Vashti

04/06/2024

Instead of relying on police, provosts and prime ministers, it’s time we mobilised cross-community movements to uproot antisemitism at its foundations, argue Ben Lorber and Shane Burley in this 10-point guide.

Ben and Shane’s new book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide To Fighting Antisemitism, is out today.

Instead of relying on police, provosts and prime ministers, it’s time we mobilised cross-community movements to uproot antisemitism at its foundations.

31/05/2024

Two decades after the “Save Darfur” movement failed, the recurrence of ethnic cleansing and famine in Sudan calls for an international response that better accommodates political complexity, argues Vashti editor Dr Matthew Gordon.

Two decades after the “Save Darfur” movement failed, the recurrence of ethnic cleansing and famine in Sudan calls for an international response that better accommodates political complexity.

24/05/2024

🗳️ PICKLE 109 // WHAT PUSHED ME TO RUN WAS GAZA // INTERVIEW WITH INDEPENDENT LEFT-WING PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATE ANDREW FEINSTEIN 🗳️

In this week’s Pickle, Vashti editors Evan Robins and Eli Machover speak to the independent left-wing candidate Andrew Feinstein, who is challenging Keir Starmer for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras.

Subscribe to the Pickle and read the full piece via the links in our bio.

📸: Talia Woodin

20/05/2024

Sasha Baker speaks to former Jewish youth leaders, who, like them, have struggled to reconcile their values with their Zionist education.

Read the full piece and subscribe to our weekly newsletter The Pickle via the links in our bio.

17/05/2024

PICKLE 108 // ❌ WE ARE NOT NUMBERS: REFUSING GAZA’S DEHUMINISATION ❌

“As minutiae become meaningful, the image next to me juxtaposes - flashes of a ruined home on a television screen, with flattened surfaces obscuring the intricacy of life below.”

Artist, writer and Vashti editor Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin reflects on an exhibition of short stories by Gazans, and what it means to stay human amid our broken world. Follow to read more about the exhibition organisers’ upcoming projects.

Read the piece in full and subscribe to our weekly newsletter The Pickle via the links in our bio.

10/05/2024

⛺️PICKLE 107 // LIVE FROM THE OXFORD ENCAMPMENT⛺️

Vashti editor and Oxford doctoral student Kendall Gardner reflects on the launch of Oxford Action for Palestine’s solidarity encampment this week.

Read the piece in full and subscribe to our weekly newsletter The Pickle via the links in our bio.

07/05/2024

‘I am the saddest, angriest, most disappointed Jew in the world, I think.’

Levi Cohen explores recent and historical misuses of Holocaust memory before sitting down to speak with survivor, and veteran peace and justice activist, Marione Ingram.

Read the full piece up on our website, via the links in our bio.

03/05/2024

🚫PICKLE 107 // RESISTING THE RWANDA PLAN🚫

This week, the government began a surprise operation to detain thousands of asylum seekers for eventual deportation to Rwanda.

At the same time, activists across the country are resisting this policy by supporting asylum seekers outside reporting centres and in their local communities. Yesterday, protestors in Peckham successfully stopped a bus from taking asylum seekers to detention on the Bibby Stockholm barge, leading to 45 arrests.

To better understand what’s happening, Vashti editor Evan Robins spoke to activists from Action Against Detention and Deportations (AADD), a grassroots coalition of groups and individuals committed to ending detention, deportations, and the wider “hostile environment” against people on the move.

Read the full piece on our new website and subscribe to our weekly newsletter The Pickle via the link in our bio.

19/04/2024

PICKLE 105 // 🚨TRACING THE APOCALYPSE🚨

The escalation of hostilities between Iran and Israel since the start of April threatens to create a political reality in which Palestinians fade from view. And it is they who will suffer the most.

Read the full article and subscribe to The Pickle via the link in our bio.

Emma Louise Rixhon speaks to artist, poet and writer Joshua Leon about his first solo exhibition on the construction of British Jewish identity.

15/04/2024

Vashti is changing.

Vashti was launched in 2019 to be an outlet for the British Jewish Left in a media landscape that wanted us silent. In 2024, whether it’s Israel’s assault in Gaza, growing authoritarianism in Britain, or the willingness of our communal leaders to cheer both on, the need for that alternative has only grown.

That’s why Vashti is now in the process of relaunching. We’ve already updated our output to cover both The Pickle – a newsletter by our editorial collective looking at the news from a left-wing Jewish perspective – and the articles on our website, which span a broader range of analysis, history, reviews and more.

