and I am half made of water myself,

as though the sky has overheard

everything I could not say

and opened its mouth for me.

There is so much weather

trapped beneath my ribs.

I am tired of being handed umbrellas

when sometimes

I need someone to understand

that I am standing still

because I am tired of walking

through storms no one else can see.

I have become fluent

in tending my own garden,

watering what remains,

pulling weeds with shaking hands,

telling every wounded stem:

you are all right.

And somewhere in the roots,

another voice says:

not entirely.

Both are true.

I have lived a long time

inside that double exposure.

I left one house

and carried its hallways with me.

I crossed a threshold

and discovered

that freedom has its own ghosts.

There are doors you close

to save your life,

and still mourn

every room left behind.

No amount of careful conversation

can return a missing season.

No gentle office,

no clock,

no well-meaning map

can make abandonment

forget my address.

There are wounds

that do not ask to be fixed.

They ask only

not to be argued with.

Sometimes I look across the river

and see other lives

lit from within:

rings catching the light,

tables set for families,

photographs filling

with future tense.

And I stand on my side,

carrying an armful

of unlived possibilities,

wondering why goodness

was sold to me

as a road

when so often

it feels like a toll booth.

The wolves seem well-fed.

The saints are exhausted.

And somewhere,

someone is still insisting

that the universe

keeps perfect accounts.

I look at the ledger

and laugh bitterly.

Where is the great accountant now?

Where is the promised balance

when the scales themselves

have been bought?

I have grown suspicious

of polished doors,

of smiling mouths

speaking the language of service

with one hand

hidden behind their backs.

Sometimes the honest darkness

feels less frightening

than a bright room

where everyone insists

there are no shadows.

I am tired of searching

for a particular constellation.

Tired of looking upward

and calling it patience

when really

I am simply lonely

beneath an enormous sky.

I want love to arrive

without my having to become

a better advertisement

for deserving it.

I want to exhale,

but tonight

even my head is thunder.

I am tired of being remarkable

for surviving ordinary cruelty.

Tired of turning every obstacle

into a résumé.

Tired of being called resilient

as though resilience

were a crown

and not sometimes

a heavy bucket

I have carried for miles.

There is grief

for futures I chose

not to build.

For small footsteps

that will never cross

my hallway.

For names

I will never call

from another room.

I know why

I made those choices.

Love sometimes means

refusing to pass the fire onward.

Still,

the empty chair

can be a kind of weather too.

And then comes the chorus

of other people’s measuring sticks:

the ring,

the child,

the wedding,

the salary,

the acceptable body,

the acceptable color,

the acceptable love,

the acceptable way

of taking up space.

They keep bringing rulers

to a life

that was never meant

to be a straight line.

I am a constellation

they cannot stop

trying to turn

into a checklist.

Queer.

Brown.

Disabled.

Low income.

Single.

Childless.

A body with its own history.

A life with its own mathematics.

And still,

they whisper as though

difference were a deficit.

But where is the ceremony

for the people

who became their own shelter?

Where is the parade

for those who kept tenderness

without receiving enough of it?

Where is the pride

for every complicated thing

that refused

to disappear?

Tonight,

I do not want to be repaired

into something easier to witness.

Do not hand me a sunrise

while I am still learning

the architecture of night.

Do not call the rain beautiful

just to make me stop naming

how cold I am.

Let the clouds gather.

Let the river rise.

Let every locked room

inside me

open one window.

I am angry.

I am grieving.

I am lonely.

I am a house

with several lights still on

and no single room

that tells the whole story.

I am not one thing.

I am not one ending.

I am not the door I left,

nor only the door

that closed behind me.

Tonight,

the sky is crying,

and I am listening.

For once,

I do not have to explain

why the water is here.

For once,

I can let it fall.

And beneath all this weather,

somewhere deep in the earth,

the roots remain,

doing their quiet work,

unseen,

unapplauded,

refusing the ruler,

refusing the ledger,

learning,

in their own crooked language,

how to hold

what has not yet

stopped growing.

I do not know if there is a hand on the wheel. I only know the wheel turns, grinding bone into dust, dust into clay, and asking us to stand up and call it a day.

They sell you a blueprint signed by a God they only call upon when they need a curtain to hide their own cruelties. They talk of morals while tightening the vise, smiling with teeth polished white as bone, telling you to fit inside their narrow boxes— to quiet the mind, to erase the skin, to walk without a limp, to pretend the world isn't bleeding out in front of us.

My father said everyone is a professional liar, and some days, looking at the parade of fake grace, I think he was only understating the truth. People construct castles out of ego and performance, then demand you bow at the gate just to earn the right to breathe near them.

I have carried the weight of their judgment until my shoulders locked into place. I have watched men promise the moon and evaporate before the sun even went down, leaving behind empty chairs and the cold, familiar taste of betrayal.

Why am I here? To be an audience to their theatre? To be the canvas for their hatred? To spend two years locked inside the noise of my own chest, asking if I should hide, if I should run, if I should bend until I snap just to make their world easier to look at?

II. The Inventory of Grey

Nothing is black. Nothing is white. Every answer I look for splits into a dozen more questions:

To hold a child or to protect them from the storm? To step back into the dark of the closet or burn in the light? To cross an ocean to an ancient land or stay trapped in the pavement?

The middle ground isn't a peace treaty. It is a swamp. It is waking up at 3 AM with a mind that won't stop rewinding, tracing every insult, every door slammed in my face, every line drawn on my body by people who decided they hated me before they even knew my name.

They hate what they cannot control. They hate the brain that processes differently, the body that refuses to fit their assembly line, the truth that refuses to sit down and be quiet.

And the hardest part isn't the hate. The hardest part is that no one comes to hand you a medal for surviving it. There is no blue ribbon for living through PTSD. There is no voice from the clouds explaining why you were assigned this specific pain, this specific body, this specific fight.

God is silent, society is loud, and I am left standing in the crossfire, wondering why I'm supposed to keep loving a world that feels like it was built to tear me apart.

III. The Fire and the Pavement

Some days, I want to burn it all down.

I want to take the rage that has been building behind my ribs and turn it into a fire so vast, so hot, that everyone who ever looked through me would have to feel the scorch. I want them scarred. I want them to look at the ashes and remember: Do not mess with me. Do not pretend I am invisible.

It is a clean, honest anger. It is the only thing that feels powerful when everything else feels stolen.

But the bars are not made of iron, and the jail is already here— built inside the skull, walled off by years of enduring what should have killed me. If I set the fire, I am still the one trapped inside the room.

So I stand on the pavement instead.

I do not have to forgive them. I do not have to smile back at their fake grace. I do not have to pretend the world is fair or that any of this was meant to happen for a "reason."

IV. Just Live It

At a certain point, the overthinking exhausts itself. The mind, tired of chasing its own tail around the question of why, finally drops the bone.

I don't know why I am alive. I don't know if I will be remembered, or if the values I hold will outlast the noise of this city. I don't know when the end comes, or what wait lies on the other side of the curtain.

What I know is that shit happens regardless. The rain falls on the liars and the broken alike. The world keeps spinning whether I succeed, fail, hide, or stand out in the open.

So let the answer be that there is no grand answer.

Let the point of life be simply that I am here, stubborn enough to keep breathing in a world that tried to suffocate me.

I will not go back into their closets. I will not polish my edges to fit their small minds. I will carry my rage, my strange brain, my scarred trust, and I will walk forward anyway— not because they deserve my existence, but because the life belongs to me, and I am done asking permission to occupy it.

It is 5:00 AM, and the bone-tiredness does not arrive with sleep. It arrives as a heavy, aching architecture joint by joint, diagnosis by diagnosis, an eighty-five-year-old frame holding a soul that was only ever asking for room to breathe.

They call this a month for pride, but how do you march when the joints burn like old wires? How do you celebrate the vessel when the vessel feels like the cage? To be a hamster on a wheel that is slowly splintering, told that running is the only virtue, told that stopping is a sin, told that the exhaustion itself is a failure of faith.

You sit in the quiet glow of a screen, applying for open doors that turn out to be brick walls, hitting glass ceilings that scatter sharp, invisible dust into eyes already red from watching the dawn arrive alone.

II. The War at the Altar

They stand at the gates with their holy books, offering a love that looks suspiciously like a leash. Like “why won’t you pray harder  they say from the comfort of their certainty. To Return to the fold, return to the cage, return to the quiet, obedient shape we made for you.

But how do you pray to a sky that feels like an empty ceiling? How do you reconcile a God of light with the cold, sharp stones thrown by those who claim to know Him best? They promise salvation, but only if you erase the edges of who you are— the brown skin, the queer heart, the non-binary truth, the bold, loud refusal to fit into their narrow boxes.

To be burnt by the holy power is a specific kind of cold. To feel that even the angels are taking their time, while the zealots watch from the sidelines, waiting for the fall, waiting for the surrender back into an abusive past.

III. The In-Between

So you live in the space between panic and paralysis. Too terrified to stay in the burning room, too terrified of the dark outside the window, existing as a ghost in your own living room— waking up late, head spinning in cycles of post-trauma noise, wondering why the world rewards the cruel and exhausts the tender.

You wear the truth on your body like armor, knowing the micro-aggressions will come, knowing the political tide wants to push you into hiding, weighed down by the impossible choice: deplete yourself being radically visible, or suffocate in the quiet of a closet.

IV. A Prayer for Silence

No grand epiphanies tonight. No neat endings wrapped in golden threads. Just a quiet demand sent out into the cold morning air:

Let the body rest, even if it does not heal today. Let the noise of the haters, the trolls, the holy judges fade into white static. If there are angels, let them not demand a sermon or a prayer; let them simply sit at the edge of the bed and hold the weight for five minutes so the chest can expand.

Nirvana is not a mountain to climb when your knees are broken. Tonight, liberation is simply surviving the 5:00 AM silence. It is staying afloat on a sea that tried to drown you. It is remaining, fiercely and stubbornly, a humxn holding out a hand for peace. #Disabilitycare4all

They call it a crisis, but a crisis has an end. This is just the climate. This is the air. A Rolodex of a thousand names, a thousand faces, and not a single hand that reaches through the static to prove the nightmares wrong. The phone is a cold brick of false promises even the lifelines read from scripts, parroting "care" while the room fills with sweat, leaving me to drown in the quiet after the hang-up.

I. The Anatomy of a Ghost

They want me to be a warrior. They want the "triumph over tragedy" brochure, the neat little package of resilience to make my body readable to the neurotypicals, the able-bodied, the judges behind closed doors. But today, I am partially a zombie. Partially dead, partially forcing blood through veins that feel cursed by the weight of just existing. I am a hermit in a concrete hive, hiding from the phantom gaze of neighbors, the heavy pathologizing eyes of social workers, lovers who swear devotion until the rent of my trauma is due, and then”the predictable fade. The abandonment.

How do you unstick the labels glued to your spine? Crazy. Fragile. Sick. When you regurgitate the ache to a therapist and the words just hit the wall and drop like dead flies. When you try the meds, the food, the noise, the flesh, the cheap distractions of a screen, and the skin still crawls. The mind still spins its wheels, locked in the brutal, repetitive math of OCD, fearing the questions, terrified of the answers.

