Q&A: 'Wicked' author Gregory Maguire on souls, saints and religion in Oz

(RNS) — In the 1995 novel that inspired the musical and film, the Wicked Witch of the West is a green-skinned child of a minister exploited for his missionary endeavors.

“Wicked” and author Gregory Maguire. (Courtesy images)
Kathryn Post
November 19, 2024


(RNS) — Before “Wicked” was a blockbuster film and a hit Broadway musical, it was a 1995 novel rife with dark twists and a whole lot of religion.

Gregory Maguire’s origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West introduces readers to Elphaba, the green-skinned child of a minister who exploits her for his missionary endeavors. Set in the land of Oz, introduced in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic children’s series and brought to life in MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz,” Maguire’s over-500-page-long book fleshes out the religious, political and personal clashes that shape the familiar characters and set the stage for Dorothy’s arrival.

Named after a saint, Elphaba is an atheist who believes she has no soul, yet spends several years living in a convent and longing for forgiveness. Though the musical removes the novel’s more explicit religious references, the questions at the heart of the story — What differentiates good from evil? Where does wickedness come from? — are central in all its adaptations.

Ahead of the film’s debut in theaters on Nov. 22, RNS spoke to “Wicked” author Gregory Maguire about his religious upbringing, Elphaba’s search for a soul and why nuns, saints and witches might not be all that different. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Were you raised in a religious context, and did that shape your approach to religion in “Wicked”?

I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and I continue to define myself as a practicing Roman Catholic, though I have to practice pretty hard at it. But religion was very important to me as a young person. I came close to considering going into seminary in my early 20s, and I took the fact of religion in people’s lives, or its absence, as a very serious part of how individuals and cultures identify themselves. When I wrote about Oz, I wanted it to be more like our world, which meant I had to import religion there. Religion is one of the few things that is absent in any portrait of Oz at all, with the exception of the very general founding myth of the fairy queen Lurline.
What are the faith systems you’ve imported into Oz?

Lurlinism is a kind of paganism, a kind of foundational myth. It is ancient, sentimental, and in the world of my story, it is the peasants who adhere most strongly to it. Unionism is that more established faith found more in cities. It has a kind of allegiance with Christianity in that it has churches, basilicas and bishops, but there is no savior. The God is unnamed, influential and mysterious. In this way, it takes some tropes from faith traditions that favor a more amorphous spirit head. That is both a kind of Protestant attitude — the crashing of statues and smashing of windows, etc. — but it also has a bit in common with Islam, which disallows the depiction of Allah, except through the writing of Allah’s name. So Unionism is an odd amalgam of that instinct in certain religions to try to keep the image of God open and therefore more accessible. Interestingly enough, of course, it is also less accessible if you can’t hang an image on it.

Pleasure Faithism is, in my mind, a kind of Carnival picture of God. It puts a higher premium on spectacle. It involves the Greek idea of theater, coming together for a kind of epiphany and catharsis. And finally, there’s Tiktokism, which comes closest to a certain way that we live now in the West. A Tiktokist is the kind of person who won’t go into a church and turn off their phone. Their allegiance is to the stimulation, to the connection and to the appliance. While we don’t have cellphones in my Oz, there is a kind of reverence for that aspect of that moment in the Industrial Revolution which Oz seems to be going through. Tiktokism is a more dangerous shifting of the devotional impulse away from the question of creation and toward the questions of utility.
How might Elphaba’s early exposure to Unionism have shaped her worldview?


“Elphie” by Gregory Maguire. (Courtesy image)

I go into this with a little more depth in my novel coming out in about four months, “Elphie.” I go back to those years in Elphaba’s life that run between the age of about 2 and about 16. In this book, Elphaba is seen being courted by her father to round up possible communicants in his missionary work, to be the lure. And one of the ways she does that is by singing. Her ability to sing was a crucial part of my humanizing her. A person with a voice has beauty, and her father exploited it. She allowed herself to be exploited because she wanted his love. But religion, if it doesn’t make her into a deeply moral person, at least brings her into contact with people who are not like her, and that is what community is for. It’s to make us empathize with people who are not us.

How and why does Elphaba grapple with the idea of a soul?

To become an atheist, I think, you have to think about God. It’s not a default position. Raised in a religious environment, Elphaba has to grapple with what she believes, and if the way that she’s made is evidence of her having been rejected by a creator, or embraced by a creator. I think all young people do that, especially as they come to understand their own frailties, and the fact that they can never be as good as their religious training teaches they should be. In that juxtaposition of the ideal and the actual, we find the first exposure to possible apostasy, and have to grapple with it. And that’s what she does. She has not been treated with many instances of love in her childhood, and so it’s hard for her to project a universal love as a Godhead might be said to have for her. Nonetheless, she is smart enough that she can think, well, maybe the soul exists, even if I haven’t experienced it in my own life and times.

In the characters of Elphaba, Glinda and Nessarose, we see the interplay between sainthood and witchcraft. How might the novel’s approach to religion complicate otherwise rigid definitions of good and evil?

If you isolate the characteristics many cultures identify with the witch and the wise woman, often they were characteristics that are identical. Wisdom about the application of herbs, to the pre-rationalist mind, could be magic or medicine. I’m taking my lead from L. Frank Baum, who created four witches in Oz, two that were good and two who were bad. His mother-in-law, the feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, wrote scathingly about how women were opposed by Christianity, and how they were not given the proper valuation. Now, L. Frank Baum didn’t talk about Christianity in any of his books, but the fact the power of women could be both feared and appreciated in the same book, I think, expressed a growing sentiment that brought us into the 20th century, toward the suffragette movement.

