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Havdalah #35: Tenant Union, School Committees, & Eight Truths
5 Tevet, 5785 / January 4, 2025
White Rose RI
January 04, 2025
Hello all, and welcome to Havdalah #35 —
Well, Rhode Island seems to have finally realized it’s winter; I went out to get groceries earlier and nearly got blown off my bike from the wind. The sunshine is nice, but it’s cold and getting colder, and I see people asking for money and tents by the road, and I worry…
It’s tempting, given the constant drip drip of terrible news, local, national, and global, to be shocked into inaction, convinced that anything we do can’t make any sort of effect on all the horror in the world. It’s also tempting to spread ourselves too thin (like butter over too much bread…), rushing from one fire to another until we burn ourselves out, exhausted and apathetic. We — and I include myself in this, wholeheartedly — need to steer between these two liberal Scylla and Charybdis to find a way to help our world, and do so while not wrecking ourselves. Our FashWatch has one very good idea on what that can look like; there are others.
James also has a brilliant Sidebar on Hanukkah, and how to deal with the communities we’re part of.
It’s going to be a long winter: stay warm, and stay safe, and if you can, help each other out.
Goodnight, and mind how you go —
Katherine (she / her)
The Womxn Project: Freedom Forward
When: Tuesday, January 7, 4:00pm
Where: Front door of the Rhode Island State House, 82 Smith Street, Providence, RI, 02903
Save the date to join TWP at the RI State House for the first day of session for a creative call for transparency in our local and state government. Meet in the front door area of the State House for a creative artivist installation and simple speaking program. Hear a few speakers on issues around a range of freedoms TWP will be working to protect while they take a more committed role to being involved in upholding civil rights in our state.
The Womxn Project’s Bodily Freedom Forever Index
When: Up now, updated every Tuesday
Where: Online
The Womxn Project has put together an index of politicians in RI, showing how candidates did in the 2024 election compared to their stance on bodily freedom. TWP will post weekly reports on Tuesdays, highlighting some of their findings from the BFFI.
They’re also welcoming people to come join them as they organize in each district, creating small hubs. With volunteers, they will keep building a more transparent political landscape with data-informed action and strategy. Check them out if you want to get involved!
ACLU Firewall for Freedom
When: Up now
Where: Online
The ACLU Rhode Island has been strategizing around RI’s strengths and weaknesses to create a Firewall for Freedom page. It covers issues including free speech, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigrants’ rights. They lay out some context for where Rhode Island stands, what rights are safe for now, and protections we need to push for. It also explains some of their priorities for the upcoming Rhode Island legislative session. Check it out!
Office Hours with The Womxn Project Team
When: Every Tuesday, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Where: Zoom
Need a little support or just want to know what’s going on? The Womxn Project team will be on a live Zoom to answer your questions or point you in the direction of where to turn.
Continuing Actions for Palestine
Weekly Kaddish
When: Every Sunday, 1:00pm-1:30pm
Where: Michael Van Leesten Pedestrian Bridge, Providence, RI 02903
Jewish Voice for Peace RI and allies will be hosting a weekly gathering on Sundays to recite the Mourners Kaddish and communally grieve the Palestinians murdered by the Israeli military. You need not be Jewish to attend; all are welcome to participate.
Power Half-Hours for Gaza
When: every day, Monday through Friday, 3:00pm EST
Where: online
Jewish Voice for Peace is holding Power Half-Hours for Gaza every day — join us as we channel our fury and sorrow into collective action to stop genocide.
Ceasefire Today Toolkit
This toolkit has a variety of links, including call scripts, groups accepting donations, phone banks, petitions, and more
News Coverage
As always, especially when getting news from social media, be aware of who is sharing information and why they’re doing it.
Al Jazeera Coverage of the War on Gaza has continued to be a reliable source
Mondoweiss has also provided excellent context and deep dive pieces.
