#doykeit

Lara Ditkoff, Ornamental mizrach illustration (2024), Digital

Featured in the 5785/2025 edition of the Radical Jewish Calendar for the month of Adar. The Radical Jewish Calendar is organized by Jewish month, layering Jewish and Gregorian dates, astrological happenings, holidays, and political history.

The Radical Jewish Calendar is organized by Jewish month, layering Jewish and Gregorian dates, astrological happenings, holidays, and political history. Twelve months of political art, culture, and history made by dreamers, artists, and organizers who want to know what time it is. 

This calendar features art of the Palestine solidarity movement, celebrating anti-Zionist history, exploring themes of doykeit/hereness/diasporism.

As always, the Radical Jewish Calendar celebrates Jewish culture that is intersectional, queer, feminist, anti-racist, and that challenges and builds a Judaism and Jewishness beyond Zionism.

Rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov wrote that in olam haba’a, all borders and laws will dissolve before the light of the divinity present in all things – that even the border between Shabbat and the other days of the week would crumble, allowing the holiness of the Shabbat to infuse into every day (as Jill Hammer writes, this vision of sacredness infused into every day, every place, deconstructing artificial boundaries of space and time, “does not reject the Temple but rather enlarges it”). To divest from loyalty to the state and become instead a cosmopolitan – a citizen of the universe – “testif[ies] to the unity of the Creator and his creation – just as the former is one and undivided, so too the latter.”

“Every border implies the violence of its maintenance.” - Ayesha A. Siddiqi

There is no border between peoples, and consequently no state, that is not created and maintained through dehumanization. When we accept the existence of any state as good or even as a necessary evil, we are accepting the proposition that the people on the other side of the border are not people in the same way as we are, and that their suffering does not matter in the same way that our suffering matters.

It is only when we reject such a fantasy that we can rise together. We do not need the state to protect us from our cousins; we need to join with our cousins to protect each other from the state.

We are in a climate of unbearable propaganda; we are being thrown bodily into the memories of generations of screaming ancestors who yearn for sanctuary. This is being crafted intentionally by agents of states who need us to be too dissociated, too triggered, and too terrified to connect across difference so that they can get on with their work of exploitation and domination. Our only job right now is to resist that, to push through the dissociation and the fear and the trauma to reach out for each other, to dismantle the borders and walls and protections that the fear and trauma spring up around us, to remember that we are not each other’s enemy.

When we tear down the walls around our hearts, we are making ourselves into channels through which olam haba’a can be born, and when we tear down the walls in the world, letting the sacred peace of Shabbat rush in like undammed water, letting the artificial mechanisms of the state -- ANY state , all states -- be washed away by a river of solidarity, we are bringing it to pass.

Mir zaynen doh

‘Doykeit’ is a zine series by Jewish zinester Solomon JB Brager about queer Jewish identity "in relation to anti-Zionist and Palestinian solidarity politics".

NEW DATES FOR IN-PERSON LEARNING AND CONNECTION!

Saturday January 13th, 3-6 PM, Blackbird Infoshop & Cafe, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston NY (doors close at 4 for a protected circle practice, masks required and provided)

Wednesday January 31st, 6-9 PM, Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, The LGBT Community Center, 208 W 13th St, Room 210, New York, NY 10011 (doors close at 7 for a protected circle practice, attendance capped at 35, masks required and provided)

Neither conversation will be recorded or shared publicly, to allow people to share freely, to be courageous, to integrate the new.

Do'ikayt is the yiddish word for "here-ness." It describes a movement that came into being at the same time as, and in conversation with, the nascent zionist political project in the late 1800s, and it is based on the idea that wherever we are, that is our homeland; that our task as Jews is to build solidarity and fight for liberation in the places where we already live and work.

It’s difficult for many diasporic Jews to imagine a praxis that integrates all of the ancestral trauma that we carry with the drive for peace and justice for all peoples to which we are commanded. Do’ikayt offers as a possibility that tikkun olam will come when ALL borders fall and ALL states dissolve.

We are in a climate of unbearable propaganda; we are being thrown bodily into the memories of generations of screaming ancestors who yearn for sanctuary. This is being crafted intentionally by agents of states who need us to be too dissociated, too triggered, and too terrified to connect across difference so that they can get on with their work of exploitation and domination. Our only job right now is to resist that, to push through the dissociation and the fear and the trauma to reach out for each other, to dismantle the borders and walls and protections that the fear and trauma spring up around us, to remember that we are not each other’s enemy.

When we tear down the walls around our hearts, we are making ourselves into channels through which olam haba’a can be born, and when we tear down the walls in the world, letting the sacred peace of Shabbat rush in like undammed water, letting the artificial mechanisms of the state be washed away by a river of solidarity, we are bringing it to pass.

"Doykeit"

Page 1:  Contains a handwritten description of the word Doykeit and a type quote by Judith Butler about Jews speaking out against injustice, particularly in a post WWII context. Page 2:  Contains two pieces of handwritten text which describe the zine Doykeit itself and the motivations and intentions behind it.  There is also a typed quote by Rudolph Rocker from The London Years regarding social ideas, Jewish workers, and the libertarian movement in Britain.