Question as Action: On “Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah”
Morgan Bassichis, Jay Saper, and Rachel Valinsky, eds. | Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah | Wendy’s Subway | August 2023 | 104 Pages
There is a question swirling around in the post-October 7 discourse, less urgent than that of Palestinian liberation, but a notable question nonetheless: What is becoming of contemporary Judaism?
For Jews opposed to the state of Israel acting in their name, major Jewish institutions are something of a vacuum. I count myself in this. I am an American Jew with an already fraught relationship to organized Jewish religion, and as I grow more involved in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, it is tricky to find a place in Jewish communal spaces. Such is the case because an overwhelming majority, from synagogues to summer camps, express explicit or implicit support for Israel. What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism? What forms of gathering and collective action can we engage in otherwise? Who has come before and shown us the Judaism beyond Zionism that we imagine?
Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, a collaborative book project co-edited by Morgan Bassichis, Jay Saper, and Rachel Valinsky and published by Wendy’s Subway, lays out a roadmap for resolving this dilemma. Billed as “an anti-Zionist guidebook” for Jewish teens, the book’s 38 contributors, in chapters of two pages or less, share lessons, insights, and advice for how to ask questions about Israel, the US, and Judaism. In the process, they breathe life into the Jewish radical tradition. Short, straightforward, and decorated in bright yellow and purple with a question mark illustration on every page, the book’s intended reader is a 13-year-old. Specifically, a Jewish teen on the cusp of their bat mitzvah—the term bar mitzvah, the conventional male form for the ritual coming-of-age ceremony, is almost entirely absent from the book. This choice is never explained, but most contributors opt for terms like b’nai mitzvah, brit mitzvah, B-mitzvah, or, in what becomes the default, the historically female bat mitzvah, a nod to emerging linguistic strategies for embracing gender expansiveness and to the intersectional feminist politics of the writers.
Published in August 2023, two months before October 7, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah is all the more powerful knowing its call to action preceded the escalation of the genocide in Gaza. Copies have since been passed around and read aloud at student encampments including at Harvard and The New School. The book reaches back far before 2023, confronting many long-term historical examples of Palestinian dispossession and Zionist nation-building to present an alternative vision of Jewish diasporism and anti-Zionism. While the author list includes a significant number of Jewish Voice for Peace NYC members—a JVP chapter this writer is also active in—and is associated with two New York literary institutions, Wendy’s Subway and The Poetry Project, which hosted a reading in the East Village in May, the contributors represent regions far and wide and homelands even wider. Penning entries from Hawaii, Oakland, Ferguson, and Atlanta, Jews of color tie their intersectionalities to ongoing solidarity work and diasporic lineages. Multiple chapters touch on apartheid South Africa, decolonization in the Middle East and North Africa, the civil rights movement, and Indigenous struggles for land back in the US and Palestine. As we see Palestine redefining the global left, this is another project of linking, clarifying, moving, and building.
Questions assembles a collection of contemporary Jewish and allied activists’ and thinkers’ declarations of Jewish identity and reconstructionism, archiving the thought of the Jewish radical tradition in the early 2020s. Yet the project’s primary goal is not to record history or remake Jewish institutions. It is to encourage Jews coming of age to identify with the Palestinian cause. The questions and answers within, with any luck, are planting seeds of solidarity to bloom in future generations.
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To question is an action accompanied by expressive modes. Rather than a principally intellectual pursuit, these writers propose questioning to be a spiritual one, an emotional and moral imperative. A question can be a prayer, a small uprising, a maneuver that seems to expand the truth. In a foreword that instantly proves the book’s radical bona fides, Angela Davis writes:
What a brilliant project!—one that incorporates and amplifies the insistence on asking questions, a foundational Jewish value, from which we all, regardless of religion or culture, can benefit.
The foreword by Davis, who received her Bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University, one of the most prominent historically Jewish institutions of higher education in the US, is followed by one of the book’s editors, comedian-activist Morgan Bassichis. Bassichis names questions as “sacred” in Jewish tradition.
