Episode 16 – Solomon Brager on Ethical Ambivalence, Exceptionalism, and Being Jewishly Gloomy

Hello everyone! I have been away longer than usual between episodes due to circumstances, and I appreciate you all coming back to listen. As a kind of compensation, this is a long one today—I got to talk to one of my favorite people to get into it with, Conner Habib. We had recorded a conversation along with Dean Spade in the approach to the election in order to reorient people’s thoughts and attention towards politics beyond the state—and so we decided to reconvene, the two of us, post-election, to discuss the relationship of feeling to thinking and doing. There was of course an intensity of feeling after the election, with many claims about how people should respond and act. Instead of going that route, Conner and I try to explore ways of not giving up our feelings and power to the spectacle of politics and everything it demands from us. In doing this, we aim to expand the possibilities of action, and to reconceive our relationship to the political in a way that develops a new language or a new grammar that no long constrains us. Along the way, we talk about nottaking materialism as the only basis for politics, which gets us into both religious forms of power and the consideration of a spiritual relationship to the self and the world. As I say at the end, Conner’s podcast, Against Everyone /w Conner Habib, is an incredible resource that dives into many of these ideas through discussion and thinking. Conner references a recent series of episodes he published as a guide to engaging in a spiritual life. That might be a great place to start if you have not already listened to his podcast. He also wrote the intense novel, Hawk Mountain, which I also highly recommend. Subscribe to Conner’s Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ConnerHabib), and find Hawk Mountain here. Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/

In today’s episode, River and I return to a conversation about Gaza, focusing on the discourse surrounding it, the function of antisemitism in the colonial creation of Israel, the state of resistance and the state of Israel’s genocide, as well as decolonization and the way whiteness and identification with institutions hampers leftist’s solidarity with decolonial movements. Perhaps a fitting epigraph for this episode would be a line from Aimé Césaire that River quotes in our conversation: “Europe is indefensible.” The end of Israel is not enough, we need the end of Europe and the end of the United States. One facet of our discussion is trying to get at the way we can find true solidarity with and inspiration from the resistance in Palestine. How do we bring the decolonial force from the colony to the heart of empire? In thinking about this, we touch on what stops people from having solidarity, or what trips up white leftists in their conceptions of decolonization. We also talk a bit about knowledge production in the academy and writing and thinking during this endless series of horrors surrounding us and escalating every day. But don’t worry, it’s not just doom and gloom: we find hope in the ways that Palestinians and others are teaching us life independent from the state. Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/    

CW - the last part of this episode contains mention and some details around sexual assault We’re back with another entry in our letters episodes! In this conversation, Caroline and I discuss three different dilemmas presented to us by listeners. In the first we address the problems that come with queer longing and the difficulty of living single amidst the horrors of the world and social arrangements for couples. The second letter raises issues of ethics in relation to friendships: do you break up with a friend whose job you have a moral objection to? Are you obligated to tell them? Remember, as the endless merch says, all cops are bastards! And finally, the third letter comes from a haunted house, where the writer is battling ghosts and a very specific and terrible situation with an abusive ex, while still harboring an expansive dream of liberation for all. I want to give a content warning here, the letter discusses sexual assault, with some upsetting details, so if you are not up for that, turn the episode off after the second letter.     I really love the chance to discuss your issues, so I am very grateful for everyone who sends them in. I hope that our conversations prove helpful to you, as we look at things from multiple angles: these issues are so often, despite particular details, shared experiences and common struggles. And like with everything else, there are not many places to untangle the conjunction of relationships and our desires for liberation and anarchy, to step out of self-help into collective struggle.   We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!   If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/

