“Stay or go?” Albert Ein­stein mus­es in Ken Krimstein’s lat­est graph­ic nov­el, Ein­stein in Kafka­land, as he tum­bles down a rab­bit hole. ​“Stay or go? Stay or go?” 

It’s a ques­tion that Jews have asked them­selves for mil­len­nia as they search for home and home­land. In this, our ​“home” issue of Paper Brigade, Ayelet Tsabari and Maya Arad describe nav­i­gat­ing between dif­fer­ent lan­guages and iden­ti­ties as Israeli authors abroad. Ruth Madievsky and Katya Apekina explore how inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma from the Sovi­et Union has per­sist­ed in their fam­i­lies even though they have lived in the US for decades. 

When many of us think of home, we think of safe­ty. Jor­dan Sala­ma recalls week­ly jour­neys to his beloved grandmother’s house, where Shab­bat din­ners and con­ver­sa­tions in Judeo-Ara­bic anchored him to his Iraqi her­itage. A num­ber of con­trib­u­tors explore rela­tion­ships that bloom between young queer peo­ple who live togeth­er, show­ing home as a place where one has the free­dom to be vul­ner­a­ble, to come into one’s cre­ativ­i­ty and personhood. 

And yet, this safe­ty is always ten­u­ous. Pho­tographs excerpt­ed from Jew­ish Coun­try Hous­es doc­u­ment the heights to which some Euro­pean Jews rose in soci­ety dur­ing the nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies — only to have their dreams crum­ble in the face of anti­semitism decades lat­er. Taffy Brodess­er-Akn­er dis­cuss­es the man­sion at the core of her lat­est nov­el; built as a tes­ta­ment to one family’s post-Holo­caust Amer­i­can dream, it is haunt­ed by a fig­u­ra­tive (and pos­si­bly lit­er­al) dyb­buk. A Jew­ish lit­er­ary map of the Nether­lands — book­end­ed by inter­views with Alice Hoff­man, Yael van der Wouden, and Nina Sie­gal — invites you to delve into the his­to­ry of a coun­try that has been both a haven and a mire for Jews. 

In recent years, noth­ing has made us ques­tion the ide­al of a peace­ful Jew­ish exis­tence like Hamas’s Octo­ber 7th attack on Israel and the hor­rif­ic events that have fol­lowed. To mark the tragedies, our cur­rent issue includes four pieces orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in JBC’s online Wit­ness­ing series, which gave Israeli authors and oth­er authors liv­ing in Israel the oppor­tu­ni­ty to share their expe­ri­ences of Octo­ber 7th and its after­math. In an essay writ­ten days after the attack, Yaara She­hori describes the fragili­ty of her house sud­den­ly laid bare: ​“My eyes wan­der to the door. It’s a door that can be bro­ken into.” Fear and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty have spread beyond Israel. Jews around the world have faced grow­ing anti­semitism in the past year, leav­ing them unmoored from com­mu­ni­ties that once embraced them. In her essay ​“We Are No Longer Wel­come,” Yardenne Greenspan describes how this is per­va­sive in the lit­er­ary world. 

JBC has played a cen­tral role in track­ing and rais­ing aware­ness about the alarm­ing increase and nor­mal­iza­tion of anti­semitism in the lit­er­ary sphere. We have estab­lished a report­ing hot­line; we give one-on-one sup­port to authors and pub­lish­ing col­leagues; offer edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties and resources; and host com­mu­ni­ty gath­er­ings for Jews across the lit­er­ary world. 

JBC’s core mis­sion — to ampli­fy, uplift, and cel­e­brate Jew­ish voic­es, books, and authors — has become even more crit­i­cal. The orig­i­nal paper brigade, a group of writ­ers and intel­lec­tu­als in the Vil­na Ghet­to, risked their lives to hide away thou­sands of books and doc­u­ments that the Nazis intend­ed to destroy. Inspired by them, we strive to pro­vide a home for Jew­ish literature.

—Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter