Volume 53 - Issue 1

The New Journal Volume 53, No. 1

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

September 2020

Editors-In-Chief Helena Lyng-Olsen Candice Wang Executive Editor Elena DeBre Managing Editor Hailey Andrews Associate Editors Jack Delaney Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Madison Hahamy Meera Rothman Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Eli Mennerick Elliot Wailoo

Copy Editors Nicole Dirks Anna Fleming Ella Goldblum

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby

Creative Director Meher Hans

Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

Design Editors Brian Chang Natasha Gaither Rebecca Goldberg Annli Nakayama Illustrators Alice Mao Cindy Ren Sydney Zoehrer

Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, Whether you are reading this note from a park bench in New Haven, your childhood bedroom, or a place you’ve never lived before, we hope these stories bring you back home to our city. We’re wading through a season of uncertainty and settling into strange new patterns—wearing face masks while racing against essay deadlines and struggling to stay together while speaking over blurry video calls. You may be socially distancing and physically alone as you read this, but we hope the voices and experiences that our writers have brought to the page bring you a renewed sense of intimacy and community.

We bring to you the voices of those struggling to find vibrancy and beauty in their religious practice despite the closing of synagogues throughout the city. We follow the stories of international Chinese students stuck between two clashing nations at the brink of conflict, and students fighting to disarm the Yale Police Department. We enter the studios and headspaces of New Haven artists and grapple with the idea of how politics and art should intertwine. Slip into the group chats of Librex’s student content moderators, discover what Yale did during the last global pandemic, and more.

We’re so glad our magazine ended up in your hands.

Yours, Helena & Candice

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.

Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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The New Journal September 2020 FEATURES Ko Lyn Cheang

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THE STILL SMALL VOICE OF GOD Observant Jews in New Haven distill beauty and closeness from socially distanced religious practices.

Eli Mennerick

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ART IN CRISIS New Haven’s artscape has been resculpted by the coronavirus pandemic and recent social movements.

Kapp Singer

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LIBREX ET VERITAS A student’s app ignites a fierce debate over anonymity and freedom of speech.

STANDARDS Meera Rothman

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point of departure: SEARCHING FOR PRECEDENT

Abby Steckel

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Macrina Wang

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snapshot: THREE FEET APART

point of departute: STUCK IN THE MIDDLE

Ali Brown / Jack Delaney

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poems: BIRTHDAY / HULUMUM

Beasie Goddu

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essay: INTUITION

Branson Rideaux

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critical angle: NOTES TO A STUDENT ORGANIZER

Mirilla Zhu

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critical angle: LEFT OUT IN THE COLD

Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

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snapshot: HEALING FROM HOME

Beasie Goddu / Renee Ong

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photography

Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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endnote: DISPATCH FROM THE BOOK TRADER CAFE WRITER IN RESIDENCE

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

SEARCHING FOR PRECEDENT

MEERA ROTHMAN

We’ve been through this before.

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nprecedented times. Unprecedented deaths. An unprecedented president. In less than a year, unprecedented disruption. I am fucking sick of the word unprecedented, but I can’t escape it. It’s on every channel, email, and news alert.

True, sometimes the unprecedented can be wonderful and liberating—the train is finally off the tracks. But the unprecedented can also be singularly terrifying. There is no reference point, no first or second draft to look back on. It’s just us–– people––free-falling through 2020 and making things up as we go. If you sit and think too hard about it (as I have been doing all of June), everything seems too strange to believe.

Like we have detached from the natural string of time.

It reminds me of a line from a story by Yalitza Ferreras. This geologist, who has a lifelong obsession with rocks, loses part of her hand trying to touch and feel molten lava. In the months following the accident, she’s lying in bed, unable to move, and her boyfriend comes to comfort her: This can’t go on forever, he would say, as she felt the layers of forever crushing her down.

This is often how it feels. A global disease is killing hundreds of thousands of people, and all around us there is loss.

Hospitals overflow with people who can’t breathe, workers lose their jobs, children can’t go to school, and everyone is being shepherded quickly and urgently into buildings and rooms, so that in the end we lose the ability to move. It feels like our lives have been unbuttoned one by one and flipped inside out. The school and city that I’ve spent the last three years digging fingernails and roots into is shut down, and we’re all staring at screens around the world trying to reach out to each other.

But I’m also reaching desperately for an explanation. I don’t understand how an event so extreme can fit into the narrative of my life, or even the narrative of history. I feel that there must be a precedent––there has to be one. This can’t be the first time that universities shut down, or that the world spun into freefall.

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t made sense to start my search for a precedent with the last global pandemic. The influenza pandemic of 1918 is

largely overlooked in U.S. history; I had never even heard of it until this year. Scientists initially thought the virus was just a common cold, until it started destroying people’s lungs, filling them with fluid and causing tissue inflammation. The virus infected about 500 million people, a third of the world population, and killed 50 million, far higher than the death rate of World War I. I wonder how people back then comprehended this degree of death and destruction. I wonder if they looked for precedents, too. Just like today, people in 1918 wore masks and avoided large groups. Just like today, Yale was completely shut down. There’s little writing about what it was like in New Haven back then––it’s almost like people have forgotten.

But Julia Irwin has not. In 2008, the then-doctoral student at Yale’s History of Science and Medicine program wrote a deep dive historical paper about influenza’s impact on the city. Irwin’s paper is a goldmine.

She studied how the pandemic affected group relations in New Haven, specifically the relationships between the city’s largely ‘Anglo’ majority and a newer group of working-class Italian immigrants. Irwin is now an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, and she has been working from home during the pandemic. Through the Zoom screen, I can see that she has thick, layered brown hair and a warm smile.

Irwin spent the bulk of her early career researching pandemics. Even though today her research focuses on international history, her voice picks up speed and inflates with energy when our conversation pivots to public health.

“In epidemics, but also disasters more broadly, those sorts of moments reveal issues that are already in societies that are sometimes below the surface,” she explains.

“Health disparities, for example, or economic disparities that are existing but people have become complacent about. An epidemic can bring those to life.”

The influenza epidemic of 1918 was a prime example, precipitating a harsh nativist stance against the Italian immigrant community. According to Irwin, Italians died at a rate twice as high as Anglo residents in Connecticut. Public health officials used this data to confirm the theory that Italians as a ‘race’ had succumbed

Design by Rebecca Goldberg

more to the disease. Yet despite the fact that this prejudice became visible during the pandemic, Irwin found that Italian and Anglo residents unexpectedly suppressed the unrest.

“Contrary to historiographic expectations, the New Haven story is one narrated by piercing silences and a distinct lack of hostility towards the immigrant community. These silences must be understood as a product of the period’s political and social context,” Irwin says.

World War I was coming to a close when the influenza pandemic occurred, and Americans were calling for unity and cooperation, Irwin explained. Anglo-Americans used the need for Americanism to explain why all citizens had a patriotic duty to follow public health guidelines. Meanwhile, Italian-Americans acquiesced to these guidelines and started to construct a public image of themselves as responsible citizens. Instead of clashing, leaders of both Italian and Anglo groups supported a new end-of-war unity. The shift in New Haveners’ mentalities towards one another was a direct result of the time period.

