“Diaspora has always been bound up with wrenching hardship and yet, inextricably, tantalising promise… I think of diaspora as the spreading of seeds across both space and time. It is a scattering apart, and also a seeding of many places and moments. It holds pain, loss, and separation, but hope, growth and nurturance too.” - Cindy Milstein
“I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” -Rosa Luxembourg
“Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund’s principle of doikayt—hereness—the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are… Hereness demands that we learn our local histories and resurrect hidden ones of our own. Hereness means we refuse to disappear into the interiority of our liturgy, and equally refuse to stop being Jews in public. Hereness forces us to consider critically our relationship with class and its ordering of our world. Hereness is weird and materialist and queer and fun and angry, and best of all it’s already happening.” - Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz
Tracing a journey through ancient Jewish texts & histories through to contemporary co-liberation struggles, these sessions will delve into this hereness and explore the possibilities of a Jewish identity beyond nationalism & assimilation. We want to explore what it means to affirm & embrace a belonging and connection to the lands we are on now, cultivating a Jewish identity that is both multi-rooted & committed to cross-diasporic solidarity.
These sessions will explore diasporism with a Jewish diasporic lens, while drawing on the vastness of diasporic experience. In some sessions there’ll be more of a Jewish focus than others, however all of these sessions are really open to everyone - you don't have to be Jewish to attend and no prior knowledge will be assumed.
These sessions will be held by Sara Moon, Samson Hart and Rachel Solnick, who will be joined by guest presenters. You can find more information about individual sessions below.
You can join for the whole series or for individual sessions and all sessions will be recorded and sent out to participants after each session.
If you'd like to join live - you'll need to have purchased a ticket by 6pm on the day of the session in order to receive the link on time. If you sign up for 'all sessions' once the series has begun you will still receive recordings of all sessions.
Note, some of the session content may be subject to minor change.
Wednesdays 7:30-9:00pm GMT (2:30-4:00pm ET / 11:30am-1:00pm PT), February 8th, 15th, 22nd, March 1st, 8th.
Per session: £7 / £10 / £15
All sessions: £35 / £50 / £75
Purchase tickets here.
Session 1 - 8th Feb - What is Diasporism? (With Joseph Finlay and Rachel Solnick)
Galut. Tfutzot. Exile. Diaspora . What do we mean when we name Jewish relationships with place and land? In this session we will trace the etymology of the word ‘diaspora’, from the Greek meaning to scatter, exploring its roots in Jewish thought and political practice from ancient times to the modern day.
Session 2 - 15th Feb - Radical Histories of Diasporism (With Rachel Solnick)
Jewish history is awash with radical thinkers who fought colonial narratives and resisted nationalism in favour of building solidarity with other marginalised communities. So many of these thinkers and their stories have been erased from Jewish history, from Hannah Arendt, to the Bund, Levinas to Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz. In this session we will repopulate our Jewish histories with these missing narratives, diving into radical histories we might not have been taught but that are ours to reclaim. Note this will be a more participatory workshop.
Session 3 - 22nd Feb - ‘Cultivating Rootedness’: A conversation with Rachel Solnick & Claire Ratinon
How might diasporic peoples build an identity beyond the nation-state, in solidarity with other diasporic and migrant communities? How might reclaiming the role of ‘land-steward’ help to cultivate rootedness and belonging wherever we find ourselves, when our ancestral relationships to the earth has been disrupted? This session will be a conversation exploring Claire Ratinon’s Mauritian Kreol heritage and Rachel Solnick’s Jewish Diasporist identity, speaking to their two very different experiences of diaspora, displacement and identity.
Session 4 - 1st March - Diasporism & Ecological Belonging (With Lucy Michaels & Ione Maria Rojas)
To be a diasporist is to connect to the earth where we are, to honour the seeds, soils and stories of our multi-rooted heritage’s that we carry with us wherever we go. To be a diasporist is to steward the lands we are on, to enter a reciprocal relationship of healing & nurture with them.
In this session we will continue to explore the significance of tending land to support our own thriving as well as that of the soils, cultivating deeper rootedness in a time of great disconnect from ourselves as nature.
Session 5 - 8th March - Seeding Diasporist Futures (With K Greene & Robyn Minogue)
In our fifth and final session together, we will explore contemporary examples of diasporist Jewish organising across the world. We will learn about diasporist seed-saving from K Greene (Jewish Seed Project) and Robyn Minogue (South-West Seed Sovereignty Programme) and we will close this series by sowing our seeds for our own diasporist visions.
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Speaker Bio’s
Rachel Solnick
Rachel is a land worker, artist, researcher, mother, Ashkenazi/Sephardi Jew. She is a PhD candidate investigating the intersections of Black and Jewish political radicalism on land.Her work focuses on how discourses of racial justice and Diasporism provide a means for a radical politics of co-liberation and anti-racist, decolonial land practices.
