Chanukah 2023
Boeing Headquarters, Chicago
December 14, 2023
On the last night night of Chanukah, you stand on a bridge, alongside twelve others, blocking traffic. You hold a black rectangular posterboard with the letter “I” lit up in small holiday lights bright against the dark matting. You are letter seven in the phrase CEASEFIRE NOW! “F” stands to your left, “R” to your right. You check in with each other, smiling. Each one of you, each letter, is a necessary part of the entire demand.
On the sidewalk, a rally with speeches, singing and chanting continues, a determined, spirited din to accompany your blockade. Through the crowd, you see the face of your rabbi holding a mic, but it’s hard to distinguish his words.
A row of police officers stands in front of you, and another row behind them, and a third behind the second, their faces impervious. They are young. Many of them are not white. They are too far away for you to read the last names on their badges, but you imagine they contain all the identities of contemporary working-class Chicago, all the ethnicities from which CPD now amply recruits.
You note their guns, their batons, their body armor, their pepper spray. You are not inexperienced with police and are fairly certain that at this moment, the situation is under control. There will be no tasering, pepper spraying or shooting. Still, with the cops, there are no guarantees– those words spoken at your training last week come back to you -and you could imagine the situation unraveling and getting rough, but you don’t. You feel calm, strong, completely certain, no second thoughts or doubts. Your parents, of blessed memory, taught you how to face the police.
You are about to be arrested.
Standing on this bridge and blockading traffic had taken more maneuvering than you expected. The group had to line up in reverse order on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway without attracting police attention. Keeping police focused on the rally in front of Boeing headquarters would give you the space needed to figure out how to spell backwards, get in formation, cross the bridge on the green light and stop. You spread out and took position, resting the four-foot letters on the asphalt in front of you, your message shining: CEASEFIRE NOW! You stopped traffic in a matter of seconds. Now drivers wanting to head east onto the Washington bridge are stuck and their horns, blaring from behind the police line, make it clear that you’ve made a lot of people angry.
You wear many layers. Underneath, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece. On top, a parka and insulated vest. Wool socks, zippered boots, no strings-you’ve prepared for what you will be allowed to keep in your cell, which will be cold. Woolen hat, gloves, and of course, an N95 mask. You won’t be able to put it on later, so you’re wearing it in advance. Your ID is in the zippered vest pocket. You’ve made sure to get to a bathroom before the rally, since no one knows how long it will take for the police to clear everyone from the bridge. You wonder if the much younger people blockading the street with you have had the same concern. Probably not.
Your underlayer, the lightweight cotton t-shirt, nestles against your skin. You bought it at the Yiddish Book Center last spring, after a week-long language class there. It is black, and has der aleph-beis, the alphabet, printed in white letters across the back. No one can see your shirt, but you know it is there and you feel the language of your ancestors sprawled across your ribcage. Yiddish is buried deep inside you, protecting you. Khof curls like a reverse C, a strong spine protecting the top and bottom as they open to the left, like two outstretched arms in a battering wind. The sound of khof, its friction against the back palette, is easy for you to pronounce. You’ve heard it since you were a child, words like Khanike and kholem and Khelm, the town in Ashkenazi Jewish lore known for its harmless, charming simpletons. Snuggling your back, mid-alphabet, khof lies somewhere near the bottom of your lungs and when you breathe, it comes to life, a seed germinating and sprouting inside you, rising from the black Galician soil where your grandmother raised her gardens.
But now is not the time to dwell in your past. Not the time to lament how this language was passed on to you only as a relic, not something alive and breathing, even though your grandmothers were born into it, lived and loved and birthed their own children in it.
You are here to protest what is happening right now. Today, the civilian death toll from the Israeli bombing of Gaza stands at 18,000. Among the dead, there are at least 8,000 children. You are standing on this bridge to disrupt, to say there can be no business as usual, that your tax dollars will not pay for meting out slaughter. You are blocking this bridge to call out the death company whose headquarters you stand in front of, the company that supplies the fighter jets and the bombs delivering this assault. On this last night of Chanukah you are saying not in our name, the slogan written in stark white letters across the black t-shirts worn by many in the crowd of protestors. By now, two months into public, continuous protest around the country, these t-shirts have become a familiar outfit.
