REBEKAH EREV ORAL HISTORY

NINA PICK: This is Nina Pick, and today is July 7th, 2017.  I am here at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut with Rebekah Erev, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Rebekah, do I have your permission to record this interview?

REBEKAH EREV:  Yes.

NP:  Thank you.  Rebekah, I'm going to start with a couple questions about your family and your childhood.  Could you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

RE:  Yeah, in terms of where they lived and are from -- so, my mom's side of the family is Jewish.  And my grandfather on that side of the family, his 1:00family was Ukraine, Russia, and -- as was my grandmother's family.  His family -- he was born here, but his father came here escaping pogroms.  And his father was a rabbi, and apparently seven generations back were rabbis on that side of the family.  My great grandmother, her name was Sarah, from -- my grandfather's mother -- her family, I know, owned a -- inn in, I want to say -- I know -- I know my grandmother's family is from Vilna and I know my grandfather's family was from near where they were from, but I don't know the name of the town.  Anyway, her -- my great grandmother, my grandfather's mother, her family owned 2:00an inn.  And apparently, she and her mother died when she was young.  So, apparently, she helped run the inn with her father, and a lot of people came in from all different countries and places, and she spoke, like, five languages, which I always thought was really cool.  She kind of has the reputation in our family for being mean.  And I think that stereotype and kind of association comes from peo-- women who are more strong women.  And I remember when I was born, they told my parents -- my parents wanted to name me Sarah after her, but she was really old and she said, "Don't name her Sarah, because the angel of death will take her and not me."  And so, they -- that's why they named me 3:00Rebekah.  And I always really loved that -- that story about her, 'cause I didn't really know her.  She died soon after I was born.  But I loved that story, because to me, it shows what peo-- some people might call a superstition.  But to me, it's more of a belief in magic.  And I think that's why people thought she was mean, 'cause I think she was a strong woman and that she had unresolved feelings about being treated that way, and her knowledge not being valued, 'cause she -- I mean, she -- as an older woman, she lived in Atlantic City and hung out and played mahjong with her friends.  And, I mean, they're -- she went swimming every day, she was very physical.  Yeah, and my -- 4:00my great grandfather really had a reputation for being very kind.  Yeah, so -- so that's that side of the family.  Both my grandparents lived a very assimilated life.  They belonged to a Reform synagogue.  But my grandfather's sister, Clara, and her husband, Alex [Petkov?], they lived in a cooperative building in Philadelphia.  And they were very involved with political work.  And, yeah, her -- her best friend and her would go to protests.  And, yeah, they weren't very religious, as -- after my grandparents died, I became closer with my aunt Clara, and I brought a challah and candles to her on one of my 5:00first visits from -- after -- when -- after my grandmother died.  And she was so happy.  She hadn't said the prayers in fifty years.  And then I started saying them and she remembered them.  And so, every time after I came to visit her after that, she was just, like, "Are you going to bring the Shabbat things?"  And so, I always brought them after that.  But she -- both -- both my grandparents knew Yiddish.  They didn't speak it to each other, but they understood it because their parents spoke it, among many other languages, apparently.  Yeah.  My -- do you want to hear about my dad's side of the family?  They're not Jewish.  (laughs)

NP:  Sure.

RE:  I don't know --

NP:  Yeah, go ahead.

RE:  -- if that's interesting for this.

NP:  Yeah.

RE:  But, yeah, I guess what's interesting about my dad's side of the family is 6:00all of his siblings married Jewish people.  (laughs) Well, not all of them.  But I do have cousins who are also part Jewish and part Engl-- well, yeah, his family were the assholes of this country, basically.  I mean, they were the people -- they owned paper mills, and my great grandfather -- they were from Wales and Scotland and Ireland and England and France.  And they came over early and, yeah, had farms and paper mills.  And my great grandfather, I guess, invented the hand signs for the stock market and gambled away the family fortune that way.  But both of my grandparents, my dad's parents, were in the theater.  And my grandmother was a -- actor at local community theater, and my 7:00grandfather was a stage manager and later a radio station manager, yeah.

