Projects

Talmud + Reparations Project

Engaging traditional Jewish texts in conversation with Black and Indigenous organizers, this project articulates our collective obligation to intervene in the historic and ongoing theft of wealth, labor, and land. This course asks: What do Talmudic texts reveal about a Jewish ethic of reparations? How can we read Jewish tradition as insisting upon collective redress of historic harms? What do Black and Indigenous activists mean when they say “Reparations” and “Land Back?” How do rabbinic ideas about atonement and repair apply to the contemporary moment?

Using these framings, I discuss what Talmudic texts offer as redemptive action for a society built on stolen wealth, what Jewish history reveals about the emotional and political implications of reparations, and what communities today are doing to organize and intervene.

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I facilitate this course annually through the Hebrew College Community Education Initiative.

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I have additionally taught this work at Yeshivat Hadar, Tzedek Lab, Base Berlin / Hillel Deutschland, The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Congregation T’Chiyah, Shtibl Minyan, and Temple Israel of Greenfield, MA.

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For more information, or to bring this project to your community, please contact me.

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“I still think about your class at Hebrew College as one of the most transformative experiences that led me to my work at Harvard Divinity School.” — Former Student

Evaluations from my Spring 2022 cohort

Academic Writing

“German Wiedergutmachung in the Black Imaginary: Transatlantic Reparations Frameworks and Black Radical Organizing” (2023/2024)

Linking archival research, critical theory, and movement rhetoric, I analyze the role of German reparations policy within the Black radical tradition. Questions that frame my work include: How are German reparations to Jews being understood, metabolized, and disseminated by Black American movements past and present? What do Black American movements understand to be the purpose and impact of German reparations? Does this purpose and desired impact align with their visions for repair? What are the limitations of analogy or comparison? This project attends to what emerges when movements mobilize comparison and highlight analogy as a call for equity on the global stage.

“James Baldwin’s Critique of Jewish American Whiteness” (2018)

This piece engages with James Baldwin as he critically explores the shifting landscape of Jewish American whiteness in the twentieth-century. Looking at Baldwin’s works spanning forty years, we witness an arc of thought which traces some of the most significant decades for Black and Jewish identity formation in the United States. Through written and spoken words, Baldwin depicts these decades of American Jewish identity marked by a coerced acculturation, loss of moral authority, and confusion about identity and one’s historic self. This essay claims that Baldwin’s writing presents a critical mirror, asking Jewish Americans if our alignment with whiteness is really worth “the price of the ticket.”

“How We Get Free” Summer Study Collective

In response to the powerful uprisings in 2020, I facilitated a cohort of organizers and educators through weekly gatherings to dive deep into a book of significance to racial justice and prison abolition. Now an annual summer study collective, this project cultivates shared knowledge towards collective action as participants embark on close analysis of texts and self. My partner in this work is Ari Keigan.

Texts:

~ this project is currently in the process of sunsetting ~

“Our Liberation Is Bound Together: Combatting
Racism, Antisemitism & White Supremacy”
with the Kavod Curriculum Team

Kavod is a community of progressive Jews in Greater Boston, committed to each other and to building a liberated world for all people. We live out our values through vibrant Jewish ritual, transformative social justice organizing, and collective responsibility.

Designed by a collective of organizers and educators at Kavod, “Our Liberation is Bound Together: Combatting Racism, Antisemitism & White Supremacy” is a six-part workshop committed to a world in which Jews of all racial and ethnic backgrounds build authentic, sustained solidarity with one another and in deep relationship with other communities targeted by white supremacy. My work with this team began in 2017 as we collaboratively built the curriculum from the ground up. We publicly launched the curriculum in 2019. I led and facilitated this curriculum in communities across Greater Boston five times between 2019-2022. As this project begins to sunset, we continue to work with local organizers and educators to incorporate feedback and meet the political demands of our current moment.

For more information or to bring this curriculum to your community, please see our website:
https://sites.google.com/view/kavodantiracismworkshop/home?authuser=0