What are we all doing?
Hello friends. What a timeline we’re all in.
In this email:
A new workshop about values, for helping you figure out what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it
Thoughts from a mind disordered by current events, plus the Stop Gaza Genocide Toolkit and Jewish Voice for Peace Stop Weapons tool
Values-Based Decision Making is back
Before the rambling, the short and sweet: I’m offering another session of Values-Based Decision Making for Your Career (I should shorten the title, perhaps?) coming up October 28-November 1. This workshop is the OG, the first I ever offered— it used to be entirely self-guided, but something I notice about the folks I work with is that they (let’s be real, WE) all struggle with making time to do the kind of reflective work we often need, especially when we are in an information environment that prompts us to react, not reflect. So this time, the workshop will be five days, with live session time and the option to watch recordings of the exercises after the fact, just in case timing doesn’t work for you and/or you have to miss one of the sessions. Check out the whole thing here.
No Really, What Are We All Doing
I don’t know about you, but every day I feel like I encounter a new thing in the world that has irreparably changed me from who I was before. I guess at some level that’s always true, but I am referring specifically to the genocide in Gaza and continued occupation of the West Bank. I will never be over seeing a 20 year old young man tethered to his hospital bed by his IV being burned alive, nor any of the other horrifying images we have seen in the last year.
I recently read both Elie Wiesel’s Night and Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (I had no intention of reading two accounts of the Holocaust back-to-back, but I’m working on curating a library and those two fell into my hands in this moment) and have been reflecting on the flow of information, what the world is and is not able to know and see at any given time. Wiesel’s account is particularly interesting in that respect, as he was interned relatively late during the war, and the earliest pages of the book make clear how little his immediate town knew of the danger they were in. After the war, it’s also clear how long it took people to not only become aware but to believe the full scope of what the Nazis had done. In fact, the original title of Night was And the World Remained Silent— a phase I think of often as I look around at people living their lives like nothing is happening. All this, despite the fact that there is a genocide being livestreamed to us daily by Palestinians as they are being corralled and murdered.
This past weekend, I co-produced a benefit show called Uprising for Palestianian circus artists in Gaza and the West Bank. It was a huge undertaking for our very small team of folks, all of whom donated their time and skills to make it happen. The event started as a benefit for the Palestinian Circus School, which is in Bir Zeit (a town north of Ramallah in the West Bank), but we worked with the school’s director to broaden our reach to artists in Gaza (getting money directly to people in Gaza is difficult even under “ordinary” circumstances— I’m including my opening remarks for the show below, which has some added context about that if you’re curious). The morning of the show, I heard from Mohamed of Free Gaza Circus, who I’d reached out to previously, via Instagram message— it was a heartbreaking exchange, in which he told me he only wishes for the nightmare to end, and feels the world has forgotten them. I told him that I know it’s hard to see but that people are protesting all the time, that we want this brutality to end, and that we have not forgotten. He said they would return to entertaining people in the camps soon, and I told him they do not need to be entertaining for us to love them and want them to be free. After I sat on the couch and cried (partly sitting with the irony of being a safe American with a couch to cry on), and wondered if it’s true that people haven’t forgotten. Haven’t we? If we haven’t, what are we all doing? The show raised about $3400, but it feels like having a bake sale to buy a fighter jet. To be alive right now feels like a kind of walking insanity: I grumble about the rain, I see a dead child; I wonder what I will eat for dinner, I see someone burn alive. I send a friend a picture of my cat and she tells me she is losing her mind, I tell her that every movement must have felt like nothing was working until it did. If you’d like to read them, I’m including my opening remarks from the show below.
Please check out the many options for actions you can take in USCPR’s Stop Gaza Genocide Toolkit, no matter who you are there is something for you in there. Jewish Voice for Peace also just released what I think might be the lightest-lift action yet, a tool that will literally call your senators for you, you don’t even have to dial the number.
Opening Remarks from Uprising: A Night of Performance Benefitting the Palestinian Circus Community
Good evening everyone, and welcome to Uprising! My name is Lulu, and I’m one of the coproducers and performers in tonight’s show— fun fact, I’m also one of two Lulus you will hear from this evening, along with Lulu Jamal from our cosponsor Salon Kawakib, so you don’t have to remember too many names, but I also hope you don’t feel confused by all the Lulus.