On today’s episode, I got a chance to talk with Solomon Brager, the artist and author of the recently published graphic memoir,  Heavyweight. Solomon Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. They are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artists Fellow, a member of the Pinko magazine editorial collective and the director of community engagement at Jewish Currents magazine. Heavyweight deals with Solomon’s own search through the archives to learn the story of their German Jewish family fleeing the Nazis and escaping the Holocaust, specifically through Solomon’s elective affinity for a great grandfather, Erich, who was a boxer (and punched Nazis). The book is careful to tell the story of the Holocaust within a larger context of European colonial genocide, so that we see the eventual targeting of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others as a continuation of German policies in Africa, for example. In this light, as Sol and I discuss, we can also view the eventual statehood of Israel as a culmination of this history of colonialism and violence. Though the book’s focus isn’t on Israel, we do spend time in this conversation analyzing the dynamics of Zionism in relation to the stories and teaching of the Holocaust to American Jews, and the idea of Jewish exceptionalism. One of the things I loved, and that we discuss also, is the way Sol represents in the book their own ambivalence about the this history, both in terms of family relations and scholarly practice, an ambivalence that Sol discusses as an ethical relationship to the past, an openness to being wrong. In this light, I also love the way this book depicts a kind of trans choosing of history and ancestors, as Sol finds a link to a Jewish masculinity in their great-grandfather: this is another ethical ambivalence, one that I think shows us we can tell stories of the past that don’t determine our future as inevitable, while still honoring the complexities of the dead.  I highly recommend this book, it is honest, vulnerable, and thoughtful. You can find Solomon Brager at https://solomonbrager.com, or on Instagram @jbbrager. I also am linking a comic that Sol did for Jewish Currents debunking claims to Jewish indigeneity, “When Settlers Become Native”—they mention it in our talk, and it’s a text I have also called on in my own writing. I also recommend checking out Pinko and Jewish Currents. As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Check out this link to find many other important and fun projects, like my buddies, The Final Straw Radio.

On today’s episode, I talk with Ariel Ajeno, who recently published an essay in the latest issue of Pinko, called “After Consent”: What is the role of consent in a revolution? Ariel Ajeno is a writer, dancer, and independent scholar based in Chicago, IL. The beautiful essay mixes personal experience with theoretical and practical analysis of the benefits and limits of consent and how that relates to the work of transforming the world beyond the principles of oppression that contain us now. Our conversation digs down into some nitty gritty questions about sexual consent, its difference from bodily autonomy, its parallels with revolutionary or resistant actions and organizing, and prefigurative aspects of how we might relate to one another, including experiences with cruising. As Ariel says towards the end of the conversation, There is going to be sex at the barricades, there is going to be sex at the encampment. So we should be honest about how we want to deal with the overlapping of revolutionary and sexual desires. I think that desire or pleasure is often left out of the overly serious conversation of destroying this world and forming other ways of relating, both as a legacy of masculinist authoritarian Marxist party organizations, and in reaction to the failures of gay liberation and radical feminism. But we can’t just dismiss the ways that these earlier militants engaged with these questions, nor the obstacles they faced and created. Having sex at the barricades means we need to be able to step in to difficult, complicated, messy relations that we can’t control or predict—in other words, an anarchist vision of action and change. Assessing the end of the radical gay movement, only a year after it started, Guy Hocquenghem said that they had radically changed the homosexual geography of Paris, where their general assemblies became giant cruising sites, with the police threat removed. And that in itself is not so bad. Thinking after consent really asks us to confront our desire for control and our willingness to experiment and fail, in other words how we must engage with our own power in between us. Ariel’s analysis in the essay and the conversation feels very thorough and generative, and I’m excited to share it. I will link to the essay and to the wonderful Pinko collective in the show notes. You can also find Ariel on Twitter @generoajeno and on Instagram @ariel_ajeno As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!

On today’s episode, I am presenting the talk that Cindy Barukh Milstein and I did at the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, which we called An Anarchism of Despair. When we planned to collaborate for the talk, we checked in on where we were mentally, emotionally, and politically in relation to the specific moment, filled with frustrations around anarchists’ involvement in movements, and the walls that we run into time and time again. We wanted to lean into the despair, to look it in the face, and to learn from it how we might consider acting from this position. This is the description we wrote for the talk: After October 7, the upswell of Palestinian solidarity has been heartening. But in the mechanics of the movement itself, we have found ourselves stuck in outdated forms of protest, marching in circles, making demands that will never be heeded. It feels like each iteration of rebellion meets its end at the blatancy of power: we are shown again that those who govern won’t help us. And all this while watching a genocide in real time, feeling desperate and powerless. We have the energy and will, but not the means. What can we do, then, with this spike of liberatory urges? This discussion will interrogate anarchism at this particular moment from the position of despair. Where does it meet its limits? Where does it show up to keep the energy going? Are we endlessly hitting our heads against the wall ? Or does our effort need to be seen in the long view? When faced with the impossibility of liberation and action, where do we go? We organize the talk around three central provocations, which essentially point to the ways our political actions, ideas, and horizons are circumscribed and therefore commit us to walking in circles. We then offer some thoughts about what anarchists actually do well and how we can use those practices to try to leave behind the useless forms of protest. I have included comments from two comrades who attended, Bonn and Jubilee V Debs, who made important contributions to the ideas. I keep coming down to anarchism as something that creates the possibility of action: it doesn’t guarantee the consequences, but drives us to the edge where we can do something, rather than nothing. We turn away when there are no guarantees, stuck in our miserable comforts in this world, whether through the tired tropes of resistance or individual consumption as solace for work. While the state looks at us as if we are already dead, we can instead find a way to act like we are living, in the bursting of a moment that cannot be contained. If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/  And now for some despair . . .