“Questioning Israel or speaking up for Palestinians seemed like a big taboo—even more than being queer!” they write. Theirs is one of many testimonies by queer and trans authors in the book—fitting for how queer and trans anti-Zionist Jewish communities have a reputation for being, at least among those in the know. From lawyer Dean Spade to artist Gregg Bordowitz, these testimonies chip away at the contradictions of liberal Zionism and connect anti-Zionism with other struggles for freedom. In a chapter on pinkwashing, Ita Segev, a writer, performer, and Israeli trans woman, turns to the activism of queer and trans Palestinians, who say the biggest threat to their existence is not Hamas or homophobia, but the violence of the state of Israel itself. Segev writes implicitly to trans readers: “Learn to recognize all kinds of borders and limitations the world puts on people. Learn to draw inspiration from all the ways people are fighting to be free.”
If it isn’t already clear, the text is of course offering not only questions, but answers, as these thinkers have highly developed stances on Palestine and its interconnectedness with many issues. You can tell this book is written by community organizers. Each chapter title is a question, some more on the nose than others: from “What even is a bat mitzvah?” to “Doesn’t the US do a lot of the same things as Israel?” The effect is warm, clever, approachable, not unlike the light pressure of a teacher. Bassichis jokes that when they had their bar mitzvah (rejecting the masculine conjugation in the same line), they were “riddled” with questions: “Will anybody come? Do I have food in my braces? How do I walk less…gay? Why did g-d make my sister the hot one? How many lava lamps are people going to give me?”
A joy of the book for those of us who grew up in Jewish homes is that it adds itself to a long list of titles about Jewish questions. In my case, I remember The Jewish Book of Why by Alfred J. Kolatch staring back at me from my parents’ shelf, summoning me to curiosity. It is as Jewish a thing as halakha, Jewish law, or almost the same thing: the Talmud, the over 6,000-page collection of Jewish texts, endlessly mines questions, interpreting (an exponential amount of times) what the Torah stories mean and how they should instruct our behavior. The Talmudic rabbis seemed to have known that always, as you seek answers, more questions come.
Although Kolatch’s book lay on the shelf, I never learned much about halakha in my generally secular Jewish household, and didn’t find out about the Talmud until later, but it aligns with what I do remember about Jewish religious instruction: that any goodness that exists in us is due to our mitzvot, good deeds. Judaism is about behavior. Perform a mitzvah and it helps you become good. Questions as a project evolves along a similar line of thinking. It follows questions to their logical extension, like a step that leads to information, followed by a final step: action.
The book’s questions also unfold in that sequence. It is the information-gathering step in the second of four sections, “Learning from Palestine,” that leads to the book’s darkest and most poetic inquiries. At the start of the section, the question form shifts its purpose with a chapter entitled “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” Rather than addressing 13-year-old Jewish (likely American) kids, the chapter, by the young Gazan writer Kholoud Balata, takes the diaristic form. Addressed “Dear Diary,” the text is directly lifted from Balata’s diaries, written in the few moments she found time during the 2014 assault on Gaza. “I couldn’t write earlyer,” reads a note from August 30, 2014, “but I survivd,” apologizing to her diary for dooming it to “even heavier pages.” Her testimony marks the beginning of a section that transitions us from the perspectives of Jewish youth to those of Palestinian youth, displaying contrasts in our lived experiences. As is critical to any good book on anti-Zionism, a significant part of the text then is devoted to making legible Palestinian subjectivities, or as Edward Said wrote in 1979, “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.”