Before we really get started, I’d like to take a quick poll: who has seen a circus show before?
Now, who here has NOT seen a circus show before?
Well if you’re brand new to circus, welcome!
Now, as your MC, and the MC of a circus show, normally my role is to run around the room getting everyone excited, encouraging you to cheer and stomp your feet and yell! But I don’t know about you, I have not really felt like cheering this week.
While yes, we’re gathered together to enjoy these performances— some circus, some poetry, and our documentary screening— I don’t think it’s lost on anyone in this room that Monday brought us over the threshold of a year into the genocide, the first livestreamed genocide in human history, where all of us have born witness to the brutality of Israel’s colonial violence. Where we all know that the only reason we are seeing these terrible images is because of Palestinian journalists and people who are documenting ethnic cleansing as it is being done to them, and begging us not to look away.
And I also think that if you’re at this show, you likely realize that while it’s been a year of all-out genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian struggle for freedom from colonization and oppression did not start last year. It did not start with the 2014 war on Gaza. It did not start in 2000, it did not start in 1987— the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination goes back at minimum to the Nakba nearly 80 years ago, and even to before the creation of Israel, against occupying British forces.
The name of this show, Uprising, is an English translation of intifada— meaning a collective revolt against oppression— and the intifada will continue until we live in a world with a free Palestine: from the river, to the sea.
So while at a regular circus show, I might try to get you to cheer, or to laugh, here I invite us all to be together in whatever we feel in this moment, and with whatever it brings— be that joy, tears, neither, or both. We are here, with all that entails, in solidarity.
All of the proceeds from tonight’s show, whether it’s your ticket, a donation via the QR codes you see in the space, or having a donation-based beverage during intermission, will benefit the Palestinian circus arts community-- and I’d like to talk for just a moment about why circus arts, what you’re going to see tonight, and also how we plan to distribute funds.
If this is your first circus show, and/or perhaps you haven’t really thought about circus arts before, you might have no idea what to expect! On top of that, it might sound sort of niche— after all, the entirety of Palestine needs help, so why circus? Most people who have not seen contemporary circus might think of things like clowns (and yes, sometimes there are clowns— not tonight but sometimes), but contemporary circus is a movement art that is about storytelling and expression.
At its core, I believe circus is about freedom of movement, and bodily autonomy. Our ability as human beings to move freely, to express ourselves fully and without fear, to exist in and have determination over our own bodies, are some of the most fundamental rights we have.
The oppressor knows this: that is why Israel heavily curtails the movement of Palestinians, such that for example, as a non-Palestinian tourist from the US, it might take me 20 minutes to get somewhere in the West Bank that could take two and a half hours for Palestinians trying to pass through Israeli checkpoints. It is why, long prior to the beginning of the genocide, Gaza has been rightfully referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, where residents are trapped within so called “security” walls, subjected to impossible travel restrictions, and denied access to food and clean water.
And yet: Palestinian circus artists exist, both in Gaza and the West Bank. In movement, and in sharing or teaching circus arts to others, they are liberation in action.
After our aerial and poetry performances, you will get to hear from and see some of the artists from the Palestinian Circus School in tonight’s short documentary, “What Happened in the Tent”. The PCS is located in the West Bank, in the city of Bir Zeit, north of Ramallah, but there are also numerous other circus groups elsewhere in Palestine, including in Gaza (such as Free Gaza Circus and Gaza Stars).
Some of our audience may be familiar with conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, but if you are not: Like many settler colonial states, Israel tries to create divisions within Palestine by dangling the promise of better treatment to some places, like the West Bank, and exacting more brutal punishment to places like Gaza, which has a history of more forceful resistance.
As a result, while it is difficult in general to get funds or any form of support into anywhere in Palestine, it is easier to get funds to some places than others. For this benefit, we are collaborating with the Palestinian Circus School, which receives its funds via a Belgian NGO called Friends of the Palestinian Circus School, and they are ensuring that funds will be redistributed to not only benefit PCS but circus groups in Gaza as well. Because try as it might to sow division, Israel’s apartheid state will fall, and Palestine will be free.