Ayin Press feeds and seeds Jewish culture

Ayin Press is an independent publishing platform and interdisciplinary creative studio rooted in Jewish culture while reaching beyond traditional boundaries, and a recent grantee of the Jewish Liberation Fund. Below is an edited transcript of a video interview titled “Writing as Activism: Ayin Press” uploaded on July 14.

Noa Barash [Jewish Liberation Fund]: Hi there. I am joined today by three incredible folks from Ayin Press. Penina Eilberg-Schwartz who’s the managing editor, Talia Krevsky, development and partnership manager, and Tom Haviv, executive director and co-founder. Thank you all so much for being here with me today. Ayin Press has been transforming Jewish cultural expression since 2020. You amplify innovative Jewish ideas through books, digital content, and programming with a mission rooted in the belief that culture and creativity can heal and transform the world. You don’t just publish books; you actively seek out work that crosses boundaries and challenges conventional thinking. So, tell everyone about your approach and how you see publishing as a tool for social transformation.

Tom Haviv: Ayin Press has always grounded itself in an interdisciplinary approach to publishing and culture making. From the very beginning we have seen our curatorial and editorial process as actively trying to engage with different disciplines and engage different fields, from the literary artistic fields of cultural production and output to scholarly and academic fields to community organizing and social justice fields. Of course, these are wide categories and there are other fields as well, such as theological spiritual work.

The siloization of these fields has limited some of the generative cross-pollination that we know is a fact of life and is the fact of people’s individual experiences as Jews and as citizens and as participants in culture. Readers are, you know, co-creators. And so from the very beginning we were always thinking about how do we curate across a spectrum and make sure that people encounter a holistic and poly-vocal or multivalent approach to thinking about culture.

At the very beginning of our project, co-founder and editorial director Eden Pearlstein and I had three different pillars that were kind of like playful categories for how we were thinking about our curation. We thought a lot about what we called speculative theology, which was an orientation towards theology and spirituality that was open to emergence and to new ideas and to taking seriously those new ideas as part of a larger, ongoing expression of Jewish life and also spirituality beyond Judaism. The second and third pillars were political imagination and radical aesthetics. For political imagination we had imagined our relationship to social movements and to social justice also tending to the horizon of emergence, seeding different ideas, supporting people who were taking risks within the social justice space, supporting the cultural expression of certain social justice ideas and values, and also moving out of the fully operationalized or instrumentalized — the on the ground, you know, in the streets — version of activism. Political imagination was our expansive way of saying we want to publish on risk-taking, imaginative political thought and practice.

Third, radical aesthetics, may sound bland now because what does “radical” mean? It can mean anything. But I think the etymology of radical still is powerful being “at the root,” looking at the root of different aesthetic ways of presenting Jewish life. We asked, how do we talk about aesthetics that is beyond just art as additive, but also art being at the root of how people see themselves in the world.

Noa: Those are all really important pillars. I’m excited to dive a little bit more into the work you do in each of those. You all have made a commitment to featuring voices that spark important conversations and really challenge the status quo. Can you walk us through your process for identifying and selecting boundary pushing authors and writers, and what has this taught you about the relationship between controversial ideas and meaningful change?

Penina Eilberg-Schwartz: One of the ways in which publishing is a kind of organizing is that it is deeply relational if it’s done in an aspirationally liberatory framework. Ayin Press is very much operating in that way: we accept submissions from the public. We’re a pretty small team so we’re still figuring out how to read as much of the work as people want to send to us, which is amazing how much interest we’ve seen.

A lot of the identification of transformative thinkers has been through relationships. We’re publishing out of the communities that we are a part of: Jewish communities and communities that gather around spiritual axes, around political organizing, around art, and also communities that of course expand beyond the Jewish framework. We are finding people who are saying things that feel deeply transformative and liberatory and important. Sometimes it means new ideas. Sometimes it means emphasizing something that people have been saying forever in a new way that has found a way to slip through the cracks of discourse that can tend to feel staid or broken or overly determined. So, through relationships we find there’s definitely a connection between controversial ideas and change and resistance to change. So, ideas that are really meant to find a way through, to open up new possibilities for the future, to speak truth about violence, but also to speak truth about the interconnection of all things, of all beings, of the dignity and right to freedom and equality for all people — all of these important things that Jewish Liberation Fund community members are working towards — they raise resistance.

At Ayin, we’re really interested in finding ways to identify those controversial ideas, but also to work with authors to bring them into registers that are the most likely to be effective. That’s another way in which we’re organizing. We’re thinking the message is there, the message is true, but there are as many different ways to communicate an idea as there are ideas in the world. Artists get really creative about how we say something that might be controversial in a way that people might finally hear it, might finally listen. We’re interested in artistic expression of controversial ideas both because it can be liberatory and radical and transformative, and also because art can make the controversial feel more immediate or possible or accessible.

Tom: I would like to add something to that, dovetailing on what you just said, Penina. In the DNA of Ayin, there’s a very serious belief in the need for avant-garde work, for artistic or scholarly or intellectual or spiritual practice being part of the way we see cultural transformation, cultural shift happen. We see the pipeline of new ideas that make it to the mainstream change consciousness and political and social discourse on a large scale.