NP:  Thank you.  Can you describe the home that you grew up in?

RE:  Yeah, I grew -- I always say I grew up in a small, demented South Jersey town, about ten minutes from Philadelphia, on a little one-way street with the houses right close up next to each other.  We could talk to our neighbors through the bedroom doors, and -- and it was very assimilated growing up.  We would do High Holidays and, yeah, and Passover with my grandparents, but we didn't belong to a synagogue or anything.  And, what else?  We -- yeah, I've 8:00always -- we went to Jewish day camp, so that's kind of where I got into being Jewish, and -- because I was in this public school where there weren't many Jews, and I felt kind of an outsider.  And now, looking back, I realize it's in part from being Jewish and in part as a queer person.  But, yeah, I went to this Jewish day camp and I didn't have, really, many friends there most of my years going there, in elementary school.  And then, my last year there, these two, I guess, popular girls befriended me for some reason.  I had known them for years, and they were having bat mitzvahs.  So, I heard about this for the first time, and I asked my mom if I -- we could join a synagogue and I could have a bat mitzvah.  I think it was kind of through the friendship I felt my 9:00first kind of sense of belonging, with friends, because they were so accepting of me.  And I had some idea that they were great -- a little -- like, because they were popular, more people accepted them or something, and I didn't -- for the first time, didn't really feel like an outsider.  So, I wanted to have more of that feeling.  So, a year before my bat mitzvah, I started taking -- I had got some Hebrew tutoring, sort of going to this temple.  I was -- had to practice a lot.  And I had a bat mitzvah.  I remember my grandmother cried at my bat mitzvah because I was the first girl in the family who had one and she was so proud and happy.  Yeah, and then I just went all the way through.  I was, okay, I love this.  And I was the kid at Hebrew school that was always arguing, "Is there really God?"  And I just loved -- I would -- I'm so 10:00Jewish.  I loved questioning.  And I think that stuff was also very -- my parents appreciated that about me.  I mean, I know it also annoyed them, because I was, like, "Why are you making this rule about this arbitrary thing?"  But that's something -- even though I didn't grow up in a very religiously Jewish home, there was this way that my mom stood out in the town.  Her affectations and her personality are very Jewish, culturally, Ashkenazi.  And people didn't like her very much, and people didn't like her very -- my dad's family didn't.  I mean, they liked her, but they didn't -- there wasn't an ease that I saw between other people, which is -- was a very WASP-y way of relating.  My mom just had a stronger personality than most women that I was 11:00relating with and most people in my dad's family.  And so, I guess part of me associated that with people not liking her, but I don't know if that was necessarily true.  I actually think lots of people did like her.  But I felt kind of embarrassed by that.  I mean, now I think it's great.  But yeah, and -- yeah, my parents were married.  They're still married, I have two younger brothers.  A pretty, I don't know, conventional -- 'cause there's no such thing as conventional, but I grew up very -- a very South Jersey, middle class life.  And I really found a sense of self in Judaism for myself.

NP:  So, we've been talking a bit about your background.  And I know today you're a multi-disciplinary artist and a teacher.  So, I'd like to turn now to a discussion of how you got to where you are today.  So, let's start with some questions about your history with Yiddish.  How would you describe your knowledge of Yiddish?

