Kevin Coval

The night of Nov. 9... was the fulfillment of a dream. German Chancellor Angela Merkel

today concrete stretches into sky,
twenty-six feet high. drab slabs
cut into four hundred and thirty-six
miles of country. dominos to block
the sun. an accordion of cement,
strung like a clothes line, wheezing
a deep, lone note.

today in al-Ma’sara children
grab barbwire with bare hands. march
toward a wall soldiers protect with guns.
soldiers push the children back,
bloody their hands on barbwire.

today armed men push children in the holy land.

today in Berlin, people celebrate.
politicians give speeches. the east and west
battle to tell the story in the light
that most suits them. regardless
how it is spun, people demanded
the wall fall.

twenty years later, more walls.
nations erect walls to keep people out.
walls are static, ugly and stupid.
people are resilient, fluid and numerous.
people break walls.

The Court in The Hague said the wall
is illegal. the wall is Israel’s myopia.
america’s revisionism. the wall bulldozes
hundreds of Palestinian homes
in a shrinking, stolen land.

today in Qalandiya, protestors
tore one slat of wall down,
twenty years to the day the wall
in Berlin fell.

today Palestinians wear neon yellow
shirts, black block letters across their chest
read, JERUSALEM, WE ARE COMING.
coming thru jidar al fasal al unsari!
coming thru the wall of apartheid!
coming to the city of peace!
as long as the wall exists
the city will have no name!
sons and daughters of the city
coming to reclaim the name!

walls fall like dominos.
the earth moves and people
demand the freedom to move
as the earth does; the freedom
to see cousins, to buy olives,
to visit hospitals. walls fall
or get ripped down or knocked
over. people walk thru walls
like superheroes.

today the state of Israel builds a wall.
today a piece of the wall was toppled down.
today the people of Palestine and today the people
everywhere dream of peace, dream no walls,
dream of the day the wall will
come down, piece by piece.

Our Response to being Censored by J Street
by Kevin Coval and Josh Healey

This weekend, J Street, a new Jewish “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” PAC and Washington-based organization is holding its first national conference. The two of us, along with another artist, were to perform and read poems at several sessions during the conference. Specifically, we were invited to lead a workshop on how culture and spoken word create democratic spaces that sift through difficult issues and ensure a multiplicity of voices are heard: and how that can be used to open up the Israel/Palestine debate. Instead, we have been censored and pushed out of that very debate.

This week, some right-wing blogs and pseudo-news organizations latched on to various lines of poems Josh wrote and churned the alarmist rumor mill saying that hateful anti-Israeli poets are keynote speakers at the J Street conference. This is not surprising. The radical right-wing, including the growing Jewish right-wing of this country and abroad, hates complex discourse, especially when it brings to light truths they seek to systematically deny. The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and their AIPAC-influenced brethren have been attacking J Street for weeks, scared that the conference will bring together the majority of American Jews who do favor a more rigorous peace process. When they found Josh’s poems and took lines out of context, they had the perfect straw man: the Van Jones to J Street’s Obama. Again, this is not surprising.

What is disappointing, and troubling, is J Street’s response in caving to this sort of McCarthyism. The executive director of J Street called us to say “I know what I’m doing is wrong...but there are some battles we choose not to fight,” before canceling our program, and disinviting us from the conference. This accommodates their red-baiting and is the wrong response. Rather than give in, which only emboldens the right and legitimizes their attacks, we need to stand up for our principles and engage on that front. Van Jones is another perfect example: after the Fox News venom became too much and he resigned last month, the radical Right hasn’t stopped attacking Obama, or more accurately, the alternative, progressive voice they fear he represents. The Right stands by its politics, and practices solidarity with their allies. Too often the Left doesn’t. And that’s why we often lose – on health care, on global warming, and on Israel/Palestine.