Here the subsequent chapter titles use the question form in repetition, filling the syntax “What does the (blank) symbolize to Palestinians?” with five symbols in succession, as in “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” followed by the watermelon, the cactus, the spoon, and the key. Author-activist Sumaya Awad outlines the destruction of olive groves in Palestine and the concept of sumud, or steadfastness and resistance, tied to rootedness; architect-scholar Mahdi Sabbagh uses a story about eating watermelon in his childhood in Jerusalem to discuss the ban on the Palestinian flag, writing that watermelon reminds him of the “unbreakable spirit” of the Palestinian people. In a piece once again reflecting a stylistic diversion, visual artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme introduce a surrealist poetics to these writings. Tasked with expressing the resilience and loss associated with the cactus patches around destroyed Palestinian villages, they give the plant and themselves new form:
Every time I spot cacti, a whole subterrane opens up to me, as though the cacti were part of our bodies, as though they were our bodies, rooted in the land. Our bodies folding in and out of each other… We are searching a landscape made unrecognizable, for a part of ourselves, the cactus is us and we are it… We were here and we are still here. The cactus calls out to us, the land calls us to return.
The last of these chapters, on the spoon and the key, both ignited in this reader a spell of weeping. Organizer Izzy Mustafa tells the story of the spoon, the magical tool six Palestinian prisoners used to break out of Gilboa Prison in 2021, and organizer Sandra Tamari writes of the key, a symbol of the right of return for Palestinians who still have their keys to the homes they fled or were kicked out of during the Nakba. Tamari’s story centers on Jaffa, where her father-in-law Elias lived before he fled in May 1948. When he was ninety years old, she traveled to Jaffa with him for his first time back in sixty years. “We took him to see the house that had been stolen from him,” Tamari writes. “He guided us to the neighborhood and walked up to the door. It was unlocked… Elias entered the home… The Jewish Israeli woman in the house wasn’t scared, only curious, and she allowed us in.”
Truly remarkable stories are dispersed throughout Questions in such quantity it is astonishing, considering it is only 104 pages. In JVP organizer Elena Stein’s story, another that moved me to tears, Stein describes her own tears when she traveled to Lithuania on her grandmother Rivka’s behalf to return to the shtetl where Rivka was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust. A man in the town led her to the mass grave that all the Jewish men, including Rivka’s father, were forced to dig and then were buried naked in, and as he told her what happened there, Stein found herself standing on the grave. “Aghast, I wept,” she writes. “I turned my head back towards the town: What about the neighbors, the bystanders, who watched this happen and did nothing?” After her trip, against the backdrop of Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Stein committed herself to Palestinian liberation. “Now I understood: the horrors of my family were being used to justify horrors against Palestinian families. And I had been scripted into the role of bystander.”
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Childhood often refers the reader back to the purpose of Questions. Author Aurora Levins Morales tells a story of how her biologist father left his microscope on the kitchen table every day, hoping she and her brother would use it to look at things more closely. “Solidarity,” she purports, is “a way of living and at its heart is curiosity.” Artist-educator Una Aya Osato writes about the twin vulnerability and potential of youth, a bitter pill to swallow given how many thousands of Palestinian children have died in Gaza since Osato wrote her entry:
Every single day in Palestine teens are arrested and imprisoned for resisting colonization and for simply existing. The Zionists who are trying to steal their land know how powerful teens are—that’s why they’re doing this. But these cruel acts of preemptive punishment don’t actually work: young people’s spirits are too strong and powerful.
So too it is youth that reveals instances of common experience between Jews and Palestinians: of reclamation, of dreaming, of admiration for elders and ancestors. Poet Tariq Luthun writes of playing soccer as a teenager in Gaza and going to get the ball from where it strayed, “we built our rituals in retrieval, in returning,” simultaneously conjuring how much Jews have to retrieve and return to in our journeys beyond Zionism.
Luthun’s entry, Balata’s diary from 2014, and other chapters harness the lens of childhood, activating its unifying, universalizing quality, and yet the predicament that demands they do so betrays its own injustice. Since October 7, Palestinians and allies have spent so many hours urgently decrying the loss of children, to no avail. It is often children we mourn best in our efforts to process the Holocaust, too: our core cultural memories of the event include the diary of Anne Frank and cinematic portrayals from Sophie’s Choice to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. For readers of this project, if any such parallels between the genocides of Jewish and Palestinian children come to mind, they can be converted into fertile ground for solidarity, a form of shared fury and grief.