Next comes our new site, which will go live on Monday 22 April at our usual domain, www.vashtimedia.com. To get things ready, our current website will go down towards the end of the week. Don’t panic – you can still read Friday’s Pickle as usual by subscribing here: https://mailchi.mp/18bf7cff29d5/the-pickle.

There’s plenty more in the works. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for announcements about in-person events and introductions to our new 14-strong editorial collective, as well as information about how you can help Vashti continue to improve and expand.

Thank you for all your support so far. The voices of left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews are still an inconvenience for many of the world’s worst figures, Jewish and gentile; Vashti is committed to making those among ones they can no longer ignore.

10/04/2024

Emma Louise Rixhon speaks to artist, poet and writer Joshua Leon about his current exhibition in the Chisenhale Gallery, London on the construction of British Jewish identity.

Read the full piece and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pickle, via the links in our bio.

05/04/2024

“You know a geopolitical situation has gotten really out of hand when people start invoking Somalia”, states Matthew Gordon, author of this week’s Pickle:

“Indeed, after six months of unprecedented bombardment at the hands – and AI machines – of the Israeli military, Gaza, where “civil order” has “eroded” and predatory power-brokers have emerged to fill the “vacuum”, is the latest theatre of battle that seasoned humanitarians have begun comparing to Mogadishu, Somalia’s war-torn capital, according to an article published in The Guardian on Monday. In warning of the Gaza Strip’s impending descent into a situation akin to a “Mogadishu on the Mediterranean”, observers are sounding a powerful alarm regarding the level of humanitarian breakdown faced by ordinary Palestinians, building on well-worn depictions of Somalia as a permanently “failed state”.

As an academic and practitioner who has spent over a decade exploring the diverse and often innovative ways that Somalis have responded to “statelessness”, it behooves me to begin by pointing out that such comparisons, while evocative and potentially useful in galvanising a political response, perpetuate unhelpful and even Orientalist tropes that present certain peoples and countries as inherent “basket cases”. Moreover, like all meme-ified forms of political narrative, such reductive analogies fail to do justice to either the archetype (in this case Mogadishu) or the object being illuminated (Gaza’s unfolding catastrophe), often glossing over important political differences necessary for understanding divergent contexts.”

Read the full newsletter and subscribe to The Pickle via the link in our bio.

29/03/2024

A ‘non-binding’ UN Security Council resolution for a two-week ceasefire is no match for Israel’s five-month assault. That resolution must only be the start.

Francesca Newton considers the limitations of the UN Security Council’s call for an immediate ceasefire.

22/03/2024

⛰️ PICKLE 101 // AS STATE VIOLENCE RAGES, PALESTINIANS IN THE SOUTH HEBRON HILLS REMAIN STEADFAST ⛰️

It has been a devastating few months for Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills, or Masafer Yatta — a region of the southern occupied West Bank.

In the last week alone, soldiers arrested a village resident and an activist before firing shots in the air; settler gangs attacked residents and pushed shepherds off their land; and over a dozen masked soldiers raided a village at night, forcefully searching houses and terrorising families.

Roughly translating to steadfastness, sumud is a Palestinian notion of nonviolent resistance, of carrying on in the face of a regime that seeks to make life unlivable.

In this week’s Pickle, Aman Abhishek, an activist and researcher currently based in Palestine-Israel, reports on daily life, struggle and sumud in Masafer Yatta.

18/03/2024

✊ PICKLE 100 // RESISTANCE FROM WITHIN ✊

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been accompanied by the violent repression of criticism and protest inside its own borders.

In this intimate photo essay by Yahel Gazit, left-wing Israeli activists describe the struggle to speak out.

Yahel Gazit photographs the activists defying repression and persecution to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

29/02/2024

PICKLE 97 // RAFAH: A READER

Over 30,000 Gazans have been killed in Israel’s genocidal assault, and now we hear the worst may be yet to come: an invasion on Rafah, one of the last zones of relative refuge. Vashti editors share the materials helping us understand the situation on the ground and the world letting it happen.

https://vashtimedia.com/2024/02/23/formats/editorial/rafah-reader-gaza-israel/?utm_campaign=later-linkinbio-_vashtimedia&utm_content=later-41279828&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio

02/02/2024

🗞️ PICKLE 94 // WHOSE STREETS?: PROTEST SINCE 7 OCTOBER 🗞️

Tomorrow, thousands of protestors across the UK will once again take to the streets to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Since 7 October, cities across the UK and throughout the globe have hosted enormous demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine. Although ‘Ceasefire now!’ remains the rallying cry for most of these marches, many are motivated to participate by a commitment to longer-lasting and more thorough liberation for the Palestinian people. Some protestors have been attending these types of demonstrations for decades, often picking up a mantle passed to them by previous generations; for others, these marches are a new type of political participation, made necessary by the present genocide.