For the second time in two months Kevin, who is Jewish, has been told not to come to a Jewish conference because of what he will say about Palestine and Israel. This past August, the evening before the International Hillel Conference, conference planners said if he were to read poems about Palestine, they’d rather not have him. Today, Josh, who is Jewish, has had his name thrown into a mudslide of blogs and hate emails. All this because we are practicing the Jewish maxim of the refusal to be silent in the face of oppression, anyone’s oppression.

One of the key teachings of Judaism is the insistence on wrestling with and debating ideas. There are a thousand years of codified arguing, recorded in the Talmud and Midrash, over the meaning of the stories in the five books of Torah. Jews debate everything. There is the old adage, “when you have two Jews in the room, you have three opinions”. Our families cannot come to agreement about what constitutes a deli as opposed to a diner. (A deli must have pickles on the table with poppy seed rolls, etc....)

But when you try to talk about Palestine there is silence. When you talk about the role the United States plays in supporting Israel and its military coffers, there is no room for discourse. If you bring up Palestinians’ right to return to land they were forced out of, or mention that this past January over 1400 Palestinians, mostly civilian, were killed in Gaza, there is no room to speak in Jewish-centric spaces in this country.

There are many reasons why this trend of censorship is disturbing. We believe in democracy, in the right to speak and be heard and in the right be disagreed with. We are disheartened and outraged by the lack of democratic discourse in the American Jewish community and within the country as a whole.

Why are we scared of what will come from an honest conversation? What do we have to lose, or discover, or admit to if we question the policies of Israel or America’s support of its government and military? It can be unsettling for one’s worldview to unravel, the intricate web of white lies and half-truths pulled apart. This can be disconcerting for generations of Jews who have accepted the propaganda of a chosen people and the acting out of geostrategic nightmares via military might.

Kevin works at a Hillel for Hashem’s sake! He is charged with the task of addressing why so many young Jews are distancing themselves from the religious and cultural practice of Judaism. This is one of those reasons! American Jews are told at shul to repent for our sins, but silenced if we bring up the sins of the country that acts in our name. We need authentic, honest discourse in the American Jewish community. It must start today and it must be about Palestine and Israel.

So, we are searching for a minyan—a crew of progressives and progressive Jews to build and connect with. We want to have a conversation. Not wait for the conversation to be dictated and have borders and walls built around acceptable topics, but to have a conversation determined by us, Jews That Are Left, that are on the Left. A conversation that is honest and open and genuinely reclaims and considers our progressive past as well as forges the future world. A conversation engaged in the work of tikkun olam for real, the work of repair and healing and wholeness.

Progressive American Jews where you at? Holla at us! For real: jewsthatareleft@gmail.com. Let’s reshape the conversation. Let’s build a minyan, a coalition of progressive Jews and gentiles who want what is just and right for ALL people and all people in Israel and Palestine.

go to: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122325.html
for an interview Josh did with Haaretz

This is a poem dedicated to a student that I worked with who was murdered last spring. The event where the poem was presented was a peace and unity rally sponsored by the city of Chicago.

peace. i invite and hope for conversation with poems i write. this about a real event that happened last month
that sounds like orwellian fiction, but is true and tragic and unacceptable. it is 2009. writers, artists, and all who believe in democracy must consider the current and historic practices of the of state of israel. i offer a reflection.

Reflection on The Israeli Army shutting down The Palestine Festival of Literature
in the month of May in 2009: Burning Books, A Bebelplatz in Jerusalem

Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
Heinrich Heine

jews love books.
we dress them up
in crowns and gold
breast plates. fine
paper, our finest
calligraphy. our books
live in an ark lit by a flame
that always burns, a metaphor
for a G-d, we don’t have
vowels for.

