And a lot of us move through multiple diasporas. Here's [Aram?] who's a member of Jewish Voice for Peace in the Bay Area.
S1: 11:32
Diaspora is still a rusty, old term as I heard it regularly talked about growing up. Referring to all these peoples from the old homelands who have ended up here in the Bay Area, somehow. My godfather came from Haifa. My cousins' grandparents came here from Baghdad. Some might classmates came from somewhere in Russia. All my teachers seemed to be from Beirut, and I went to the one Armenian school up here in Northern California. So it felt like everybody had ended up here in one location. I was born in San Francisco. And I'm half Armenian-Palestinian and half French-Canadian-American. So they tell me. With me, my family members had fled from one town to the next, and it sounded like almost everyone else's family around at school too every decade or so for the last 100 years. That's a lot of moving. And our Jewish and Muslim and some religious family friends would tell their stories of moving around the Middle East and moving around the world over the years and ending up in the Bay too. It all sounded pretty familiar, but at least we had landed near so many neighborly folks as if we were still living back on the other hemisphere. In the past few years, lately, lots of us have started to break down our community's hive mind a little more and more. Here we are. We've been this far-flung. Where have we landed? And what will we do from here at this point? It's all unfolding currently faster than ever. So we'll see.
S6: 13:50
Some of you got grounded in looking at the origin of the word.
S2: 13:55
According to Wikipedia, it is derived from a Greek verb meaning to sow or to scatter as in seeds and referred to citizens of a dominant state who emigrated to a conquered land in order to colonize.
S9: 14:08
The word literally means dispersion from the Greek, and it did originally refer to the Babylonian exile. We can reclaim and can figure it, but it does insinuate to me a place or places of origin somewhere being dispersed from.
S5: 14:30
I love these questions, Tallie. Thinking about does the idea of dispersal just reinforce the idea that there is an origin point?
S6: 14:38
Yeah. I mean, these are very real questions, and it brings us to one of the things you all grappled with the most, land. What's our relationship to land for those of us who are not indigenous to the place we live? What does it mean to find home somewhere else in the world when that somewhere else was also stolen from another group of people.
S5: 15:01
Here's Tyler and Jessica and Josina. I should tell you Tyler is a little hard to hear. So if you're struggling, just check out the transcript.
S3: 15:12
Diasporas often caused by external circumstances. Despite anything that has caused a reason why a population isn't within a diaspora is that they have an extrinsic right to live in the place that they do. And I actually have a sticker of that stuff that I really enjoy. But the sticker says that our homeland is wherever we have lived. And I think that is engaging that diaspora the act of recognition that we are a population with-- no matter the circumstances, they have the right to but not necessarily meaning that that justifies the Federal Council relationship.
S9: 15:54
At this point, the concept of diaspora raises as many questions as it answers for me, especially reads these questions of from and to, diaspora from where to where. So then there's this question. What are our relationships to those places we don't live but remain in connection with, either places we choose actively to remain in relationship with or some places that we feel compelled to beyond all rational reasoning? And there's the to question, where have we been dispersed to and what are our relationships with these places where we live when diasporic? We admit we're not necessarily or always from or of the places where our bodies reside. I remember reading Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor by indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang and learning, right, yes, diaspora cannot be a way out from responsibility as a settler in the place I live. Diaspora [inaudible]. Now, these are frameworks for me of honoring my ancestors' stories and their complicated relationships to the lands they lived and oriented to. It's a way of getting at the truth that it's sometimes hard to rest and root and to know where home is. Diaspora is a way of saying for me I know my people much more than I know my place and what I'm learning is there other very necessary ways of conceptualizing our relationships to land, place, and earth and I can layer them on top of diaspora. They don't need to all fit together nicely in a line or like snapped in puzzle pieces. My relationships to land, place, histories, time and ancestry, story, move and shift and grow and change as I do with more and more words and feelings and experiences to describe and understand them.
S2: 17:58
I live in Minneapolis in Dakota Territory the origin place of the Dakota people who were forcibly interned in concentration camps then expelled after the Dakota Uprising in 1862. As a non-Indigenous person, as a person who has directly profited from settler colonialism, where I come from matters. My own origin story and cultural and mythology matters because paired with origin story I believe we must tease apart the myth from the lived. In myth, my origins are traced to the Red Sea and Jerusalem. In the origin story, less myth, it is Eastern Europe and the struggles of Western Russia. I can trace my ancestry across multiple continents, but not to the land of Palestine. My origins as inherited from my parents and grandparents are in the US. I've lived and traveled my whole life on other people's lands, people whose origin stories would be uninterrupted were it not for white settler colonialism displacing them from it, and knowing this is important, it has power to connect with myself and my story and with others. Honestly, this is all part of diaspora. Diaspora evokes the active motion of developing story from one place to the next transition as place. The word diaspora allows for a multitude of cultures and identities to gather together with a shared mythology as origin story. The word "diaspora" appeals to me as an anti-Zionist and someone who seeks the end of colonialism overall. It acknowledges history and origin story without claiming that mythology as living present. Zionism on the other hand interprets mythology as realized truth or necessity and seeks to enforce mythology on top of geopolitical fact and uses settler colonialism in order to do so. I hope for a day when diaspora as a word and identity, as a people in motion no longer is tied to colonialism, but rather to people in relationship with each other.
