Often, the way we tell a sto­ry is as impor­tant as the sto­ry itself.

In our polar­ized world, this is on the minds of many Paper Brigade con­trib­u­tors. Some exam­ine how nar­ra­tives can — inten­tion­al­ly or not — pre­clude oth­ers. In a short sto­ry by Lee­or Ohay­on, Ashkenor­ma­tive retellings of his­to­ry exclude the Mizrahi pro­tag­o­nist by plac­ing the Holo­caust at the cen­ter of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. In a con­ver­sa­tion with Gary Shteyn­gart, Claire Stan­ford observes that this kind of bina­ry sto­ry­telling is only rein­forced by apps and online plat­forms that push us toward a ​“sim­pli­fied cat­e­go­riza­tion” of our lives.

So how do we cre­ate a space for indi­vid­u­als’ sto­ries to coex­ist as part of a larg­er Jew­ish nar­ra­tive? For Sam Cohen, this comes down to a lin­guis­tic shift — ​“the melt­ing of the I into the we” — that lets peo­ple tran­scend dif­fer­ent opin­ions and come togeth­er as a ​“mot­ley col­lec­tive.” Feli­cia Berlin­er also describes lan­guage as a tool for hon­or­ing both per­son­al and group iden­ti­ty. Com­bin­ing Yid­dish and Eng­lish allows the pro­tag­o­nist of her nov­el to rec­on­cile her Hasidic upbring­ing and the sec­u­lar world she dis­cov­ers online.

Oth­er writ­ers remind us that Jew­ish sto­ries can be enhanced by a ​“lan­guage that goes beyond words,” as Gen­naRose Nether­cott notes. For her, this lan­guage is pup­petry; for orphans in the War­saw Ghet­to, as Jai Chakrabar­ti explains, it was act­ing in a Ben­gali play that pro­ject­ed ​“a sense of hope and pos­si­bil­i­ty.” And some sto­ries can be passed down with­out any ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion at all. Michael W. Twit­ty, Shaunna J. Edwards, and Alyson Rich­man explore how sewing and cook­ing are repos­i­to­ries of Black and Jew­ish history.

Of course, as still oth­er writ­ers and artists in this issue point out, nar­rat­ing is only one half of sto­ry­telling. The oth­er half is lis­ten­ing. Our hope is that, by bind­ing dis­parate sto­ries into the ​“mot­ley col­lec­tive” you hold in your hands, the mul­ti­fac­eted whole of today’s Jew­ish lit­er­ary voic­es will be heard.

—Bec­ca Kan­tor, Edi­to­r­i­al Director