Individuals from Muslim and Jewish communities across the UK, in particular, have found themselves attending marches due to a deep personal connection to the cause of Palestinian freedom, one intricately intertwined with their identity. For me, the marches have become one of the only spaces in which I feel like I can breathe, knowing that I’m surrounded by others undergoing the same emotional turmoil. These moments have solidified my Jewish identity as one intimately tied to a politics of liberation.

In contrast to my experience, the mainstream public rhetoric surrounding the marches has foregrounded division and fear. In a climate of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, these demonstrations have become a symbolic flashpoint, often referenced as evidence of a growing climate of hostility.

As Sasha Baker investigates in this week’s Pickle, the real response to these marches among Muslim and Jewish individuals is much less straightforward. Their report offers us a glimpse into the complicated ways in which our identities tie us to the current moment and the history that lies behind it.

Read the full piece and subscribe to The Pickle via the link in our bio.

26/01/2024

🎧 PICKLE 93 // DISAGREEMENT FOR A GREATER GOOD 🎧

A row over banners at an antisemitism march in Manchester raises a significant question: who is considered welcome in the fight against antisemitism? Or in other words, what gives some Jews legitimacy within the Jewish community and the authority to speak on its behalf?

Launching in February, a brand new podcast tries to unpack this question. Machloket – which roughly translates as ‘disagreement for a greater good’ – is not just a podcast, it’s a community storytelling which aims to explore what British Jews really think. Over the past year, producers Nick Cassenbaum and Tash Hyman have been travelling up and down the country — from Truro to Bradford — inviting community groups to participate in refreshingly raw, funny, and productive conversations. In this week’s Pickle, we find out what they learned.

A new podcast explores what British Jews really think.

19/01/2024

🕎 PICKLE 92 // WHAT AN EXTINGUISHED HANUKKIAH TELLS US ABOUT ANTISEMITISM IN POLAND 🕎

In this week’s Pickle, Ignacy Dudkiewicz examines the social and political context of Polish MP Grzegorz Braun’s December attack on a parliamentary Hanukkiah.

Ignacy Dudkiewicz examines the social and political context of Polish MP Grzegorz Braun’s December attack.

05/01/2024

🪡 PICKLE 90 // STITCHING TOGETHER ‘BRITISHNESS’ FROM MILE END TO MAYFAIR 🪡

Emma Louise Rixhon explores the complex relationship of Jewish migration to London fashion in their review of the Museum of London Docklands’ new exhibition Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style.

Read the full piece and subscribe to The Pickle:
https://vashtimedia.com/2024/01/05/formats/review-formats/stitching-together-britishness-jewish-fashion-london/

15/12/2023

🏳️‍⚧️ PICKLE 87 // BRITISH JEWRY’S TRANSPHOBIA PROBLEM 🏳️‍⚧️

It’s the seventh night of Chanukah and I’m putting on new tzitzit that I received as a Chanukah gift. As a trans Jew, this is an act of making myself explicit, of outing myself in multiple ways, as I walk through my local neighbourhood of Stamford Hill towards Hackney Wick. Dana Mills’ urge, republished on Vashti this week, that Chanukah must remind us of the sanctity of all human life and to resist violence enacted in the name of Jewish safety, sits heavily in my bound chest. I light the chanukiah with some of the trans and Jewish people in my life, and go to see q***r Jewish cabaret Homos and Hummus’ Chanukah show at The Yard.

In the back of my mind, I’m running over how to introduce this week’s Pickle. We, the editors at Vashti, knew the time would come when we would deviate from publishing Pickles largely focused on 7 October and Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, despite the atrocities there continuing, relentlessly, as we do so.