An Evening with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: The Man, The Myth, The Martyr
When: Wednesday, January 15, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Auditorium, Westerly Library and Wilcox Park, 44 Broad Street, Westerly, RI 02891
In partnership with Westerly Area Peace and Justice Group, Westerly ARC, and The Rotary Club of Westerly, please join the Westerly Library for an evening honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with a selection of short readings from his works followed by small group discussions.
Refreshments will be provided.
For more information or questions, please contact Madeline at [email protected].
Atlantic Mills Tenant Union Legal Fund
The tenants of the Atlantic Mills have voted to affiliate as a chapter of the Rhode Island Tenants Union, forming the first commercial tenants union in Rhode Island. The AMTU’s next step is hiring an attorney to negotiate with the owners, and are raising money towards this goal. Please consider donating!
The 2025 Legislative Session Will Begin January 7th!
If there are bills you’d like updates on, let us know! Email us at [email protected] with the bill number, and we will track it!
James (he / him)
I.
When my conversion certificate arrived in the mail, I threw it in the trash.
The document was a vanilla cardstock, with my last name misspelled and the wrong Hebrew name. It’d been three and a half years since my mikveh.
Originally, I’d planned to burn it if it ever materialized — and wouldn’t that have been a more beautiful image! — but its unceremonious appearance didn’t seem to merit a Viking funeral. So, it joined the lemon rind and the two empty Oreo boxes in the wastebasket. I fancied I could hear Taps in the cosmic winds, played on kazoo.
By now, that certificate is (hopefully) being recycled [editor’s note: this is not how recycling works]. Or perhaps it’s in the landfill. Maybe it’s been burned after all. Whatever its fate, the evidence of conversion is dead to spoliation.
In the interest of being perfectly clear: my actions were not driven by a desire to erase my history, nor by any regret over the documented event. I destroyed the proof because I have nothing to prove.
II.
It’s been a year since my previous Hanukkah Sidebar. The butcher’s bill has only grown since.
The asymmetry of violence is stark. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be persuasive. The faith of those who believe in the righteousness of Israeli brutality is as unshakable as it was on October 7th. It’s the same profane faith that hangs flags beside Torah arks.
III.
From December to June, I served as a dramaturg for a play set during the Shoah. During the spring in which I did the bulk of my research, I lost twenty pounds in less than three months. My sleep was troubled, my dreams disturbing. An already difficult time was made unbearable by the ricochet of history into the present.
A hospital is bombed. I transcribe a podcast description of Germans skeet shooting infants.
A man self-immolates in front of the Israeli embassy. I construct a timeline of legislation.
IOF troops open fire on Palestinians in what becomes known as the Flour Massacre. I read about mobile vans and mass graves.
College students occupy campuses and face police batons. To keep my mind off Kent State, I compile examples of Polish collaboration with Nazis.
Articles hit the presses about Israeli war criminals suffering from PTSD. I explain to the actors how the gas chambers were invented because the Einsatzgruppen could not handle the trauma of shooting tens of thousands of Jews a day.
The cast and crew sit in hollow-eyed silence after listening to me tell the story of the White Rose, of Rachel Corrie. They stare into the middle distance as they learn of Jewish children dumped en masse into a bonfire, of Palestinians decapitated and crushed under bulldozers.
Terrible though the stories may be to those who do not yet know the past, we who have learned are only more horrified by what we know is only the beginning of worse to come.
IV.
I am out to dinner with my partner and his friend to celebrate his birthday. It’s only the second time I’ve been to this restaurant, but I’m fond of it because it’s where he took me for lunch the first day we met, and I think of this as the place we had our first date.
His friend and I are gushing over the waiter’s earrings when I hear a word behind me, a word I recognize without processing. I turn to look over my shoulder. A woman, middle-aged, white, short, has read the tattoo on my forearm.
Those who have seen me in the flesh know that I have a conspicuous amount of ink, a substantial proportion of which is Hebrew. Normally, it’s a treat when I hear someone correctly read the words. I’ve been found in public by a wide gamut: Chabadniks to Reconstructionists, college converts to secular forty-somethings who barely remember their b’nei mitzvah passages. Curiosity, excited nostalgia, baffled delight; it’s a lovely way to make visible these connections I have to strangers.
