“This twilight is seen as possibility: possibly day, possibly night, neither wholly one nor the other. And, yet, it is time for creation.”

~ Scout Bratt, Tzedek Chicago

I like now to think that Jack, who held such a great love for Israel but perhaps an even greater passion for Judaism, for its community and its traditions, gave me a hint so many years ago of not just how it is to die but, rather, how we may choose to live.

The people who appear in this project are my people. We grew up in many of the same communities, with many of the same experiences. But they moved on to make different choices, saw things I didn’t see, and our paths diverged dramatically. I grew up, becoming a cognizant person, via certain predetermined binaries: white vs. Jewish, Arab vs. Jew. I only realized, much later on in life, that you don’t have to do it like that. I had slipped into the dark comfort of the night, while they now stride consciously and bravely into the twilight of creation. The path that I didn’t take fascinates me.

Atalia Omer opens her latest book, Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, with an excerpt from a Yom Kippur eve sermon delivered by Scout Bratt, a member of Tzedek Chicago, “a values-based Jewish community that defines itself in terms of nonviolence, solidarity, equality, and non- Zionism”. 

“On Rosh Hashanah our fate is - according to some - written in one of those two books-of-the-binary, but it isn’t until tonight, until Yom Kippur, that our fate is actually sealed. We have, in fact, been living in the in-between, a time when, according to our liturgy, we could actually change what was written for us on Rosh Hashanah… It is in this liminal space that I believe creation happens and transformation occurs. Out of our comfort zones, out of our privileged standpoints of knowing, that we create new understandings. In expanding upon that oh-so-binary story of creation, Pirkei Avot inside the Mishnah describes ten things created at twilight, created precisely during the in-between of the sixth day of creation’s end and restful Shabbat’s beginning. Twilight yielded us the rainbow. The manna we ate in the desert. Moses’s staff. The tablets and writing of the Ten Commandments. I like those. This twilight is seen as possibility: possibly day, possibly night, neither wholly one nor the other. And, yet, it is time for creation. I want us to courageously acknowledge how our comfort, our safety, our security lie in the binary and in the reliance of us vs. them. On the reliance of separation. I want us to speak to the unspoken binaries in order to find the twilights… Twilights that seem unthinkable, seem irrational, seem impossible.”

Omer writes: “Bratt’s Kol Nidrei sermon … captures an insight that broadly animates American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists and other Jewish critics of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. I focus on their process of reimagining Jewishness as they grapple relentlessly with communal sins, especially the suffering inflicted on Palestinians in the name of Jews… The book, in other words, investigates a continuous ‘Days of Awe’ where, as Bratt says, we inhabit ‘the in-between’ or a ‘liminal space’ where ‘creation happens and transformation occurs.’ In Bratt’s words, ‘the work of repentance and reflection’ entails ‘rewriting’ our stories through a space of uncertainty rather than the one of either/or certainty, the hallmark of binary thinking.”

I was born into a liberal but culturally-traditional North American Jewish family that has its origins in refugees fleeing from forced military conscription and violent anti-Jewish riots in early 20th century Imperial Russia. During my childhood in the United States, Jews were still marginalized to a certain degree: we weren’t able to purchase homes on certain streets; we were banned from membership at the area’s prestigious golf club (though as a kid I got a job with other Black and Jewish caddies kept hidden from sight – literally – in a caddy shack in a dark ravine, called up to the luxurious clubhouse in order to haul golf bags around for members at below minimum wage); we faced playground bullies who imposed ethno-religious criteria in selecting their targets. Every time I thought I might pass, I didn’t. Even as a kid, this sense of otherness was extremely palpable, and had a long-term impact. I grew up very conscious of what I was and what I was not in white American society. As a resentful and unruly child, I’d roam the neighborhood just before the Fourth of July, pulling American flags up out of my neighbors’ lawns and shoving them back into the ground upside down. Constantly trying to understand my place vis-a-vis the “Christians” - a term my family used specifically in reference to non-Jewish whites - I resented being forced to go to Jewish day school rather than to public school with the “normal” kids, with their coveted blonde hair and dainty facial features. But at the same time I’d daydream about armed uprisings of Black and Native Americans against America’s WASP elite. Long before I knew what checkpoints even were, I imagined being stopped by Native or Black fighters when riding in the family car with my dad and allowed to continue when our Jewish identity and corresponding allyship was clarified. It was clear to me, as a Jewish kid growing up in the United States in the mid-to-late 1970s and 80s, where I felt my allegiances stand.