Today, the same sorts of pervasive health disparities are manifesting in New Haven, but between Black and white Americans. Due to centuries of systemic violence, Black people in New Haven are the racial group most likely to be hospitalized and to die from coronavirus, according to statistics from New Haven Mayor Elicker in April. However, unlike in 1918, we are not approaching the end of a war but rather the end of an openly racist president’s term. Police officers are murdering Black Americans in cold blood, and the Black Lives Matter movement has taken flight. While the influenza pandemic may have smoothed over community fissures in New Haven, the coronavirus pandemic has certainly not.

There are few mentions of Yale in Irwin’s paper, but midway through she writes, “During the epidemic, Yale University, a centre of significant power and influence in New Haven, quarantined itself and ‘refused to let any of the students speak to any citizen unless he had a special pass.’”

Irwin details how Yale prided itself on the number of nurses it had to care for sick students, and celebrated the fact that just three Yale students died. Meanwhile, New Haven suffered from a severe shortage in nurses, and the New Haven Register reports that the total Connecticut death toll was over fifty-five hundred.

Yale’s actions today will speak to whether or not it has learned from the apathy of its past. A couple months ago, President Salovey declined Mayor Elicker’s request to open up some of Yale’s empty dorm rooms for public safety officers at risk of contracting coronavirus.

Elicker criticized Yale, asking, “If your house is burning down and you asked a neighbor if your kids could stay at your house and your neighbor said ‘no,’ but here is a check so you could stay at the Econo Lodge across town, what would that tell you about your neighbor?”

The next day, Salovey announced that he would make three hundred beds available. But on a city budget call in mid-May, dozens of New Haveners demanded that Yale do more with its $30 billion endowment. So far during the

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pandemic, Yale has offered New Haven just $1 million. thirty-five hundred to eight thousand students.

“They called any house in New Haven—do you have an extra bedroom? Can someone sleep in your basement?”

Schiff tells me there were hundreds of cots in the gym and JULY single rooms were turned into triples. Some of the students returning back to campus were married and had babies by n the first of July at nine in the morning, President this point.

Salovey sends an email entitled ‘Fall 2020,’ announc“I remember meeting a woman who was married to a Yale ing that we’ll be returning to campus. It seems impossible. physician,” Schiff recalls. “She had two babies in diapers in I can’t remember a time when my heart didn’t race when I one half of a quonset hut on Science Hill.” left the house, or when I lived without the background noise I have to look up what a quonset hut is—it’s essentially a of the hot, screaming TV. I think there’s something about steel dome that looks like a can sliced in half. I’m trying to staying inside that makes time feel completely stagnant, like imagine hundreds of these semi-circles lined up on Science you could wake up every morning for the rest of eternity Hill and housing families with babies. and you’d still be stuck in the pandemic’s layers of forever.

“Of course, there were no disposable diapers in those days,” Going outside for runs and trips to the grocery store are my Schiff laughs. only reprieve.

If anyone could tell me whether people felt like this before, it would be Judith Schiff. She prefers to talk AUGUST on the phone, so I call her from the landline in my basement. Schiff is the chief research archivist of Yale o my surprise, the layers of forever ease up and I Library’s Manuscripts and Archives and the city historeturn to campus. The day I arrive, my friend and I rian of New Haven. She grew up in New Haven, went to Hillhouse High School, and has been working at Yale go for a socially distanced walk up Prospect Street and Science Hill (I am relieved to see that there are no quonset for over forty years.

Our conversation meanders. I ask one question, and huts). We pass fewer than twenty people. It’s strange to see Schiff slides seamlessly down tangents of history, often Yale so quiet, to walk without weaving around people or losing me in the enormous network of knowledge she having the usual litany of semi awkward run-ins. I miss the holds. We talk about how Yale was founded, the origin frenzy.

But it’s also fascinating to see campus like this. It’s as if Yale of Skull and Bones, and what Yale school dances were like a hundred years ago. But eventually we make our has been dropped and cracked open, like a fruit or a large glass jar. The shroud of isolation that usually encircles these way to World War II. World War II was one of the most recent instances when eight blocks has been stripped away, and the pandemic has Yale’s campus was severely disrupted. Charles Seymour, the allowed reality to seep in. This is a quieter way of going to president at the time, supported the war, while many students college, but in many ways it is a more grounded one, free of opposed it, causing tension on campus. But when the U.S. pretenses. My friend tells me that it’s been like this all sumfinally entered the war, all students, regardless of their beliefs, mer, and that nearly everyone is seriously social distancing.

My last interview takes place six feet apart on the chairs were subject to the draft.

“Yale became a sort of ghost town,” Schiff says. “They only outside the Yale Art Gallery. I am late and he is early. My had enough students to fill two residential colleges, who were interviewee wears a green shirt and hat, and he looks strangely ineligible for the draft either because they were too young or comfortable on one of the sidewalk’s stiff metal chairs, watching the cars pass on Chapel Street. He is eighty-five years old. they had disabilities.”

Sam Chauncey became a Yale administrator when he Many formerly enrolled students went elsewhere. People picked fruit on farms to keep up the food supply, some was just twenty-one. He started as an assistant dean, served became firefighters, and others assumed civic positions. And, as Yale’s chief of staff for twenty years, and then founded the with students gone, Seymour offered up Yale’s campus as a Yale Health Management Program, the first health/business military base. Over the course of the war, twenty thousand program of its kind at a major university. Now retired, he people came to Yale’s campus for training. Old Campus was advises students as a Davenport Fellow.

“For the first two and a half months, everything was shut rented to the Air Force, which trained at Tweed Airport in down,” he recalls. “I could stand at my building and see all New Haven during the day and slept on campus at night.

“It was a constantly changing student body,” she explains. the way to Broadway and not see a single human being on When students finally returned in 1946, they called it the street.”

Chauncey’s voice is strong and clear, and if he hadn’t told “reconversion.” Seymour welcomed anyone who had survived the war and wanted to finish their degree back to cam- me otherwise, I would have thought he was much younger. pus. Overnight, Yale was transformed from a student body of He smiles often, revealing two slightly crossed front teeth.

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“It was great for everyone because you could walk without worrying that you’d run into anybody… I try to do six miles a day.”

The coronavirus pandemic is not the first pivotal moment Chauncey has witnessed at Yale. As chief of staff, he helped lead Yale during the radical movements of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and he contributed to both the admission of minority students and women into Yale. Chauncey is best known for his leadership during the May Day rally in 1970, during which twenty thousand to thirty thousand protestors arrived on the New Haven Green to denounce the arrest of Bobby Seale, a Black Panther leader who was put on trial for allegedly murdering a fellow Panther member. This is the only time since 1950 when Chauncey recalls Yale shutting down.

“I’M FUCKING SICK OF THE WORD UNPRECEDENTED.” “Every single store on Broadway was boarded up,” he says.

“There were national guard troops on York Street. So that was a very eerie feeling.”

Unlike other universities, which closed their campuses and took issue with the protests, Chauncey invited the protesters in. While other campuses erupted into deadly violence, Chauncey tactfully juggled the needs of protesters, police, students, and faculty, enabling the protests to take place peacefully.