RE:  I mean, it's minimal.  I -- I heard words growing up from my grandparents and parents, especially my mom.  And -- and then, later my great aunt.  Yeah, I have -- I've wanted to learn it more before, and learning language is particularly difficult for me.  I have a -- auditory processing disability, which is -- I hear fine, but processing information auditorily is challenging.  13:00So, I mean, I can -- I can learn and it's -- it's chall-- it's challenging, yeah.  But I felt really drawn to a lot of the theater in Yiddishkayt culture and, yeah, music.  Klezmer music.  And I felt, I don't know, a sense of familiarity when I hear Yiddish words and use them, and want -- have wanted to bring that more into my art.  And also, the politics around Yiddishkayt.  I think that's -- probably was one of the ways that I was most drawn in, learning about -- when I was in college -- I went to the Evergreen State College, which was a really alternative college.  And I -- you know, I'd gone to this Reform 14:00synagogue for Hebrew school and learned all about Israel, and my grandfather's dream was to take his family to Israel.  And he signed up when he was seventeen to fight the Nazis and had a very Jewish nationalistic identity.  And -- and just when I was there, when I was fourteen, I felt very strange.  So, as an adult, when I was in college, I went to -- I didn't go to school right after -- I didn't go to college right after high school.  Well, when I got there in my early twenties and was learning about Palestinian struggle -- and I also learned about the Bund.  And, yeah, so that kind of is also part of thinking about language and what disappears and why and -- and learning more about Hebrew and 15:00learning that Hebrew -- when Hebrew was created as a modern language, that they chose to use a French accent -- which, to me -- I was, like, that's so strange.  And racist, really, because here's Israel existing in -- arou-- amongst Arab countries, so why wouldn't there be an Arabic accent if there were to be a -- picking out an accent?  Yeah, and -- and, yeah, just thinking of Yiddish pronunciation versus modern Hebrew pronunciation, and how my family said words.  And then, when I was in Hebrew school, how I was taught to pronounce words.  I -- I feel like something got missed, and -- for me.  And it also has made me really curious about other Jewish languages, too, and what got missed there is such a rich culture of language.  So, yeah, I'm still interested, and 16:00I'm still interested politically in this idea -- and I'm not sure I'm not pronouncing it correctly, but "doikayt," which is an idea that came out of the Bund, of here-ness -- is -- was what it translates to, and of -- if you're here and this na-- if you're living in a nation and there were indigenous people to that place, there are people who currently live in that place, and as a Jew in diaspora, I just need to be here, where I am, is my sense.  And I think that's a lot of my identity as a Jewish artist, is as a Jewish artist in diaspora.  17:00And that's really informed a lot of my work and a lot of my political work, too.  And if I'm -- if I -- if my identity is of a person in diaspora and I don't have a land to go home to, per se -- and I don't ascribe to Israel in that way -- then, what does that -- what does that mean about how I live my life and st-- what -- how I've come to feel -- what that means for me is to work -- do solidarity work with indigenous people on the land that I live in currently.  I live in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area.  So, working with the [Chalon?] people who are -- the Europeans called Ohlone people, more commonly known as, 18:00and, I mean, that work's been so transformative for me, to do that work, and for me to feel a sense of home and here-ness and presence when I acknowledge that -- and to work to support the people who are indigenous to the land that I'm living on, not -- on -- yeah.

NP:  Yeah.

RE:  I have more to say on that.  I don't know if -- if --

NP:  Yeah.

RE:  -- okay.

NP:  Go ahead, yeah, please.

RE:  Yeah, I'm curious about Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, particularly.  And in the current political climate, we're living in a time where to criticize 19:00the State of Israel is thought of as anti-Semitic.  So, any work that exists culturally for Jews -- or spiritually for Jews -- that step separate, that's -- just exists in and of itself, to me, in a way, is solidarity work with Palestinians.  You know, that's a -- that would be a mild way.  It's -- I, of course, see solidarity work being much, much more involved than that.  But there's this way that I think about bringing my culture -- because I am a Jew living in diaspora -- bringing my cultural gifts to the land that I'm a settler 20:00on is a way to bring healing to the land that I'm on, because if I don't have a home to go home to, land that I'm indigenous to, then I have a responsibility, it feels, to share the gifts of my culture and the spiritual technologies of my culture.  And yeah, it's a connecting with the gifts that exist, and I do that through my art, yeah --

NP:  So, you're the creator of the Moon Angel tarot deck, which integrates Yiddish words along with the art and the text in English.  Could you tell me a 21:00bit about the Moon Angel deck?