In today’s episode, Caroline and I respond to a couple of listener’s letters. As I was editing the episode, I thought about the common theme, and came to this idea of getting over things. The first letter asks about how much work we are supposed to put into our relationships and ourselves, and what are the ethics of leaving someone in a crisis. The second letter asks for support around a relationship from years ago that is still able to wound, especially based on the ex’s perceived success. Before the letters, I talk a bit about where my thoughts are currently in terms of how we deal with our wounds and where our power might lie. I apologize for some segments of noisy audio!  As always, please rate and follow us on your podcasting things, share our show with your friends and exes, and subscribe to the patreon (https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory)—nothing is paywalled and you’ll get notified of all the different things I’m putting out there. You can also add some financial support if you wish! Finally,i f you want to submit your own question or breakup story, write us at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories or call ‪(917) 426-6548

In this episode, I talk with a student from the New School about the encampments there and what we can learn from the experience. Students at the New School set up their encampment in the lobby of the University Center in April a few days after the encampment was established at Columbia University and over 100 students were arrested. The New School student encampment last for over two weeks and eventually took the Parsons Building across the street, before President Donna Shalala had the students arrested early one morning. A few days later, faculty at the New Schools set up another encampment at the University that also lasted a couple weeks and eventually took the Welcome Center, holding it a few days before disbanding on the promise of a vote on divestment (which has not been delivered). In this conversation, we talk about the way the university administration dealt with the encampment, using less brute force than many of the other schools, and how this altered the organization of the encampment. In going through the whole experience, we discuss how our groups start mirroring bureaucracies, the use of divestment as a goal, the changing experience of study of revolutionary texts in the context of an encampment as opposed to the classroom, and more. Ultimately, we don’t know where the energy that was invigorated by the encampments will turn up next in resistance to genocide and control. But it is important to look at our actions and name their consequences. If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!  

On this episode, Caroline and I respond to a listener letter that really gets at the heart of the breakup experience: A fundamental question of how do you survive a devastating break up, and how to relate to yourself afterwards. We take the opportunity to look at this situation from all the angles. The main issue is coming to accept that you live with ghosts.  And then we turn to a new a new segment where we discuss what we are currently breaking up with. Here we talk about the pressures of individualism both in the sense of therapeutic advice and career or professional expectations and the questions of joining things or letting yourself off the hook while the world is falling apart. There is a real pleasure in doing nothing! Thank you to everyone who shares their stories and let us consider them. Please keep writing and calling us! As always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, we can’t wait to hear from you! And finally, you can support the project and my other work by subscribing at patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have some extra money, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing is paywalled. On the Patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for the people supporting me and this project! I’m developing extra things for subscribers, like real time discussion sessions or reading groups. You can also rate and follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and of course share with your friends and exes.

On this episode Shuli talked to Aidan Khamis, a Palestinian student at Indiana University Bloomington, about the student encampment established on the campus in solidarity with Gaza (and still existent as of the recording of this episode). Aidan gives a rundown of the initial stages of setting the camp up, the waves of violent repression from the administration and police, as well as the positive experiences of worldbuilding, collective study, and solidarity they experienced. The conversation continues with a deep and wide-ranging discussion about the tactic of encampment, the parallel of police repression and the apartheid state in occupied Palestine, the left’s colonial reservations about resistance, the different fronts of decolonial struggle, and the possibilities of solidarity in the heart of empire. Aidan shares brilliant insights and makes really beautiful connections. This solidarity movement is now in a turning point as most encampments have been packed up or evicted and we move into summer, where life on campus slows down. There is much to learn from the experiences that students and faculty had together, and we don’t know yet how the seeds planted in these experiences will sprout in further forms of resistance to genocide, empire, capital, and the police state. Hopefully this conversation will help spark more fires! CW: mention of violence and sexual assault Aidan shared two forms of possible support:  A GoFundMe for Aidan's close friends and family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-family-and-i-evacuate-out-of-gaza A friend’s epoetry site that he’s using to help evacuate his family: https://mizna.org/product/a-gaza-of-siege-and-genocide/ Please share and send material support! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/storiesand a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!