I was taught up until the end of 12th grade by Catholic nuns. I was pre-Vatican II, and my first teachers for the first four years, you might as well call them witches. We were tiny. They were tall, and had long black skirts that went to the floor, black shoes and black veils and white wimples and white bibs. They were simultaneously good and all-powerful, and were self-imposed paupers living in community. They exerted on children the highest moral authority. I was raised by strong women, by nuns and librarians and my stepmother. I have great respect for those women.

Can you talk about some of the more subtle ways your original novel’s spiritual themes are integrated into the musical?

I don’t think they are, with a single exception. Religion teaches us to be collaborative and communal (by churchgoing and respecting others who may not be like us), but also to be independent, and in possession of our own moral guidance system. We’re meant to own the behavior of our own souls, and we’re meant to belong to a community and make it better. In “Wicked” the musical, that same crisis between the impulse to be a citizen and care about society, and the impulse to be an individual and not anesthetize yourself away from your own individuality because it offends society, does exist. I wouldn’t say that is only a religious impulse, but it’s one of the things that religion does.

One of the things about “Wicked” you see in my book, that you don’t see in L. Frank Baum, in MGM, or in the wonderful musical and movie, is that the culture is really made up of very different populations. In my books, there are several languages spoken in Oz, a number of cultures. In that setting, a character who has no place in the world, Elphaba, might recognize we all feel somewhat illegitimate in the breadth of human experience, and we all must get on with it anyway. That’s not exactly a religious instinct, and Elphaba is no Jesus figure, but I do think she is like all of us who ask ourselves, how can I be a Samaritan? How can I lean toward the humanity of somebody who looks nothing like me, doesn’t speak like me, doesn’t behave like me, doesn’t pray like me, and maybe wishes even my demise and destruction? What does my belief system require me to do? And where can I find the courage to do it?

'Sanctuary People' follows faith-based organizing in the first Trump term

In 'Sanctuary People,' Pérez takes a hopeful look at how the sanctuary movement has broadened to include not only offering shelter to migrants, but help for victims of hurricanes and police violence.

“Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities" and author Gina Pérez. (Courtesy images)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
November 22, 2024

(RNS) — Days before the recent U.S. election, Gina Pérez, author of the new book, “Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities,” said many people in the sanctuary movement, which shelters migrants and refugees, “can’t even bring themselves to think about” the implications of now-President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises of mass deportations.

But Pérez, a cultural anthropologist and professor of comparative American studies at Oberlin College, said the community showed resilience in the first Trump term — four years she had spent participating in and observing faith-based communities in Ohio, which had some of the highest numbers of immigrants seeking sanctuary in churches to avoid deportation.

“From its inception, sanctuary’s appeals to divine power and the authority of God have been a powerful way to challenge the secular and punitive power of the state,” Pérez, a Roman Catholic, writes. In conversations before the election, Pérez made clear that many migrants faced grim prospects with Kamala Harris.

In “Sanctuary People,” Pérez takes a hopeful look at a broader understanding of the sanctuary movement that provides not only shelter to those at risk of deportation, but hospitality to Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria and solidarity with those impacted by police violence.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How do you define sanctuary?

In the 1980s, faith-based organizing really focused on Central American — namely Salvadoran and Guatemalan — migrants and people seeking refuge in the United States or Canada. They were leaving the U.S.-fueled violence in Central America and coming through U.S. faith communities. That was my first introduction to sanctuary, when I was a student at the University of Notre Dame, thinking about churches as sacred spaces offering sanctuary.

The New Sanctuary Movement begins around 2007, under the Obama administration, when people who had lived undocumented for a very long time were evading and trying to challenge deportation to remain with their families. There was a famous case in Chicago of a woman, Elvira Arellano, who took sanctuary in a church for more than a year.

Following Trump’s (first) election, I became interested in how, suddenly, people were talking about sanctuary in a variety of ways. Trump immediately wanted to target sanctuary cities, but a bunch of faith communities declared themselves sanctuary churches. At Oberlin, as at more than 200 colleges and universities, students, faculty, staff and administrators organized to get their campuses designated as sanctuary campuses. I became interested in people who were using the term sanctuary more broadly.

This idea of accompaniment, of a preferential option for the poor, of walking with people through struggles and through the ways that they have to face different kinds of injustice, was something that very much informed both my faith, but also the kind of politics that I was trying to be involved with. I see accompaniment as being one sanctuary practice.

RELATED: She spent three years in church sanctuary. A new documentary tells her story.

You write about the community’s devastation in 2018 after Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 114 workers at an Ohio garden center and compare this to the response to Puerto Rican arrivals after Hurricane Maria. How are those two responses intertwined?

After the raid, people in Ohio were starting to take sanctuary in houses of worship, and there was debate within the Diocese of Cleveland about whether its churches would (offer) sanctuary, as Presbyterians and Mennonites and Lutherans (were). One of the things that came out of those discussions was a recognition that sanctuary had become this politicized word.

One of the organizations working with churches made this explicit connection — that everyone who was here for Puerto Rican migrants when they arrived in 2017 after Maria were going to be here in the same way. The same networks of support would help these families devastated by this ICE raid. They were using that language of sanctuary to talk about Puerto Rican migrants needing a place to feel safe and welcome and using that same language to talk about people being split apart from their families.

People were (also) organizing and using the language of safety and sanctuary to talk about providing support for families, for women of color and Black women who lose their children to police violence.

Celestino Rivera, the late police chief of the city of Lorain, Ohio, is a key figure in the book. How did he reconcile the tension between his official role and his support for sanctuary?