RE:  Yeah.  Actually, have it right here, which you asked me to bring.  This is the -- Moon Angels, Malakh Halevanah, oracle deck, and that's the only Hebrew in the deck, which means Moon Angels.  And yeah, this came out of my work during my time being trained as a kohenet Hebrew priestess.  And I was really interested in connecting with the cycle of the moon, and a learning that I latched onto, that when you have a feeling, it's an angel visiting you.  And I really liked this teaching, 'cause it felt very non-patriarchal to me in a society that often tells us to disregard our feelings.  I liked the idea of a 22:00feeling being an angel visitation.  And honestly, before that, I don't even think I knew that angels were a part of Judaism, of -- you know, since then learned more about that.  But yeah, so I latched onto this idea and I felt that being a -- connected to the cycle of the moon, I was more able to navigate and express my own feelings.  And to me, there's a feeling connected with Yiddish for me.  And it's a feeling of connection to my ancestors.  And I think about their stories and their feelings and the ways that they expressed themselves.  And so, I asked my friend, Anna Elena Torres to translate the titles of the 23:00cards into Yiddish.  And I really like that.  I really like -- when I pick a card, I often will say the title out loud, in Yiddish, to evoke a feeling of connection to my ancestors.  And I like it because it's very intuitive and self -- and yeah, intuitive and undefined in what it means, per se, besides the connecting feeling.  But it does feel like a way of honoring who came before and also honoring that my ancestors gave me the gift of my life and gave me -- 24:00give me a lot of inspiration in my day-to-day life that I can't even track or understand, which is a lot like the cards.  You know, I just -- I made the art very intuitively.  Should I hold up some of them?

NP:  Please.

RE:  Here, you -- well, here you can see the backs of them, here.  And here's some of the fronts of them. -- Yeah, so -- yeah.

NP:  Could you provide an example of one of the readings, as well?

RE:  Sure.  I'll do the first one.  Oh, or maybe I'll do -- where is it?  25:00Okay, I'll do two of them.  So, I'll do the -- I'll do the ancestors card, which is the first one.  And the Yiddish is "avoseynu [our ancestors]."  "Whispers in the ear, déjà vu, butterfly kisses, footprints in the sand, train whistles.  The smell of garlic, after dark.  Clanging bells, handkerchiefs."  So, the idea is to pick one and let it kind of -- pick one to start your day or before you go to bed and reflect on synchronicities or imagery that comes up related to it.  And it's different than -- you know, you might have heard of tarot decks.  It's -- I call it an oracle deck, because it's trusting the oracle within yourself to make the connections.  And, yeah, also -- often, I'll 26:00pick them around the moon time, different phases of the moon.  The new moon for setting intentions, the full moon -- or -- or for letting -- letting go and then setting intentions, is kind of more of the new moon, and the full moon for thinking about what you want to make full in the world.  I also wanted to share this other card, because it's just really great.  So, this is the go card, and in Yiddish it's "gey," and loved that.  (laughs) So, that card says, "Reach out, reach, reach, go, go.  Stretch.  It will blow your mind and your body.  Your mind is going to blow the fuck open.  (laughter) Your body is not going to believe this shit.  Go, go!  Get it!"  (laughter) Obviously, I'm completely 27:00irreverent with language, in some ways, and completely reverent in others.  But that's kind of what it is to be gay in a lot of ways, to be queer, is going for it and making -- finding meaning and making meaning within Judaism for ourselves.  Yeah.

NP:  That's a great segue to one of my next questions.  What do you see as this connection between queer culture and Yiddish culture?

