Next Year in an Indie Bookstore

A (true) short story about a Latina Jewess sleuthing the current American leftist zeitgeist at a place that once felt like home. Names and locations have been changed or redacted for anonymity.

During recent downtime on a work trip, I took a stroll to a nearby independent bookstore—a universal third place that I’ve enjoyed visiting since early childhood. I’ve always found these bookstores to be hidden gems of their respective cities, a place where independent publishers, local artists, and stories that would otherwise remain in the margins are able to thrive. At 20 years old (the mid-2010s), I began hosting poetry nights at my nearby independent bookstores, both in my college town and in the bigger city just 45 minutes away. When I moved to an even more WASP-y city for work, I found another local bookstore and kept my little project alive. I always joked that Hashem made me a walking identity crisis: bisexual, Latina, AND Jewish, and led me to predominantly WASP-y, hetero towns for character development, so the only way to find community was to make one for myself. I found other poets and musicians who shared this sentiment and began hosting and reading my work monthly, connecting with other queer and non-White artists from all over the world.

This was around the time when the ripple effects of Tumblr-era identity politics were flourishing, and truthfully, I believed in the ethos of this movement at the time. I grew up in the early 2000s, where thin was in, popular YouTubers were saying the n-word/wearing blackface online and garnering millions of views, and my favorite popstars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were criticized for gaining a bit of weight after pregnancy. In my eyes, it was about time the pendulum finally swung, and when I stumbled across this platform as a 14-year-old, it felt like medicine. The remedy to my pain became learning about the pain of others, the systems that hurt them became ones that hurt me too, because it was drilled into our heads that ALL our struggles were interconnected. I followed accounts like “Your Fave is Problematic” and became part of the mob of chronically online misfit teenagers who lashed out against the culture that so deeply wounded us. While we were systemically powerless in the real world, we could wield power in the virtual zeitgeist, and it felt absolutely thrilling. An eye for an eye felt fair, until it wasn’t. After stepping out of the college echo chamber of identity politics galore (and a few years of real world social work experience under my belt), I quickly realized Jewish people were once again being scapegoated as the evil of our time: the culprits of white supremacy and colonialism.

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As I walked into the aforementioned work trip bookstore, the first thing I saw on the bookshelf was Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. I picked it up and read the back.

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions…

With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis.

I flipped through the book and to my relief, saw that capital punishment by Hamas toward queer Palestinians was discussed. “The bare fucking minimum, Baruch Hashem,” I muttered. I continued reading:

“Israel’s reputation as a safe haven for gay people is also dubious.”

Huh, it’s definitely a safe haven compared to being beheaded in the West Bank or Gaza. I continued on. I walked to the poetry section: Poems for Palestine was featured. I walked to the history section: The Hundred Years' War on Palestine was featured. I walked to the graphic novels section: Palestine: In the Gaza Strip, and so on. Let me make it clear: my frustration did not come from these books being highlighted, as I truly believe diversity of thought and perspective are essential to understanding this conflict and ultimately bringing forth lasting peace. My frustration came from not being able to find a single book on the indigeneity of Jews to Judea, a single book on the ethnic cleansings of Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries, a single book representing the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze people that all make up the state of Israel. It wasn’t until I reached the magazine section in the very back that I saw the title Jewish Currents peeking out from the shelf.

”Finally….” I whispered under my breath, and began reading. As I picked up the magazine, the front cover took me by surprise. In the bottom right corner, I read the two headlines:

Hinduphobia and the Anti-Antisemitism Machine

Germans Are the New Jews

What the hell is ‘anti-antisemitism’? Isn’t that a good thing? I did a quick Google search and found that the word encompasses “those for whom every critical observation of Jews as individuals or as a community, or, most crucially, of the state of Israel, is inherently antisemitic.” I rolled my eyes, and flipped through the magazine until I found the headline: Germans Are the New Jews. The quote they bolded and highlighted reads as follows:

In a paradox typical of the upside-down dynamics surrounding Jews, Arabs, and Germans in contemporary Germany, a questionably conceived anti-antisemitism has become the mechanism for keeping Germanness Aryan.