II. Internalized Static

The world whispers that I should stay in the closet of my own mind. Conform. Shrink. Apologize for the space I take. It breeds a quiet, poisonous shame” the thought that maybe I am not worth chasing. Why am I fighting to meet them halfway when they won't even step off the curb? The social anxiety isn't just a symptom; it's a map. It’s the body remembering every time it trusted and got handed a stone instead of bread.

New York is eight million people screaming for connection, yet it feels like a factory built to manufacture loneliness. The air pollution mixes with the sweat of panic. The poverty feels like a cage designed specifically for me, a punishment for a crime I never committed” just being born different in a world that worships machines.

III. The Right to Fall

I don't want to build myself up today just to watch the world take a swing at my knees again. I don't want to be an inspiration. I want to resign from the war.

Let the armor drop to the floor.

Let the warrior dissolve. I don’t want to see my enemies win, but I fear of raising kids to be constantly on the defensive.

There is a child inside this adult frame, terrified, neglected, shaking in the dark, and tonight, that child gets to speak. Tonight, it is enough to just sink into the couch. To hold the plush toy tight against the chest, to draw the vapor in, to let the world outside the door spin its hateful, judging wheels without me.

If the environment isn't safe, I will make this small corner a fortress. I am learning the brutal, necessary art of self-forgiveness when the plate is spinning too fast and everything spills. We are stronger than we look, yes— but we also deserve the right to be weak. To pray to a God who might be listening, to be a big baby, to tune out the noise, and to let the body rest, even when it feels like a stranger.

The desert air at night did not cool; it only grew sharp. In the Negev, the dark was absolute, broken only by the yellow floodlight humming on the corner of the barracks. I was eighteen, sitting on a wooden bench with my wrists slit pulled behind me, the coarse hemp rope biting into my skin with every shallow breath.

"If you fight the barbed cord, it only gets tighter," a voice said from the shadow. It was one of the counselors ”a man in his late fourties who wa an also a sexual predator “coaching Me” who wore the white linen shirt of a Israeli settler and smelled heavily of sweat and dust. He didn't look at my face. He kept his hands on the knot, pulling it until my shoulders wrenched backward. "This is the physical manifestation of your stubbornness. The physical wall you build between yourself and Hashem."

I did not fight. I let my forehead rest against the rough grain of the wooden table in front of me. The metal of my watch-buckle pressed into my raw skin under the rope, a small, cold reminder of the world outside this camp. Inside, there were only the ropes, homophobia, sexual/emotional/ verbal abuse and the scorching Negev heat, and the quiet, rhythmic recitation of Tehillim from the main cabin where the other bochurim sat. We were all told we were sick, abomination, made against the Torah and that our desires for other men were “curable” that could be scraped out if we only surrendered to their indoctrination.

"Are you ready to confess the source of your desires?" Rabbi Koren, a psychotherapist from Jerusalem was observing my torture, he pretended to be my father figure, therapist but really saw me as a evil lab rat that deserves to be fried 🐀 A softer voice of a Morrocan Yeshiva guy named Moshe, was softer, coming from the doorway of the barracks. He eventually, coerced me into being raped & expecting me to go down on him and I was barely an adult. How in any way was this sexual violence, considered moral, and was going to “purify” my sexuality. But no one ever listened to the brown, queer, poor, victim of senseless hatred by Orthodox Jewry, ultra Zionists, and a Israeli society that wants to eradicate its gay population, and turn us into militarized men, that would die another way in their bloody wars against the Palestinians. Moshe, stepped into the light, his long black beard tucked neatly into his vest, his eyes steady and clinical. He had been sent to us from the network of "life coaches" in Jerusalem, his flight paid for by the Yeshiva University against the NY Attorney General’s permission, breaking humxn rights law of discrimination against lgbtq foljs. "Is it the father who did not hold you and other boys who neglected you? Is it the vanity of the modern world? Were you molested as a child? All these questions that were invasive trying to gaslight and blame me and other queer youth as to why we “turned gay” and wanting us to confess to a crime we never committed. Tell us what you are clinging to, boy." Which wasn’t how identified either as a genderqueer person. My pronouns, chosen name and identity was never respected, only how they wanted to mold me.

"I am not clinging," I whispered. My throat was dry, lined with the desert sand.

"You are a sicko," Rabbi Koren said, spitting at my face with rattlesnakes to taunt opposite me. He reached out, his hand heavy on my knee, squeezing the bone until it throbbed. "You cling to the cardinal sin. You want the easy path of the Rasha, and be lost in your Aveiros. But Hashem does not make mistakes. He made you a man, and a man does not look at another man with hunger. We will stay here until the hunger is starved out." I went days without food, and at times water, and the Israeli Ministry of Health, continues to allow a network of deceptive “conversion therapists” to profit off our suffering, with no actual cure that is recognized by any major medical association, and no reparations for all the tortured victims have endured to the point of suicide, depression, and self harm, off the Israeli tax payers dollar. In Palestine and the rest of the Islamic world 🌍 we would be hanged, stabbed and killed to the point of being demonized in the media. While in Israel, it pinkwashes to the world that they are the only lgbtq 🏳️‍🌈 friendly country in the Middle East which is far from the truth. I’ve always encountered queerphobic violence everytime I visit the region both pre and post CT. What have lgbtq folks ever done to the majority of the population for them to legitimize our genocide? How can the Abrahamic faiths claim that it’s a cardinal sin to slaughter, yet they legitimize killing lgbtq+ folks in a daily for centuries? If they aren’t physically harming us, the emotional / mental abuse leads us to our deaths, ao they can clean their hands of bloodshed and blame us for being “mentally ill” to again rationalize us to lock us up into cages as conservative politicians keep suggesting in both western democracies and eastern totalitarian states.

The hours bled together in the dry Mitzpe Ramon Desert heat. In the secret “therapy” sessions in New York, NJ & Meah Shearim we sat in circle chairs in a windowless basement, listening to men in their seventies weep because they could no longer afford the program's fees but feared God would strike them down if they left. Here, the basement had turned into a desert, and the silence was louder than the weeping. Every time my eyes closed, the counselor would shake my shoulder or pull the rope tighter, the fiber digging through my shirt into my flesh until my fingers went numb.

"You think you will find love out there?" Rabbi Huna had mocked, and told me back in Brooklyn via email, before they casted me away. He had sat behind his heavy oak desk, tapping a silver pen against his calendar. "You will be a ghost. A pariah. Your father will not look at you. Your community will erase your name. You will die alone in a hospital room with no one to wash your body."

Sitting on the bench in the Negev, the ropes felt like the physical shape of that prediction. They were holding me to the only world I had ever known, a Jewish world that demanded I dismantle my own skin to stay inside it.

"Say the tefillah damn it," the fake counselor commanded from behind me, his hand tightening on the braid of the rope.

I looked down at the dirt floor, at the beetles crawling near my worn-out shoes. My chest ached from the compression. I opened my mouth, but the Hebrew words felt like ash. I did not want their God, and I did not want their cure. I wanted the weight off my wrists. I wanted to breathe without the smell of their sweat in my nose.

"No," I said.

The counselor pulled the knot. The metal buckle of my watch tore into my skin, and the pain shot up my neck, hot and clean. In that sharp, blinding second, the illusion of their holiness cracked. They were not saving my soul; they were just holding the rope…

In many states across America & countries across the world, 🌍 Conversion Abuse Torture Methods as I call it or as they glamorize it by claiming Conversion “therapy” is making billions off a pseudo science 🧪 to torture, discriminate and fill hysteria to poison our souls. You can learn about #BanConversionTherapy at Born Perfect in the 🇺🇸 CT Survivors & CT Survivors Dropout Network as well at Outright International. Many CT survivors havent come forward due to societal queerphobia, stigma, and powerful forces trying to water down our experiences of suffrage. Sadly, the queer ngos don’t have the funding, nor does the mental health community have the resources, to make post trauma of conversion therapy to treat low income, marginalized, and other queer/trans folks who can’t find accessible & queer affirming care. Learn to be a 🏳️‍🌈 ally 🏳️‍⚧️ with empathy

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I have wanted to write this for a very long time. I’ve never felt lucky, special or even chosen for being a former Jew. I felt always it was a curse, burden, filled with guilt, intergenerational trauma, too much responsibility, hysteria and a Hashem that is never fully pleased with the tribe. At a young age, I was both trapped, and planned my escape for many years. Feeling forced to take on ancestral

Suffering, that no kid is able to handle, and we are scorned / admonished if we decided to not follow up to our elders. I also felt sick, of all the expectations by Jews, to be the better person, and even gentiles projecting a moral litmus test, where even high school kids near me, felt naive that “Jews arent allowed to curse.” I felt I dreaded, when I heard Rabbis, who tried to scare us into submission to follow the 613+ endless laws of the Torah, and that g-d punishes us for every little mistake, sent shivers down my Psyche, where I have intense theophobia. I wrestled to this day, of having desires outside of an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, which were deemed sinful, from eating, loving, and acquiring knowledge that the frummies forbade. Yet, my soul / mind felt miserable, being forced to study Gemarah, Mishna and other subjects of old Ashkenazi men who were kvetching over which side to tie your shoe in the morning when it felt

Irrelevant to my contemporary life. As I wanted to study what helps my future, not be stuck in the past memorizing names, halachic laws, and concepts from 1000s of years ago in Babylon, that wasnt going to improve my life. Added the rules on boys are much harsher than girls, and being non-binary, I wanted the freedom to pick and choose which gendered rituals felt right to me. My mother till this day, screams/shames me if I break Muktzah, aka turn on the light or my phone on Shabbat. Or eat non kosher, or don’t wash my hands with

A bracha, I’m only rewarded for being an obedient son, and I’m constantly shamed for being a rebellious genderqueer adult. Yet, today, I am still trying to figure out how to make peace with my past, heritage, and connect to the parts of my upbringing that makes sense to me. Awhile recuperating and forging a new lifestyle that heals me, not drills me with endless shame. I can’t even enjoy my life at times from relationships, sex, eating, traveling, absorbing beliefs without years of family drama and their violent behavior and nagging voices are bullying me to suffocation, that made me think and fear I’m being controlled by G-d and them to not ever leave the fold. I never got to choose if I wanted to be born jewish, as sages will claim that my soul decided before I arrived on earth to make a tikkun, and even now as I choose to leave mainstream Judaism, I am wrestling with the stigma, of “how can you possibly abandon your faith?.” It was never mine To begin with…

I am writing this to shatter a myth. I am writing this to dispel the persistent, suffocating caricature of the monolithic American Jew—a stereotype that erases me, my family, and hundreds of thousands of others in the diaspora who continue to go unseen.

To much of the public, Jews are pitied only when dead and feared when alive. We are projected as white, wealthy, powerful, and elite—the ultimate “oppressors.” But this projection is a dangerous lie. It takes complex global people and flattens them into a single, wealthy monolith and then projects that resentment onto marginalized Jews who have none of that power.

I had no silver spoons in my mouth. I have been bullied by the same rich white Jews of the Upper East/West Side and in the wealthy metropolitan NY districts my whole life.

I was raised in a Mizrahi family by a Temani (Yemeni) mother. I was born chronically poor, and today, at 33 years old, I still live under the federal poverty line. I am a person of color. I am someone of Middle Eastern ancestry who has experienced racism and colorism from white Ashkenazi Jews and the general public alike (who frequently assume I am Latino or Arab).

My existence doesn’t fit the script. And because of that, I have spent my life being erased.

