Workshop Reflections: A Facilitator Dialogue

by Sophia Sobko & Mira Stern

Teaching workshops for local organizations, communities and groups is an important part of what JOOL does. In order to better align the Bay Area Jewish community with local Indigenous communities and encourage paying the Shuumi Land Tax, we must educate each other about the fight for Indigenous rematriation. Education is important, but just as important is deepening our learning and engaging with the education. In this interview, JOOL members Sophia and Mira explain their thought process for creating “Beyond Giving Thanks: Reckoning with Reparations”, a workshop designed to help participants delve into issues in our communities while taking into account broad patterns of domination and oppression in the United States and globally. 

Regarding the brainstorming/learning process, what did you envision as the goal(s) for this workshop? How did you shape the lens of analysis?

Sophia: Often JOOL workshops have tended to (1) share the history of colonization of Lisjan Ohlone land, offer testimonials and calls to action from Ohlone leaders, and share the Shuumi Land Tax as a call to action for settlers, as well as to (2) create space for participants to engage Jewishly with this content. This is a lot to do in 1.5-2 hours! With this workshop, we wanted to offer the audience a chance to interrogate the history and impact of Jewish settler presence on this land, and to situate paying Shuumi within a broader commitment to divesting from colonial relationships of domination. These types of discussions required a closer look at extraction and accumulation, so we hoped to help participants make connections between settler colonialism, white supremacy, Jewish whiteness, and racial capitalism. After looking at white settler complicity, we offered people time to articulate and share how they root in their Jewishness in this work - this was a really rich conversation. 

Finally, it’s important to add that as educators (we’re both former high school teachers), it was really important for us to give people opportunities to feel, respond, process and integrate the information, rather than just present a lecture. 

Mira: I agree with everything Sophia said! I think it’s especially challenging to get white folks to commit to larger movements of dismantling white supremacy, rather than contributing in ways that feel good for us or maintain most of our power and privilege. This deeper learning, around the formations of this nation-state and this construction of whiteness, is essential for our long-term movements and willingness to engage with the entire thing falling!

What ideological underpinnings/critique of white supremacy did you include in your teaching methods and content and why?

Sophia: We presented white supremacy (and racial capitalism along with it) as an ideology and structure that makes the settler colonial project possible in the U.S. We first emphasized that given the historical and ongoing oppression of native people, Black people, and people of color, all material accumulation (land, wealth) is stolen - that means it is based on dispossession of these groups. We then used Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s framework of “assimilable immigrants” to share the history of Ashkenazi Jewish assimilation into the white middle class, a process that reinforced anti-Blackness and native erasure. Without assuming the race or class of individual participants, it was exciting to bring this frame of racial capitalism and actually get us all thinking and talking about how many of us accumulated any wealth that we do have. We drew inspiration from.

Can you share some recommended readings or practices that you find a part of this "next step" engagement?

Mira: Next step--learning and action, learning and action! We’d recommend engaging with some of the deeper texts, and getting connected to indigenous media that is current and is calling us settlers to deepen our relationships with native folks and dive into change work. Some resources I love are Indigenous Action Media and the All My Relations podcast. There is a lot of discomfort that is necessary in dismantling multi-layered centuries-old systems of power and dispossession. If the learning doesn’t lead to action, though, it’s incomplete. 

Here are some readings for “next step” engagement:

Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang - Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (2012)

Evelyn Nakano Glenn - Settler Colonialism as Structure (2015) 

Deborah Miranda - Bad Indians (2013)

Baldwin - Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White (1967)

James Baldwin - On Being White and Other Lies (1984)

Toni Morrison - On the Backs of Blacks (1993) 

What went well and what do you want to change/improve for a future workshop?

Mira: I think we had great attendance, a lot of opportunities for folks to plug into dialogue and connection during the workshop, and ample follow up from folks wanting to be involved in JOOL! Those are all big wins. Some feedback we heard was to slow down a bit! We had 3 breakout rooms across a 2-hour session, which might have been a lot for us. Again, as former teachers, we wanted to center interaction and engagement, but certainly need to remember that a lot of dialogue and process might be hard for folks especially when the content is new or more challenging.

I also think that next sessions can ask folks to dig into deeper asks that build upon paying Shuumi and really get into building solidarity and centering reparations work for all Black and Indigenous people on the lands we are occupying. Clear asks, options, calls to action...etc. make folks feel a little more grounded and ready to move. And, also, sitting in the unknown and the discomfort is essential too. The both/and!

Sophia: I am also thinking a lot about how we do not all enter this conversation and the structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy the same way. How can we imagine the broadest, most diverse group of participants for our workshops, including indigenous Jews, Black Jews, and Jews of color of various origins, and de-center whiteness, even as we seek to challenge it? We are working on offering caucusing for breakout rooms (e.g. indigenous, settler, white, POC groups), to allow the option for people of similar positionalities to be in conversation with one another. 

The workshop creators also drew inspiration from these works and people:

Toni Morrisson, James Baldwin, The Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, 

Wolfe, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2012, Roediger, 1998; Robinson, 1983; Glenn, 2015

Here’s Our lesson plan

JOOL Note: A drash is a teaching about the Torah that usually takes place in a synagogue. We are remixing that practice. In this digital space, JOOL members teach about the Torah of Jewish/Indigenous solidarity work. Individuals offer their perspectives on the questions and ideas that are moving through them. We hope it's a wild and sacred space. By lifting up different points of view, we practice our values of transparency, learning and relationship building. And we celebrate the diversity of our collective, where many different voices are joining together, connected through shared values, to call for Indigenous sovereignty.