As the woman greets me, she compliments my tattoos. While she peers avidly at the rest as I rotate my arm for her, my shoulders are tense. I’m waiting for her to notice the words on the soft inside of my bicep: from the river, to the sea.
She doesn’t. She says some more kind words, thanks me again, and tells us to enjoy our dinner before departing.
Weeks later, another white woman, older this time, spots my tattoos at work and marvels at them. Again, I wait like a coiled spring for the interaction to pass.
A vector of connection has become a conversational landmine. It is not universally so; I still hold my limbs loose when people of my generation want to take a gander. But what once made throngs of strangers and public spaces possible arenas of mutual amusement has now made them potential social hazards.
I often don’t want to be found anymore. I would rather those ties that bind remain invisible.
V.
The past year has seen me struggle with nearly unfathomable depths of shame. I have not finished this reckoning, nor have I been entirely successful.
I haven’t made my feelings a secret; nearly every Jewish holiday has elicited a meditation on the subject. Hell, I’m writing another one right now.
Well, not exactly.
Here is the truth: shame can suffocate; shame can also motivate. Shame can be poisonous, or productive; self-flagellating, or necessary. Shame can be justified.
Here is the truth: I am not ashamed of being Jewish. I am ashamed of other Jewish people.
Here is the truth: this is not about shame.
Appropriately for Hanukkah, this is about pride.
VI.
The first time I called myself Jewish, I was ten years old.
Let me be more precise: the first time I remember calling myself Jewish, I was ten years old.
My fifth grade teacher asked any Jewish children to identify themselves. When I raised my hand, I was scolded. This was during Hanukkah, the time of year Ben S’s mom came into school to teach us about the menorah and dreidels and latkes. I was a gentile girl, and thus was pronounced Christian by my teacher (because they’re synonyms, right?). The memory, despite its resulting confusion and embarrassment, didn’t really have an outsized impact on me. Its significance is contextual, endowed only by hindsight. Regardless, it is significant.
Each burning wick flickers like a ripple in a pool, reflecting back the face of a little girl I know. I see her clearer each night, the shadows drawing apart like curtains for just an hour or so. She stares back into the lights, and I wonder if it was me that she saw in Mrs. S’s menorah.
VII.
On Shavuot, I rabbi’ed for the first time. At an IHOP.
My own rabbi, continuing a cherished tradition, reserved the longest booth the restaurant had available. “Voluntold” to go first, I presented my Midrashic thoughts on Lilith and agunot. From sundown to about 2 am, dozens of Jews came and went, teaching and questioning and arguing, consuming dairy and sharing Lactaid pills, and in one instance, falling asleep on the table.
Perhaps because of the types of people my rabbi likes to associate with, most of the people who attended were non- or anti-Zionist. All embraced Diaspora. There was no dearth of subjects or materials to cover. Each rabbi could go as deep or as wide as they so desired, and each student was eager to follow. The table was crowded, but if one took into account the traditional view of Shavuot, then that IHOP was full beyond capacity with every Jewish soul.
And all of them were a captive audience to a Jewish version of Cards Against Humanity.
On my fourth order of the evening, I took stock of my company and thought, this is my mountain.
VIII.
Some shame is not to be worked through, but to be lived with. It cannot be overcome, only accepted. I have to decide what shame to bury, and what shame to carry.
The truth is this: I am ashamed of other Jewish people. But it is only other Jewish people who have redeemed Judaism for me. It’s those who make this mountain a home who are miraculous.
Needle Drop: “Cold War”, Janelle Monáe
Reading Rec: It’s 2025, Babes
Wading Into 2025: How to Begin (Kelly Hayes in Organizing My Thoughts, December 31, 2024)
A Plea for Action: Stop Fascist Incursion into Local School Committees
In 2024, Rhode Islanders who still believed in the myth of the region’s unassailable progressivism were given a rude awakening. Far from the utopic blue bulwark against bigotry, the Ocean State harbors its own extremists waiting to exploit political and institutional weaknesses. Nowhere are our vulnerabilities more apparent than our local school boards and committees.