---

## 1. The Erasure Within: Living Below the Line

There is a massive economic disconnect in how American Jewry is perceived. The top 10% of our community is projected as the universal success story, while the rest of us are left in the dark about it. In major hubs like New York City, organizations like the UJA-Federation have shown that over 40% of Jewish households live in or near poverty. Yet the myth of universal Jewish wealth persists.

To study Jewish history is to witness a constant, agonizing irony: **Jews are blamed when they are in power and blamed when they are not.**

* We are scapegoated as the ultimate capitalists, yet targeted as the architects of communism.

* We are demonized by the right and cast out by the left.

I am tired of being born into a tribe that is treated like a curse, constantly forced to answer for conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with our lived realities.

> ” Please point me to the money potluck. Point me to the fancy media job I’ve been hunting for years. Because right now, I’m in thousands of dollars of debt, and my degree in media studies hasn’t made me a wealthy influencer.”

---

## 2. A Penny on the Williamsburg Highway

The antisemitism I’ve faced in my life isn’t abstract. It is physical, and it started early.

Growing up in the late 1990s, my mom would take me after Shabbat to Times Square to look at the toys. One afternoon, a group of white supremacists saw me wearing my kippa. They threw a copper penny directly at my head from the highway and yelled, “Pick it up, you dirty Jew!”*

Even as a child, I recognized the pure, unadulterated hatred in their eyes. I looked back at them, dead in the eye.

What I wish I had said to them then was: ”No, I won’t pick it up. Because I know I’m worth more than a penny. I’m waiting for you to drop the hundred.” You see, we Jews aren’t cheap; we are thrifty, and pennies don’t help on a rainy day.

```

That was just one of many moments. I frequently came home in shock, hiding the bullying from my mother. It came from all sides. I’ve had kids in my neighborhood tell me “Hitler should have finished the job,” while others called my Israeli relatives “worse than Nazis and baby killers.”

The psychological toll of this constant projection is a slow-burning trauma.

---

## 3. The Double-Margin: Race, Queerness, and the Jewish Community

There is a quiet, systemic racism within the broader Jewish community that is routinely overlooked.

For over 2,000 years, my ancestors lived in Yemen. Yet, most American Jews and non-Jews have no idea this diaspora even exists. We are not taught our own history in American Jewish day schools or university Jewish studies departments. Why? Because of a systemic bias where Ashkenazi centricism, white-passing experiences have dominated the narrative of upward mobility. Those of us with darker skin, different heritages, and non-European backgrounds are sidelined.

To survive, we’ve had to build our own spaces. Organizations like **Ammud**, **Lunar**, **Kamocha**, the **Jews of Color Initiative**, **Jews of Color Shabbaton**, and the **Sephardic Queer Mizrahi Network (SQMN)** are doing vital, life-saving work. But they are tiny, underfunded, and fighting an uphill battle.

Even within the Mizrahi and Sephardic communities, we are fractured. The older generations often reside in conservative areas, while the younger, queer, and progressive generations live in pockets of liberal cities. We are constantly tokenized—especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian debate.

I remember talking to a Yemeni Muslim merchant at his bodega in Harlem. I spoke to him in Arabic, and when he asked where I was from, I told him I was a Yemeni Jew.

He looked at me and said, *”There’s no such thing.”*

I replied, *” Clearly you don’t know your history, because we were there for over 2,000 years before the cultural genocide forced us out.”* while another Yemeni Muslim bodeaga owner in the LES, spoke daily Arabic with my mother, as I went to school, and he gave me his regalia to borrow as a Purim costume in 5th grade to take pride in my erased Temanit roots, and yet I was called “dirty, hairy, barbaric Arab & terrorist” by Ashkenazi / light skin Sephardic kids at Manhattan Day School - Yeshiva Ohr Torah, and profiled by security like continues to happen to me at Hillels, Shuls, Jewish conferences / NGOs, while my Ashkenazi / white passing peers enter the same Jewish venues without needing to pull out their ID, like constant checkpoints in the Americas.

---

## 4. Reclaiming the Pieces

Part of my artwork, my archival work, and my personal healing is about reclaiming the parts of myself that the world tried to erase.