When the book turns more consciously to US politics, its analysis remains clear and complex, even in short form. In a series of chapters focused on how to actually fight antisemitism, journalist Collier Meyerson and researchers Jonathan Brenneman and Aidan Orly tie the rise of the US far right and white nationalism to Christian Zionism, stating: “The overwhelming majority of Zionists in the world are Christian.” Meyerson and organizer Noah Habeeb connect antisemitic violence to white supremacy and xenophobia, referring to neo-Nazism in Charlottesville and the 2018 gunman who killed eleven Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, motivated by that community’s support for immigrants.
Occasionally, perhaps due to the range the book ambitiously attempts to cover, there are missed opportunities. Chapters on Birthright and Seeds of Peace touch on issues in both programs, but the Zionist foundations upon which both were founded remain unclear and beg greater demystification. Diasporism is touched on many times but isn’t thoroughly defined as a strong, coherent alternative ideology to the ethno-nationalist and settler colonial politics of Zionism. Perhaps this vagueness is because contemporary Jewish leftists are still working out exactly what we want diasporism to mean. In my view, diasporist thinking is a fundamental, powerful tool for dismantling deeply held beliefs in Zionism because of how Jewish attachments to land are framed. Early Zionists conceived of their movement as an attempt to end the Jewish people's exile from the Land of Israel, interpreted exile and ethnic mixing as conditions under which Jews could never escape antisemitism, and presented a Jewish state as the only hope; diasporism, instead, proposes making Jews safe everywhere.
Yiddishkayt, a key element of contemporary and historical Jewish radical politics, is also mentioned but not defined. This is also true of the Bund, and it would be easy for a young reader to miss the profoundly inspiring history of the Bund, the Jewish Labor Party in Eastern Europe formed in 1897 and known for its socialist universalism and working-class organization against capitalism and Zionism. The Bundist concept of doikayt, or “hereness” in Yiddish, opposes Zionist mythology and provides the resonant basis for the diasporist Jewish principles we are developing today: “Wherever we live, that’s our homeland.”
It was highly radicalizing for me personally to learn that early Zionists banned the Yiddish language in 1948 for its association with diaspora and, in their minds, the feebleness and racial degeneration of Eastern European Jews, compared to the strong, militaristic, gendered, and racialized Israeli national subject the Zionists were interested in constructing. While a chapter in Questions by scholar Shirly Bahar, a welcome exploration of Mizrahi identity, goes back to Israel’s privileging of the Hebrew language over Mizrahi Jews’ native tongues, such as Turkish and Arabic, the book could have included a few more details about how the early history of the formation of Israel was already embroiled in racist, eugenicist conceptions of not only the Muslim body, but the Jewish body.
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What lingers from Questions is the alchemy of turning awareness into action, a cycle fueled ever more by awareness of traditions of action. It worked, for me, as something of a salve for my longing for Jewish communal life. How vivid and welcoming the linkages and lineages are here, introducing the Jewish movement elders I had hoped existed, seemingly evidencing a new degree of their reality. Dialogues crystallize between figures in the book, conversations between pages: Angela Davis’ foreword emphasizing intergenerational ties is nicely bookended with editor Jay Saper’s afterword about how their Aunt Jeri’s struggles in Jackson, Mississippi taught them bravery, and then how they went on to organize a Jewish-Black-Palestinian solidarity effort on Davis’ behalf in 2019. An entry by Satya Zamudio, a youth activist in Oakland, is followed by a letter from Zamudio’s mother, Brooke Lober, reciting in glorious abundance all the people, in particular Jewish, queer, and mixed-race women, who have come before in her and her daughter’s shared fight for liberation. “This book is an invitation for you to join this legacy,” Saper writes. Their words assume the reader will carry on the tradition, accept the passing of the torch, assume the nature of the question is to catalyze, assume the Jewish radical tradition is tradition enough. They have evaluated the stakes for young Jewish people inheriting such a world. What action these young people take is yet to be seen, or, arguably, is already beginning.