What?! Since when have we been considered Aryans? Since when were we lumped into the the race of people whose pursuit of ‘racial purity’ justified our industrialized mass slaughter? I kept reading. I saw words like “apartheid,” “colonialism,” and “genocide” thrown around like curse words in a Carlin stand-up set. I sighed.

The over-prescription of anything the left deems negative as “colonialism” has led to this word, and others in the same vein, losing all meaning. What’s most comical to me is that upon reading the widely-quoted-among-leftists-after-October-7th paper Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, it describes this exact phenomenon in the Abstract:

Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor.

I laughed to myself, and made my way to the second floor.

Right next to the self-help books, I found a group of queer people sitting in a circle with their N95 masks, each holding a copy of the aforementioned book Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. I saw a sign behind one of the attendees that said, “[Bookstore’s name] LGBTQ Book Club.” I had arrived just in time to hear the introductions. I hid my Magen David, grabbed a random self-help book, and pretended to read while secretly listening. I felt like a Jewish Nancy Drew.

“I wanted to start off by acknowledging we are on stolen [tribe name redacted] land,” said the group leader, a woman in her 30s with bleach blond hair, a silver nose ring, and a local band t-shirt. “I also wanted to acknowledge that the current genocide we’re about to discuss is not an easy thing to talk about. Not because there’s not a clear right and wrong,” she quickly added, nervously, “but because we’re bombarded with horrific images of what the IOF does to the indigenous people of Palestine every day, and I want us to be able to hold space for the sadness and despair that come up as we continue to watch this ongoing genocide and colonialism play out in real time.” I heard a soft “mmm” amongst the attendees. Okay so they’re definitely all following AJ+, I thought to myself. She continued.

“Today we’re going to discuss how queer liberation goes hand in hand with Palestinian liberation, so I want us all to go around and share our names and pronouns and what queerness means to you,” she said.

What queerness means to them? Isn’t this supposed to be about how queer Palestinians are oppressed? I shrugged it off and listened to everyone share their introductions.

”My name is [Mary], I use she/they pronouns, and queerness to me is about being free to love who I love and express my gender in a way that makes sense to me. I’ve recently been struggling to pick which label to take on, since I thought I was bi until a few months ago when I learned about comphet, so now I’m exploring whether or not my attraction to men has been compulsory and if I maybe only like other women and nonbinary people. We’ll see, I guess!”

“My name is [Art], I use they/them pronouns, I’m aroace and transmasc and queerness to me is about creativity and liberation. It’s always political, because like, I wouldn’t consider someone who’s gay and runs for office for a government that like, drop bombs on people to necessarily be queer you know? So it’s like a whole ideology and mindset to me.”

“My name is [Avery], I use he/they/she pronouns, and queerness to me is about transformation and expansion. I used to think all these labels were a bunch of white people shit, but it’s actually helped me explore myself in a deeper way.”

This continued for another 30 minutes as people carried out monologues describing their definitions of queerness, and I couldn’t help but feel like each person was trying to out-abstract the person before them. They then began popcorn reading each paragraph of the book and stopped after the first page to continue to discuss how it related to their queerness in the United States, their own experiences, and their own lives. I flipped to the next page of my random self-help book without reading a single word, listening as they formed connections with one another through a sense of camaraderie over a geopolitical conflict thousands of miles away. I listened to a group of people discussing intimate details of their identities through metaphor, with Palestinians representing them and Israelis representing their oppressors. And I observed in real time how a book centered around the hardships faced by queer Palestinians became another metaphor for a group of well-meaning but misguided American leftists, who could not help but inevitably succumb to the individualism they claimed to stand against. I felt a wave of sadness sweep over me: I was no longer welcome here. These places that felt like home and offered solace from the pains of my reality have become cesspools of black-and-white thinking and misinformation campaigns. I thought back to my social work days, and how black-and-white thinking was often a symptom of severe trauma or PTSD. Another wave of sadness swept over me; how deep must the collective’s suffering be that an entire group of people reverted back to their ancestral habits of scapegoating Jews after years of promising us Never Again?

I walked back down the stairs, deciding that my sleuthing was officially over for the day. Exhausted, I visited my last stop of the building where the postcards and greeting cards were displayed. I found a Father’s Day card I liked, swiftly placed it in my bag, and—in an act of “decolonization” I hoped the Queer Book Club would be proud of—snuck out quietly with a grin.