“If you look in the sixties, there was a woman named Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring––she was said to be a nut. Everyone said she was crazy. The gay and lesbian movement was beginning and they were nuts. The antiwar people were nuts. It turned out that all those things they were preaching were today’s gospel. I think that having society upset and your individual life upset is a good thing,” he says. “I’m in favor of revolution, quite frankly.”

Chauncey acknowledges that today’s pandemic poses unique challenges that the upheavals of the sixties did not.

While May Day was a disruption caused by people, the pandemic is an invisible enemy. The ‘radicals’ who arrived on campus were driven by issues they passionately believed in, whereas the coronavirus has no ideology. Still, Chauncey hopes that Yale students and faculty will find some meaning in the pandemic and in society being “shaken up.”

“Every Yale student should ask him or herself––do I want to go back and be a Yale student just the way I was a year ago?

Have I got some new values about things? Maybe my view of human life is a little different.”

As I ponder this, he tells me what he himself has learned.

“Before the pandemic, I usually had two appointments in the morning. I was having lunch with somebody, I had two appointments in the afternoon. I might be going to a dinner at night with somebody in New Haven. Now, you spend more time by yourself and I have come to believe that I don’t want to go back to normal. I want a new normal.”

In the spirit of Chauncey, I am working on casting my gaze forward. In the two weeks we’ve been in New Haven so far, my friends and I have barely left our house. We cook dinners and sit in circles with our computers and we put our faith in change.

Nothing has the privilege of lasting forever.

New Haven’s streets feel empty but in the outlines surrounding their silence, I can see a loud and resounding respect for this city. Yale, with its sky-high gothic towers, has closed and shut down, and the city has swelled and sighed with students coming and going. But New Haven remains, with a population that outnumbers students approximately 10:1, even when campus is at its fullest. There are trees that were rooted here when campus closed in 1918, when students left for war in 1945, when protestors came in 1970. There are people who remember.

The best part of my new room is that there is a skylight in the ceiling. Over the course of each day, I can watch light flood different parts of the room. I considered putting a shade on it so I could sleep better, but decided against it. If I stand on the right side of my room, I can see the Payne Whitney Gym, but if I stand on the left side by my bed, I just see open sky. When I feel crushed with claustrophobia, I look up.

—Meera Rothman is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College and an Associate Editor.

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Immigration detention conditions in Bristol County, Massachusetts have faced renewed opposition since the start of the pandemic.

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ach person signed the letter with their name, ID, and bed number. Some of the metal bunks stood empty, an ambiguous remembrance of a former occupant’s release or deportation.

When COVID-19 swept through Massachusetts in March, the detainees inside the Bristol County House of Correction Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) units were stuck sleeping in beds moored three feet apart. They were terrified. The fifty-one members of Unit B wrote and signed a desperate letter outlining

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their situation, followed days later by a similar plea from forty-seven detainees in Unit A. Represented by Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic and the Boston-based firm Lawyers for Civil Rights, the detainees filed a lawsuit against Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson and ICE officials on Friday, March 27, 2020. Savino v. Hodgson sought the release of immigrants detained in Bristol County to mitigate the risk of contracting COVID-19. The lawsuit alleged that Sheriff Hodgson and his staff disregarded social distancing guidelines, failed to provide sanitation supplies and personal protective equipment, and admitted new detainees without taking proper precautions to prevent the virus from spreading.

Massachusetts federal district Judge William Young began issuing orders to release detainees in early April, eventually freeing around fifty people. But those who were allowed to return to their communities found that Sheriff Hodgson continued to scrutinize their move-

Design by Brian Chang

ments, and people who remained incarcerated reported that conditions did not improve.

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odgson, who oversees Bristol County’s jails and ICE detention center, has positioned himself as a severe administrator since he was appointed sheriff in 1997. As a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, Hodgson offered to send incarcerated people to the US-Mexico border to build Trump’s long-advertised wall in 2017. A photo published by The Boston Globe at the time showed Hodgson wearing a dark suit jacket decorated with an American flag pin and sheriff’s badge. He posed, arms crossed, in front of a barbed wire fence.

Early in his tenure, Hodgson charged detainees five dollars each day they were imprisoned in his facility.

In 2010, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ordered him to return the fees with interest. Undeterred, Hodgson testified in 2017 in support of an unsuccessful state bill that would have permitted his controversial fundraising Drowning #7 by scheme to continue.

“That very well frames … how [Hodgson] thinks about incarceration and punishment, but also his mindset when somebody has the temerity to challenge what he does,” said James Vita, a public defender in New Bedford, Massachusetts who serves clients inside Bristol County House of Correction.

After Judge Young began releasing detainees, Hodgson published a list of their criminal charges, warning in a Facebook broadcast that “these people” could now be “wandering” the streets. Advocates said that Hodgson’s purported public safety announcement was deceptive. “Even if people may have been accused of crimes in the past, right now they are solely detained because they are non-citizens,” explained Oren Nimni, a staff attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights.

Beginning in June, Hodgson petitioned to revoke the release of detainees who left their homes in violation of a house arrest order. Some people had indeed tried to resume their lives, including going shopping or going to

work, but lawyers found that many supposed violations were due to GPS errors. Moreover, Ninmi said his clients were not well-informed of the precise boundaries of house arrest. As a result, detainees were marked as non-compliant for going outside to their backyard or out front to check the mail. Judge Young has granted some of the bail revocation requests, permitting ICE to re-incarcerate people.

In a 2012 article in the Massachusetts-based Herald News, Hodgson described himself as a “pit bull on your pant leg,” referring to his tenacious advocacy for inmate fees. Recently, he ignited public outrage for wearing a Confederate flag-inspired tie in a 2003 portrait for the Sheriff’s Office. When the photo came to light in June, Hodgson denied any association with neo-Confederate groups and defended the tie as a patriotic display of red, white, and blue.

Inside Bristol County House of Correction in North Dartmouth, people were not in a position to denounce Hodgson’s ties; they were desperate for soap. The cleanMarco Battistotti ing supplies provided by the sheriff’s office for the month of April ran out after a week, according to Ira Alkalay, an attorney for several current and former ICE detainees. Investigators from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) visited the House of Correction in late June and confirmed concerns about dirty bathrooms, overcrowded cells, and food safety problems in the facility’s kitchen.

Even before the pandemic, DPH had reported repeated health code violations in Bristol County, including scummy showers, dusty ventilation, and inadequate floor space in the ICE units. A December 2019 review of Ash Street Jail in New Bedford documented grimy toilets, peeling paint, and doors vulnerable to bad weather and rodents Bristol County Sheriff’s Office has historically denied or diminished complaints about conditions.

Public Information Officer Jonathan Darling cited 100% scores on the county’s last two inspections by the American Correctional Association (ACA) as evidence of a high standard of care. For Mario Paredes, a law-

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yer for Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, these inspection scores don’t inspire confidence.

“If you look across the board at ICE detention, even some of the ones that are considered the most dangerous for immigrants have consistently passed inspection year after year,” Paredes said.

The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit that researches mass incarceration, states that the ACA is “well known” for accrediting prisons despite reports of poor conditions.