```

While visiting Berlin and taking a train from the airport to the downtown HBF station, I noticed all these German women with shriveled noses, and I didn’t find them appealing; I noticed them gawking while I felt beauty in who I am. I was triggered as if I were on a train in the 1940s in Nazi Germany. “My nose is beautiful. It is a nose that would have been persecuted, and yet here it is, breathing, living, and defying history.”

```

I remember standing on a train in Berlin, looking at the women around me. For years, I had internalized Western beauty standards, believing my nose was too big, too Jewish, too “other.” But in that moment, in the heart of Germany, I looked at my reflection and realized the following: *My nose is beautiful.* It was a medium-sized, physical piece of my identity that survived.

I don’t want to be a spokesperson for all Jews. I am not a Torah scholar, nor am I an expert in Israeli geopolitics. I could have easily been born into any other faith or background. It is exhausting to have my humanity conditioned on my ability to answer for an entire global population or for the actions of a foreign government. And how invasive and microaggressive it is for me to be pinned to a corner to see where I stand on certain issues and to be vetted if I am a friend or foe to other Jews/Gentiles alike, from trying to rest on a plane to the subway platform. Like, please leave me the F alone. Ask me questions that heal, inspire, and bring me joy!

Jews represent less than 2% of the American population and less than 0.1% of the world. To claim that we are an all-powerful kabal controlling the globe is not just a lie—it is a bloody libel that has for centuries gotten us killed, doxxed, and attacked.

---

## 5. The Beautiful, Unruly Intersections

I am not a monolith. I am a beautiful, complicated, unruly intersection of identities:

* **Agnostic**

* **Culturally Jewish & Humanistic**

* **Mizrahi & Temani (Yemeni)**

* **Queer & Trans**

* **Disabled & Neurodivergent**

* **Low-Income**

I spent so many years in the Orthodox community; I grew up feeling small because I wasn’t white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied, or wealthy. I thought something was wrong with *me*.

Today, I know better. I wasn’t born to fit a box but to be a kaleidoscope, where my evolution, like a butterfly, gives me the opportunity to connect with the wondrous diversity of the world that the yeshiva boys in the shtetl would never reach deeply.

I try my best to stand up for all marginalized minorities because my lived and ancestral experience has taught me what it feels like to have a target on your back.

To force Jews—or any marginalized group—to fit into a neat, comfortable box just to make the majority feel safe is suffocating. It is not how we were made. If there is a Creator, I believe we were made different so that we could learn to evolve, to look past our biases, and to accept one another. To strip any one color from the Crayola box wouldn’t be an enjoyable crayon set.

We are here. We are diverse. Educate yourself about the beauty of humanity—one heeb at a time.

P.S. I affirm Jews of all hues, as long as they aren’t hurting others. One should be allowed to identify with their Judaism and Jewish heritage and have pride in their Semitic roots as anyone else. All Jewish diasporas should be taught in Jewish schools worldwide equally. Jews have never fully gotten along, and even in NYC are divided into 1,000s of various different communities and identities. My father carries the pride of his family’s knowledge but lives a secular life; my mother wears proudly her Modern Orthodox Jewish identity in public life; my brother connects to Israeli culture/politics and is traditional; and I am an artivist inspired by Jewish values for human rights and learn and practice in egalitarian ways despite my extended family’s objections to their Orthodoxy. Not all Jews are my cup of tea, and I don’t associate myself based on similar faith but on shared respect and values. The Hasidic/Orthodox streams have never made room for me and don’t consider me an equal unless I follow in their footsteps, and they have exiled, excommunicated, and rejected me, but I also don’t accept their hostility and philosophy. Hence, the divide in Israeli society between secular, traditional, and Orthodox denominations makes an imperfect Jewish nation that is constantly weaponizing the Torah to claim dominance in the region. There are just as many Jews who are anti-Zionist as there are Zionists, or a few in between who are non-Zionist like me. Hitler’s Nazi regime didn’t care about the size of your kippa, politics, or even if your mother was Jewish. Just like Jihadists, Neo-Nazis, and other extremists who want to eradicate Jews are bothered by our existence and have pitted our multicultural dispersed tribe as all the same enemy and deadly spies, for centuries other faiths have been taught to either praise us like philo-Semites, seeing us as “chosen,” or our haters treat us like 3rd class citizens as infidels. All blood libels, historically and currently, like ongoing Holocaust denial propaganda or antisemitic conspiracies, are highly dangerous and harm innocent Jews and their allies, if not killed. Given the hatred in the world we live in, some Jewish folks live their lives in hiding, assimilation, shame, and fear, while others are bold and proud and live their faith openly. I’ve been attacked on and offline by Jews and non-Jews from all sides of the Israeli / Palestinian debate, and yet I’m not the enemy just because I disagree with others and stand on my own feet. I have met good and bad Jews, smart and dumb, rich and poor, white and Black, converts and former religious; everyone’s life has their own journey to defining who they are with God, Torah, history, and ritual. It’s not for me or any rabbi or even some schmuck online to tell you how to live your life and cherish who you are becoming. Just like I started on one side of the political and identity spectrum of Judaism to another, evolution is bound to happen for Jews, just like our people have expanded over time and learned to still kvetch about it to the shul.

---

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Shavuah Tov !

Today I turn thirty-three, and birthdays have never been simple.

Some mornings I wake up feeling eight years old, carrying an injured child who still waits to be understood.

Other mornings I feel eighty-five, exhausted by mental illness, disability, debt, uncertainty, and the invisible weight of surviving.

Time has never fit neatly inside my body.

I grew up believing this age would mean marriage, children, security, and a respectable career.

Instead, I chose freedom, authenticity, and a life that many cannot understand.

My relatives celebrate the person they remember, not the person I fought to become.

My chosen family celebrates who I am now, but they cannot always see everything I had to lose to arrive here.

Between those worlds, I often wonder where I belong.

Birthdays, like so many celebrations, ask for happiness on command.

They rarely make room for grief, trauma, loneliness, or the complicated truth that surviving can be its own celebration.

I still question my future.

I still overthink every path.

I still dream of coming home to love…

To stability…

To an animal companion curled beside me…

To work that sustains me…

To a life where I no longer apologize for existing.

So today I offer myself what the world often forgets to give:

I am resilient.

I am independent.

I am queer.

I am authentic.

I am an artist.

I am creative.

I am intelligent.

I am recovering.

I am compassionate.

I am courageous.

I am resourceful.

I am worthy.

I am enough.

I am human.

I am deserving of love.

I am deserving of rest.

I am deserving of joy.

I am deserving of peace.

I am healing.

I am growing.

I am learning.

I am surviving.

I am evolving.

I am hopeful.

I am free.

I am building my future.

I am an entrepreneur.

I am a dreamer.

I am a phoenix rising.

I am protected.

I am seen.

I am loved.

I am becoming.

Happy birthday, Je’Jae.

May this year bring peace that stays…

Health that strengthens…

Love that embraces every part of you…

Goodness that surprises you…

Protection that surrounds you…

And the courage to live without fear.

You have survived thirty-three years.

May the years ahead become a life you no longer have to survive…

But one you are finally free to live.

Happy 33rd birthday 🎁 Qween 👸🏽

A government.
A bully.
A stranger.
A diagnosis.
A war.

No one warned me

that sometimes
the prison guard
learns your name so well
they begin speaking
with your own voice.

For thirty-two years

my mind has rehearsed
the language
of everyone
who wounded me.

It memorized every insult
like sacred scripture.

It archived every rejection.

It replayed every humiliation
until memory
became prophecy.

The abuse
became the abuser.

Not because I deserved it.

Because survival
is a terrible student.

Children absorb.

Disabled people absorb.

Queer people absorb.

Trans people absorb.

The poor absorb.

The lonely absorb.

Those of us raised
inside rigid worlds
learn that love
is often conditional.

So we become librarians
of other people’s cruelty.

Cataloging.

Indexing.

Quoting it back to ourselves
long after
our persecutors
have left the room.

My mind became
its own courtroom.

Every morning

a trial.

Every afternoon

another appeal.

Every night

another guilty verdict.

The prosecution
never needed evidence.

Only fear.

Only shame.

Only inherited ghosts
wearing the masks
of certainty.

I believed

that wanting softness
was weakness.

That resting
was laziness.

That pleasure
required permission.

That my body
was suspicious.

That my queerness
was rebellion.

That my femininity
was failure.

That desire
was corruption.

That disability
was inconvenience.

That survival
had to be earned.

Who taught me
these impossible equations?

Who convinced me
that I had to become
someone else

before I was allowed
to love myself?

Religion?

Family?

School?

Capitalism?

Ableism?

Trauma?

Or was it all of them

passing the microphone
from generation
to generation

until my own voice
could no longer distinguish
truth
from inheritance?

Yesterday

I could not leave
my apartment.

Not because
the world ended.

Because my mind
made every doorway
feel like a cliff.

Every decision
became catastrophe.

Every possibility
became failure.

I stood
inside my own home

unable to move

because even choosing
what shirt to wear

felt like deciding
whether I deserved
to exist.

This is what
mental illness
sometimes looks like.

Not violence.

Not screaming.

Not spectacle.

Sometimes

it is simply
someone frozen

trying to convince
their nervous system

that opening the front door

will not destroy
the universe.

No one applauds
that kind of courage.

No one photographs it.

Yet every inch forward

is a revolution.

People ask,

“What are you so afraid of?”

As though fear
requires logic.

As though panic
fills out paperwork.

As though trauma
waits politely
for evidence.

My body remembers

things my language
cannot explain.

My nervous system
keeps score

long after
the courtroom
has closed.

Yet somewhere

beneath decades
of criticism

there is another voice.

Small.

Patient.

Almost forgotten.

It says—

You are tired.

Not broken.

You need rest.

Not punishment.

You need community.

Not isolation.

You need compassion.

Not another sentence.

Maybe

the mind
isn’t only
a prison.

Maybe

it is also
the cellmate
learning how
to become
a friend.

Maybe healing

is not escaping
your own brain

but teaching it

a new language.

One that was never
spoken to us.

A language

where mistakes
are teachers.

Where disability
is not failure.

Where trauma
is not identity.

Where medication
is not weakness.

Where therapy
is not surrender.

Where boundaries
are love.

Where rest
is productive.

Where asking for help
is wisdom.

Where surviving
counts.

I am beginning
to understand

that not every thought

is a prophecy.

Not every fear

is revelation.

Not every memory

is instruction.

My mind
creates stories.

Some save me.

Some imprison me.

Learning the difference

may be
the hardest education
of my life.

Disability Pride

is not pretending
my mind
never betrays me.

It is refusing

to hate myself

for having
a mind
that learned
to survive
inside impossible conditions.

It is mourning
what I lost

without surrendering
what remains.

It is accepting

that brains
are organs.

Not moral failures.

Not proof
of virtue.

Not proof
of sin.

Just wonderfully
complicated

beautifully
imperfect

human.

We are not robots.

We were never designed
to perform
without pause.

Every nervous system

speaks
its own dialect.

Every disability

writes
its own grammar.

Every survivor

translates
their own history.

We cannot compare
our blueprints

because none of us

were built
from the same storm.

So if today

your greatest enemy

is the voice
inside your own head,

know this—

that voice

was taught.

And what is taught

can slowly

patiently

lovingly

be untaught.

One breath.

One boundary.

One act of kindness
toward yourself.

One impossible day
survived.

Until one morning

the prison guard

lays down the keys.

And the voice
that once sentenced you

becomes the one
that whispers—

Welcome home.

I’ve been waiting
for you
to believe
you belonged here
all along.

May you all find the keys 🔐 to unlock your minds towards liberation!

Recovery was never meant to be a solitary act.

People tell us to heal ourselves,
to meditate harder,
to journal,
to forgive,
to pray,
to think positively,
to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

As if healing were merely an individual achievement.

But recovery has always been communal.

Recovery is someone driving you to an appointment when your body refuses to cooperate.

Recovery is someone believing your pain before asking you to prove it.

Recovery is someone learning your pronouns because they love you more than their assumptions.

Recovery is someone saying,
“I don’t fully understand what you’re going through,
but I’m staying.”

For many of us,
those people were never our families.

People romanticize home.

Home is supposed to be where wounds are bandaged,
where children are believed,
where difference is embraced,
where rest is respected.

Yet for many queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, and traumatized people,
home became the place where survival first had to be learned.

Even now,
when I walk into the house where I grew up,
my body remembers before my mind does.

The tension.

The fear.

The anticipation.

The careful editing of myself before speaking.

I become smaller without realizing it.

Not because I want to disappear,
but because disappearing once kept me safe.

I grow sick from the atmosphere itself.

Not from the walls,
but from the memories trapped inside them.

I grow tired of the misgendering.