RE:  I mean, all of my friends who are into Yiddish are queer.  So, there's gotta be something there.  I think that, as a queer person, we experience an amount of stigmatism in our lives, depending on our history and oppression.  28:00And that can and, for many of us, does end up helping us have compassion for other people who have experienced stigmatism.  And we've had to iden-- we've had to identify -- use an identity -- the na-- naming ourselves.  We've had to name ourselves in order to find each other, and a -- in order to transcend those names.  And when you have to identify yourself, you want to know, I think, often, about other parts of your identity, as well.  And so, I think that leads many of us -- I can speak for myself -- to wanting to understand where I come 29:00from.  And that includes Yiddish culture.  And there is this particularity around the politics around Yiddish culture and socialism and anarchism that I think many queers are also drawn to because we've felt, either as Jews or as queers or both, that there's this sense of wanting to -- I think -- I -- I mean, I think one of the things is wanting to make comedic that which has made the -- the stereotypes that have been made against us.  So, if, you know, someone's making some stereotype against me for being queer, I think it's very queer to 30:00turn that on its head and kind of play it out even more.  And I think that's also true in Yiddish theater, of stereotypes of Jews and then kind of playing those out even more.  So, in the arts, there's interest, particularly, I think, as a queer Jewish artist.

NP:  What, if any, is the role of Yiddish in your work more broadly?

RE:  I don't know.  Yeah.  (laughs) I mean -- I mean, I guess I can think about it a little bit more.  I think it is important, actually, to identify, because it's drawn me to other artists who are interested in working with Yiddish, and it's helped forge connections with -- with other artists, and Jews 31:00-- yeah, and, for example, learning songs, sharing Yiddish songs at Shabbat with other queer Jews.  And, yeah, and interest in it.  Yeah, and an interest in using some of the words as reclaiming words, like "feygele [gay, lit. "little bird"]" and "zaftik [fat, lit. "juicy"]" and that those -- similar to queer English words, reclaiming, like, dyke or queer or -- yeah.

NP:  And you mentioned that you came to your work with the Moon Angel deck while you were studying to be a kohenet.  Could you tell me a bit about what a 32:00kohenet is?

RE:  Yeah, kohenet is a -- it's called a Hebrew priestess institute, and it's a -- it's a training program and it's a community.  Kind of using ancient Jewish practices, bringing them into a more modern context.  And I got -- peop-- I mean, I don't know if this is resonant for people listening, but using feminism and using Earth-based Judaism put into practice in ritualic community.  That would be a short answer, yeah.

NP:  And what is the role of divination tools in Jewish culture more broadly?

RE:  I mean, I think people have always used divination tools.  I really think my grandmother used divination tools.  I mean, she -- I also heard her say -- there was also a story about her saying don't step on cracks in the sidewalk, you know?  And that's a common thing people say.  Don't -- step on a crack, break your mother's back.  Well, it came from somewhere, and I'm super curious about the origins of that.  And I also love the superstition about naming, too, that -- the idea that there's some divine moving in the world, and that how we call ourselves has some -- has power, and that there's some energy or divine moving in the world that acknowledges and connects to that power. -- (UNCLEAR) 34:00What was the question again?

NP:  The role of divination in Jewish culture.  Is there a particular link to a Yiddish cultural history that you know of?

RE:  I'm not thinking of anything, but I -- well, I feel like in lots of Jewish -- lots of Yiddish stories, there -- there are -- you know, the golem and different figures and characters and -- that feel very much about magic.  And 35:00that's part of my interest in it, as well.  I'm not thinking of anything per se, but I think so.

NP:  Thank you.  Could you tell me a bit about your current project?