Celestino was called to a meeting by a local priest, Father Bill Thaden. Some of Lorain’s immigrant rights association wanted to meet with him. Celestino asked, “What can I do, Father? How do I prepare?” Thaden said, “No, they want you to listen.” They brought him in to hear what the policing practices actually looked like on the ground. It opened his eyes to the ways that moving car violations, for example, were setting in motion immigrant detention of people and separating of families.

He was able to develop policies that wouldn’t necessarily be formally considered sanctuary policies, but that emphasized the job was to enforce city laws, not necessarily federal immigration laws.

RELATED: Faith groups resolve to protect migrants, refugees after Trump win

Did organizers ever talk about rising religious disaffiliation and what that means for the future of sanctuary?

There is some concern, both in academic circles as well as some of the organizing circles, about the secularization of sanctuary. I don’t necessarily think that means that that’s cause for concern. There are plenty of people who still see progressive, social justice faith-based action as important. People are willing to work with faith communities, even if they don’t share those religious theological epistemological premises.

I work at a secular institution with students who weren’t raised in any faith tradition or have a kind of skepticism around them or have bad feelings because of bad experiences. And the public discourse around religion has been so consumed by the religious right and white Christian nationalism that sometimes the history of these progressive faith-based organizing and social movements gets lost.

But one of my jobs as a professor is to expose students to (faith traditions’ social justice) histories, (and) that makes it possible for people to reorient themselves to faith communities.

What’s your source of hope?

There’s a lot of sources of hope for me. Part of it is working with young people who want to make the world a better place, who see a lot of injustice around them, who don’t want to embrace the status quo, who really believe we can create a different world and create a different order.

I was inspired by recognizing that people have been doing this work for decades, and that through community and through relationship with each other and with God, that has sustained them, and that’s what grounds the work that they do even in bleak times.

How are faith-based communities preparing now for Trump’s second term?

What seems to be emerging is a renewed focus and attention to the power of churches, sacred spaces and sanctuary specifically as a way to support immigrants as they face renewed threats of deportation.

This includes attention to ecumenical organizing across differences of class, education, language, citizenship and race or ethnicity. Lessons learned from 2016 to 2020 are informing strategies among faith-based groups, including meeting with immigrant communities to share information about legal resources, hear concerns, affirming sanctuary city ordinances and policies, conversations with local elected leaders and law enforcement.

So while the days following this election definitely felt different than before, a couple of weeks in it is clear that people are centering faith-based organizing in ways that show continuities from the past. Part of what my book documents is that sanctuary people continually draw on histories of resistance and faith to face and respond to the present.

Young, observant Jews find a place to protest Israel in the Halachic Left

(RNS) — The group, with five chapters across the U.S., believes observant Jews have a particular obligation to oppose what they see as an unjust war — and are uniquely positioned to do so.

People organized by Halachic Left demonstrate against the Israel-Hamas war outside the 96th Street subway station on Tisha B’av, Aug. 13, 2024, in New York City. (Photo by Yona Roberts Golding)
Yona Roberts Golding
November 20, 2024

(RNS) — In the first months of the Israel-Hamas war, some of the loudest critics and the largest pro-Palestinian rallies originated with progressive Jewish-led groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. Both welcome non-Jews, and their Jewish members span from the highly observant to those who define their Judaism apart from religious practice.

IfNotNow has not made a declaration on Zionism, but JVP is explicitly anti-Zionist. Three weeks after Hamas murdered nearly 1,200 civilians and soldiers in its attack on southern Israel and took some 200 hostages, a protest organized by JVP bottled up commuters at Grand Central Station in New York as thousands chanted, “Let Gaza Live!”

Eliana Padwa, a 25-year-old history teacher from the Bronx, didn’t participate in any of JVP’s early protests. Having grown up an adherent of modern Orthodoxy, a sect of no more than half a million believers, or about 5% of American Jews, Padwa was stricken by Hamas’ attack. She vividly remembers the grief that hung in the air in her synagogue on Simchat Torah, the usually joyful holiday that fell on Oct. 7 last year, as she sat with her parents and information trickled in about the scale of the destruction.

In the weeks and months that followed, Padwa became increasingly disturbed by the rising death toll in Gaza, certain the war was making the prospect of peace and security in the region more remote. Even before the war, Padwa questioned Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, a perspective she says is rare among modern Orthodox Jews.

Eliana Padwa demonstrates with other Halachic Left members in New York City

(Image via Instagram/jfrejnyc)

Still, she said, “it’s been a big radicalizing moment for me.”

Over the past year, Padwa said, she noticed more young, observant Jews expressing discomfort with the broader Jewish community’s support for war. In January, Padwa set out to create a place where Jews like her can express their feelings and protest the war, calling her movement the Halachic Left.

The organization now has chapters in five U.S. cities. Many of its members have spent time in Israel or have friends and family who live there. Some have served in the Israel Defense Forces. While demanding an end to the current wars in Lebanon and Gaza, the group does not think of itself as a breakaway religious community of anti-Zionists, said Padwa. “We’re putting forth a way forward that’s not endless destruction and violence. We want that message to be heard within the religious community.”

The Halachic Left held one of its first public actions on Tisha B’av, a Jewish fast day mourning the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem and other calamities throughout Jewish history. This year it fell on a sunny Tuesday in August. Padwa and more than a dozen other Halachic Left demonstrators sat on the sidewalk outside New York’s bustling 96th Street subway station in quiet contemplation.

“This is a holiday about having your entire society crumble before your eyes,” Padwa said at the time. “For me, there’s no way to mourn this year outside of the context of what’s currently happening in Gaza.”


They chose the subway stop, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, for the surrounding neighborhood’s high density of modern Orthodox Jews, sometimes called centrist Orthodox Jews, who have been some of the most outspoken supporters of Israel in the United States.