Tired of being mocked.

Tired of hearing disability discussed as though it were a moral failure instead of a lived reality.

Tired of having my beliefs dismissed while others insist their faith should become my prescription.

I am agnostic.

That should not require defending.

Prayer may comfort some people.

For others,
therapy,
medication,
mobility aids,
community,
and accessible healthcare are the miracles we’ve been praying for.

Faith should never become an excuse to deny someone treatment.

People often repeat a statistic that one affirming parent dramatically lowers the likelihood of suicide among queer youth.

Whenever I hear it,
I wonder what happens to those of us who had neither.

Those whose parents loved an imaginary child more than the one standing before them.

They wanted certainty.

They wanted masculinity.

They wanted a son who would fit neatly into their expectations.

Instead,
they received me.

Queer.

Femme.

Disabled.

Traumatized.

Still searching for a language to explain myself that doesn’t begin with an apology.

Their disappointment became another weight I learned to carry.

It settled onto my shoulders beside chronic pain,
beside fear,
beside shame.

Not every disability introduces itself with a wheelchair.

Not every illness announces itself through visible scars.

Many disabilities hide beneath practiced smiles,
carefully timed movements,
forced laughter,
and extraordinary amounts of masking.

People congratulate us for “looking so healthy.”

What they’re really praising
is our ability to suffer quietly.

I have lived with fibromyalgia and other chronic conditions for much of my life.

Some days every step feels negotiated.

Some days simply standing is exhausting.

Yet because my body does not always match society’s image of disability,
I have become accustomed to suspicion.

I’ve had strangers question why I needed a wheelchair at an airport.

Too young.

Too healthy.

Too capable.

As though disability has an age requirement.

As though pain must perform itself publicly before compassion is offered.

People who have never lived inside chronic illness often believe disability exists only when it can be seen.

But invisible disabilities are not imaginary disabilities.

Pain does not disappear because it photographs well.

My family sometimes calls me lazy.

What they call laziness is often recovery.

Rest is not surrender.

Rest is treatment.

Rest is resistance against a culture that believes productivity determines human worth.

Our bodies were never designed to function as factories.

Yet capitalism convinces us that exhaustion is virtue.

That burnout is ambition.

That our value increases only when we overproduce.

Disabled people often become unwilling participants in this impossible performance.

We are expected to prove we are sick enough to deserve accommodations,
yet well enough to remain productive.

Strong enough to survive,
but never struggling enough to inconvenience anyone else.

Recovery asks something radically different.

Recovery tells me my humanity is not measured in billable hours.

Recovery tells me accommodations are not privileges.

They are justice.

Recovery reminds me that asking for help is not failure.

Believing someone when they describe their pain should never be revolutionary.

Neither should respecting pronouns.

Neither should accessible healthcare.

Neither should kindness.

I don’t take pride in my disabilities.

Chronic pain is not something I would wish upon another person.

The trauma that shaped me is not something I celebrate.

But I refuse to carry shame any longer.

There is a difference between celebrating suffering and refusing to be ashamed of surviving it.

Sometimes I believe I am cursed.

Sometimes I wonder how many versions of my life were stolen before they ever had the chance to exist.

Other days I recognize that suffering has taught me something tenderness never could.

Pain has made me listen more carefully.

It has slowed me down enough to notice who is excluded.

Who cannot climb the stairs.

Who cannot afford treatment.

Who is spoken over.

Who is left waiting.

Who is told they simply aren’t trying hard enough.

Empathy is not born from suffering alone.

But suffering has given me the ability to recognize loneliness in another person’s eyes before they say a word.

Perhaps that is one thing no illness has been able to steal.

I cannot control how strangers perceive me.

I cannot force family members to understand what they refuse to see.

I cannot make the world more compassionate through willpower alone.

But I can continue searching for people who believe that care is not charity.

That accessibility is not optional.

That chosen family can become as sacred as blood.

I dream of a world where disabled people are not required to become inspirational simply to deserve dignity.

A world where recovery is adequately funded.

Where mental healthcare is affordable.

Where mobility aids arrive without endless bureaucratic battles.

Where caregivers are supported instead of exhausted.

Where no one has to prove their pain repeatedly to earn compassion.

Most of all,
I dream of ordinary love.

The kind that does not ask me to earn it through productivity.

The kind that does not disappear when my symptoms flare.

The kind that does not require me to become someone else before I deserve belonging.

Until then,
I will continue recovering.

Slowly.

Imperfectly.

Sometimes stumbling.

Sometimes crawling.

Sometimes resting.

Always surviving.

Because recovery was never meant to be about becoming the person everyone else expected me to be.

Recovery is finally allowing myself to become the person I already was beneath the shame.

And maybe that person was never broken.

Maybe they were simply waiting for a world willing to care.

AMEN! 🙏 Ashe 🤲 Hare Krishna 👼 Namaste 😇

Celebrate what?

The fireworks?
The flags?
The discounts?
The sponsored patriotism?
The freedom sold at premium prices?

Even joy has a price tag.

The parks fill with vendors.
The rooftops become luxury seating.
The waterfront belongs to those who can afford it.

I wake up poor
in one of the richest empires
to ever exist.

Apparently,
even independence
has admission fees.

They tell me America is opportunity.

Opportunity for whom?

Greed has become so normalized
that we no longer recognize it as violence.

Everything is monetized.

Our labor.
Our attention.
Our grief.
Our identities.
Our friendships.
Our bodies.
Even our healing.

Compete.

Consume.

Perform.

Sell yourself
before someone else sells you.

Capitalism has become our national religion,
and the invisible hand
always seems to wrap itself
around my throat.

I carry America inside me
like inherited shame.

Poor.

Brown.

Semitic.

Disabled.

Unemployed.

Queer.

Trans.

Traumatized.

I have spent years believing
that my inability to survive
was somehow my own moral failure.

Not the inaccessible world.

Not the collapsing healthcare.

Not impossible rents.

Not employers who see disability
before talent.

Not politicians writing hundreds of bills
against bodies like mine.

Me.

America taught me
to blame myself
for wounds
it keeps reopening.

I was born in New York City.

I thought that made me American.

But New York is not America.

It is an island convincing itself
the continent agrees.

Outside my multicultural bubble,
I meet another country.

One that stares.

Questions.

Mocks.

Legislates.

One where churches hold more influence
than community centers.

One where whiteness
is mistaken for normal.

Where Christianity
is mistaken for neutrality.

Where Republican rhetoric
often decides
whether I deserve healthcare,
housing,
or simply the right
to exist.

My family once believed
America saved them.

After Nazi Germany,
the United States
looked like refuge.

Yet antisemitism
never disappeared.

It simply learned
new languages.

Neo-Nazis.

White nationalists.

Conspiracy theorists.

Extremists.

Sometimes wrapped in flags.

Sometimes wrapped in revolutionary slogans.

Sometimes wearing suits.

Sometimes holding microphones.

Hate has never struggled
to reinvent itself.

They ask me to believe
in the American Dream.

But dreams
are all I have.

Luxury remains fantasy.

Healthcare remains debt.

Education remains debt.

Housing remains debt.

Existing remains debt.

Everything costs.

Everything accrues interest.

Everything reminds me
that poverty
is treated as personal failure
instead of political design.

The land of liberty.

Where is mine?

The pursuit of happiness.

Where is mine?

The land of justice.

Where is mine?

The greatest country on Earth.

Great for whom?

Was it great
when enslaved Africans
built its wealth?

Was it great
when Indigenous nations
were massacred
for expansion?

Was it great
when immigrants
were welcomed only
to become disposable labor?

Was it great
when women
couldn’t vote?

When queer people
were imprisoned?

When disabled people
were institutionalized?

When trans people
were erased?

Exactly which version
of greatness
am I expected to miss?

Some immigrants eventually became white enough.

The Irish.

Many Ashkenazi Jews.

Many light-skinned Latinos.

Many Arabs.

Whiteness,
in America,
has always been
a moving finish line.

But some of us
remain too ambiguous.

Too brown.

Too foreign.

Too visibly different.

No matter how fluent
our English becomes.

America is wealthy enough
to build bombs
that reach continents away.

But somehow
not wealthy enough
to guarantee healthcare.

Not wealthy enough
for affordable education.

Not wealthy enough
to eliminate hunger.

Not wealthy enough
for housing.

There is always money
for war.

There is never enough
for dignity.

My taxes help sustain
an empire.

Weapons cross oceans
faster than medicine.

Military budgets
grow like skyscrapers.

Mutual aid
survives on bake sales.

We build statues
to slave owners.

Name schools
after colonizers.

Celebrate conquerors.

Sanitize presidents.

Erase survivors.

History becomes mythology
the moment it threatens
patriotism.

The media profits
from fear.

Politicians profit
from division.

Corporations profit
from loneliness.

Social media profits
from outrage.

Someone is always making money
off another person’s suffering.

Every inch
of this country
belongs to somebody.

Landlords.

Banks.

Corporations.

Developers.

Investment firms.

I was born here.

Yet nothing
belongs to me.

I am expected
to work
until my body breaks
for the privilege
of renting
the place I call home.

Outside my city,
my existence
becomes political.

A glance.

A sneer.

A slur.

Another debate
about whether
my gender,
my disability,
my race,
my humanity
deserve recognition.

Hundreds of laws
target transgender lives.

Entire campaigns
built upon convincing strangers
that I am dangerous
for existing.

I travel abroad
only to inherit
another stereotype.

Fat.

Lazy.

Ignorant.

Imperial.

Americans are not
a monolith.

But empires
leave reputations behind.

Resistance
is treated like treason.

Obedience
is marketed
as patriotism.

Questioning power
becomes suspicious.

Whistleblowers become enemies.

Protesters become problems.

The flag
is expected
to cover
every wound.

There are fast-food chains
everywhere.

Fresh groceries
far less so.

The market feeds us
what keeps us consuming,
not necessarily
what keeps us alive.

Justice belongs
to those
who can afford it.

Lawyers.

Lobbyists.

Corporations.

Campaign donors.

Money speaks
with remarkable fluency
inside democracy.

Sometimes
the cost of living
becomes the cost
of wanting
to keep living.

Every morning
I calculate survival
before breakfast.

How much longer
can I afford
to exist?

I dream of labor
less than I dream
of rest.

Yet this country
asks me
to sacrifice
my body
for an economy
that has never promised
to protect mine.

Black history.

Indigenous history.

Immigrant history.

Queer history.

Disabled history.

We celebrate them
only after
they become
less threatening.

Only after
the revolutionaries
are safely dead.

Surveillance cameras.

Algorithms.

Data collection.

Identity verification.

Police profiling.

Cyberbullying.

Everywhere,
I am watched.

Rarely
am I protected.

Sometimes I wonder
whether governments
know me
better than neighbors do.

Whether activism
places invisible files
beside my name.

Whether privacy
became another luxury
I was never meant
to inherit.

America grows
more diverse
every census.

Yet segregation
finds new architecture.

Race.

Class.

Religion.

Gender.

Disability.

Neighborhood.

School district.

Healthcare.

Prison.

The walls remain.

Only the paint changes.

They still argue
whose face
belongs on money.

Meanwhile,
the people
who transformed history
rarely inherit
its wealth.

We broke from Britain.

Yet colonialism
never truly left.

It simply
changed accents.

Cheap labor
keeps shelves stocked.

Brown hands.

Black hands.

Immigrant hands.

Invisible hands.

While wealth
accumulates upward,
generation after generation,
toward those
already protected
by inheritance,
property,
and proximity to power.

My poor friends
dream of becoming rich.

I understand why.

This country teaches us
that money
will finally purchase
our humanity.

Commercials become scripture.

Consumption becomes hope.

Shopping becomes therapy.

Work becomes identity.

Debt becomes adulthood.

And yet—

America is not
only empire.

It is neighbors
feeding one another.

Artists refusing silence.

Musicians inventing
entire futures.

Immigrants carrying recipes
across oceans.

Black resistance.

Indigenous survival.

Queer joy.

Disabled brilliance.

Workers organizing.

Students marching.

Communities rebuilding
what governments neglect.

Perhaps
that is what frightens empire
most.

Not our hatred.

Our refusal
to stop imagining
something better.

So today,

on your
two hundred and fiftieth birthday,

I refuse
to wave a flag
that has never fully
covered me.

I refuse
to confuse patriotism
with silence.

I refuse
to inherit shame
for surviving systems
designed
to exhaust me.

God bless me.

America
has already blessed itself
enough.

And if freedom
is ever to mean
what it promises,

it will not arrive
through fireworks.

It will arrive
through liberation.

Not for some.

For all….?

Our Minds Are Revolutionary

By @mx.enigma

July asks us to hold two truths at once.

It is Minority Mental Health Month and Disability Pride Month—a reminder that mental health does not exist in a vacuum. Our identities shape how we are treated, how we access care, and whether our pain is believed.

For many Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, immigrant, Jewish, Muslim, queer, trans, disabled, and other marginalized communities, surviving isn’t simply about overcoming symptoms. It is about navigating systems built with barriers that too often mistake our trauma for weakness, our grief for instability, our anger for danger, and our resilience for limitless endurance.

Healing should never require us to erase who we are.

The Weight We Carry

Mental illness does not discriminate—but healthcare often does.

