Heroes and Villians

It is my sincerest belief — if I have even one belief left — that “peace” or anything close to it requires the admission of messy, ungraceful, untriumphant stories like mine… Stories where there is neither a clear and consistent villain, nor a clear and consistent hero, where the ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ monikers are interchangeable, rather, many times over, and most notably dependent upon who’s telling the story and who’s willing to listen. “Peace” as a legitimate antidote to war requires a certain amount of unlearning, perhaps a significant amount of unlearning, letting go of our perceived inherent rightness and wrongness, a courage to find valor in specific moments instead of in sweeping nationalized operations. It is my sincerest belief — if I have even one belief left — that “peace” or anything close to it requires a humble and broken willingness to finally, finally allow the means to justify the end.

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Since you can’t really “start” a story like mine — one that does not have a clear beginning and is mostly a vast and incoherent middle without any semblance of an end in sight — I’ll just…unfurl. Yes? And we’ll see what’s left of me (and you, I’m afraid) after 1000 words. Hopefully, you will forgive the lurching, staccato disjointedness of this ride, but deem it worthy of your taking, nonetheless.

My family lives in Israel Palestine.

And I don’t know what the fuck to think about anything anymore.

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(Do you need some tea? Maybe go get some tea and come back. Just a suggestion. Because you know, it’s never a good idea to read something like this without something warm in your belly. But I digress..)

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Being Jewish used to be my favorite thing about myself. It was my own personal silver lining to every single situation life presented me, a pride and a purpose and a groundedness in the rituals of simply being, the rituals of celebrating the preciousness of human fragility over and over and over again — it was this expression of my culture, my ancestral heritage, and my spirituality that buoyed even my darkest of circumstances. Shabbat shalom. Breathe in. Breathe out. Life is love. Life is short. Life is love.

Being Jewish was also something I felt I never had to explain or introduce because well, first of all, I grew up in a coastal metropolis and, secondly — hellloooo — my Judaism explained and introduced itself before I ever entered the room, honey. Am I about to launch into a series of potentially offensive but entirely accurate stereotypes about myself? Absolutely. Can you hear my voice in your head as you read this? Of course you can. I’m a loud, LOUD, nasally-calibrated, wildly-gesticulating, hyper-speed-talking-with-a-propensity-to-speed-talk-over-your-speed-talking, whirlwind of a frizzy-haired wonder woman with absolutely ZERO ability, whatsoever, to divulge the details of my bodily functions discreetly, nor am I capable of even keeping my bodily happenings to myself in the first place. I’ve got anxieTEA on the drip, a forever crush on Paul Newman, and my love language is “jokes at very inappropriate times”. I offer unsolicited advice, unsolicited compliments, and unsolicited blessings: Oh, you sneezed next to me on the subway? Here’s a tissue, some hand sanitizer, and l’chaim because your heart stopped for a second there and life is fucking short, honey.

Life is love.

Life is short.

Life is love.

My grandfather skied through the German forests on New Year’s Eve with the family’s silverware strapped to his chest beneath his shirt. He chose New Year’s Eve because he knew the soldiers would be drunk and under-policing their otherwise impenetrable border. My grandfather would ski through the German forests in the dead of winter, in the black of night, for miles, for hours, with the knowledge that bullets hovered over every molecule of his soul’s shadow, with the singular hope that he would escape with his life. He was not trying to escape with his Judaism. He was trying to escape with his life. He was not aiming to go “colonize” the Middle East. My god, to think that people think that we aimed to colonize the Middle East…

Other family members, ones who did not ski through winter forests in the middle of the night, were kidnapped and tortured. We don’t need to go into detail here. I know you know what happened next. Or maybe I just thought everyone knew what happened next.

My friend Jacob comes from Russian Jews who fled to the United States in the 1980s after years of horrific persecution throughout the Soviet Union. “Go back to Jerusalem!” they would shout at his family… always seen as outsiders. No matter where we were in the world, we were always seen as outsiders. But Jacob and his family were never granted visas to go to Jerusalem, only to parts of western Europe, where they would temporarily sell condoms on street corners to college kids to make ends meet and with the hope of finally reaching the aspirational leg of their journey: Chicago, Illinois.

For over one thousand years, our people have been saying the phrase L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim, which in Hebrew means: “Next Year in Jerusalem”. The phrase appears in text as early as a 10^th century rabbinical poem by Spanish Rabbi Joseph ibn Abitur. You might remember we were also kicked out of there, too? Not Spanish enough for Spain either, I’m afraid.

Do you know what it’s like saying, “Next year in Jerusalem!” every single year of your stupid little life as a means of commemorating your ancestors’ exile, enslavement, and execution only to then one day be told by thousands upon millions of people from every corner of the internet that Jews…are the colonizers?

My favorite high school teacher at my all-girls Catholic high school was a bold-and-brilliant, Buddhist-practicing, half-Arab woman by the name of Maryam Khalidi. She was loud, like me. She was rule-rejecting, art-obsessed, societal expectation-obliterating, and wildly passionate about, well, everything—like me. She taught the entirety of our very Gentile student body about WWII and the Jewish Holocaust. She did an outstanding job. I mean that sincerely. Nothing was sugar-coated. At the time, I did not know she was Palestinian. I would not find that out until many years later when it became clear, through a series of social media posts, that she and I were impacted by this horror in a way that only family members of war-torn anything can be. We were barely getting by. “Free Palestine”, she would write. And then she would write something that may surprise you, “And, of course, Bring Them Home. For you cannot claim to be ‘pro-human rights’ if you are only pro some human rights.”

When I see the body bags, the shrieking parents, the bloodied faces, the rubble…all the fucking rubble…All. The. Dead. Children — I secretly wish to scrape off all my skin and claw my eyeballs out of my face and heave my menorah into the sea — and pretend I never knew what it felt like to be proud of where I come from…

…wherever that is.

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Juliana (or “Juju”, rather) is the ‘loud, LOUD, nasally-calibrated, wildly-gesticulating’ creative director of Bay Area-based illustration company, Good Juju Ink. Juju was a professional choreographer and thespian for decades before realizing her life’s truest passion: drawing elephant butts. These butts (not to be confused with Deez Nuts) and all other adorably illustrated Good Juju Ink products can be found in thousands of stores and museums (gift shops. same same.) around the globe. She’s honored to be “Maman” to daughter Josephine and son Caspian and “Bébé” to husband Ryan. “Life is love. Life is short. Life is love.”

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