But during this period, I was also simultaneously shaped by an insular education and socialization revolving around Judaism and an imposed, unconditional Zionist pride in the Israeli state.

Zionism conveniently provided an answer to my profound sense of marginalization and alienation from white American society that I felt as a Jew. Further, Zionist activism seemed so much more practical, and real, and immediate than anything Jewish religious identity or ritual practice could ever possibly provide for me. The former subsumed the latter and unwittingly drove me down a very long and very different path that severed much of the intersectional ties I had already unwittingly created for myself as a child. Being the best Jew you could be meant being as Zionist and as Israeli as possible.

This phenomenon reflects much more than just my own personal experience. R., one of the American Jewish activists I interviewed for this project, explained:

I was so passionate about my love for Israel and my desire to not only be a proud Jew in support of Israel, but as Israeli as possible, as culturally Israeli as possible. This was really sold to me as the peak of what it meant to be a Jew. The more proximate you were to authentic Israeli culture, the more Jewish you were. [My year at a military prep academy in the settlement of Gilo in the West Bank] was the best year of my life. It was an incredible experience. It’s where my Hebrew is from. It’s why I speak with a much less-accented Hebrew, which at the time was a huge deal. When Jewish Americans heard me speak Hebrew, they were like ‘this girl has made it. This girl is the kind of Jew we want to be’. 

Following university, I actualized the fantasy embedded in me by years of Zionist-dominated American Jewish education and became an Israeli soldier. I felt a sense of pride and belonging that I never had before and suddenly, within months, found myself on the ground in Gaza and experienced, also for the first time in my life, what it was like to be on the other side of the power paradigm. I was in control, I dominated, I decided, and I had an entire state military system to back me up. However, from the very start, disturbing, fundamental questions seeped in and began to spread. My military service left upon me an indelible mark and was, perhaps, unprecedented in shaping who I am today. But this self-questioning nevertheless ultimately led me to a place in which I eventually felt I had no choice but to leave the military. A personal/political evolution that commenced in Gaza has reshaped my understanding of my own Jewish identity and place - or lack thereof - in Israeli society. 

This glacially-slow evolution in consciousness did eventually grant me a lens with which to actually recognize Palestinians for the very first time. The absurd, oft-repeated “invisible ships” phenomenon which posits that Native populations literally couldn’t “see” the tall ships European colonists sailed up to North American shores because the concept was so foreign to them, nevertheless has some relevance to my own experience. I didn’t see Palestinians, or hear their narrative and stories, or recognize their colonization and violent, forced dispossession, because these very things were so utterly foreign to me. But importantly, they were by design foreign - unspeakable, in fact, - not just to me but to nearly the entire American Jewish and wider Diaspora community. The Nakba eliminated not just the Palestinian presence on the land but also their presence in our consciousness, allowing American Jews to much more readily and unquestioningly swallow the Zionist concept of “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

American Jewish activist Bob Suberi, whom I also photographed and spoke with extensively as part of this project, described his own experience:

I went to Israel for the first time in 1970. I was actually on leave, I was in the U.S. army stationed in Vietnam… I never even thought about the indigenous population that was here before. It just never occurred to me because it was just never discussed… I had never really considered Palestinian people, and who they were and that they even existed. They were so completely erased from the histories that I’d read. So I wanted to meet Palestinians; I wanted to see for myself. We came to the South Hebron Hills and visited several different Palestinian villages and met people. They were not what I had imagined: they had a culture, they had values, they had needs. They had land that they don’t have anymore. 