Many people of color and disabled people delay or avoid treatment because of stigma, financial barriers, inaccessible services, language differences, racism, ableism, transphobia, xenophobia, or previous experiences of being dismissed by providers.

Generational trauma, housing insecurity, discrimination, poverty, violence, displacement, and political attacks leave marks on both the body and the mind.

Our suffering is not created in isolation.

It is produced, reinforced, and too often ignored by systems that reward some lives while treating others as disposable.

When Privilege Doesn’t See the Whole Picture

One of the greatest frustrations marginalized communities experience is being told that our struggles are “all in our heads.”

Some hear:

“Just stay positive.”

“Everyone goes through hard times.”

“You don’t look disabled.”

“You’re being too sensitive.”

“Have you tried smiling more?”

These statements often come from people who have never had to navigate racism, ableism, poverty, anti-trans legislation, inaccessible transportation, medical discrimination, or generations of accumulated trauma.

Privilege can make oppression invisible.

Understanding begins not by speaking over people—but by listening to lived experience.

Empathy means recognizing that not everyone begins the race at the same starting line.

Our Mental Health Is Collective

Mental health is not merely an individual responsibility.

Communities heal when they create:

• Accessible healthcare.

• Safe housing.

• Living wages.

• Disability accommodations.

• Trauma-informed education.

• Community care instead of punishment.

• Culturally affirming therapy.

• Mutual aid.

• Belonging.

Healing cannot be separated from justice.

Words to Carry With You

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation.”

“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”

“Rest is resistance.”

“Healing is not linear.”

These reminders matter because progress is rarely a straight line.

Recovery includes setbacks.

Growth includes grief.

Joy and pain often coexist.

A Poem for Minority Mental Health Month

We carry worlds
they may never understand.

Generations of survival
woven into our bones.

They called us
“too much.”

We were never too much.

They called us
“broken.”

We were adapting.

We learned to bloom
in soil never meant
to nourish us.

Still—

we rise.

We rest.

We cry.

We create.

We organize.

We laugh louder
than despair expected.

We choose each other.

We become homes
for those who were denied one.

Our scars are not evidence of failure.

They are proof

that we survived.

Empowerment Through Community

Representation matters.

Accessibility matters.

Affordable healthcare matters.

Culturally responsive mental health care saves lives.

Community saves lives.

Being believed saves lives.

Sometimes healing begins with hearing someone finally say:

“I believe you.”

“You are not imagining this.”

“You deserve care.”

“You deserve rest.”

“You deserve joy.”

Disability Pride Means More Than Visibility

Disability Pride reminds us that disability is not something to hide.

It is part of human diversity.

Mental illnesses, neurodivergence, chronic illness, physical disabilities, invisible disabilities, and trauma-related conditions deserve dignity—not pity.

Accommodation is not charity.

Access is a human right.

To Every Marginalized Person Reading This

You are not a burden.

You are not your diagnosis.

You are not your trauma.

You are not your oppression.

Your existence carries generations of resilience.

Your story deserves to be heard.

Your healing deserves investment.

Your joy deserves protection.

May we build communities where no one has to choose between survival and dignity.

May we replace stigma with solidarity.

May we replace silence with advocacy.

May we replace isolation with collective care.

This Minority Mental Health Month and Disability Pride Month, may we remember:

Our existence is resistance.

Our healing is revolutionary.

With solidarity,

@mx.enigma

#MinorityMentalHealthMonth #DisabilityPrideMonth #DisabilityJustice #MentalHealthAwareness #BIPOCMentalHealth #AccessibleCare #CollectiveCare #CommunityHealing #Intersectionality #CripJustice #Neurodiversity #EndTheStigma #MutualAid #QueerAndDisabled #HealingJustice

Just like Pride Month, where I wrote a Acrostic poem everyday of June. I’ll be also unveiling my trauma, recovery & disability rights awareness on July for disability pride & minority mental health month, that includes me and my upcoming birthday. How even being at home alone jailed in my ptsd is hell, and survival is an ongoing crisis for all.

Not the one on television.
Not the one debated by rabbis,
politicians,
or strangers with flags.

A quieter war.

One fought between
the child they raised
and the person who survived.

Every morning,
I wake to a courtroom of ghosts.

My father’s expectations.
My mother’s tears.
The voices of rabbis
who never knew my name
beyond the version they preferred.

They gather like judges.

They ask why I fled.

Why I traded certainty
for questions.

Why I chose strange cities
over familiar prayers.

Why I became
a queer traveler,
a wanderer,
a person with no script.

Why I abandoned
the life they prepared for me:

the wife,
the children,
the synagogue seat,
the smile of obedience,
the closet built like a palace.

They call it belonging.

I remember it as suffocation.

Still,
their voices follow me.

Across oceans.

Across WhatsApp messages.

Across every border
I have crossed trying to find myself.

They arrive wrapped in nostalgia.

Photographs.
Holiday greetings.
Memories of Jerusalem sunsets.

As if memory alone
can erase the reasons I left.

As if longing
is stronger than truth.

I am split
between continents.

America and Israel.

Liberal and conservative.

Sacred and secular.

The name they gave me
and the name I chose.

The person they mourn
and the person still learning to live.

I stand at the intersection
like a traffic light stuck on every color.

Go.

Stop.

Return.

Run.

Repent.

Become.

Disappear.

Choose.

The noise is relentless.

Pandemonium.

I carry shame
that was never mine
yet somehow feels stitched into my skin.

Shame for loving differently.

Shame for questioning.

Shame for apostasy.

Shame for wanting my body
to belong to me.

Shame for eating what I want,
wearing what I want,
becoming who I am.

The smallest freedoms
treated like crimes.

The smallest joys
called rebellion.

How strange,
to be told that survival
is a scandal.

How strange,
to be treated as dangerous
for wanting to breathe.

Sometimes I ask myself
the forbidden question.

Would life have been easier
if I stayed?

If I swallowed every truth?

If I buried every desire?

If I smiled through the wedding?

If I performed holiness
while disappearing inside?

Would I have been safer?

More loved?

More stable?

Perhaps.

But ghosts cannot enjoy stability.

And cages do not become homes
simply because they are decorated.

What hurts most
is knowing I will never win.

No argument.
No achievement.
No degree.
No play.
No award.
No proof of happiness.

Nothing can convince someone
who believes your freedom
is evidence of your failure.

They call me lost.

My chosen family calls me brave.

They see rebellion.

My chosen family sees survival.

They see abandonment.

My chosen family sees resurrection.

They see a soul wandering from God.

I see a soul
trying desperately
to remain alive.

And despite everything,
I do not hate them.

That is another wound.

Because anger would be easier.

Instead,
I carry grief.

Grief for what could have been.

Grief for conversations
we will never have.

Grief for the version of me
they keep waiting to return.

Grief for the child
who spent years believing
their spirit was evil.

When really,
their spirit was the only thing
telling the truth.

The Torah they wanted me to carry
became too heavy.

The shame became too heavy.

The fear became too heavy.

Yet somehow
they expected me
to carry it forever.

And when I finally put it down,

they called me weak.

There are thousands like me.

Former believers.

Closeted unbelievers.

Queer children of tradition.

Living between worlds.

Speaking in whispers.

Editing their stories.

Hiding photographs.

Changing pronouns.

Deleting posts.

Learning how to survive
without being erased.

We become experts
at disappearing.

Because visibility
has consequences.

Because authenticity
has consequences.

Because sometimes
love arrives with conditions.

And conditions are not love.

So here I stand.

Not fully free.

Not fully forgiven.

Still arguing with ghosts.

Still flinching at old voices.

Still wondering why God
made my heart pull
toward roads
others call dangerous.

But I know this much:

The voice they taught me to fear
saved my life.

The spirit they called rebellious
kept me breathing.

The questions they condemned
opened the prison door.

If that is wickedness,
then wickedness carried me home.

And if freedom is a sin,

I will spend my life
learning how to commit it
without apology.

Because the real pandemonium
was never leaving.

The real pandemonium
was trying to stay.

Amen? 🙏

P.S. Did g-d intend for me to venture into unfolding into a kaleidoscope or convince myself to fit a box, so I can be wrapped up easily to be served for the chaggim? One will never know!

— Mx.Enigma.

You are standing in the middle of a burning room,

holding the ashes of a name you never wanted,

wrestling a God who feels like a tremor in your bones,

and the world expects you to be a monument.

They want you to be a PR stunt for a tribe you have one foot out of.

They want you to be the target for a blood libel reinvented in an algorithm.

They want you to explain the politicians you didn’t vote for,

the border walls you didn’t build,

and the history that broke your back before you were even born.

You are the third generation of the running.

Yemen, Belarus, Palestine—the maps change,

but the packing of the bags remains the same.

And now the diaspora is an online cage,

where the feeds are loud with people who want you dead,

or want you perfect,

and both feel like a different kind of execution.

The Impossible ?s

You are drowning in questions with no answers,

a cascading list of challenges you never asked for:

The PTSD that rewinds the tape of old wounds.

The dysphoria that argues with your very reflection.

The raw, vibrating panic that knows your name

and says you could be killed at any moment,

simply for the crime of existing in this skin.

You have turned to the Torah,

running your hands over the centuries-old text,

finding many opinions, many interpretations,

but not the specific, tangible, human answers

you so desperately need.

Where is the instruction on how to heal?

How to cope? How to survive the onslaught?

How to sustain this tired body,

to protect your fragile peace,

to prepare yourself to simply face tomorrow?

How to make a difficult, necessary peace with yesterday

and find a way to ground your feet in today,

when the very ground feels like it is about to swallow you?

The rabbis, they are just men,

flawed, complicated, and no closer to God than you are.

They do not hold the sources, they are not your superiors,

and they have curated a history that leaves out

the important facts, the difficult questions, and the responses

that could make you feel confident, comfortable, and proud.

They have left out the history that could make you say,

"This is who I am. This is where I come from."

Instead, they demand a trembling performance of obedience.

They leave you constantly at their whims,

afraid, frantic, another Jew following in line,

another generation being misguided,

marching towards a metaphorical death bed

while pretending it is a holy walk,

just another reflection of the history that tried to end you.

The Weight of the Multiplicity

You are too queer for the right,

too Jewish for the left,

too traumatized for the secular,

too broken for the Orthodox,

and too visible to ever truly hide,

even if you wore a spy’s skin.

They told you that to be chosen was a blessing,

but it feels like being chosen for the frontline of an invisible war.

They told you *Tikkun Olam* was the DNA,

but how do you repair a world that uses the shards to cut your throat?

Your father kissed the *tuchus* of the pious while the house burned down.

The elders want your tattoos gone before they give you love.

The radicals want your lineage erased before they give you safety.

And you are just a human being.

Unemployed, disabled, tired.

An artist who wants the luxury of a quiet window,

fresh air that doesn’t smell like smoke or tear gas,

and an end of days that doesn’t ask you to defend your right to breathe.

🧘 The Agnostic’s Minyan

Let the great thinkers plague you.

Let the OCD cycle through the questions—

that *is* the tradition, isn't it?

Not the wealth, not the brilliance, not the "matzah mama" demand to be a king

when you are barely surviving the day.

The tradition is the argument. The tradition is the screaming at the sky.

*“What the hell do you want from me GAWD?!* is the most Jewish prayer ever uttered.

You do not owe them your allegiance to their flags.

You do not owe them the performance of the "Good Jew" or the "Good Anti-Zionist."

You are allowed to be a broken vessel.

The *Neshama* does not need a rabbi's stamp to be holy.

It does not need to shed its ink or its pink and gold triangles to be seen by the One

who is supposed to know about liberation.

🧌 The Hermit’s Prayer

If you must run to the wilderness, run.

If you must build a sanctuary out of your art and your quiet, build it.

The Shetl didn’t save us, and the status quo is suffocating you.

You are allowed to drop the weight of the global public relations crisis.

You are not the spokesperson for the trauma of the millennia.

May the God of judgment—the boogeyman they scared you with—

fade into the background noise of the internet.

And may the God of the radical margin,

the God of the tired, the disabled, the queer, and the exiled,

meet you in the fresh air.

You are here. Flawed. Living.

That is enough of a miracle for one lifetime.

Dear confused Jew,

Your pain is devastatingly heavy, but your insight is sharp and your soul is loud. It makes complete sense why you want to retreat from the crossfire of an entire world's projections.

When you look at your art or your space right now, what is the smallest piece of peace you can claim for yourself today without asking anyone's permission? My art is the evolution of the Torah, that doesn’t extend to my lifetime. That the jewish story, doesn’t start at Abraham and end at Ashkenazi-centricism, that I’m part of the evolution of our collective Jewishness, and whether others want to acknowledge my Chochma, Nefesh & Binah, my Refuah, identity, and Tzaros matters! #NextLevelJews

Every day feels like a tug-of-war between two versions of myself.