Squad cars arrive, blue lights flashing, followed by paddy wagons. The lieutenant in charge is angry and frustrated by your surprise move which changed the scene from a rally easily monitored by officers on bicycles into one that would require much more. He warns you that your action is illegal, and you are subject to arrest. As if you didn’t know. As if this were not intentional.
The arrests happen quickly. The lieutenant approaches you one at a time, starting with C, unraveling the demand for ceasefire from its beginning. He gets close in your faces and repeats what he has already said -your action is illegal. He asks if you will agree to leave and walk off the bridge on your own, then asks if you understand that you are about to be arrested for disorderly conduct and obstruction. R, to your left, seems subdued, maybe nervous. He is young, likely has a job to get to tomorrow or an interview for something next week, something consequential. Most of your group is young. They are all putting themselves at risk. But no one breaks rank.
No, I am not walking off this bridge. Yes, I understand I am going to be arrested and charged.
You watch as the police detain C,E,A,S,E and F. The same procedure for all –several officers tie their hands behind their backs, capture their wrists in zipties. Each one is led from the bridge past the crowd towards the paddy wagons. The crowd cheers and sings and sends love.
It’s a parade of sorts and you wonder why the police have chosen to march people on this side of the bridge right past the rally, when they could have walked all of you on the other side where you would be far less visible to your admiring comrades. It is dramatic and theatrical.
As your turn approaches, you remember your daughter’s advice, from her own arrest last month in New York. “Have them tie you up in front. It’s your legal right if you ask. It will be easier on your shoulders, Mom.”.
Lately, your shoulders have been bothering you. You’ve been aware of your rotator cuffs in a way you weren’t before. When the lieutenant approaches you, you have already seen and heard six people arrested and you are ready. After he asks you if you will leave on your own, warns you of your imminent arrest and tells you the charges, you hold your wrists in front of you and make your request. To your surprise, though he is snarly and clearly tired of all of you, he agrees.
And off you go, zip-tied in front, masked, bundled in layers, past the cheering crowd. A friend and her daughter stand on the sidelines, taking pictures and a video you will watch later, over and over again, seeing yourself taken to a paddy wagon by the Chicago police.
If your parents were still alive, they’d be in the crowd giving you the thumbs up. If they could have heard another friend shout “Free Palestine,” as you were marched by, they would have agreed.
Eventually, there are seven of you in the paddy wagon. You’ve been sorted by perceived gender, or perhaps by what’s on your IDs. You’re careful about what you discuss. Nothing about your action. There is only one other woman in your age range, and so when the conversation turns to music, you are pretty much lost.
You sit in the wagon for a long time before it bounces off towards wherever you are heading. There don’t seem to be any shock absorbers in the wagon, and no seat belts. You all agree that you are heading east over the same bridge you’ve been blocking, though of course you can’t see outside. Chicagoans internalize a sense of the grid. Zip-tied and jostled, you sit in two rows, lined up against either side. After a short ride, the wagon comes to an abrupt halt. You wait, perhaps fifteen long minutes, or more, no idea where you are. “They are probably getting dinner,” your companion to the right says. She has an extensive arrest record and says it wouldn’t be the first time the cops stop for pizza while the protestors in the wagon wait.
This remark leads to an exchange about previous arrest experiences, even though music is a safer topic. Surveillance. When one of your wagon mates asks you if you’ve been arrested before, you say no, only tear-gassed, but you note that you’ve been protesting your entire life, even while still in utero, at least according to family lore. Whatever was being protested in 1958 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin before your birth month of October, well, you were there along with your mom. There was plenty to protest. The sixties were in their prequel and your parents were certainly not too happy about the fifties either.
“And how does it feel now to be arrested?” she asks.
“Overdue,” you say.
This will become your go-to phrase when people ask you about the arrest. You are not inclined to say that it is the least you can do, that it is nothing compared to the death and destruction raining down upon the people of Gaza, because it sounds trite, but, given your long protest history, it really is how you feel. The least you could do. And certainly overdue.
In the collective holding cell at the precinct jail, you share stories. You bond. Seven women in a cell for an undetermined period, of course it happens. Demographically, there are obvious ways to distinguish the group.