You may have been following Steve Ahlquist’s coverage of the Chariho School District meetings and the Middletown School Committee over the last several weeks. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that this is a continuation of a larger trend that began last January: in 2024, far-right rhetoric reared its ugly head at school committee meetings in Barrington, Central Falls, Cumberland, East Providence, Foster-Gloucester, Lincoln, North Providence, North Smithfield, Pawtucket, Smithfield, Tiverton, Warwick, and Westerly. Most recently, a Christian Nationalist pursued a position on the Providence School Board, and at the time of this writing, it’s uncertain whether he will be prevented from achieving it.
Conservatives seeking to gain and consolidate ground in the culture wars by turning local school boards into battlefields is, unfortunately, a proud American tradition. That being said, we’re seeing a concerted effort across Rhode Island to pivot hard to the right in our public schools. Most of the towns listed above were able to valiantly fend off these attacks, but the margin of victory has varied. And crucially, these chucklefucks will be back in 2025.
One particular dipshit to keep an eye on: Robert Chiaradio, who, flanked by Moms for Liberty, made a whistle-stop tour of every school board or committee meeting he could get to last year. Chiaradio is a board member of the Rhode Island Family Institute, which is just as precious as it sounds.
Speaking of Moms for Liberty, the new Rhode Island chapter had a very active first year. Not content with warming the benches (evangelizing school committees), M4L successfully got a foothold in local politics. In addition to finding support in political incumbents like black mold connoisseur Patricia Morgan, the group backed several horses in the recent races. Two of the candidates, Louise Dinsmore and Diane Tefft, later participated in the shenanigans Steve Ahlquist has been reporting on in Chariho, shadiness which is itself a bellwether of bullshit to come.
One of the more alarming details I’ve noticed is the petty embrace of authoritarianism when allotted the smallest sliver of status. On December 17th, Steve Ahlquist filed an Open Meetings Act complaint against the Middletown School Committee for the behavior of the current Chair and his faction on the 12th. Usually, an isolated incident like this would be the result of lone petty tyrants and their pencil-pushing lackeys, high on the power of being King Shit of Committee XYZ in Bumfuck, Nowhere.
Except it’s not an isolated incident.
On August 21st, the Westerly School Committee (one of the towns on the list that had a more protracted public spat over trans students’ rights) violated the Open Meetings Act.
And now, Chariho.
One might think that local school boards are pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of the current political landscape. But these are not just little squabbles over rules lawyering. What’s being displayed here is a willingness to brute force entry into institutions in order to then bludgeon them into the desired shape. These are not just conservative control freaks — this is fascism.
The Rhode Island far right may have spent much of 2024 using trans people as a wedge issue to bully their way into classrooms, but make no mistake, it is exactly that: a wedge, a boot jammed into a door about to slam in their face. Even if anti-trans bigotry is soundly rejected, which in certain towns it has been, the fascists will come back wearing a new pair of kicks. They don’t care how they get into the room, they just want in. And we need to break their foot in order to close and lock that door.
So what do we do?
To paraphrase a close friend, be the institutional hellterror you wish to see in the world.
Each of us lives in this state, whether in one of the towns I’ve mentioned already or in a city or village that will be next. Pick one committee — I suggest school [editor’s note: zoning is also a good pick] — in your city or town, and haunt the fuck out of it. Make sure the committee members know your face, your voice, your name. Make sure they know you’re watching them closely. If you’re really ambitious, make sure the good ones are excited to see you and the bad ones know when they see you that they’re about to have a long night.
Chad M. Topaz wrote up an incredible resource on how to fuck up an asshole school board, and I highly recommend perusing it if you’re not sure where to begin.
It may not feel like much, but I promise you, the impact you can make is all the more significant for being an especially obstreperous fish in a small pond. People who turn into authoritarians when granted any tiny measure of power are the people who should not be allowed any power, and it’s up to us to keep them out.