One side calls me back toward familiarity: tradit…

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Growing up in an abusive, archaic Orthodox Jewish household, I was taught to fear Christians. They were the historic oppressors, the authors of the blood libel, the architects of our trauma.

But the truth was, I never felt safe or protected by Jews either.

I dreaded the forced obligation of *Ahavas Yisrael*—the mandate to love fellow Jews unconditionally, even when they didn’t love me back. I was a curious explorer trapped in a rigid system that used God as a weapon of fear and punishment. I still remember being sent to a secular camp housed in a church building. I ate a non-kosher hot dog after the counselor mistakenly assumed Hebrew National meant it was safe. When I got home, my mother berated and beat me. For years, any unintentional mistake under her roof was met with violence.

I couldn't understand a God who demanded that much fear.

So, I started looking out the window. I envied our Christian neighbors’ elaborate Christmas and Halloween parties while Jewish holidays always felt tethered to mourning, trauma, and historical scapegoating. I was tired of being the minority, tired of being different in a predominantly Christian society, and I started to venture out.

Finding Sanctuary in the Shadows

My first taste of the Christian world wasn’t a grand cathedral; it was a basement church in the Lower East Side during a Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) training, featuring a mural of a Black Jesus. It was the first of many church basements that would literally and figuratively shelter me.

By the summer of 2016, homeless and navigating the system, I found myself residing in an emergency youth shelter run by the Ali Forney Center in Astoria, Queens—housed safely in the basement of a church.

As a queer person, navigating Christianity felt like walking through a minefield. If I thought Judaism was complex to explain, Christianity was a dizzying web of hostility and grace. I quickly learned who to avoid: the Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Methodists, and Lutherans were largely unsafe zones.

But then I found the Episcopalians.

For a long time, they felt like the only true allies to queer and trans youth. Every Saturday night, I would go to St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village for their Art & Acceptance drop-in space. There, we ate, made art, and got clothes. I found room to breathe at the Quaker headquarters on Rutherford Place in Gramercy Park. I witnessed the beautiful exception of a trans drag gospel at a progressive Lutheran parish, listened to gay Black pastors at Living Waters, and found arts / trans 🏳️‍⚧️ community at Judson Memorial Church.

The irony isn’t lost on me that even lefty, progressive Jewish collectives who can't afford Manhattan rents—like Romemu, Lab/Shul, or Hefker Minyan—constantly operate out of rented church spaces. The old Reformed Church in Park Slope offers their "Hope Dinners" monthly, running for over 37 years to uplift those who are formerly homeless or dealing with a substance abuse crisis. Eating there, I’d find myself staring at the gorgeous stained glass windows with the same deep boredom I used to feel staring at the walls of a Shul during a long sermon, watching their progressive female pastor walk around in a hip polo paired with a pastor’s collar.

Yet, whenever Jewish politicians like Chuck Schumer or Jerry Nadler would attend a memorial for a great church leader, the Facebook comment sections would be filled with Jews nagging them: *“Get out of there, you’re a Jew.”* I always found that mindset arrogant. Paying courtesy to another community’s loss isn’t a betrayal; it’s a *mitzvah*.

The Audacity of Theological Theft

Let’s be clear: I don’t believe in Jesus as a deity, nor do I believe in the Christian Bible. I have massive objections to the institution of Christianity—from the systemic pedophilia scandals to its rampant queer exclusion. I don’t find Christians to be any better on average than Jews. But they aren't the scary boogeymen the Orthodox community painted them to be. Honestly? I’m often more creeped out by the *yids* who think they have a right to police my body and soul than a Christian stranger.

But Christianity has a deep, systemic issue with boundaries—not just in how they treat people, but in how they treat history.

As an artist and a researcher, it is impossible to miss how much of Christian art, iconography, and theology is explicitly stolen from us. I look at the age-old question of whether humans would have advanced as much without the monarchy of the Church, and then I look at what they built their foundation on. They took our foundation, stripped the context, and rebranded it.

I remember traveling through Poland, spending time in places like Bialystok, looking at the religious art and history. The irony is staggering. Christ-like folks love to claim the Torah is theirs, pulling a massive act of cultural and spiritual plagiarism while historically persecuting the very people who wrote it. They colonize our texts, warp our prophets, and then look down on us for not accepting their fan-fiction sequel.

Christians have a serious boundary problem across the board. No other faith goes so far out of its way to aggressively proselytize. It’s disrespectful to shove doctrine down the throats of people just trying to survive. For over twenty years, a Dominican elder has blocked rush-hour traffic by the Delancey Street subway entrance, screaming about salvation, genuinely believing it is his divine mission to disturb our peace.

I don’t speak "Bible talk" with Christians usually, unless at a funeral to speak common ground or it's to flick them away and keep my mental space safe. I’ve lost friends who became Christian zealots and purposefully misgendered me. I even survived a childhood where my mother literally ripped a pair of tiny cross-and-skull earrings out of my ears because the symbol of the cross triggered generations of trauma. I dreaded my trip to Italy for the same reasons, realizing so many Italians don’t actually live by their religious values; the faith is just a badge for them to hide behind.

Yet, I feel equally ashamed when I see religious Jews spit on the steps of churches. How can we cry out against antisemitism and demand our shuls be respected when our own people desecrate the holy spaces of our neighbors?

I only ever found myself believing in a "Gay Jesus." Once, during a drag brunch and photoshoot hosted by a queer NGO in Jackson Heights, I took a smoke break outside. I ran into two Latino friars and told them bluntly: *"Straight Jesus doesn't bless me as much."*

The Blood on the Altar

As someone who has researched American history, I cannot look at Christianity without seeing the bloodshed. The stains of what this religion has done to BIPOC, Native Americans, Muslims, and Jews should never be forgotten.

We still live in an America where white Christian men believe they have a mandate to dominate our quality of life, completely violating the separation of church and state. We watch Christians glorify Donald Trump as a savior, completely blind to his cardinal sins. Christian hegemony has become synonymous with white supremacy and nationalism—a psychological attack on our global humanity trying to erase the "browning" of the world. The bloody axis between Abrahamic religions fighting over territories never seems to stop. They claim a religion of love, but the chambers of their history echo with hate.

Because of this, I can never assimilate. I can never convert. The guilt, the shame of my past, and my own humanistic soul cannot stomach the inhumane ailments of the institutional Church.

Instead, I stick to the corners. I carve out safe spaces in New York City like Kaleidoscope, The Church in the Village, or Middle Collegiate. I stay on guard against hidden agendas, people trying to sell my soul, or the suffocating, unyielding persistence of Chabad.

I find it ironic, that even Christians who fear of losing members, try to bring folks back, by rebranding the church as fun, as many jewish non profits and chabad / oorah / Aish hatorah would all do the same before they start sinking their rules and agenda into our necks. Whether churches who want to use a concert, or give away free movie tickets, where I tried to bring another jew to get double the points for them to think we are converting to a photography class with a Christian lens, that as long as it’s free I’m down. To even seeing my former employer, only be hospitable to me, once she realized I went to visit her church, and not saw me as an equal humxn, to neighbors who are only kind, if it gets me to sign up for services. Are all ploys to be deceptive and force religion in our faces, and shows their kindness is not out of goodness or altruism, but out of turning us into cult followers and expand membership.

An Agnostic's Prayer

In the Talmud, Jesus is often demonized as a harlot's son. I don't see him that way. I see Jesus as a humanitarian, a radical Reform Rabbi who changed humanity forever. Modern mainstream rabbis—who divide their temples based on expensive memberships and preach segregation politics—could learn a thing or two from his wider humanism.

I don't mind being in an interfaith relationship, so long as they are culturally sensitive to where I come from. But the endless fighting between religions makes me sick. I don't wish to see an Israel or Palestine governed by *any* fundamentalist faith, even if reality tells me that peace is far away.

Regardless of faith, we are all people. We must treat each other equally, while holding our temples and leaders accountable for past and present atrocities.

In my desperate plea as an agnostic, I pray to all the gods to protect me. And if there is a God in the sky, I wish they would come down right now and tell the abusive, powerful men and women of the world to back off, and stop using their holy names to oppress the rest of us.

Amen! 🙏

The autumn of 2020 on Staten Island was defined by heavy rainstorms and a persistent, heavy isolation. After two years on the island, the walls felt like they were closing in. In my apartment buildin…

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I used to dread being forced to attend the Israeli Day Parade, like so many American Jewish schools, having to take out my fun Sunday for a mandatory march, where we are waiting for hours, with no food/drinks, surrounded by Jewish kids who tormented me, both Sefardi and Ashkenazi, and being a quiet, bullied, and closeted Temani kid, who was made to feel ashamed for their creativity, sensitivity, and femininity. One year in 7th grade, a random group of guys from Ramaz came up to me. They asked, “Are you Jonathan Daniels’ brother?” I replied, “Yes!” Then, in front of my whole school and 100s of other demonstrators, they said, “We heard you are gay,” and pushed me around and made other homophobic slurs, and none of my teachers did a thing while other students at MDS laughed at me. I was falsely made to believe that being amongst Jews and supporting the Israeli state was a safe bubble for all of us, when its militaristic nationalist identity is far from the Judaism I subscribe to today. I remember feeling excluded when I was on a C.A.M.E.R.A. journalist fellowship back in 2016, seeing how they use their right-wing politics to report on Israel/the fellowship. I challenged the false claims by a modern Orthodox educator, who claimed Israel was a bastion for gay rights in the area when the country is filled with homophobia and denies marriage and basic protections for trans folks. Or claiming “Israel is the only true democracy in the SWANA region when it’s ruled by a theocracy controlled by the alt-right, where civil marriage isn’t a thing and religious minorities have barely any funding and recognition, with exemptions to the army for the Orthodox Jewish men studying in Yeshiva, while all other religions’ worship, practice, and learning are forced to send their teenagers to the IDF to die for its wars.

I’ve been indoctrinated and brainwashed with over 18 years of lies from Zionist propaganda, claiming Israel was the best, most moral, and most beautiful country in the world. It has parts to it that are of beauty and morality, not in the human rights sense, and the best are in subjective terms, which are hailed by its cult followers. Israelis are abrasive, often sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic. The Israeli right-wingers glorify their IDF, loath to mock Arabs, Palestinians, Druze, and other Semitic folks, including Mizrahim who have, like my ancestors, been residing in Israel/Palestine for centuries, before Ashkenazi-White Netanyahu supporters invaded the holy land, turning its essence into an impure war zone. I used to hear Rabbi in Jerusalem, whom I used to trust, claim, “A good Arab is a dead one!” In which I responded, “Didn’t the Nazis use to joke about the Jews in the same way?” Zionists are such hard-core believers in protecting the Israeli state that they will turn a blind eye to all of its atrocities to convince themselves they are on moral high ground.

Learning about the 2000 Yemenite Baby Tragedy and reading Dr. Shoshana Madmoni’s research, where the Israeli government abducted Temani infants from their vulnerable refugee mothers and sold them to Europeans and post-Holocaust families. Lying to Temanim and claiming their babies died of a deadly disease, leaving these families devastated to this day, not ever truly knowing what happened to their precious babies. Like the forced sterilization of Ethiopian Jews and the toxic litmus test that most Jews of color had to endure, oppression by the Orthodox Ashkenazi Rabbinate, the same Rabbis that made me internalize decades of queerphobia and forced me into conversion “therapy” in Jerusalem for over two years, where I was tortured, raped, and beaten, and when I finally broke free, I was scolded, excommunicated, denied entry to many of their spaces, and outed as if I were to blame for coming out; having to leave a harsh reality and blamed for being sexually assaulted, while my Rabbis, who pretended to be father figures, ignored my suffering when I reported my rapist. My rapist, Moshe, a 30s Sephardi religious guy, was never affected, as he thrives in Jerusalem at the Mir Yeshiva, and the Jewish Orthodox world stigmatizes the victim and treats us as disposable goods not to be married, as if it’s our fault for being violated, rather than holding the same pressure and accountability on the assailant. It took me over a decade to spell the words R.A.P.E., as well as try to get legal/mental counseling, only to fail again, turned away by the Israeli government from filing rape charges due to the weak laws of the statute of limitations. While my rapist gets celebrated in his cheder, married with kids, and the rabbis who were meant to help me at Netiv Aryeh, like the notorious Rabbi Eytan Coren, Rabbi Aharon Bina, and Rabbi Huna, amongst others, all clean their hands of the blood they shed while I was a yeshiva student from 2011 to 2013, being mocked openly by their students, who were being deployed to the IDF, while I struggled with the war inside of me and the shonda of being gossiped about, slandered, and treated like an outcast within the Jewish Modern Orthodox bubble that I resided in for 20 years, before I turned my back on them. The same Jews, who made it their business to joke about me in Shul and on the streets and jab at me in school about my orientation, gender identity/expression, and mock my Temani background amongst other intersections, are the ones who claimed they were my people and protectors and wanted me to sell my soul, body, and mind to their agenda of being abused, choked in the closet, and suffering with these wicked entitled Jews, who believe they are morally superior to most people, even viewing poorly non-orthodox Jews, and will kill anyone to claim more land in Israel, which they believe is only theirs to the point of annihilating all who resided before them. #PalestiniansMatter