Two of you are in your sixties. The rest, much younger.
One of you is Christian, a minister. The rest, Jewish.
Three of you are well versed in the Frankfurt School. The rest, not so much but they do get the basic concepts. Everybody in this cell has at least an undergrad degree.
Four of you work at non-profits. Two are professors (or retired, you, specifically.). And then there’s the one minister.
Six of you have tattoos. Only one does not. You. So you feel inadequate and explain that for five years, you and your daughter have been trying to decide on a mother-daughter tattoo. You both can be indecisive, debating people and so it hasn’t happened yet, because you haven’t agreed on a design yet, but you will. Maybe a monarch on you, a milkweed pod on her. Or loons and canoes. She has some nostalgia for the Midwest, despite her decision to trot off to New York.
And then, on this night of a Chanukah protest and arrest, the next division raises one of your important foundational stories. Of the six Jewish women, five have had a painful, conflictive break with Zionist ideology and the communities and families in which they were raised. Only one has been raised as an anti-Zionist. Only one has never supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish ethnostate at the expense of Palestinian freedom and self-determination. Only one has been raised as an American Jewish minority within a minority. You.
“You are lucky,” someone tells you. The others agree.
You think about this before responding.
On the one hand, you admire people who break with the ideas they have been raised in, if those ideas are unjust. You admire people who can make a break with received wisdom. There is liberation in that act. Rejecting at least some part of one’s parents’ thinking is usually necessary. Each generation should be an improvement upon the preceding one, you often say to your kids, when they let you know that their ideas about something are different -i.e., more advanced-than yours.
At many moments in your life, certain aspects of your parents’ Old Left beliefs have been a constraint. Perhaps shackle. But you have always agreed with their most basic premises, certainly those about justice and equality and the evils of capitalism. And you have always admired their consistent walking the walk, the life of protest and boycotts and political actions, your upbringing among Black and brown people in hyper segregated Milwaukee, their clear, lived intention to provide you with something other than whiteness. But it was not an easy way to grow up.
And especially on the topic of Israel, the basic tenet in which they raised you–no, there should not be a Jewish ethnostate-one you have never broken with, has made it hard for you to find community with other American Jewish people, including your extended families.
“Yes, lucky,” you agree. There is nuance in everything, but not always.
You’ve just heard the heartache of someone who told her rabbi that he had taught her a pack of lies. They avoid each other. Another whose parents have told her that they are deeply ashamed of her. And another, whose parents haven’t spoken to her in years, speaks with resignation about their rupture.
The stories are painful.
At some point, you leave the topic of Zionism and return to tatoos. Show and tell begins. But it is winter in Chicago and are dressed warmly, to have stood on a bridge in the cold, so you are all wearing long sleeves and warm leggings and sweatpants. Someone rolls up the left sleeve of her shirt. But how to show the upper arm? Some minor undressing occurs. Another rolls up the leg of her sweatpants to show off the art on the back of her calf. But how to show the thigh? Pull them down! Finally, a cellmate rolls up her shirt to show you a tattoo that extends from her neck along her spine, almost to her butt, a gorgeous breathtaking tattoo that elicits oohs and aahs from the entire group. Along with the tattoo we see her belly and bra, her ribs and backbone. This escalation of the undressing is enough for the officers watching you from outside the thick glass windows of the collective cell. Enough story-telling, enough female bonding, enough revealing of the artwork on covered limbs and backs. More than enough. The show is over. One by one they call you out, dissemble the collective. They “process” you, take your fingerprints, your mug shot, take you to another are of the jail where there are individual cells, each one of you on her own. You spend the rest of your time, another seven hours, in a cold cell with bright lights, a camera, a hard bench, an open toilet and sink combination with a trickle of water to wash hands and take a drink, left alone to ponder. You sit in solitary, counting the cinder blocks of your cell, with lots of time to go over the shared stories, the laughter, the tears, the determination.
At 3:30 a.m. you are released. The jail support team is waiting for you outside the precinct door to offer hugs, smiles, sufganyot, the jelly-donuts you eat at Chanukah, and a ride home. They’ve been waiting outside half the night. Now the other half is yours.
You wonder, where did this story begin? Where will it take me? How do I tell it?
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