RE:  Yeah.  I am currently working on a film called "Queer Mikvah: A Jewish Water Ritual" -- working title.  But it's a film and a project.  And I'm not -- I'd never had any aspirations of making a film.  It kind of just was a natural unfolding.  So, I have been interested in mikvah, which is a Jewish ritual of water immersion where you fully immerse yourself in water without touching anything else.  And a lot of the tradition is around going back to how you were in your birth state and in the -- in the womb, which -- that can be 36:00very -- that could be -- that framing of it could be really useful for maybe someone who was born intersex, who had their body change without their consent of -- that you were made exactly as God made you.  And it could also be hurtful for someone who has decided to change their body, identifies as transgender or genderqueer, and saying that's the only way to go back to how you were when you were birth-- you were born.  So, the idea of queer mikvah is really to frame this ritual as it's meaningful to yourself, and to use the part of the tradition that speaks to you, personally.  And it's also about making it accessible, and 37:00-- both physically accessible and just known about as a ritual that you could do.  And -- and because Jews -- queers have been excluded from traditional mikvah space.  So, yeah.  So, a mikvah is a natural body of water.  It could be a lake or a -- the ocean, but it also, as most people know about, it's some kind of pool or tub in a synagogue, often, and you kind of go and it's very gendered and according to law, it's -- it's gendered.  But the queering of it is saying anyone can enter this.  How are we going to find spaces where it is possible to enter?  And there are a couple projects that are specifically 38:00working on that.  There's a -- a place outside of Boston I haven't gotten to visit yet called Mayyim Hayyim, and they are particularly focused on making the mikvah space available to people with disabilities and trans and genderqueer people who have -- haven't been able to access in other ways.  There's also a project called ImmerseNYC in New York City that's looking -- that's training people to be mikvah guides, and also looking on -- about how to create space in -- New York area for queer people.  And the idea of the film, it came from my interest in this ritual, and I've been interested in it for a long time.  When I did this farming fellowship at Isabella Freedman, here, called Adamah -- and I remember, like, the first week, it was Shabbat and they were, like, "Okay, it's 39:00time to do mikvah.  And so, we went down to the river and they said, "Okay, men go over there and women go over there."  And I was, like, "Um, we need a third option, because I identify as genderqueer.  And -- and what about -- other people here may, as well, have needs around this," so -- but it was great, because the program actually really integrated that after that, at that point.  And it introduced -- it really was my first claiming of that ritual for myself, because I was able to put it in a context that worked for me.  And then, over the years, it was -- it was -- the ritual was revived for me recently through my friend Orev Katz in kohenet a couple years ago, and -- who was doing a project around mikvah in Toronto, queer mikvah in Toronto, and we just started having a 40:00lot of conversations and collaborating in a way together, and I started writing grants for -- to do queer mikvah and to -- I was -- had all these idea of public installation and bringing these thing-- this queer mikvah that I just did with my friend spontaneously, not formalized, that I'd been doing for a decade, bringing it to -- for -- to a more public context and bringing it, as I was saying before, as a gift of my culture, to the land that I was living on, and -- but I wrote a lot of grants and I didn't get any of them.  So, I thought, I need to show people what I'm talking about, that they need to see what this 41:00thing is that I'm trying to create for more -- broader access.  And so, I thought, Okay, I should make a little film about it, just like a five-minute film.  And I actually was working on a promotional video for my deck, and the person that I found, Chani Bockwinkle, to work on the -- the promotional video for the deck -- I said to her at the beginning, "I have this idea for doing this other film about queer mikvah."  And she said, "Okay, well, let's see how it goes for this promo video."  And it was -- it was a really great experience, 'cause it was -- people have no idea.  I had no idea what goes into film.  And making this forty second promo video was four hundred hours of work.  So, I got a taste of what -- and, of course, something like a commercial -- really quick shots and lots of different shots is gonna be different than making a full-length film.  But I did get a taste of the amount of work that would go 42:00into doing something like that.  But I really loved it, and so after we finished that and it turned out great, I said, "Hey, do you want to start working on this other project?"  And so, it's been -- we've been working on it for four months now, and we have a -- we've done a bunch of interviews.  