Judaism Unbound Episode 430: Zines Are Torah – Chava Shapiro
Chava Shapiro is the founder of the Jewish Zine Archive, an archival collection of Jewish zines and a digital Jewish cultural space. They join Lex Rofeberg and Dan Libenson for a conversation related to their upcoming UnYeshiva mini-course, Unraveling Jewish Zines: From Rashi to the Haggadah to Instagram, which will explore the intersection of Jewish identity, DIY ethos, and artistic innovation through the lens of zine culture.
Learn more about and register for Chava Shapiro’s UnYeshiva class, Unraveling Jewish Zines: From Rashi to the Haggadah to Instagram, which starts on May 22nd!
[1] Be sure to check out the Jewish Zine Archive, and follow them on Instagram, @jewishzinearchive.
[2] Shapiro recommends visiting the Barnard Zine Library.
[3] Shapiro discusses Dada, an early 20th-century German artistic movement that strove to deconstruct and democratize the creative process. Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet and leader of Dada, created The Dada Journal, which Shapiro cites as an early zine. See this article in The Forward about Tzara and Jewish Dada: Jewish Dadaists: Forgotten Jewish Dada-ists Get Their Due.”
[4] Shapiro says that Emanuel Ringelblum’s “Oneg Shabbos” – a group of Jewish historians in the Warsaw Ghetto who documented their lives before and during the Holocaust – largely inspired JZA.
[5] Turning to the archival nature of their project, Shapiro cites Saidya Harman’s writing about the importance of both documenting contemporary Black experience while looking back at historical archives and filling in the blanks. Learn more about Hartman’s work in this New Yorker piece, “How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life.”
[6] Shapiro mentions a butterfly meme, and then Lex tries to explain it.
[7] Lex shouts out Shapiro’s zine about Emma Goldman for the month of Sivan.
[8] Shapiro explains how the DIY punk scene served as their gateway into zine-making, sharing their special affinity for Riot Grrrl. See this article from the Jewish Women’s Archive connecting Riot Grrrl to Judaism, “Ritualizing Riot Grrrl.” They also talk about discovering Ezra Rose’s Six Songs Zine as a major moment in their Jewish zine-making journey.
[9] JZA is physically housed in the Blacklidge Community Collective in Tucson, Arizona, and shares space with The Arizona Queer Archive, Perilous Chronicle, which documents political organizing among incarcerated people across North America, and Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, a small radical literary publication.
[10] Lex brings the conversation back to whether or not the Haggadah is the original Jewish zine. Decide for yourself by listening to Episode 211: The Passover Haggadah, A Biography – Vanessa Ochs, and watching the recording of our book launch event on the same subject.
[11] Shapiro states that they subscribe to Harold Bloom’s position that one of the writers of Tanakh (the source that academics refer to as “J”) was a woman, as argued in his famous book, The Book of J.
[12] Shapiro talks about their illustration of broken chains accompanied by the text, “There are no prisons in olam haba.” Check it out here.