Modern Orthodoxy, which traces its roots to 19th-century Germany, when Jewish communities were grappling with how to engage with values popularized by the Enlightenment, seeks to integrate parts of secular culture with strict religious observance, particularly in the realm of education, combining contemporary mathematics, science and literature with study of Torah.

One of the movement’s early defining features was its relationship with the Zionist movement. Unlike other types of Jewish Orthodoxy, which were largely hostile to secular statehood, the movement’s embrace of modernism made room for a new position that saw the return of Jews to their ancient homeland as a fulfillment of God’s biblical promise to Abraham.

While most early Zionists were not religious, modern Orthodoxy’s framework has since gained political momentum in Israel. Today it fuels a segment of Israeli society known as the Religious Zionism, which at its most extreme advocates full annexation of the occupied West Bank.

People organized by Halachic Left demonstrate against the Israel-Hamas war outside the 96th Street subway station on Tisha B’av, Aug. 13, 2024, in New York City.

 (Photo by Gili Getz)

The idea of a religious connection to the land also underpins the education that many members of the Halachic Left received early in their lives. “One of the strongest messages of my education was that you’re supposed to love Israel, and anyone who tells you something bad about it is lying and trying to manipulate you,” Padwa said.

After spending a post-collegiate year in Israel, she returned home in 2022 and rejoined her modern Orthodox synagogue. “Judaism is the air I breathe, the water in which I swim,” Padwa said, but politically she felt at odds with what she heard.

Then, the violence of Oct. 7 and the international backlash against Israel’s ensuing war caused many in Padwa’s community to redouble their support for Israel, even as the civilian death toll climbed in Gaza. Programming at her synagogue promoted Israel’s cause, and sermons took on a distinctly nationalist tone.

But Padwa also began hearing “clandestine conversations” among her peers, she said, “like, ‘We’re not sure about this. We’re questioning this.'” She organized an event in a basement cafe on the Upper West Side where fellow religious Jews could speak openly about what it meant to oppose the war.

“I expected to get 10 or 15 people,” Padwa said. “Instead, 50 people signed up.” She scheduled a follow-up conversation over Zoom so people outside New York could participate.

Since the initial demonstration in August, the Halachic Left has kept up a steady schedule of events, from a bake sale to raise funds for families in Gaza to learning sessions such as a panel discussion held in Chicago in October about moving from grief to repair within the Jewish tradition. The Halachic Left often collaborates with other groups, including IfNotNow, believing that the more people who know about the organization, the greater influence it can have.

Noam Weinreich, a 30-year-old modern Orthodox Jew in Chicago, attended Padwa’s initial virtual event after hearing about it through what he called a “whisper network” of religious Jews with anti-occupation views. At that meeting, he said, he felt profound relief.

“Finally, I’m talking to other people who share the same lingo, had the same upbringing, but also share these very taboo views — the desire to even talk about Palestinians,” Weinreich said. He helped write a guide on how to broach difficult conversations about Israel and Palestine at synagogue that was published on the group’s website in late August.

Weinrich believes that for many American Jews born after 1993, when the failed peace agreement between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel known as the Oslo Accords was originally signed, “the story where Israel is the one who seeks peace and the Palestinians are the ones who are refusing has become a lot less compelling.”

He asked, “In the years since, what steps has Israel taken towards giving Palestinians the basic rights that every human is entitled to?”

Many of those who have joined the Halachic Left believe observant Jews have a particular obligation to oppose what they see as an unjust war — and are uniquely positioned to do so. After all, Jewish observance, from prayer in a minyan to finding kosher food, can only be done as part of a broader community. Halachic Left is trying to broaden its own reach by appealing to that sense of commonality.

“Our goal is to actively change the conversation and ultimately to put pressure on those in our community who hold power to stop funding Israel’s actions,” Padwa said. “If our communities can start holding Israel accountable, I think we will see material change.”

For avid readers of Yiddish news, print is still king

(RNS) — Technological advances as well as changing social attitudes have sparked a cultural renaissance among Hasidic Jewish communities, for whom Yiddish is the native tongue.

(Photo by Jen Theodore/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
David I. Klein
November 22, 2024

(RNS) — As many local media outlets around the world are struggling, the Yiddish press is experiencing a rebirth, surprising many who not long ago pronounced the Jewish language as doomed after millions of its core speakers died in the Holocaust.

“Since 2000, over 30 Yiddish print media have been founded, almost exclusively in the Orthodox Jewish milieu of New York and the surrounding area,” said Bjorn Akstinat, a German media researcher who recently compiled a directory of Yiddish media outlets.

Sparked by technological advances as well as changing social attitudes, the boom has led to a parallel cultural renaissance among Haredi and Hasidic Jewish communities (sometimes called ultra-Orthodox), for whom Yiddish is the native tongue

An outgrowth of old High German, heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic languages, and traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish was the primary language of Ashkenazi Jews living in central and Eastern Europe for nearly 1,000 years. At the turn of the 20th century, more than 10 million people spoke Yiddish, encouraged by hundreds of newspapers on at least three continents, with a wide range of religious and political bents.

America’s once largest Yiddish-language newspaper, “Forverts” (The Forward), was founded in 1897 to bring immigrant Eastern European Jews the news of the world — and their new world — in their native tongue. By the eve of World War I, it had been joined by more than 150 other periodicals in New York alone, at least 20 of them dailies, rivaling the output in Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius, Minsk and other cities with large Jewish populations.

One might write for a religious audience, one from the perspective of the local Communist Party, one for far-left Zionists and yet another for far-right Zionists, and so on.