if we carry nothing
else into Diaspora, we carry
these stories, these scrolls
that unroll a history we revere
and parade thru aisles
on the highest of holy days.
we kiss the corner of tallis
to our lips, put cloth to text
to praise words Moses brought
off the mount, our ancestors
lugged thru the desert. stories
told and told again at a kitchen
table some where, the 5th and 15th
time we heard them bored out
our seder mind, but the 50th
and 502nd time something stuck
so we wrote them down
in our most reverent hand style
in the blackest of ink on bone
parchment. we record the trials
and rivals and lineage and heroes
of our families cuz we love books
mourn all the storied bodies
burned by the those who hate books
with messy endings. we love books
cuz books are bodies of stories
and stories make history
and we are a people who believe
in the stories of people to tell history
and mourn all the bodies and stories
burned before they are recorded
in the Eternal book, authored
by the voiceless and Voweless.

but it is 2009/5769

& this spring Israeli troops shut down The Palestine Festival of Literature
behind barrels of guns. they stormed into a theater where poets were reading poems
& demanded silence behind triggers where bullets scream & governments check point
& knessets approve military bombardments & schools bombed & burned on ground they are meant to be on fire from words & ideas, not metal.

in the name of a jewish state
Israeli educated young men aimed guns in the faces of women
reading poems. in the name of a jewish state stories silence forever.

which raises the question(s):
who are we because of empire? what democracy are we scared of?
how can we deny the right to sing, to chazzan a Palestinian song?

mad men bring books to the bond fire.
power mad men bring bodies.

our books been banned & burned & bordered, bodies into boxes
& camps cuz they demand memory, insist our presence in the story
of the world & books are memory of never forgetting & people house books
in their stories & stories should never be crushed by missiles. books record the day
& days in exile & days that should not have been recorded. the horrors & the horrible. the record of families spilt & broken & bastards forever. books are records that never forget & preserve & serve memory & history when militarized revisers deny events
as lived by the natives. the records prove otherwise, proof of existence & empires
want proof of purchase & per chance & pursue silencing stories that make them look criminal in the honest of day & moon of night.

records are stories, a people
hold dear. who knows this
more than us?
all us wandering immigrants
all us seekers of safe land
all us unfettered poets of wind
all us literate builders of pidgins
all us inventors with scraps
all us people of the book

though we don’t seem to know anything
anymore except the havoc
reaped on our bodies in exile, the learned
behavior of executioners we internalize
the bureaucracies & boots & lines of refugees
we terrorize. gather families into open air
prisons & worse. we bury bodies in graves
of steel. bodies who house forests of stories.
the sad song of our own malignancy untold.
where is the ark in the center of the congregation
the ark in the center of the city of peace filled
with bodies of stories, records stacked
unsequestered & unsilenced.

it is mad men who burn books
& bodies & hold poets at gun point

this the work of emperors & empires
furors & fascists. scared colonists
insane to control what no state could
the record of people living
despite the state’s efforts
to have them not.

Purple Rain Beat Downs

bart friedman and i loved Prince. in 3rd grade after school, mom not home till dinner, we’d barricade ourselves in the bedroom i shared with my brother; a red metal bunk bed, sheets white with red and blue geometric shapes that made the room look like a homework help show on PBS.

flipped a-side to b-side. back and forth in a yellow boom box. buttons big as toys
kids on the small bus would get at recess.


bart and i, until my brother bothered us and we’d beat his ass with noogies, wedgies
(back, frontal and flying), iron claws the Von Erich’s taught us in Texas League Wrestling typewriters— a knee on each arm, eric’s back flat on the carpet, banging his chest like an arcade keyboard, dinging his head to typeset the next line of red marks along his sternum— titty-twisters so raw one time he bled and i got grounded and had to do eric’s half of the chores for a week
cuz he was such a wuss.


bart and i would sync our pelvises to the Revolution’s baseline, whirling like we knew how
to use them. i’d be front man, royalty, mouthing in the mirror, a vacuum extension,
my microphone. bart whaled air guitar solos, before we knew what lace and lesbian sounded like. back to back, an isometric bridge, supporting each other’s weight. red-violet lights swirling
in the discoball-townhome-live-video-concert of our minds.