Asked about the primary purpose of Bristol County’s jail facilities, Darling said that they aim to provide “care, custody and rehabilitation.” A video published by the New Bedford Cable Network in 2015 suggests a different objective. In it, Charles Crowley, the sheriff’s late chief of staff, states that Hodgson’s goal is for people to “dread coming to jail.” Crowley says that Hodgson converted a gymnasium to a sleeping unit because his facility is “not a country club.”

Throughout April, Judge Young considered release requests from Bristol County detainees. Meanwhile, detainees developed statements about the conditions of their confinement, to be presented at a hearing in early May. But before the hearing, Sheriff Hodgson paid an inauspicious visit to ICE Unit B. On Friday, May 1, 2020, Sheriff Hodgson entered Unit B to separate a group of detainees for COVID-19 testing.

“I told them that it was critically important that they go down to be tested at our medical unit down at the main building,” Hodgson said at a press conference the next day.

However, according to Alkalay, detainees had reason to believe that Hodgson’s visit was not beneficent.

Alkalay’s clients told him that previously, detainees who were taken for COVID-19 testing were instead placed in solitary confinement. The Sheriff’s Office maintained that isolation was a public health practice and not a punitive measure. Darling said anyone who tested positive, was awaiting results, or displayed symptoms but refused testing was placed in medical isolation and monitored by health professionals. Notwithstanding the facility’s official procedures, Paredes said, “It’s pretty consistent... from all the individuals I speak to that there was this big fear of using COVID as an excuse to have people placed into solitary.” Fearing this isolation treatment, the detainees refused to leave the unit on May 1.

While detainees were being summoned for testing, one of Alkalay’s clients, Marco Battistotti, called to tell him what was going on. According to Alkalay, Hodgson interrupted the call by taking the phone and grabbing Battistotti violently. In Hodgson’s telling, he only

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approached Battistotti after calling his name, and he denied physically attacking Battistotti. He claimed that the other detainees in the unit rushed at him and one person threw a chair. Afterwards, Hodgson left the room and gathered an armed team of corrections officers outside.

At the May 2 press conference, Hodgson referred to Battistotti as a “con man” who “spends all his time on the phone talking to advocacy groups, pushing false narratives.” Vita described him much more modestly.

Unlike many other detainees, Battistotti is fluent in English. “By default, he ended up in a position where he could communicate in writing and verbally with people who have authority over there,” Vita said. “The sheriff is not used to somebody being that forceful in pressing for rights and for accommodations,” so he identified Battistotti as someone to intimidate.

“‘Guess what? We’re still putting people in boxes.’”

Several minutes after Battistotti dropped the phone, another man picked up and told Alkalay in panicked Spanish that the detainees were being gassed. According to Alkalay, officers released tear gas through the air vents, deployed two stun grenades, and shot detainees with rubber bullets.

Three detainees were hospitalized following the incident, including one who had a seizure and another whose breathing was obstructed by a rubber bullet in his throat. According to Rafael Pizarro, an organizer with Bristol County for Correctional Justice (BCCJ), the statements detainees had prepared for the May hearing “mysteriously disappeared” from their lockers following the confrontation with the officers.

After the incident, Battistotti and the others who refused testing were put in solitary confinement. For three days, Alkalay says, Battistotti was left totally naked in an air-conditioned room. “I live ten miles from there,” Alkalay said. He sat in a well-lit office, in front of a framed painting of a sailing ship. “To think that my clients are being held naked for days…” he trailed off.

“It’s just shocking, it really is.” Battistotti was in solitary confinement for sixty consecutive days.

When Vita visited the jail, Battistotti passed him a small styrofoam cup to illustrate the food rations he was receiving. On it, Battistotti had estimated his servings in pen. About one third of the way up the cup’s battered side, he wrote “pasta.”

His cell in solitary confinement consisted of a bed, a cement desk and stool, and an attached toilet and sink.

His quarters also included an additional ornament: a bullet casing. As Vita understands it, his client was taken out of his cell to shower, and when he returned the casing was on the floor. Battistotti had not seen it before he left, and he believes it was placed there as a threat.

Before May 1, Battistotti’s English literacy had helped other detainees communicate their needs. Afterwards, the provisional community within Unit B was fractured.

“I think one of the things that Hodgson was able to accomplish after May 1 was breaking up these groups of people and putting them in different units in the main building,” said Vita. “And I think that was intentional.”

While Battistotti and other detainees faced isolation, activists outside the jail gathered to protest. BCCJ has opposed Sheriff Hodgson since the organization’s founding in 2017, and recently circulated a petition demanding that Hodgson take down the Confederate tie portrait in his office. Lindsay Aldworth of BCCJ asserted that Hodgson’s tie and the allegations of abuse in his custody are closely linked. “He cannot be wearing Confederate ties, he cannot be doubling down when asked about it, and he can’t be treating community members as he is,” Aldworth said.

Hodgson’s portrait sparked outrage in a county and nation already roiled by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans at the hands of the police. On June 18, BCCJ joined with Black Lives Matter activists for a rally in downtown New Bedford, where not for the first time, protesters called for Sheriff Hodgson’s resignation.

Bristol County’s Black civil rights activists have historically existed adjacent to and in tension with the local incarceration system. Dr. LaSella Hall, president of the New Bedford NAACP, noted that New Bedford’s Ash Street Jail is the nation’s oldest operating jail, and the New Bedford NAACP is one of the organization’s older branches.

Hall has thick-framed rectangular glasses and a piercing gaze even over Zoom. He described Hodgson’s tenure as one component of a criminal-legal system that has traditionally placed white men in positions of power and black men behind bars. “There’s no political will to get rid of [Hodgson],” Hall asserted. “Massachusetts is overwhelmingly white, and it’s overwhelmingly people who… don’t want to talk about [race].” If Hall’s assessment is correct, it might explain why Hodgson’s constituents are not up-in-arms about his role as an advisor to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration organization the Southern Poverty

Law Center has designated as a hate group.

Aspects of the May 1 incident stand out in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Attorney John Swomely said that the detainees were made to lay on the ground with their wrists bound by zip ties. “There are detainees who, when dropped to the ground, had [correctional officers] hold them down by standing on their necks,” Swomely said at a May 27 webinar presentation. Paredes also heard that officers placed their knees on people’s backs and necks, evoking the restraint used to kill Floyd. Darling confirmed that detainees were zip tied, but denied that they were held down by their necks.

Four months after the incident, Battistotti remains imprisoned at Bristol County House of Correction.

And five months after the first detainees were released, they remain under strict house arrest. In early August, the plaintiffs’ lawyers asked Judge Young to loosen the house arrest conditions. “It’s really difficult to not be able to even go and buy groceries for your family or go to a medical appointment without notifying the court or without notifying ICE,” Nimni said.

Around August 23, officials placed Battistotti back into restrictive housing. Neither he nor Vita received a justification, but Vita suspects that the sheriff was retaliating against Battistotti for expressing his concerns to a DPH investigator earlier that month. Battistotti is still seeking release under the Savino lawsuit, but according to Vita, he is “very discouraged with the entire process.”