In Europe, that world was shattered by the Holocaust, and for its survivors, many residents of the U.S., Israel and elsewhere, assimilation meant speaking English or another local tongue. In Israel, Hebraicizion encouraged Jewish immigrants to leave their native languages on the boats they came on and adopt modern Hebrew. For most, Yiddish quickly became a thing of memory.

According to Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish editor of The Forward, by the 1990s, the last Yiddish outlets were mostly publishing feel-good articles for elderly Eastern European immigrants. As the new millennium dawned, they seemed to be on borrowed time.

Except they weren’t.

Today, in New York’s Boro Park and Williamsburg neighborhoods, or in upstate New York towns such as New Square and Palm Tree, newsstands are filled with Yiddish media of every shape and format.

While Yiddish has indeed declined among the world’s Ashkenazi Jews, the Haredi Jews arrived after the Holocaust as refugees, not as immigrants wanting to become Americans. Fighting assimilation, they have clung to Yiddish as their everyday language. “People came here from Eastern Europe and they resettled together with other people who were like minded, and they kept speaking their language,” said Meyer Labin, a Hasidic journalist.

The birth rate among Haredi couples, at six to seven children, according to a 2023 study, far outpaces the rate of other Jewish groups or just about any other demographic in the United States, boosting a community of a few thousand in the 1950s to hundreds of thousands today.

Clinging to Yiddish certainly preserves a culture but it also insulates a population from outside influences, something that has its costs alongside its benefits. In 2022, a New York Times report argued that Haredi yeshivas in metro New York were failing to educate their students in English, leaving them unprepared for life outside their enclaves.


A variety of past Moment Magazine weekly issues. (Images courtesy Moment Magazine)

Even if Yiddish has bounced back as a vital language, that’s no guarantee of a thriving media scene. (If so, the world’s adoption of English might have stopped the evaporation of newspapers by the thousands since 2000.) Since that year, the circulation of English-language print media has been cut in half, according to a Pew study.

But other facets of Haredi life — including its self-induced cultural isolation — have made print a necessity. “With Orthodox communities, we don’t do digital, up to a certain extent,” said Yoel Krausz, a Satmar Hasid who in 2014 co-founded Moment Magazine, the largest Yiddish weekly magazine in the U.S. “Especially with our youth, our youth don’t have any web and of course no television.”

A little more than a decade ago, Haredi leaders drew as many as 40,000 members of various traditions to New York’s Citi Field to rally against the encroachment of the internet. Opposition has softened since, especially among businessmen, but many Hasidim still don’t use the internet at home and largely forbid it for their children.


“Our youth is growing up only with print publications for their learning and for their education and for entertainment,” said Krausz, and advertisers can only dependably reach the 700,000 or so American Hasidic Jews in print. Even those who do use the internet are invariably offline on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when Orthodox Jews refrain from using electricity.

“S’iz farbunden alle tzuzamen” — it’s all tied together, said Krausz in Yiddish. “It’s a domino effect. Because our readers are only reading in print, they will buy the magazine, they will pay for the magazine, pay for subscription for a print magazine, and then the advertisers will appreciate it as a place to advertise.”

Krausz’s Moment, with a circulation of 25,000, estimates it reaches 150,000 readers weekly, given the size of Haredi households, the overwhelming majority of which are in and around New York. It also finds its way to other Hasidic enclaves around the world, such as in London, Antwerp and parts of Israel. Moment prides itself on its independence, Krausz said, and is not affiliated with any one Hasidic sect.

“Journalism in the Haredi world started, actually, as something somewhat revolutionary in its inception,” said Labin. It sounded like a contradiction, “that the Haredi world would produce newspapers on its own, because newspapers were seen as something foreign, and something that is too worldly,” said Labin.

Past Der Yid newspaper issues. (Image courtesy Der Yid)

Der Yid, founded in 1953, delivered Yiddish speakers the news they might need for business but with little cultural or community coverage. “One of the main aspects of Haredi ideology is that the only culture we have is our religion, Judaism,” Labin explained.

“In Orthodox Judaism, you know, we listen to our rebbes,” Krausz said, referring to the grand rabbis who lead many Hasidic sects. “They have the last (word) on what to do, how to do it and how to go about things.”

Media might distract from direct Torah and Talmudic study, the ideal pursuit for Hasidic men.

“But you know many people need their reading. I can tell you from personal experience it recharges me and allows me to focus on my work,” Krausz said, lamenting that when he was a child there were far fewer options in his own language to satisfy him.

Slowly however, the rebbes’ views began to change. They feared that if they did not provide their own options, their youth would find their media elsewhere. Now, in Hasidic areas, one can find magazines affiliated with different Hasidic sects, editions targeted at children and on special topics such as mental health or parenting.

“We started seeing a proliferation of specialized niche content,” Labin said. “It’s a very vibrant landscape of media.”

Technology has changed things as well; while designing the layout for a magazine was once a laborious process requiring special equipment, nowadays it can be done quickly by anyone with a laptop.

Krausz noted that while much of Moment’s content is journalistic, covering the goings-on of Hasidic communities, it doesn’t report on crime and generally eschews topics that cast a negative light on the community. All of their content is approved by a rabbinic board.

A parallel landscape of grassroots media by and for Haredi women has also seen an explosion in recent years, countering Haredi media that has been blasted for its practice of removing photos of women or doctoring photos to remove the women.

The explosion of Yiddish media interest has also impacted the last remnants of Yiddish publications outside of it. The Forward long since shifted the vast majority of its content to English but still dedicates part of its website to publishing in Yiddish, and even for a time published a special section targeting Haredi readers.

Though the Forward has retired the special section due to changes to the website, said Schaechter, its Yiddish-language editor, “I’m very happy to see how prolific the Haredi and Hasidic world has become.