Instead of marching, I am choosing a different path today. I am choosing to spend my time in arts and cultural spaces that uplift my whole identity. I am choosing to surround myself with people who can hold my conflicts without judgment and who are actively striving for genuine peace and coexistence. Even when I attended a few years ago with a bunch of Jewish queer organizations, the parade was not in support of Zionism but was a queer visibility protest. Even going full circle, being out and about, I didn’t feel proud, with American onlookers booing us and calling us groomers as Orthodox Jews stole our rainbow flags, recorded, mocked, and gawked at our tiny group while being experts at whispering, playing the invasive Jewish geography game so they could report back to their peeps to gossip freely and say, “Do you know Jacob is a homo?” ”Lol, or I told you they were gay.” I was never given a proper coming out, as I was shamed in the closet, even in the 2nd grade, where boys at Manhattan Day School manipulated me to inquire if I was gay and claimed gay meant happy, and I said yes, which they told all in the school, and never stopped targeting me. The cruelty and cold-heartedness of the Jewish environment, which I was told to defend against antisemitism and weaponize the Holocaust to build steadfast solidarity with Israel, are the same violators of my rights as their enemies. I was trapped in the closet, I struggled in between, and I am degraded being out of it, losing touch of most of my blood relatives, and the years of depression, self harm, violence, gaslighting, and infantalizing I’ve faced from both Jews, gentiles and secular society’s bigotry against Queer/Trans folks, still makes me feel cursed, haunted by the defamation of the Rabbis who scared the closeted me from burning in hell, hated by g-d, and considered an abomination, and training generations of homophobic yeshiva students, to make it their mission, to disparage, disown, and attack us, as my blood family has successfully done, and leaving me in isolation, terror, and abandonment, sitting at home, alone, not invited to most of their functions, feeling sorry for myself, and wondering why I am still chronically single, poor, and targeted by them, while the majority of the world, believe they are holier than me, and as an agnostic, if there’s a moral Hashem in the sky, how can they possibly side with my oppressors, and make me born to be in destitution, only to be a jester for others queerphobic attitudes, to suffocating in the closet, to being treated as a 3rd class citizen in the world’s eyes.

My relationship with my heritage, with Israel, and with the religion are deeply complicated. It is a fracture I carry every day. Over a decade ago, I was living a life in the closet, pretending to be a modern Orthodox Yeshiva boy studying in Jerusalem. In that closet, I was cherished by certain relatives only for attempting to become a clone of them. But growth requires truth. How can I be taught Israeli history, but only Ashkenazim are the heroes of the story, where I never had any mention of other Semitic groups’ contributions to its society, despite going to the top yeshiva day schools in New York? Yet, my ethnicity, amongst others, is completely underreported and erased, as if Jewish historians only care about the plight of their whites and continue to project a racist narrative of the rest of their people. Today, I am out, living as a queer artivist in New York—and that authenticity has changed my perspective entirely.

When I look at Israel today, I see a society that has normalized a deeply abrasive culture, where the glorification of war is a constant. The external marketing of a progressive playground—the "pinkwashing" of Zionism—does not match the reality on the ground. On my first day volunteering in Israel during the summer of 2024, I was stalked and severely harassed by teenagers in a major market in Tel Aviv. I felt gaslit, isolated, and stared at. My identity marginalizes me within the very society that claims to be a haven for people like me. I feared, as I left my former closeted identity, that there’s no safe area in Israel/Palestine for queer leftists, who are despised as we are demonized in America and its axis of Zio-proxy supporters.

Yet, navigating this as a non-Zionist means being caught in a painful vise. I am firmly against nationalism and the injustices of an ethno-state that harms both Palestinians and its own marginalized Jews. To build a space for nuance, I recently started a Non-Zionist United Facebook group. But even as I build that community, I still have to remain partially closeted about my criticisms around my own family, who hold anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab sentiments. I understand where their fear comes from. It is fed by a relentless media hysteria that targets their identities, just as the media on the other side stokes fury against Israelis. It feels like an endless cycle of trauma.

I often feel like the "monkey in the middle." The global landscape is dominated by rigid, uncompromising camps: fiercely pro-Israel or fiercely anti-Zionist factions that sometimes seek total destruction. There are so few visible peace negotiators. And just as my gender exists outside the binary, my political and cultural identity feels at odds with both sides. I have faced rejection from former Jewish friends who see any criticism of Netanyahu, the IDF, or the West Bank settlers as a betrayal of the tribe. At the same time, I’ve faced physical hostility and water bottles thrown at me by radical religious and political extremists at public events simply for existing as a queer person.

Being born into a Semitic tribe means inheriting a beautiful heritage but also a crushing burden of endless infighting and the historical weight of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. There are moments when the stigma of wanting to leave the tribe entirely feels lighter than the burden of staying in it.

So today, I am opting out of the spectacle. I am refusing to let a commercialized, nationalistic export define what Judaism means to me. I am picking out the parts of my heritage that sustain me—the parts rooted in art, empathy, and human rights—and leaving the rest behind. I was pressured by my yeshiva heads to open up an Israeli passport, despite having a valid student visa, all to profit from foreign students and force us to go to the army. In which I resisted and protested, and every time I visit Israel/Palestine, I am stopped at customs and even fear losing my flight when I am held for times on end before my departure, as the Ministry of Interior has still put a tracker on me to ship me to enlistment, despite being disabled and way above 18 years old, as they are trying to weaponize every citizen to become an IDF soldier, which I don’t want blood on my hands, nor am I forced to aim at Palestinians and shoot my Arab neighbors.

True safety and solidarity won't be found in a heavily policed, claustrophobic march. It will be found in the quiet, creative spaces where we are allowed to be complex, where coexistence is a practice rather than a slogan, and where we are valued for exactly who we are today. Making activist magnets and pins at Washington Square Park, expressing how traumatizing and triggering the Israeli Day Parade is for me, and being supported by other anti-Zionists who understand my pain. Avoiding highly anticipated Israeli/Jewish crowds who are like drunk soccer players and are turned on by vandalizing others’ property if it doesn’t support their Zionism. They will justify their violence as self-defense and against “antisemitism” while continuing to be antisemitic towards other marginalized Jews and Palestinians.

I’ve been doxxed by anti-Zionists in college as much as I have been trolled by ultra-Zionists for not siding with them. Sometimes being a pacifist is an illusion, but we need to dream, aim for a better world, and not allow the ongoing bloodshed or the normalization of Islamic & Jewish terrorism, whether from Hamas or Hesdernicks, to be the reality. I’m sick of seeing land, people, and identities being segregated by differences rather than celebrated. Join the peacemakers who want equity, justice, kindness, humanization, and healing for all! Israel/Palestine deserves to be a land of shared heritage, spirituality, learning, and cultural revitalization for all who claim attachment, as I pray for the day our neighbors in the unholy land become friends and no longer enemies!

As Rabbi Jill Jacobs from Truah says, “We need in New York City a Jewish parade to celebrate our people’s diversity, not a nationalistic one that divides us.”

Spending #ShabbatDinner with my #ToxicBlood! They are closeted bigots/conservatives behind doors. 🚪

1) Don’t respect my #pronouns!

2) Shame my liberal/progressive views

3) My brother 🧑 is invited to the table amongst other abusers in my #bloodfamily, despite trying to get an order of protection; my brother assaulted me for years, and my mother tolerated it, and my father blamed me when I took him to court. He doesn’t even look at me; I still feel afraid of his anger 😡, and he doesn’t even pass the salt 🧂 or food 🍱 when asked.

4) My mother degraded me for years, hurling me at passive-aggressive attacks, claiming I would be forever alone for leaving orthodoxy and coming out. 🏳️‍🌈

5) My father claims my boundaries are some lefty bullshit 💩 that I’ve been brainwashed into. While also closing his doors onto me when I was homeless.

6) I’ve never heard, and the only version they pretended to love 💕 was my closeted self. Pretending to be a good 😊 #JewishBoy, and bowing down to their ultra-Zionism and conservative rage 😡

7) I used to believe for so many years that I was the problem & #TheBlackSheep for the constant ridicule, abuse, and gaslighting I faced and that I deserved it. I know now, I am the one 1️⃣ who is breaking away from their intergenerational curse & my trauma. 😞

Even many folks 🏳️‍🌈 in my #ChosenFamily have hurt me and abandoned me when I suffered for years behind doors. 🚪 I have to keep choosing myself, as it seems sometimes the only one 1️⃣ who can show me 💕 is myself, a higher power (I hope), and maybe a therapist.

As the reality is, most people don’t want to hear your struggle; like #Jews, they stigmatize you for being a nebach, aka a pity case. While society judges, then empathizes when we are single, not married, and without kids, as if we have no humxn value.

It’s so suffocating to fight against all these internal/external voices of shame, PTSD, religious trauma, and gender roles, and wrestle between the authentic self that will be rejected, or rejecting myself to be partially accepted.

#Family & #HumxnBehavior is complicated, and #nyc divides #families, making it hard to survive, with sabotage/harassment, and not making it a safe environment for many marginalized folks to feel loved, without an agenda to steal our money 💰 taxes 🇺🇸 and even vote 🗳️

#Love 💕 shouldn’t be transactional, and yet we can’t readily afford our basic needs and can’t still buy affection, understanding, judgement 🆓 and secured #relationships without a hefty price, sacrifice and being trapped at times to others’ poor expectations to not walk alone 🚶

#IChooseMe and have always been independent; I find more #peace ☮️ being in #nature & clearing my mind and connecting to the earth 🌎 than with #toxicpeeps!

I often fear 😰 that there’s not enough love 💕 for me, as much as I try to love 💙 my fractured self that is targeted, dehumanized, pathologized, and despised in a society that I never shed blood 🩸 on. Even the #BlackPanthers claim that 🏳️‍🌈 folks are the most oppressed members of 🇺🇸 society.

I might be able to love 💕 me, and have some allies, but I still feel vulnerable, afraid 😱, triggered, traumatized 🙀, and reduced to being a number and feeling enslaved to capitalism and the prison in my mind 🧠, even more than in the Big Apple 🍎, to feel like a fully valued humxn.

I realized that the #radicallove I carry for myself, others, rejects of our environment isn’t the problem, but the normalized aggression, hate, and bias in the world 🌎.

Against the innocent 😇 to exercise their power and fangs 🦷 and claim they are superior 🐺 due to their religion, nations, race, and bloody history.

The reality is, #TheresNothingWrongWithMe; it’s the corruption of #humanity to place themselves in a hierarchy with others of the same species; they won’t do the work to learn to love 💕 freely!

The #irony, is #empaths #hypersensiblepeople #CancerTypes & #MotherFigures / #FemmeEnergy are being demonized in a patriarchal society that glorifies #Violentmasculinity to “protect us” as we all have #daddyissues, and believe that a feeble mortal man with muscles 💪🏽 power suits 💼, money 💰, and fame 🎙️ will care for us, when it’s the #MaternalCare that will truly restore our souls.

Where even #womxyn have to be forced to be bitchy and exude our beauty so that we can stand strong amongst men and yet become wicked and corrupted like men for our #ToxicFemininity and be degraded at the same time by a 🌎 that continues to place less than 47% of the 🌎 #Womxyn as second class to childish, reckless, barbaric, and smelly pathetic men that y’all deem so superior.

What will it cost for emerging #LittleFemmes and anyone who has been discarded for being viewed as different to be destigmatized, sustained, and protected with affirmation 💕 in a 🌎 that has made us ashamed, terrified, and harmed by a hyper-masculine empire 🏰?

I pray 🤲 for restorative justice for my #innerchild to heal, praise, feel whole, loved, safe, respected, and to find peace ✌️ in my mind, body, and spirit to lay rest 😴 in this 🌎, my home 🏡 and the next 🪦 #ShabbatShalomMofos

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