In trying to frame our doing so as not having moved on, but as an insistence on the inherent interdependence of the freedom of all oppressed people(s), all people, I think of the principle of doikayt – translated from Yiddish as something like “hereness” – that underpins disaporist Jewish organising. Hereness reminds us to not only organise against the occupation in Palestine and the genocide of its people – thereby reifying the existence of the Israeli state as a/the centre of Jewish political/social/religious expression – but to identify and build solidarity against oppressions functioning on the same logics here, where we are, in our home.

A local, solidarity-fuelled, togetherness at the root of Jewish diasporism, a return to doikayt, might help us to resist both the ongoing genocide and apartheid in Palestine, and the transphobia that Sasha Baker identifies as rife in the British Jewish community. In this week’s Pickle, Sasha draws together and names the shared “annihilationism” that frames trans people and Palestinians, respectively, as an existential threat to other marginalised communities, in order to justify their oppression and annihilation.

With Liz Truss’ draft law to amend the Equality Act and attack trans rights due for its second reading in Parliament on 15 March, the stakes could not be higher.

Read the full piece and subscribe to receive future Pickles to your inbox: https://vashtimedia.com/2023/12/14/formats/the-pickle/how-transphobes-became-the-voice-of-british-jewry/

08/12/2023

🔀 PICKLE 86 // WORLD JEWRY, REORGANISED 🔀

Last night – the 61st since 7 October – marked the beginning of Chanukah. For Palestinians in Gaza, the occasion brought not only the horrors of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign – to which the Israeli state eagerly returned earlier this week – but the grotesque and deeply disturbing appearance of a 13-metre tall Chanukiah, constructed by Israeli soldiers in the Gazan neighbourhood of Shejaiya. This is the same neighbourhood in which, five days earlier, Israel had flattened 50 apartment buildings in the name of targeting a single Hamas commander. The bombardment killed hundreds of Palestinians in what was possibly the single deadliest bombing of these horrific two months.

It is unsurprising that Chanukah – a festival formative to, and in turn shaped by, the Zionist movement – has become a narrative through which Israel and its allied communal institutions celebrate and mythologise efforts to inflict indiscriminate violence on Palestinians. This destructive instrumentalisation of Jewish tradition, however, is not specific to Chanukah. Rather, it has become a fact of Jewish life seen year-round and entrenched in the politics of the institutions which purport to represent and define our communal existence.

In these circumstances, creating a Jewish politics beyond Zionism feels both more difficult and more necessary than ever. In this week’s Pickle, Vashti editor Matt Gordon draws on his decade of research in Somaliland to examine the fractured state of Jewish community and the possibility for new, non-statist forms of political life.

Read the full piece and subscribe to receive future Pickles to your inbox: https://vashtimedia.com/2023/12/08/formats/essay/jewish-politics-beyond-zionism-lessons-from-somaliland/

01/12/2023

⏮️ PICKLE 85 // A LONG WAY FROM CABLE STREET ⏮️

Last Sunday, a reported 50,000 took to the streets to participate in London’s “March Against Antisemitism”. Among this number were far-right politicians and agitators, such as former prime minister Boris Johnson and English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson. Robinson and his supporters may have been told to stay away, but their inclination to attend in the first place raises important questions about the march’s political nature. The racist track records of these figures alone should give pause to anyone willing to credit the event’s organisers with a genuine concern for Jewish safety.

Rather than fighting the very real instances of antisemitism in our communities, the organisers of the March Against Antisemitism chose London’s weekly Palestine solidarity demonstrations as its target. This choice led many Jewish organisations to speak out against the march and question its intentions well before the event took place.

As photos and videos of the march emerge, these initial doubts appear confirmed. The sight of Israeli flags and union jacks flying side-by-side underscored the march’s true ideological commitment to nationalism and imperialism, at the expense of colonised people worldwide. As the death toll in Gaza exceeds 15,000 and vocal proponents of Palestinian liberation continue to be fired, arrested and shot, we must question whether Sunday’s march advanced any meaningful kind of freedom or equality – for Jews or anyone else.

In this week’s Pickle, Michael Richmond brings these questions to the fore by grounding the March Against Antisemitism in British Jewish history. Michael unveils the attempt of the March’s organisers to rewrite history and argues that the British government has never been on the side of British Jews, but rather the side of global imperialism. To truly fight against antisemitism, we must also fight for Palestinian freedom. It is only through global decolonial and antifascist struggle that we can achieve liberation for all.

Read the full piece and subscribe to The Pickle via the link in our bio.