What Eden and I have found — as writers and artists ourselves — is that there’s often people getting involved in social movements without understanding the roots of those social movements, the roots of the leaders who had formed the ideas, or the history around those ideas. We felt like part of those roots are in emergent, unpopular ideas— forget even controversial, they are ideas so unpopular that they’re not even controversial because people aren’t even talking about the ideas other than the few people who came up with them. And so, we actually believe that in order to have serious impact on the widest scale possible, we both have to be functioning as a distribution hub, a publisher, a platform that is bringing things to as many communities as possible. But also to work with, as Penina was saying, artists and thinkers and community leaders at the ground level before their ideas have even caught fire with the world, supporting and stewarding their intellectual, spiritual, and creative process so that they can have a longer-term impact. That also means revisiting work that’s been out of print or that’s been out of the discourse so people can follow those roots and have the lessons of how we create the cultural shift from the ground up and on our own terms.

Noa: So, going off of what you were just saying about centering perspectives that aren’t even controversial because they’re not even in the mainstream or being talked about, one part of your mission is really centering these often-silenced perspectives to reshape what’s possible in Jewish publishing and activism. How does your work reflect that commitment — maybe some examples of that work — and what impact have you seen from prioritizing these voices?

Penina: Since Ayin’s founding, we’ve been prioritizing lifting up marginalized voices, stories, perspectives, avant-garde ideas and ways of being. There are lots of different fronts on which that’s happening. We are especially committed to lifting up Levantine, Sefardi, and Arab Jewish perspectives; and cultures, histories, and thinkers who are critical of Israel or Zionism who are often not finding space in institutional Jewish containers. Also, queer voices. I can share a couple of projects that are examples of that kind of commitment. I’m thinking about Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s first kid’s book, Golden Threads, which we published earlier this year, that draws on an historical instance of Jewish Muslim collective organizing in 1920s Fez and then uses that to inspire ideas about what might still be possible even though the world that the book’s events happened in has been destroyed. I know that Ariela really wanted to write this book because she found that she didn’t have such a book to read to her grandchildren that showed them where their family came from and also provided a template, a frame, for imagining the world that they still can and must create.

An example of Ayin’s work on Zionism and Israel is Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile, which is having a pretty profound impact. It examines the costs of Zionism’s attempt to erase the exilic thread in Jewish thought, political life, and culture, and serves as a powerful site of conversation including charged difficult conversations in the days after October 7 and as the destruction of Gaza accelerated.

One more example on the queer publishing front. I’ve had this short story of Jay Michaelelson’s in my head for some weeks in which Michaelson imagines that one day everybody wakes up and Leviticus 18:22, one of the verses that prohibits queer sex, has just disappeared from all of the Torah scrolls in the world. In all these examples there’s this imaginative thread that Tom has already spoken to that is key to our commitment to lift up these voices. We definitely see that expanding communities of people are looking for their reflection, for histories to delve into and to use as maps for imagining futures and inspiring political organizing. That imaginative piece of the work can sometimes fall to the wayside, especially in times of emergency like we’re living through. But imagination is what creates the future, so it couldn’t be more important.

Noa: Now I want to read all of those. So, switching gears a bit beyond traditional publishing you all have developed creative projects that function as tools for grassroots organizing. Can you tell us a bit about this work and how it functions as both artistic creation and cultural activism?

Tom: I think it goes back to looking at publishing in an interdisciplinary way. We don’t look at publishing just books or articles on the internet. On one level we are publishing audio work, we’re working on podcasts in context with traditional publishing. In addition, my work that has been woven into Ayin’s work since the beginning, connected to the Hamsa Flag project, is definitely a more unorthodox way of thinking about publishing. Not everyone thinks about printing flags, but the Hamsa Flag project is a publishing and dissemination project. That project was born out of a question about how nationalism and Zionism function in Jewish identity, and is part of a conversation with my Sefardi ancestors and heritage. Going back to what Penina was saying about imaginative acts that help us envision and landscape possible futures, the Hamsa Flag functions primarily as an artistic intervention that didn’t necessarily have a specific outcome, but was designed to raise questions about how flags, as markers of collectivity, function. To inquire into what markers of collectivity like a flag, like a hamsa, like a pomegranate, like a fig could signify about other forms of collectivity that could be more inclusive, that could be more horizontal, that can include Jews and Palestinians or Jews and Muslims or different kinds of identities in diaspora and not. The Hamsa Flag was printed in connection to my own book of poetry, A Flag of No Nation, that was connected to some oral history work I did with my family, my Turkish Jewish side of the family, and also connects to social movement spaces like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Standing Together, and If Not Now, helping think about other ways of speaking about collectivity and Jewish identity that could be connective across identity lines and ethnic lines.

There are a couple other projects that I would like to mention. One is Toratah, which means “Her Torah,” and it’s the re-gendering of the Old Testament in Hebrew and English. That project is being led by two women, Yael Kanarek and Tamar Biala, and they are basically creating a community around this work so it functions not just as publishing a book, but also like an anchor into the real world of community practice.

So, as with the flag, books function as community shapers and they function as ways of creating foundations for real world interactions.

Just to round this out, even the way we publish books is to think about them in a holistic sense, and not in a consumerist sense in which people read the books and walk away and that’s entertainment.

We ask, how do we seed enough cultural work that we start to see people in community, in synagogues, in other kinds of organizing spaces start to have a library of books and other kinds of cultural tools to open up other possibilities?

To engage with Ayin Press’s vision, visit their website, ayinpress.org