Activists in and around Massachusetts continue to push for state and federal officials to sanction Sheriff Hodgson for the May 1 incident and the detention conditions in Bristol County. However, as the county’s electoral politics stand, the sheriff appears unlikely to be unseated. Even if someone were to challenge Hodgson, Hall does not expect a sea change at Bristol County House of Correction. “Let’s say you get a nicer guy, he takes down the Confederate flag,” Hall said. “Guess what? We’re still putting people in boxes.”

--Abby Steckel is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE Chinese international students find themselves in the crosshairs of collapsing US-China relations.

Macrina Wang *All names with an asterisk are pseudonyms. These interviewees have requested anonymity for a variety of reasons — mainly because of uncertain U.S. visa statuses or fear of identification for political reasons.

O

n March 17, Chen* began his eighteen-hour journey from New York City to Guangdong. For weeks, experts had pinpointed New York as the next COVID19 epicenter, and rumors swirled of an imminent lockdown. His parents asked him to come home. Chen made a list of pros and cons, then booked a flight set to take off from JFK a day later. Before he left the city, he emptied his Upper West Side apartment—where he’d lived for half a year as a graduate student at Columbia—leaving behind only nonessential books, clothes, and furniture, packing as if he would never return.

Three months after arriving home, Chen booked a visa renewal appointment with the U.S. Embassy in Guangzhou. His F-1 visa—the student visa which had granted him a year’s stay in the U.S.—was expiring in August. Mere days before his appointment, he received an email from the U.S. Embassy, notifying him of his appointment’s cancelation. Not just his, but all immigrant and non-immigrant visa appointments at every U.S. embassy in China from June 8 through June 26 had been suspended. The reason provided by the email was limited staffing due to the

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pandemic.

Chen tried to reschedule the appointment. But whenever he checked the website, no appointment slots were available for F-1 visa holders. For the past two months, he has been regularly scouring the website, looking for an opening. There have been none.

He has called the U.S. Embassy three times, seeking clarity, but has received ambiguous responses each time, Embassy representatives saying it is ultimately up to American authorities. His visa expired on Friday, August 14.

S

ince the first U.S. COVID-19 case was reported in late January, U.S.-China relations—already shaky from a two-year-long trade war—have only continued to deteriorate. The two powers have clashed on every significant frontier, from technology to trade, national sovereignty to human rights, and the pandemic has only amplified pre-existing tensions. Both countries have, at some point, blamed the origins of the virus on the other. President Trump’s popularization of terms like the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu” has also proven incendiary, as incidents of Covid-related anti-Asian racism surge worldwide.

Students from both sides are getting caught in the crosshairs of the two countries’ disputes. Chen isn’t

alone in struggling with visa issues—the lives of Chinese students in the U.S. have been upended by recent China-specific policies that endanger student visa procurement and renewal. And with the cancelation of intercultural programs like the Peace Corps and Fulbright in China, American students hoping to strengthen their understanding of China and forge transnational connections are being denied the opportunities to do so. All of these are signifiers of an ominous trend—what experts are calling a complete decoupling of the U.S. and China, and perhaps even a new Cold War. The stakes of visa approval are especially heightened for Chinese citizen and Yale Law School student Yao Lin. Yao is 36, bespectacled and effortlessly eloquent, a Chinese national from the coastal province of Fujian. He speaks to me from his study in New Haven, a teal, lightsoaked room lined with shelves of books stacked like Jenga blocks, occasionally pausing to soothe the fussy 2-year-old on his lap. He says he cannot return to China anytime soon, as he fears the fall-out from his history of political activism.

For years, Yao advocated in China for feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and migrant workers without facing much backlash from the government. Then came his criticisms of President Xi Jinping’s policies. He wrote his critiques publicly on WeChat, Weibo, and Douban, and even authored an op-ed for a Hong Kong-based website. In 2017, he denounced the government’s eviction of millions of migrant workers from Beijing, and a year later, the removal of term limits to Xi’s presidency.

In 2018, he was invited by Peking University to teach a summer course on political philosophy. But a few days before the course was scheduled to begin, the department told him he was no longer allowed to teach the class, per a verbal order from the Ministry of Education. A substitute teacher replaced him. Yao knew then that his teaching career in China was over.

Under President Xi’s administration, academics who have spoken out against the government have faced severe consequences. Xu Zhangrun and Zhang Xuezhong, professors and vocal critics of the Chinese government, are prominent examples of this trend. Xu and Zhang believe they were fired by their respective universities, and since had their teaching privileges suspended because of their criticism of one-party rule, the removal of term limits to the Chinese presidency, and the government’s Covid-19 response. In the last few months, they were both detained by Chinese authorities for unclear reasons, but have since been released.

For fear of similar treatment, Yao decided to leave China. At that point, he had already been admitted to Yale Law School, so he decided to join his wife Yuan in New Haven. Yuan had already been studying at Yale for five years, pursuing a doctorate in philosophy and caring for their young children. In 2018, Yao reunited with his family. As he and his wife progressed through graduate school, they planned for careers in American academia.

In May, they learned that the Trump administration was considering suspending the 12-month work authorization program Optional Practical

Design by Meher Hans

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Training (OPT). Yuan, who was slated to graduate from Yale that month, had applied for an OPT and needed its approval to not only begin her position at a university in Virginia the following semester—but also to remain in the country.

They worried for several months, fearing the visa approval would never come. On July 7, finally, Yuan’s OPT application was approved. “If the approval didn’t come by the end of July, she would have lost her job,” Yao said.

That means, for now, they get to stay. Yuan will be an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University this semester, teaching philosophy courses remotely. Yao will complete his final year of law school, and apply for an OPT himself this time next year. The U.S. has become their home. Their children, a girl and a boy, both born in America, know no other country as well as this one. But as a family, they continue to hold their breath.

“These small things have a day-to-day psychological effect on us,” Yao said. “Even if all of these difficulties can be resolved, we live in constant anxiety, fear and worry.”

A

s students in STEM, Yale School of Medicine postdoctoral student Zhao* and third-year graduate student Xu* are among the cohort of Chinese students who are especially scrutinized by the U.S. government.

Over the past few months, the Trump administration has made significant political moves that indicate a growing suspicion of Chinese students, especially those studying STEM. In May, President Trump issued a presidential proclamation banning Chinese graduate students and researchers suspected of ties to the Chinese military from entering the country on a F- or J-visa. In June, Senators Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn introduced the SECURE CAMPUS Act to Congress. The bill would effectively bar Chinese students from receiving visas to the U.S. for graduate or

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postgraduate studies in STEM fields.

Senators Cotton and Blackburn have increasingly accused China of intellectual property theft and espionage. After the contents of the SECURE CAMPUS Act were released in May, Senator Blackburn tweeted: “Beijing exploits student and research visas to steal science, technology, engineering and manufacturing secrets from U.S. academic and research institutions. We’ve fed China’s innovation drought with American ingenuity and taxpayer dollars for too long; it’s time to secure the U.S. research enterprise against the CCP’s economic espionage.”

The Trump administration has also cracked down on graduate students, researchers, and professors with possible ties to China to prevent espionage and intellectual property theft. In January, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged the chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard with one count of making a false statement, accusing him of concealing his connection to Wuhan University of Technology and China’s Thousand Talents Plan. DOJ also charged a Boston University robotics researcher who hadn’t disclosed her involvement with the Chinese army, and a Chinese cancer researcher with stealing and trying to smuggle 21 vials of cells from a Boston medical center.