Similar to the advances in publishing tech, advances in videography and recording technology — as well as a new-found forum to share content in — has resulted in a boom in the Hasidic music scene, with it sometimes seeming like artists are dropping new Yiddish albums or singles weekly.

“You know, Yiddish used to be something that was just a way of communicating. But (in the Hasidic world) it had never become this kind of thing like now, where there is this need to create in Yiddish,” she said.

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Overview | Yiddish Anarchism Conference

Mending The World As Jewish Anarchists

Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn - Oh, You Foolish Little Zionists (Yiddish Anti-Zionist Song)

 

Yiddish anarchist songs

Great Anarchists - Voltairine de Cleyre

 

Great Anarchists

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Voltairine de Cleyre was an essayist, educator, poet and advocate of anarchy without adjectives. Voltairine’s anarchism bore the hallmarks of free-thinking and abolitionism: the distrust of government and authority, sensitivity to injustice, anti-clericalism and confidence in power of individual reason. Carried into her anarchism, these ideas ran through her critique of government as tyranny, her calls to revolt and her view that social transformation depended on constantly challenging accepted standards of justice, or what she called collective consciousness. Podcast also available here: Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5cjN... Sticher - https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/grea... Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Bandcamp (free download) - https://greatanarchists.bandcamp.com/... The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. For more details see: http://dogsection.org/press/de-cleyre/ and https://www.activedistributionshop.or... Great Anarchists 1-10 now also available in collected form as a book: https://dogsection.org/press/great-an... https://www.activedistributionshop.or... Music by Them’uns -   / user-178917365   [Subtitles corrected for accuracy November 2020]

 

How to defend yourself during a police interrogation

Nov

24

2024

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From Project Evasions

An interrogation is not a harmonious exchange between two individuals. It’s a conflict.
And in this conflict, our ignorance is our strength. Ignorance of the meaning of police work, ignorance of the manipulative techniques used, ignorance of the legal framework and, last but not least, ignorance of our means of defence.
In response to this observation, this book is intended as a tool for self-defense against police interrogation practices of interrogation.

Get the PDF here:
https://projet-evasions.org/how-to-defend-yourself-during-a-police-inter...

Preface to the English version

In summer 2022, 2000 copies of this book were printed in French and 2000 in German. The french version is now sold out, and the Publisher «Éditions du Commun» had now reissued the book.

The book was written with the intention of serving as a tool of self-defense against the manipulative interrogation strategies employed by the police. As stated in the introduction, “It addresses readers in various countries in which legislation may differ“. And indeed, we soon received feedback that the content conveyed by the book is equally applicable to countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Serbia, Italy, Denmark, and many more. And soon a number of supportive people were offering to translate the book into other languages. This is what happened with the English version, and we’d like to take this opportunity to warmly thank our translator and proofreader for their fine work.

As a consequence of imperialism and colonization, English is spoken today in contexts as diverse as Kenya, Australia and, of course UK and the USA. So many different places from which you may be reading these words, and where the contexts of repression are very different. Most of what is conveyed in the book applies to all these contexts, but, in case of doubts, it makes sense to keep an eye out for certain elements that differ and check them with your local legal team.

Our network lacks relays in the English-speaking world, so let us take this opportunity to pass on the message that we are looking for a publishing house or a collective that would be interested in printing and distributing the book in its geographical regions.

With these words, we wish you a pleasant reading.

Project-evasions – network of anarchist friendships

 

Realities behind the arrest of Nikos Romanos

Nov

24

2024

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This is an attempt to provide information and context for those outside Greece concerning the recent state abduction of anarchist Nikos Romanos.

On 31 October, 2024, an explosion in the Athens neighborhood of Ampelokopoi killed the comrade Kyriakos X and severely injured the comrade Marianna M.

They were both in an apartment where an explosive device detonated, knocking out one wall of the building. The state claims they were planning to detonate a bomb elsewhere and that it exploded prematurely. Both Kyriakos and Marianna are anarchists, respected participants in the movement.

The press in Greece is owned by a handful of old families who control most of the remaining greek assets– those that haven't been sold off to foreign investors. The Greek mainstream media exists to disseminate state narratives, and it immediately began slandering the victims of the explosion as well as engaging in wild speculation– such as that the israeli embassy was the intended target. Whether or not that's true, it is true that israeli mossad agents came to assist the Greek police in their investigations. Since the explosion, the state has made additional arrests of people it claims are somehow connected to the apartment and its lease, sublease, etc.

As the Greek press promoted the propaganda of the state, there commenced activity in some cowardly corners of the left to distinguish the more "guilty" of those accused from the others. This is the question of who to tar with the labels of "anarchist" and "terrorist" — thereby assumed to deserve repression– vs. who is really "innocent."

The anarchist movement itself, both in Greece and internationally, has rejected such division and remained strong in solidarity despite a chilling increase in repression. There were multiple support gatherings outside the hospital where Marianna was held under guard and when, shortly after her second surgery, she was transferred to Korydallos prison, comrades also gathered there. Kyriakos has been honored with actions, banners, marches, events and memorials, and will remain a beloved comrade forevermore. There has been no "disavowal," no step back.

Since the tragedy in Ampelokopoi state repression against those suspected of being "anarchists" has become more aggressive, although this is consistent with an ongoing trend since the pandemic. What we have seen now are not new tactics but an increase in frequency: police actions such as stopping and searching people around the neighborhood Exarcheia, early-morning "preventative detention" of targeted individuals (people considered politically prominent) on the days of demonstrations and marches, and an increase in surveillance of those the greek state has a grudge against, including by parking unmarked cars with surveillance equipment in front of their homes.