Joseph Finlay
Joseph Finlay is a musician and a historian. He recently completed a PhD on Jewish responses to race relations in postwar Britain. He works extensively in Jewish music and leads the Zingt Yiddish song project in schools across Essex. He loves all things related to bundism, diasporism and British Jewish trivia.
Claire Ratinon
Claire is an organic food grower, writer and author of Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong. Claire has grown edible plants in a variety of roles including growing crops for the Ottolenghi restaurant, Rovi and for the social enterprise Growing Communities. She co-wrote the pamphlet, Horticultural Appropriation for Rough Trade Books with artist Sam Ayre and her first book, How To Grow Your Dinner Without Leaving The House was published in August 2020. @claireratinon
Lucy Michaels
Lucy is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist. She has a training in both social and environmental sciences, holding a PhD in desert studies from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Lucy has held research fellowships at Warwick University, researching the social meanings of soil and is now a Food Systems Transformation fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Lucy spent six years living in Israel working with Palestinian - Israeli joint struggle organisations as well in environmental peacebuilding. Lucy has been active in the UK Jewish environmental movement, including with XR Jews. As part of her Warwick fellowship she has also authored a journal article on Shmita. Lucy currently lives in Leicester with her kids and dog, where she is a keen gardener.
Sara Moon
Sara is a nature-connection and rites of passage facilitator, food-grower, community organiser and Hebrew Priestess. She is co-founder of Miknaf Ha’aretz, and its little sibling project Camp Beenu. Sara lives in South Devon and dreams of building a radical land project of rich diasporic spirituality, solidarity and land-tending.
Samson Hart
Samson is a food grower, land-tender and writer based in South Devon. He is co-founder of Miknaf Ha’aretz, a regional coordinator for the Landworkers' Alliance, and a creative associate at gentle/radical.
K Greene (he/they)
K Greene is a seed being. Their seed journey began twenty years ago with starting the first seed library in a public library in the United States. Four years later, Greene and their partner Doug Muller turned the library into the Hudson Valley Seed Co., a regional, organic and open-pollinated seed source celebrating seeds and their stories through art. From there, Greene began work with Hudson Valley Farm Hub. They partnered with Indigenous and other cultural organizations to begin seed rematriation and sovereignty work including with the Mohawk community in Akwesasne, the Lenape Center, Jewish Farming Network and Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Along with continuing these seed relationships, Greene is creating resources for seed growers that reimagine botany through a non-binary lens. Greene continues to provide training to new seed libraries, teach seed saving skills, and enjoys meeting new seeds every season.
Robyn Minogue
Robyn is the coordinator for the South West of England as well as a grower and horticulture teacher. She currently runs a kitchen garden for a local seasonal restaurant and is an active member of the South West Seed Savers Network. With a background in arts and activism Robyn is particularly interested in the intersection of food and social justice, having previously worked as part of a prisoner resettlement charity running their market garden. Robyn can often be found helping others set up new growing spaces from scratch in whatever space may be available, she is committed to supporting others to overcome barriers to both food growing and seed saving.
Ione Maria Rojas
Ione is a multidisciplinary artist working with earth, plants, animals and people. She is also a food grower, which forms a vital strand of her creative practice. Ione is interested in how working with our hands invites us into different forms of connection - with ourselves, with others, with our immediate environment - and likes to play with this by digging clay, making inks and pigments with found and foraged materials, walking, drawing, writing, sowing seeds and listening to birds. In the past few years she has been exploring her mixed heritage, working across the UK and Mexico, a back and forth that was prompted by her first meeting of amaranth.
www.instagram.com/ionemariarojas
www.ionemariarojas.com
Please note, these sessions are ticketed so we can properly support our amazing array of speakers. We ask that you pay whatever amount feels most comfortable to you. NO ONE WILL BE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS. If these options are not within your budget at this time, please get in touch for a free ticket at: miknafhaaretzzine@gmail.com
We aim to make these sessions as accessible as possible. The sessions themselves will be very informal. Some sessions will be more participatory than others, and you will be invited to participate with video on or off, to engage as much or as little as you would like, from bed or out on a walk. We will take a short ‘bio’ break half-way through the session. All sessions will offer closed captioning, be recorded for later viewing or re-watch and participants will be muted, unless speaking.
If there’s anything else we can do to support your access, presence and comfort at these sessions please let us know at miknafhaaretzzine@gmail.com
Miknaf Ha'aretz is an emerging collective of british-based diasporist jews committed to building radical, wild jewish community in the UK. @miknafhaaretz