Zhao and Xu understand that their identities as Chinese graduate students in STEM might complicate their visa renewal processes.

Zhao hasn’t been home in the past two years, ever since he first left northeastern China for America.

This year, he’d planned on finally returning home— his sister is getting married—but the pandemic, coupled with the current political climate, has changed his mind.

His J-1 visa expired in April of last year, and going home would mean having to get it renewed in order to re-enter the U.S. He feared the visa renewal process would be prolonged by his being a Chinese STEM student—the exact demographic Senator

Cotton and his political allies are trying to exclude from the country—and couldn’t take the risk of being stranded in China indefinitely. “I am still working on my [research] project. I need to take care of my lab mice,” he said. “If I go back to China for one or two months and then can’t come back because of visa problems, it will be terrible for me.”

Due to similar fears, Xu, who is from inner Mongolia, hasn’t gone home recently either. Her F-1 visa expired last year.

“Science graduate students [from China] have always had a hard time applying for visas,” said Xu. “But now, the situation is getting worse. I’ve heard of [postdoctoral students] being sent back to China even though their research is not at all military-related. They worked in biology, like me, and I have no clue why they were in that situation. My friends and I are really worried that our research or our lives will be affected by these new, unpredictable policies.”

Zhao is perplexed by the political rhetoric villainizing Chinese STEM students like him. “Scientists have nationalities, but science itself doesn’t have nationalities,” he said. “For me, I come from China, but with the science I am doing now, it’s beyond countries.” He paused for a moment. “That’s how we think of it in the scientific community, anyway.”

B

uried in President Trump’s July 14 executive order addressing Beijing’s installation of a National Security Law in Hong Kong is a provision ending the Fulbright exchange programs in Hong Kong and China.

The programs’ cancelation came six months after the Peace Corps withdrew from China without so much as a press release.

Founded in 1946 by Senator J. William Ful-

bright, the Fulbright Program is an international educational program created for the “promotion of international good will.” Fulbright has operated in China since the days of the Nationalist Government, prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Over the past 40 years, more than 3,000 scholars from the U.S. and China have participated in the U.S.-China Fulbright Programs.

Grace Jin ’20 was supposed to leave for Hangzhou in March 2021. She’d spent a year applying for the Fulbright Program in China, and learned of her acceptance this April. As a Global Affairs major who’d been on the pre-med track, she’d wanted to do public health field work before starting medical school. “I wanted to apply all of the research skills I had learned at Yale to a project in a community that I was a part of,” said Jin.Her project on population aging and community-based care for elderly populations was to be conducted in Hangzhou, the capital city of the province she’d called home from first to fifth grade. She saw it as her chance to engage with the community near her grandparents’ hometown.

In mid-July, Jin learned of Fulbright China’s cancelation reading the news on the President’s July 14 executive order. But she wasn’t certain of the program’s termination until an official email from the Fulbright Commission confirmed her suspicions.

The email cited the President’s executive order and provided no further explanation.

Although she was disappointed, Jin wasn’t surprised by the news. She believes both governments are heading toward a complete decoupling and rejection of diplomacy. “There are a lot of ideological conflicts [between the two countries] to be dealt with seriously, but ending a program like Fulbright, which is necessary for understanding, is counterpro-

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ductive,” she said.

Joyce Wang ’17, a 2017-2018 Fulbright China participant, had loved her experience with Fulbright, during which she researched mental health outcomes for “left-behind children” in Changsha, Hunan. “People in Fulbright understand that China can be the aggressor,” said Wang. “I am so angered and disappointed by the program’s cancelation because I don’t see the point of it. I don’t know how Fulbright China’s cancelation helps the situation in Hong Kong.”

But she’s inspired by the support gathering around Fulbright. A Change.org petition imploring the President to restore the Fulbright China and Hong Kong programs has accumulated 2,379 signatures as of September 5.

This year’s cohorts of Fulbright China and Hong Kong participants have been given the option of being reassigned to a different host country and have until August 21 to submit new proposals. Jin is considering the programs in Taiwan and Singapore.

“Honestly, Fulbright brings disproportionate benefits to the U.S.,” Jin said. “In addition to academic exchange, it can use citizen diplomacy abroad to increase understanding of American culture, history and politics.”

As a Chinese-American, Jin is concerned about domestic anti-Chinese xenophobia, as well as zero-sum confrontation on the global stage. She said, “Ending Fulbright, a program meant to foster mutual understanding, it’s the ultimate sign that U.S.-China relations have reached a point of no return.”

F

rom their homes in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and New Haven, twelve Chinese students express to me that it’s getting harder for them to be in America, and to justify to themselves and others their desire to be in this country.

They are acutely aware of anti-Asian racism: every single one of them knows someone who’s experienced it. Yao mentions an incident at Pho Ketkeo,

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a Laotian and Thai restaurant on Temple Street in New Haven, where a vandal dented the restaurant owner’s car and wrecked the windshield of a server’s vehicle in April. Like the server and restaurant owner, he suspects that the vandalism was racially-motivated, part of a larger trend of anti-Asian hate crimes increasing in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic.

Li*, a third-year graduate student at the Yale School of Medicine, has been the victim of two racially-charged events in the past year. At the end of March, a passerby who encountered Li on her walk back home from East Rock yelled, “Fuck you, stupid Chinese people bringing the coronavirus here, go back to your country.” A year ago, on York Street in downtown New Haven, a man pointed at Li and exclaimed to the whole street, “A spy! A spy!”

These students were all enticed to come to the U.S. for different reasons: the promise of a liberal arts education, intellectual opportunities they weren’t exposed to at home, and a desire to broaden their horizons and see another part of the world. Now, many of them are exploring alternative plans in the event that U.S.-China relations worsen: Europe, Canada. Or simply going home.

Yao tells me that watching the two countries deepen their rift has been heartbreaking. He disagrees with many of the U.S. administration’s immigration policies, and opposes China’s recent actions against Hong Kong as well as the mass internment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

“The two countries I love, the two countries I want to make better, seem to be going the directions I abhor,” he says. “But what can I say, what can I do?

There’s an old Chinese saying that humans do their best and leave the rest to the heavens.”

—Macrina Wang is a junior in Ezra Stiles College

Design by Natasha Gaither

Illustration by Cindy Ren

POEMS

Birthday Candles

Humlum

JACK DELANEY

The white church sows gravel through the corn.

ALI BROWN

I would like to return the candy that I stole.

Mounds poke like nipples beside claimless bikes.

A child sits, unmoving.

Beads of wax drip into Illustration by Sydney Zoehrer frosting so Thick blue congeals on white, Unearthly pearls from a planet Of broken clocks and sugar. Years turn in tune, Melting off monuments in days. So quick, blow them out, They’re burning down while A child sits, unmoving.

The camp shop stares out into the wheat and changes mellow hands.

Tucked inside the cliff is a bunker full of art which only weevils see.

Runes salt the night.

One day soon we are going out to sea but the walk to water will take time and many feet.

Crabs rot in the harbor where their eggs hatch.