Michael Rothberg discusses the Jewish Diasporic relationship to Israel/Palestine. In his words: “I don’t consider myself a perpetrator of the occupation but by virtue of being an American and paying taxes, I am helping to perpetuate it. I was raised - as many of us were - within a certain kind of ideology of support for the Israeli state, for the Zionist project, which I think in some ways makes me a perpetuator of what has happened there … As Jews, many of us have inherited post memories of victimization - or even direct memories of victimization. Especially coming from the Holocaust but also from the history of anti-Semitism, pogroms, etc. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, those post memories of the Holocaust come to intersect with present day implication… From a particular Jewish perspective, you see how you have this kind of diachronic relationship to the Holocaust inheritance, of the history of victimization, that intersects with an ongoing present day synchronic form of implication.” 

This movement out of the binary and into the creative twilight of Jewish identity and consciousness can be wrenchingly painful, often ripping those undertaking this journey from their communities - sometimes from their very families - and leaving them feeling alone and utterly alienated from all they knew and all that was familiar.

R., who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in the United States, describes her experience during our conversation:

[One] weekend I went into Bat Ayin settlement and cried and cried at the beautiful Kabbalat Shabbat - and I never went into a settlement ever again. I do think that something that a lot of us who grew up to love Israel so dearly who are in the activist pro-Palestine scene now experience is that all the beauty, and flavor, and joy, and inheritance - and what’s more Jewish than inheritance - just turns to ash in your mouth. That loss, that grief - you go into mourning over having lost such a beautiful thing that you still love.

Margo Hughes-Robinson, a rabbi and American Jewish activist who also appears in the project, added her own perspective on this:

I feel that the American Jewish community is inching closer and closer to a fuller reckoning with this history … but I anticipate the amount of cracking open and grief and how painful it’s going to be. How are we going to build a container so that people don’t have this break, so that people don’t need to take five or 10 years to be able to patch up their relationship and be like ‘maybe I can still love seder and go to shul’? I wonder what the mechanism will be to hold people through this massive level of grief.

The story I am telling here is at times personal, but also much bigger than my own: This is a story that is communal, intimately familiar to so many Diaspora Jews. The ongoing Zionist colonization and Israeli military occupation of Palestine - orchestrated by the Israeli state in the name of Jews worldwide - has subsumed our independent Jewish identity. And, certainly unintentionally but undoubtedly more critically, Palestinians - and the fate of Palestinian liberation - are inextricably central to the re-shaping of an evolving Jewish being and identity. Of what it means to be Jewish today. Concurrently, the Palestinian activist partners in the South Hebron Hills are, indeed, the leaders, the coordinators, the directors - indeed, the protagonists - in a much larger story that also happens to facilitate a concurrent evolution of Jewish identity. These Jewish activists are “boots on the ground” supporting and in direct solidarity with Palestinian resistance and steadfastness.

I connected with just one of the groups of Diaspora Jewish activists now working in Israel/Palestine, primarily from All That’s Left and the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. They are living an on-the-ground, practical, Palestinian-driven action that is simultaneously based in Judaism as its source of core values and perspective - a cohesive alternative to a binary Jewish identity that is really just a mix of Israeli nationalism, militarism, and ethnic supremacy. 

This project may, perhaps, be best described as a study in post-Zionism. The past two years of documentation allowed me the opportunity to shine light on an ever-evolving Jewish communal identity that continues to shake off Zionist domination with each further step it takes through the twilight. Yet while decolonizing Judaism via a separation from Zionism, much of their activism is nevertheless, and perhaps very understandably, a direct result of the Zionist project and its residual impact. The project’s images, at least to some extent, were likewise influenced by historic Zionist propaganda imagery that subconsciously left me with a distinct perspective as I walked the land with these activists and documented their work. I’d like to think, however, that these Zionist images and the fragments of their influence have been repurposed as alternate means in the struggle to a very different end.

The historical images above (on left), some culled from the Central Zionist Archive, one shot by renowned German-born Israeli photojournalist Micha Bar-Am, and one actually by me, promote themes - including militarism, labor, agriculture, and presence on the land - prevalent in the constitution of the “New Jew” identity so key to the formation of the then-emerging Israeli/Zionist ideal, one that was intentionally distinct from that of the weak, obsequious, effeminate, religious, and scholarly Diaspora Jew. The “New New Jews”, if we might call them that, who appear in the project’s images (on right), are wielding many of these very same themes - labor, agriculture, presence on the ground, and even military-like movements and preparedness - from a Diasporic perspective with the aim of dismantling the Zionist enterprise and demonstrating solidarity with Palestinians.

