Yesterday, I wrote a piece called “The Jewish Left is Alive and Vibrant” in the Jewish Daily Forward as a response to Jay Michaelson’s piece in the same paper, “Death of the Jewish Left.” In my piece, […]
Category: All That’s Left
What To Do When Rammed by a Man in an Electronic Wheelchair Fundraising for 10 Needy Holocaust Survivors:
Just walk away.
Ok, um, guys, seriously we need to just walk away.
It is hot. I am confused. My shins pre-hurt. My stomach feels twisted and odd. Over the last three years of activism and direct actions, I’ve been yelled at, shoved, spit on, detained, whacked with a baton, cursed out, dragged, arrested and nearly urinated on, but this was by far the most upsetting and unexpected counterprotest I’d ever experienced.
I was standing on a kitchen chair when it happened.
All That’s Left: Creative direct action. Street theatre. In the middle of a sea of people in Jerusalem’s Machaneh Yehudah market at 2:40 PM on a Friday afternoon.
We are here, I say in loud American English, stepping up onto a chair.
(We are here), respond the other activists, the form inspired by Occupy Wall Street’s “Mic Check,” an eminently portable, eminently free, eminently intriguing grassroots type of Megaphone.
To announce that from this day forward, I yell, my assumed Voice of Authority growing louder and shriller.
(To announce that from this day forward), respond the others. Four of them are holding two large American flags in a V-formation, others are waiting nearby with flyers and cameras.
This piece of land belongs, I am only half looking at my surroundings. The other half of my looking is directed, somehow, at the space between my eyes and the world, a space that I’ve come to know as my “zone,” first experienced in theatre as a young kid, and later during spoken word performances as an older kid. It is a place of extreme focus and echoic silence. I’m in this. I am vaguely aware that we are people are yelling and that a crowd is growing, but I don’t or can’t or won’t pay much attention: I have words to say.
(This piece of land belongs!)
To Americans only, movement in the crowd, a flash of yellow, murmurs, raised voices. The flyer-ers have begun distributing. I later find out that All That’s Left member Daniel Roth (who is an superb writer, photographer and pursuer of justice) encountered someone who told him to give him all of his flyers, and when Daniel refused, the man took a half-hearted swing at him.
(To Americans only!)
Arrested in Hebron: “Segregation is Not Our Judaism” (Photos, Vignettes, Reflections).
Last week, on October 25th, I found myself under arrest in the city of Hebron. Later the same night, as my eyes wandered over the boxy orange payphone that, from my handful of anthropological case-studies, […]
All That’s Left– Redrawing the Green Line (Video and Flyers)
June 5th, 2013, 46 years after Israel occupied the Palestinian Territories, All That’s Left members came to Jerusalem to repaint the Green Line. Here’s how and why and my super-objective, wholly-unbiased analysis: And five reasons […]
“If Only You Were More Polite…” (On MASA, Naftali Bennett and a Common Critique of the Left)
Last Sunday, a group of young Jewish members of a new diaspora anti-occupation collective called “All That’s Left” interrupted Naftali Bennett’s keynote address at an End of Year “MASA” gathering, chanting “Diaspora Jews say end […]
All That’s Left: A Diaspora Collective Against the Occupation
Introducing: All That’s Left: A new collective unequivocally opposed to the occupation and committed to building the diaspora angle of resistance. This is worth following (and getting involved with). First things first, our Facebook page was […]
The Leftern Wall 