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Design by Natasha Gaither P E R S O N A L E S S AY

Intuition

I

t was snowing as I walked down High Street one February evening, furious. Why had I left Jonathan Edwards College so fast? Why had I known, in a split second, that I could no longer stand to be in that room?

I had just told John, my now-ex boyfriend, that I felt uncomfortable in my encounters with his friend Mark, another man. Mark and I knew each other from class freshman year. We never hung out one-on-one, but during group hangouts after dinner, or when I sat next to him during a meal, Mark would only address ideas about philosophy and theory to the man I was with.

He’d nod, if anything, in my direction, while angling his body towards the other man. If I attempted to join the conversation, he’d pretend that he didn’t hear what I said. The only time Mark showed personal interest in me was when he learned I was single. Immediately, he asked me to dinner and spent the entire night talking about sex—staring deep into my eyes, he talked about the wonder of sexual harmony, clearly trying to get me to sleep with him. As soon as I started dating someone, Mark resumed ignoring me, apart from the occasional appraising once-over of my body. I was no longer available for sex, and therefore no longer of interest to him.

Immediately after I relayed my experiences to John, he turned to our friend Alex, the other man in the room. “But I’ve never seen Mark do anything sexist,” John said. “Do you think he’s sexist?” This question, addressed to Alex, not me, was startling. Something felt off—I was talking about my experience with Mark, not John’s, and not Alex’s.

I left that room in JE before I even knew I was leaving, before I recognized that the icy feeling driving me to my feet was fury. As I crossed Elm Street and strode

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A personal essay

by Beasie Goddu

through Cross Campus, my thoughts began to crystallize. John had asked another male to validate my discomfort. There were several problems with this: first, that John doubted my feelings in the first place, and second, that he had needed confirmation from another male to confirm that my intuition—my sense, as a woman, that I was encountering sexism—was ‘correct.’

I don’t believe that men should be excluded from discussions of sexism—far from it. But neither John nor Alex had any right to decide whether my feelings were valid.

Nowadays, I know when I’m in danger, and I know when I have to leave. I know when I’m safe, and when I can let my guard down. But I wasn’t always confident in my judgement. First, I had to identify their source.

These feelings of intuition arise not from my brain but from my gut.

So what is intuition, really? For me, it precedes rationality. It manifests before I read a situation analytically.

It’s a feeling, but not an emotion. I cannot remember life without it, but it only started to feel important in adolescence, when I began to think more critically about my gender in relationship to others. At around sixteen, I was no longer able to leave my sense of female identity, and the particular intuition that came with it, at the door. When I entered a space with other people, I began to notice how they reacted to my performance of gender. Some guys looked over my whole body. I began to learn, based on their glance, whether to avoid or approach them. Over the years, this intuition has intertwined itself with my relationships with men in all the spaces I inhabit: the street, the library, parties,

apartments, parks––and yes, even in class.

I’ve always had a messy feeling about trusting my intuition, precisely because it is essentially non-rational. Non-rational instincts are out of place in a Western, scientific, largely masculine intellectual framework: therefore, choosing to trust them is an act of rebellion. Besides, I’m a very rational person. It’s hard to make friends with this inner sense that beats rationality to the chase, that fills in when rationality turns against itself or disappears.

Right up until February 2020, I would have said that intuition didn’t exist, at least not scientifically. I don’t believe in God, nor do I believe in ghosts, and, as logic goes, I shouldn’t believe in intuition. But now I’ve come to see that scientific existence is the wrong criteria for thinking about intuition. We should consider intuition within its own conceptual framework, in which case the evidence that people feel it should be enough.

“Why is ‘How are you’ the hardest question for you to answer?” John often asked me while we were together.

At the time, he was right: I found it hard to think through this question rationally, because my brain provided counter-evidence to every conclusion I came to.

How was it really possible to account for everything that might influence how I am? The truth was that John himself clouded my mind. My brain instructed me to use John as a benchmark for how I felt—that if he was okay, I was okay. But he had drastic mood swings, and I swung with them. I was never sure how much of my well-being originated from me, and how much of it came from him. Essentially, he muted my intuition.

But at the end of the day, it was this same intuition that rose up and saved me from the relationship; a rescue mission that started that February evening in JE. “What specifically did he do that was sexist?” John had asked me again and again. I listed a few things: body language, ignoring me in conversation. But, I argued, that wasn’t the point. When I was around Mark, I felt ignored. I felt objectified, and, on a good day, merely physically uncomfortable. I tried to explain to John that these feelings were intuitive.

But he kept asking me for evidence that would explain why Mark made me feel uncomfortable.

Unless I could prove that Mark did something truly reprehensible, John wouldn’t believe me. His thoughts went like this—because my intuition is non-rational (does not rely on rationality to function) it is irrational (nonsensical or absurd).

John fell into the trap of assuming that his white male experience is universal. He believed that his method of interpreting and understanding others using

rationality was the superior one, and relegated other forms of judgement to a lower tier. Intuition needed to first be translated into his vernacular for him to consent to its legitimacy.

I felt the importance of my experience shrink. Some things shouldn’t be translated; they should just be taken on their own terms. Intuition is one of them.

A few weeks after the episode in Jonathan Edwards College, my mom came to visit me at Yale. She picked me up outside Silliman College, and we left to eat at Pad Thai. I started sobbing as she pulled away from the curb. At the corner of Temple and Elm Street, she pulled over. She knew why I was so upset; she knew it was about him.

“I’m going to ask you one question,” she said. “When you think about him, do you get an icy feeling below your stomach? Does your heart go crazy, and is it hard to breathe? Does that feeling creep up into your throat?”

I nodded, mutely. How had she known?

“That’s your intuition. The feeling is fear. Many women have this sense; I’ve had it too. You have to get out of this relationship.”

I could only nod again. Far, far inside me, beyond my deep love for John, was the knowledge that my mom was right, a knowledge lodged within that very same intuition. My rationality hadn’t caught up yet. In some ways it still hasn’t, even six months since the rela-

“I believe this intuition is a foundation of my womanhood—passed down from my mother to me. In many of the infinitely different manifestations of strong womanhood, I’ve noticed this common thread—this beautiful watchdog strength.” tionship ended. But rationality is powerless against this warning from below my navel, at my innermost center, the place that feels like my axis of balance. I knew, based on John’s behavior over the past few months, that I was in some kind of danger. Thanks to my mom, I could now name the feeling itself: I chose to call it my woman’s intuition.

I believe this intuition is a foundation of my womanhood—passed down from my mother to me. In many of the infinitely different manifestations of strong womanhood, I’ve noticed this common thread—this beautiful watchdog strength.

Much of the internet (and individual male friends

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and relatives I’ve spoken with) thinks that women’s intuition is chimaera-like. They associate it with “magic,” “auras,” and (here we go down this infinite rabbit hole of sexism) “witches,” when it’s the opposite: reliable, ever-present, assertive. I believe in my intuition more than I believe in most things.

Is women’s intuition only experienced by cis women?

I’d argue that isn’t the case. I wasn’t born with this intuition. Instead, it has developed within me as a reaction to the experience of performing female gender identity. (Intuition is also influenced by many other facets of identity such as ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality, although here I concentrate on gender). Women’s intuition develops as a reflex in anyone who has experienced socialization as a woman in a patriarchal society.