Few people in the anarchist movement here have been under as heavy surveillance, long-term, as the comrade Nikos Romanos. He was a friend of the anarchist Alexis Grigoropolous, and witnessed Alexis' murder by police on 6 December 2008. Since that time Nikos has been arrested many times and accused of many crimes, along with false accusations of involvement with the direct action group Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

Because Nikos is a living witness to the shameful conduct of the state, he has been labeled a terrorist by politicians and the mass media many times over. Of their many accusations, however, the only crime the judiciary has ever pinned on him is a bank robbery, for which he served a prison sentence. During the time he was imprisoned, Nikos went on hunger strike for 31 days to (successfully) demand access to education, something he was entitled to under law but which the state had refused him. His steadfastness in this matter inspired solidarity actions throughout Greece and internationally, and is still well remembered.

Again, there are few people in Greece as relentlessly surveilled as Nikos, which made it all the more absurd that he was arrested on 18 November and accused of unspecified involvement in the explosion, on the basis of the state claiming to have discovered a single fingerprint from him on a trash bag "found" in the destroyed apartment.

Some or all of the above you may already know. The purpose of this piece is to contextualize the arrest and repression of Nikos in Greece's overall economic collapse and the scandals of the Greek state's ruling party, New Democracy, as well as to condemn those who respond to the greek state's abuse of Nikos with gleeful excitement (because they anticipate spectacular resistance) and those who promote state narratives about Nikos, including the lie– proven to be a lie in court! — that he was involved in the group Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

Nikos has been put through hell by the state for nearly his entire life, from the horror of watching his childhood friend murdered in front of his eyes to years of repression, intimidation, violence, false accusations and imprisonment. Anyone who repeats the state and state-media slanders about Nikos, using buzzwords like "terrorist" or breathlessly associating him with guerrilla groups he wasn't involved in, is promoting the state's narrative and serving the greek state's agenda.

On 22 November, the state used the flimsy pretext of the fingerprint to imprison Nikos more or less indefinitely, pre-trial, furthering the outrage. Even some of the right-wing TV talking heads were at a loss to explain this, which only provides (additional) evidence that the supposedly impartial judiciary of Greece is no more than a weapon of the ruling class, in this case of Prime Minister Mitsotakis and New Democracy.

Nikos is being held under article 187A, an antiterrorism statute passed by the "progressive" socialist government previous to new democracy. The excuse for 187A at the time was that it was necessary to prosecute Golden Dawn, a neo-fascist organization– but it wasn't used for that. Instead, we see in the detention of Nikos the penal code's true purpose. All state tools of "anti-extremism," including those that claim to be protection from fascists or to repress the far right, will end up used against anarchists.

Article 187A, which applies to terrorist organizations, states that a terrorist organization must be at least three people. So, we have the martyr Kyriakos, the injured Marianna… and because the state needed a third, like magic, they discover a bag with a fingerprint and kidnap Nikos.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis went and toured the site of the explosion personally, a bizarre and cynical media circus, and then pulled a true Reality TV stunt: he announced that a benevolent construction company (also, of course, owned by one of Greece's ruling families) would be providing free reconstruction of the building to give the other residents homes again.

The recent imprisonment of Nikos is likewise a stunt, but a cruel, barbaric stunt using a man's life and freedom to try and score political points. Not only has New Democracy been delegitimized by scandals– to name just a few: a mass-casualty train crash directly caused by austerity and privatization, deliberate mass drownings of immigrants, and being caught using illegal israeli spyware to monitor political rivals– but the economy of Greece is collapsing. Rent in most cities is unaffordable relative to wages, the healthcare system is being stripped for parts, and the schools are in shambles.

The abduction of Nikos Romanos is a provocation by the ruling party towards the anarchist movement, timed immediately after the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising and just before the anniversary of the police murder of Alexis. Mitsotakis wants to focus attention on the anarchists, because his coalition of neoliberal austerity privatizers is losing ground to a growing fringe far-right. Arbitrarily imprisoning a high-profile anarchist (and thus perhaps triggering a response) is perfect red meat for the kind of reactionary droolers who have been lately abandoning the technocratic soft-authoritarianism of new democracy for more overtly fascist political parties.

We can see the heavy hand of the Greek state in not just conventional media, but social media. Shameless, ignorant, parastatal parasitic "extremism" experts parrot the lies of Nikos' involvement in matters he was acquitted of, reactionaries and liberals casually refer to Nikos as a "terrorist," and Facebook auto-bans Nikos' name, much as it did the name of the revolutionary Dimitris Koufontinas during his 2021 prison hunger strike.

There is a parallel to the case of Tasos Theophilou, an anarchist-communist who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a bank robbery he didn't commit. Tasos also was falsely accused of membership in Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (despite not sharing their ideology), and the state's evidence against him was the anti-terrorism task force claiming they found his DNA on a hat near the bank– although the hat in question wasn't in the list of items collected and photographed at the scene of the robbery.

Although Tasos' conviction was eventually overturned and he successfully sued the state for his five years of false imprisonment, the government and its media parrots defamed Tasos for years based on these false accusations. After all, he's an anarchist!

There are many more instances and incidents I could invoke here, but I hope that this helps establish that

1.) the arbitrary imprisonment of Nikos in the wake of an unrelated tragedy is a sick political game by the state, and

2.) those who accept and repeat the Greek state's lies about Nikos are de facto agents of state repression.

Let us reject not only the continued abuse of Nikos Romanos and other prisoners by the state, but the state's narratives and slanders.

As has been said elsewhere, "May Athens get the December it deserves"

Intervention in Humboldt University

Nov

21

2024

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From Kontrapolis
November 17, 2024

Intervention in Humboldt University at the event "50 Years ‚Μεταπολίτευση‘ -The Restauration of Democracy in Greece"

Yesterday, around 10 people carried out an intervention at an event in Humboldt University that was trying to instrumentalize the ‘73 uprising in Athens against the US-backed military junta. We interrupted the opening of the event with slogans and a banner. A statement was given and flyers were distributed. Everybody left safely.