And I facilitated the creation of three formalized rituals of queer mikvah and learned a lot along the way.  The first one we did in solidarity with Standing Rock and the things that were recently coming up.  It was in the beginning of March, so -- around immigration.  And I facilitated it.  And afterwards I was like, no, it's too much to direct and produce this event and have it be filmed and then 43:00also be facilitating.  So, the next one, I asked a couple -- and the spirit of it is to do it in community.  I didn't want to just make a film about me facilitating these mikvah -- queer mikvah experiences.  So, for the next one, I invited -- I asked a couple friends if they wanted to do a -- [Kat Cunningham?], who's doing the gay bathhouse project in Seattle and my friend -- who -- who actually -- we just got connected through another mutual friend.  We didn't even know each other.  And then, also, my friend Dori Midnight and -- who is a wonderful artist and ritual leader.  And so, I asked both of them, because we were both going to be at the Jewish Voice for Peace national member meeting in Chicago.  And we planned the ritual together, and then we held it at the pool at the hotel.  And it didn't follow the guidelines of having natural water in 44:00it, rainwater, or anything like that.  It was a chlorinated pool, straight from the faucet.  But to me -- that works for me.  It wouldn't work for a lot of people I know, and it wouldn't work for a lot of queer people I know.  But it was nice to intend it to be that, and I, for one, experienced a kind of transformation.  And for me, it was more around planning the whole thing and -- but then, the actual moment of emerging -- and also, that it -- in that -- in these -- and then we did one in -- for Pride in -- at Baker Beach in San Francisco, in the nude area, which is known for being a nude gay beach, a few weeks ago.  And that was amazing.  That -- it -- I learned from that I don't 45:00actually want to be one of the facilitators at all.  So, I, instead, kind of curated a group of people.  I did a gen-- actually, I did a general call-out first to people who I thought would be interested.  And then, kind of -- not many people were -- you know, people in the Bay Area are so busy.  (laughs) So, I asked individual people, and it ended up to be this group of artists.  And so, a lot of art got incorporated into the -- the mikvah, and it was -- it was beautiful.  One of the art-- artists, Lukaza Branfman Verencino did a -- object mikvah where she asked people to bring objects and then kind of made them into an art piece and poured water over them.  Nikki Green, who's a sculpture -- is 46:00a sculpture -- I -- I mean, I -- she's many things, but -- sculptor.  She made pickles and did a pickle blessing for everyone, a fermentation blessing, thinking about how the pickle changes in the brine with the salt like us going into the water, the ocean -- going into the ocean, changing our bodies through that, through the mikvah in the ocean.  And [Ramilos Martinas Cantu?] also facilitated the whole ritual.  And that was just -- she did such a beautiful job facilitating our personal -- and then thinking of the larger political collective healing that needs to be happening around queers, around Black Lives Matter, around Palestinian solidarity.  And, yeah, it was -- it -- so, the -- 47:00the project's happening and I'm writing grants for it now.  And now, we have a trailer.  And it's just magical how things are unfolding, because more people are kind of coming out and are interested in it, and I think it's speaking to a lot of people.  And, yeah, I mean, I feel like the intention of the film is both to create these mikvah experiences, and we also want to document some of what's happening at Mayyim Hayyim and ImmerseNYC and the gay bathhouse, and Orev Katz is also doing another project in Toronto this fall related to mikvah but -- and I'm sure there are many people doing many other wonderful queer mikvah things other places I have no idea about.  But kind of a little -- give an example of this is a way that you can queer a ritual and make it meaningful to 48:00yourself and go do it.  Go do it with your people and your community and take other rituals and do that, too, and use rituals in the Jewish community, but then use rituals of your own culture if you're not Jewish.  And there's a way to queer spirituality, to make things meaningful.  And I think it's just kind of like knowing it's out there, you know, to create, kind of -- sometimes enough to empower people to bring that into their lives.  And, I mean, not that people aren't doing it everywhere and haven't always -- always done it, too.  But I think the more public we make these things, the more permission we have to do them more.

NP:  Great, thank you.  So, I know you had a -- a strict time frame.  We're coming to the end of our time, so I want to say thank you so much, Rebekah.

RE:  Yeah!

NP:  And -- on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center and personally.

RE:  Thank you, it's an honor.

NP:  Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]