It’s been two years into this project, two years walking into the twilight, two years floating somewhere in the space between. I’d drive down from Haifa to the southern West Bank, a trip almost as long as you can take in this land without reaching an impenetrable, menacing border fence, the car packed with nothing but camera gear, winter clothing, and a sleeping bag, alone with my thoughts. Each drive down and back, usually traveling in the twilight hours of dusk when day turned slowly into night, something small fell apart and something else came together. Each frigid night and each scalding day in the south, hosted generously by a Palestinian desert community whose very existence is called into question with each and every passing moment, under the watchful gaze of Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers peering out their living room windows just a hundred meters away, I considered what it means to exist in the space between. 

In the middle of this project, my children were born, twins, and we named our son for my grandfather Jack, who had left me wondering since 1989. As I am pulling this project together, I realize now: the space between has nothing to do with death. It is, in fact, life. The space between, the twilight of creation, is a place for my children, Zohar Jack and Ruby Isobel (named for my grandmother, Iso). It grants them a space and a way to live in this world as Jews and to decide how to navigate with strength and confidence the external forces that might seek to bend them this way and that. This project is a documentary but, in a personal first, I turned my lens inward and realized, as I was shooting, that I had been unconsciously documenting my own journey no less than that of my fellow American Jews and our collective community. A journey navigating religion, majority/minority status, our relationship with whiteness, and nationalism, throughout the course of which we are redefining who we are and how we live, shaking off the presumption of Zionism imposed upon American Jewry - overriding nearly every other aspect of our identity - for nearly 100 years. The Diaspora Jewish activists now living and working so closely together with Palestinian partners in the South Hebron Hills are forging something new, or reinvigorating something very old, or - mostly like - doing both at the same time.

My work has long been driven by a “solutions journalism” approach utilizing photography and documentation as a catalyst for justice and change. My previous photographic projects have sought to raise awareness of community and individual activism, highlighting the intersections of race, gender, social equality, and justice in Israel/Palestine: Nesa’iyeh, documenting Palestinian women activists in the West Bank, was featured in a solo exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Black Labor, exploring the role of ethnicity in the makeup of Israel’s Border Police, was recognized with a third-place award in the Editorial-Conflict category of the 2016 Moscow International Foto Awards and was highlighted in the scholarly work of James Eastwood; Under Control: A Timeline of Israel’s Grip on Gaza is a retrospective collection of images exploring Israeli state control over the Gaza Strip featured in The Progressive; Faces Behind the Cases, an ongoing project shot for the Adalah legal center utilizing photographic portraits and first-person narratives to tell the story of Palestinian struggles, has exhibited in Haifa and Nazareth. In 2014, I spoke at United Nations headquarters in Geneva with Eman Mohammed, a Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza, on the personal and societal impact of conflict photojournalism.

First and foremost, I offer my deepest thanks and gratitude to the Jewish and Palestinian activists who so generously let me into their spaces and communities over the past two years, who put up with me and my cameras all hours of the day and night. This is your story and I hope I tell it right. This project was produced with the generous support of Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellowship. It would have never seen the light of day without the wonderful backing, invaluable guidance, and unique opportunities provided by the RCPI team, including Diane Moore, Hilary Rantisi, Atalia Omer, Reem Atassi, and Navi Hardin. I would like to thank my brilliant and talented RCPI cohorts for sharing your thoughts, contributing your essential critiques, and for opening your hearts and allowing us the opportunity to learn from and to strengthen each other. Denise Penizzotto has provided unparalleled creative input, artistic advice, and technical know-how, making this online exhibition a beautiful reality. Safaa Khateeb has been my sounding board from Day One, facilitating the long-term evolution of this project and teaching me that a photographer can both document - in the strictest sense of the word - and create art - in the freest sense of the word -  at the very same time. Finally, Lihi Yona has been with me for every single moment, every frame shot, every word written. She uprooted her life and traveled across the ocean with me for this project, she believes in me and made me believe in myself. Her sharp eye and critical mind have shaped this work into what it is today, and everything I create is thanks to her. I could not have done this without you.