It might be of concern to taxpayers in greece, that the diplomatic corps in Germany is getting well payed for participating in classroom-sized events that hardly anybody else than their surrounding of corrupt establishment is interested in. At least the cleaning of hundreds of flyers in the event space might justify a tiny part of their earnings that evening.

Freedom for Marianna M., Dimitra Z. and Dimitris

In memory of the fallen fighter Kyriakos Xymitiris

Freedom for all!

Here is the text that was given out and read as a speech:

HANDS OFF OUR ANARCHIST COMRADE MARIANNA
KYRIAKOS XYMITIRIS ONE OF US, FOREVER WITH US ON THE PATHS OF FIRE
FREEDOM TO COMRADE DIMITRIS & ANARCHIST COMRADE DIMITRA

The struggle of November 1973 was a struggle for liberation and freedom. For the 50 years of „Metapolitefsi“ , the deans of Polytechnio and ASOEE proceeded to a three day full lock out of the public space of the Universities.
The belief that th fall of „Junta“ regime resulted in democracy, is an illusion. In the past years there have been many examples proving that. The justice system convicts groups and individuals based on made-up evidence, condemning them to years of imprisonment, or in cases of immigrants, threatening with deportation.
Meanwhile, the rights of prisoners for access to education and leaves are systematically denied. Tasos Theofilou, Irianna, V. Stathopoulos, migrants from Pylos shipwreck are only a few examples.
At the same time, people face police brutality on the streets and in police stations, to the extent of rape and murder.
In just the last months 5 people have been murdered by cops inside police stations. It’s more than evident that the greek state and its mechanisms are exhausting people financially, mentally and physically. Not to mention the number of people who have been drowned by the greek navy in the mediterranian sea.

You talk about resistance as if it’s history.
Resistance is daily and everywhere.

So here we are, after the greek „democratic“ state imprisoned our anarchist comrade Dimitra and comrade Dimitris with no sufficient evidence, as well as abused comrade Marianna by taking her fingerprints while she was unconscious in intensive care.

The Restoration of Democracy in Greece never happened.
– 17th of November is not a celebration
– Junta did not end in 1973

 

Bash Back Summer 2025: The Cumming Insurrection

Nov

24

2024

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Why don’t we declare our own war?

An orgy of violence, even slightly expanding the small window of allowed gestures into millions of precincts burning, writhing together in unlimited grief, unlimited pleasure.

There are so many people who feel safe calling for our deaths. They are the ones that should feel that their end is coming, because it is.

Face to face, the fragility of our enemies is fucking laughable. They put billions of dollars into protecting their fragile egos, their joke little suburban families, militarizing the borders around their sad little sexualities. Gender failures, living in constant fear, praying to stave off this inevitable unraveling. The more they attempt to police and groom nature into this arrangement, the more chaos they create.

But chaos is our language, not theirs. That's why in a slightly squatted forest, they imagine us as the Viet Cong. Their fantasies of a trans menace ravaging their safety becomes the manifestation of their next era, our era. In every one of their predatory projections, every law they pass, they beg and beg for us to consume them. To suck the flesh off their bones and spit the remains into a hole seeping back into the earth. This desire haunts their waking nightmares.

We already know, via sex work and porn searches that the "western man" wants to fully submit to us. The more repressed he gets, the more he yearns for us. Salivating for trans seed, paying top dollar to suck us off in dark alleys and fuck us in hotel rooms in members only clubs. The more he exposes his vulnerabilities, the more opportunities we will find to strike.

It’s come time for us to declare war. As if it hasn't been declared already.

Our eradication announced in an executive order.

The time of being humanized by liberal attempts to normalize and domesticate us is obviously over. This approach has failed a million times, hypnotizing everyone and killing us with a death of a thousand cuts.

It is time for us to remember what it means to be queer and alive.

We’ve lost our sacred thread, the ecstasy of our first anal orgasm, the shallow breaths of our souls awakening, the primordial right to our sacred sexualities. We’re even losing the thread of intergenerational protection and nurturing of young queer souls, leaving them with the fetishistic internet for a mother, which at best is a panopticon, at worst a police state.

Those that came of age in an earlier time experienced wild, chaotic, free spaces and were nurtured by queer elders IRL who fought for their wildness and protection. These spaces have been systematically destroyed by real estate and police fascism, forcing further generations to be raised by Reddit, or a middle aged Grindr hookup - the remaining spaces converted to expensive cocktail venues and blanched fine art non-profit “spaces”.

We all know that what we’re looking for is not just watching a band or DJ. Its an orgiastic experience where the sky opens up and everything is possible. Communal ekstasis changes your heart.

Our strategy of war, as much as it is to tear holes in rich men’s safety, is to also open up these portals, sacred holes in society where everyone can enter and experience the ecstasy of being a liberating body - someone who opens more holes of their own, until all desires for control and order are eroded and consumed by our mutualistic orgiastic horde.

The orb of goddess consciousness, this primordial cosmic force urges a time of

Endless music, Endless affection, Endless care, Endless cooperation, Endless Violence, And constant expression, Expansion.

Before you even think about killing yourself...
Burn every bridge, attack everything.
Fuck wildly in the woods, get guns.

Form a cell/crew/affinity group/gang.
Learn opsec, attack, start small.
Set larger and larger goals.

Become painfully beautiful.

Get good, Get really good.

Get everything.

Come find us.
Los Angeles, May 2025
Bash Back Summer