S6: 20:15
[music] I just really love you all so much, and I loved what you had to say. Hearing from you and reading your emails truly made my year, because you care about and fight for justice every day.
S5: 20:29
Yeah, yeah. And here, listen. I love the way Jade describes diaspora as kind of an obligation to do that work to fight for all of our liberation.
S8: 20:42
Diaspora means to me intentionally building relationship and connection with people who are different than me. And it means to me, living in the United States, as a settler on colonized land, and living in a society, a capitalist society that was built off the horrific system of chattel slavery, and off the labor of black people, that in order to be a true participant in a diasporic community, I must fight for justice, seeking reparations, seeking the return of dispossessed land for those from whom it was stolen, and seeking dignity for all peoples.
S6: 21:41
[music] Wow. Y'all, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your brilliance.
S5: 21:46
Tallie, we've been saying to each other, we've learned it again in this process as we have to keep learning it. We need other people. We can't learn this alone. We can't figure out home and our political place without fellow travelers. One of my dearest fellow travelers has been Amy Kaplan, sorry, who died last week. She was a major scholar in American studies, and she gave us this big gift at the end of her life of a book called Our American Israel. She was also my dissertation adviser and one of my favorite people to talk to about what it means to live ethically in this other colonized place. I want to dedicate the podcast to her.
S6: 22:34
I met Amy maybe once or twice, and I was always just so struck by her generosity and her deep kindness. The book, Our American Israel, is incredible. And it really shows how the story of Israel, what we think about it, or how we understand it, is so connected to this story of the US. And that we need to forge new and better connections as a community to fight that. It's a very old conversation, and it's ongoing. So we invite you to keep it going in your communities. And one way to do that is to join JVP. You can do that at jvp.org/join.
S5: 23:20
We're on our way out, but I just want to say before we go. This has been such a fun experience, and just such a great way to think. Tallie, you and I are academics, and we don't always get to go deep like this. And it was so enlightening, and beautiful, and hard to think through these questions with you. These are the questions you and I have been thinking about our whole lives, and getting to do that together with your brilliant self just was a gift.
S6: 23:55
Thanks, Nava. It's truly been so fun and engaging to do this project with you. I think it was a much bigger project than either of us really [laughter] thought it would be. I don't know. It's a bigger project than I thought it would be. But it has been such a joy to have you as my comrade in the work, and to be able to learn from you, and to hear your stories, and to make-- how do you make this a much better project than it would have been? And I really, really enjoyed being your collaborator on it, and thank you so much for joining me in this project with me. And I really want to give a shout out to Jenny Asarnow, who has been our editor and kind of coach throughout this process.
S5: 24:36
Yay, Jenny.
S6: 24:38
Yay, Jenny. I knew nothing about podcasting when we started this project, and I learned so much from them. And if this podcast sounds good, it's because of them. And if you enjoyed listening to it, they did a lot of work to make that an experience for you. So please hire them to do your podcasts, and we just very much appreciate Jenny's labor here. [music] Thank you for listening to Diaspora.
S5: 25:10
Diaspora Podcast is produced by Tallie Ben Daniel. It's written and hosted by me, Nava EtShalom, and Tallie Ben Daniel. And it's edited by Jenny Asarnow. Our theme music is the song For Our Stories by Decibelists off their self-titled debut album.
S6: 25:27
You can still follow us on Twitter @diasporapodcast or email us at podcast@jvp.org.
S5: 25:35
Signing off for now. I'm Nava.
S6: 25:37
And I'm Tallie. Thank you so much.
S3: 25:45
[music] I want to say thank you again for your making the podcast.
S2: 25:52
Thank you for your podcast and all it makes me think about.
S5: 25:52
Thanks.
S6: 25:53
Lots of hugs. Bye-bye.
S11: 25:55
I'm coming back. I'm coming back for my people, for our stories. I'm coming back. I'm coming back for my people, for our stories. I'm coming back. I'm coming back for my people, for our stories. I'm coming back. I'm coming back for my people, for our stories. I'm coming back. I'm coming back for my people, for our stories.
S6: 26:40
Yo.
S5: 26:42
Whoa. Okay.
S6: 26:44
Good job, team.