24/11/2023

📷PICKLE 84 // PHOTOS: AN ERUPTION OF SOLIDARITY 📷

This week’s Pickle is a photo essay by Talia Woodin, Jazz Noble and Jacob Lazarus documenting some of the protests organised in this recent eruption of Jewish left activism. There will be many more not covered here – acts of solidarity happening on the small and individual scale every day – but we at Vashti hope these photographs can reflect both this political moment, and the movement from which they stem.

And we should be in no doubt that it is a movement. The tradition of Jewish left activism in the diaspora is long and proud, ranging from labour organising to anti-apartheid action to housing struggles and beyond. The rejuvenation of that tradition this year is a welcome spark of hope in horrific circumstances. We hope this showcase will inspire readers to carry it forward: the political outlook, in Israel and Palestine and elsewhere, suggests we will need it in the years to come.

To see the photos and subscribe to The Pickle: https://vashtimedia.com/2023/11/23/issues/the-jewish-left/photos-eruption-british-jewish-solidarity-palestinians/

17/11/2023

In this exclusive excerpt from his new book The Necessity of Exile, rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid provides a timely reminder that resistance is, and always has been, a Jewish value.

https://vashtimedia.com/2023/11/17/formats/essay/on-jews-unjews-and-anti-jews-exile/

📸: JVP

17/11/2023

🚫 PICKLE 83 // Jews, Un-Jews, and Anti-Jews 🚫

In this week’s Pickle, we share an extract from Shaul Magid’s new book of essays, The Necessity of Exile. A celebrated rabbi and scholar, Magid asks throughout these essays the most raw and essential questions of Israel, diaspora, and everything in between. Exposing the fallacies of a ‘majoritarian’ logic by which Zionism gets the final word on Jewishness, Magid provides us with a timely reminder that resistance is, and always has been, a Jewish value.

10/11/2023

🗓 PICKLE 82 // (Mis)understanding October 7 🗓

Tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of people will gather in central London to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. For most of the week it wasn’t clear this march would go ahead, with the home secretary, Suella Braverman, seeming to stake her career on getting it banned.

This largely media-contrived row – about whether a march calling for an armistice is appropriate on Armistice Day – is one of many morbid symptoms of the increasingly upside-down world we inhabit. A world in which our government provides financial and rhetorical backing for Israel’s catastrophic assault on Gaza, while accusing those protesting the atrocities of endorsing terrorism and endangering Jews.

As if such slanderous claims from senior politicians weren’t bad enough, the CST, a Jewish body ostensibly responsible for combating antisemitism, claimed that Saturday’s march would disrupt “the peace and the basic rights of Jews”, ignoring the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of previous Palestine marches and their hundreds of Jewish participants.

When politicians or communal organisations smear solidarity with Palestine as inherently antisemitic, it makes the alarming rise of genuine antisemitism since 7 October much more difficult to grapple with. In this week’s Pickle, Professor David Feldman and Dr Brendan McGeever take on that challenge: making sense of the sudden uptick in antisemitism while charting a path forward for effectively resisting it.

Read the full piece and subscribe to The Pickle via the link in our bio.

03/11/2023

⚠️ PICKLE 81 // A PROPHECY COMES TO FRUITION ⚠️

A picture of a Hebrew advert hangs on the wall of my grandfather’s study. Originally published in Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper in September 1967, after Israel had occupied vast new territories following the six-day war, the advert reads: “Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation leads to foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression. Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”

My grandfather, Moshé Machover, is one of the statement’s 12 signatories, and the last living founder of the radical Arab and Jewish group Matzpen that was active in Israel from the 1960s until the 1980s. As Israel’s escalates its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the nearly 60-year-old ad is being circulated again on social media with renewed vigour, I spoke to Moshik to gain a better understanding of this moment in its historical context.

Read the full piece and subscribe to The Pickle: https://vashtimedia.com/2023/11/03/formats/interview/moshe-machover-gaza-ethnic-cleansing/

27/10/2023

🥀 PICKLE 80 // OUTCRY, RESIGNATIONS, BACKTRACKING: LABOUR’S FLOUNDERING RESPONSE TO ISRAELI WAR CRIMES 🥀

‘On the left, there appears to be a growing consensus that we cannot rely on the Labour party to represent our interests, especially as the war against the Palestinian people continues to increase in velocity and intensity’ writes Vashti editor Kendall Gardner in this week’s Pickle.

Read the full piece and subscribe to The Pickle via the link in our bio.