It is necessary to our survival. By springing me to my feet in JE, it functioned as a seasoned defense mechanism. Later, I wished that I had stayed; I wished that I had, in the moment, told John that it was wrong to ask Alex to validate my experience. I wished that I’d stood up for myself. But I’m also proud that I left. I had to leave, it turns out, in order to realize why I should’ve stayed. I had to leave to realize that the icy feeling in my stomach was common to my mom, too––that it was an intuition we’d developed as women.

My woman’s intuition isn’t just defensive: it is also creative. It leads me to notice emotional and other non-verbal cues that men can ignore. It does not at all detract from my ability to read a situation rationally; instead, it provides another rich layer of interpretation.

“Most everything I do seems to have as much to do with intuition as with reason,” said the writer Susan Sontag.1 Intuition fosters more complex and sensitive relationships among individuals. It can help women understand other women, as well as men. When men make the choice to listen to women’s expression of their intuition, the power of it multiplies: we all have access to a more acute and sensitive understanding of the world.

Just like I had to actually leave that room to understand why that conversation had illustrated sexist conceptions of intuition, I had to exit my relationship to understand how it had controlled my worldview for the past two years. I had let myself be subsumed by it, resulting in ecstasy, despair, and an anxiety that between the two I did not actually know who I was. I had teetered on the edges of life and thought I had no time for the boring middle. I had lost my ability to relax, and with it my appetite and sleep patterns. Finally, I had takentook up meditation, not as an attempt to achieve more clarity, but as a last-ditch effort to find some kind of center amidst John’s emotional extremes and the constant 1 The Complete Rolling Stone Interview with Jonathan Cott.

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noise of my flailing rationality trying to make sense of things.

A few days after my relationship ended, the world went quiet. Waves of COVID-19 crashed over the whole world, and as I began to quarantine at home in New York City, I couldn’t fathom how much of my world and the entire world had changed all at once.

The two things I counted on most—school and my relationship—had disappeared. I didn’t think the extremes were ever going to go away; I thought the world was telling me I’d never be able to truly gauge how I felt.

At first, incredibly selfishly, I was a little glad that the chaos of the world reflected my own inner chaos.

Around May, I began to get better, and the world got a lot worse. The noise in my own head fell away and suddenly, lying in bed one night, I realized that for the first time in a very long while I knew how I was—I could just sense it. Relief washed over me. Since then, I’ve done a lot less thinking, and things have gotten simpler. If I want to do something, I do it; if I don’t, I don’t. I pay more attention to other people’s body language and the physical dynamics of interactions. If someone says they have an instinct about something, I believe them. In the age of COVID-19, respecting people’s intuitions is especially paramount, and allows me to take better care of those around me.

In the middle of August, I met up with my two friends Charlotte and Henry on a beach in Cape Cod. We were so excited to see each other after unexpected months apart that it was a while before we slowed down enough to check in with each other. “How are you?”

Charlotte asked me. I could’ve taken minutes to mentally scroll through my uncertainty about taking a year off from Yale due to COVID-19 and the varying mental well-being of people in my pod. I could’ve searched through the expressions of the other beachgoers, hoping they’d contain a clue about how I was feeling. But this time I didn’t need to. There was a warmth and a peace deep within me. I looked out at the sea, and then back at Charlotte and Henry. They really cared how I was, me, the me without John, the me who was taking a leave of absence, the me who was going into the future knowing there was one thing I could always depend on: my intuition. “I’m really good,” I said, and smiled.

“How are you?”

—Beasie Goddu is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College and a Senior Editor

CRITICAL ANGLE

Design by Rebecca Goldberg

I

NOTES TO A STUDENT ORGANIZER A former member of Black Students for Disarmament at Yale reflects on its trajectory over the past year and a half.

BRANSON RIDEAUX

n early June, Instagram stories were filled with blackedout screens and never-ending instructions on how to be “a good activist.” Yet while students scrambled for ways to get involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Students for Disarmament at Yale (BSDY) continued what they had been doing for the past year—marching on the streets of New Haven for justice and accountability with community organizers. On June 13, BSDY joined eight other organizations and over 600 students and residents in a march on the Yale Police Department, in connection with the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, but more specifically to call out Yale for the shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon in April 2019. Created in response to the April shooting, the organization was still standing a year later to protest with the New Haven community amid a pandemic.

Tiegist Tay ’22 stood in the sea of socially distanced activists who filled the streets outside of the YPD. Articulate and confident, Tay spoke through a megaphone to the crowd, despite the fact that she, like many Yale students this summer, was new to organizing. As an international student from Kenya, she was uncertain about her position in the movement; moreover, she admitted to feeling only part of the Yale community, and not New Haven, in her previous years. She was nervous and felt she didn’t know how to approach New Haven organizers. But within moments of meeting them, Tay felt overwhelmingly safe and cared for.

“It felt like I had six mothers...I found a community of black people that felt real and tangible to me, and it was the first time I had been a part of that since I left home.” said Tay. “When I joined Yale they [painted] New Haven as if any time I step out of Yale’s campus it’s some danger to me... but I have seen nothing but love and care and attention...I am sorry if for even a second I bought the racist and classist lies that were fed to me when I joined this institution“.”

By listening to and learning from New Haven Community organizers, BSDY is setting a new precedent for organizing at Yale, one that centers the voices of dedicated organizers, recreates their spaces of love and care, and challenges Yale’s responsibility to their entire community. BSDY follows the lead of New Haven organizers and passes on the knowledge and language they have gained from entering “into community” with New Haven.

Ala Ochumare, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter New Haven, and an organizer in New Haven since 2012, holds ideas of care and family at the center of her organizing. “I see in the African tradition, the diaspora of us and our culture, that, in our best instances, we move very familially.” Ochumare continued, “Community is made up of the people that I love and like and

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know and the people that I struggle with and don’t like and don’t know.”

Ochumare sees organizing as a way of recreating the spaces of care that she remembers growing up around.

When Ochumare was young she “saw black moms, women coming together, due to social economic reasons. We’d all go over to one another’s houses, the cousins, all the family’s kids, the extended family’s kids, and we all thought we were just having fun.” Ochumare began to laugh. “But in the kitchen these black women were coming together to do what we now call mutual aid—one person brought the chicken, another brought the rice, another brought the vegetables and they made it work. They fed their kids and everyone had leftovers for the next day.”

Her organizing language was not learned from just growing up black ––it came from great personal sacrifice and a willingness to learn. When Trayvon Martin was killed in the summer of 2012, she saw the toll that type of injustice took on her young son, who announced to her that he no longer wanted to be a police officer.

When she started the New Haven chapter she recalled, “I didn’t wanna keep showing up hurt and harmed and further perpetuating that hurt and harm on other black, brown, queer, differently-abled, and poor folk.”

She began with CEIO, a year-long educational program on the history of community organizing. She credits her learning to not only this program but also to the organizers she met in the classroom. An avid reader, Ochumare sourced a massive list of book recommendations from organizers like Kerry Ellington, who works with People Against Police Brutality, Norman Clemente and Chris Garaffa, from Connecticut Bail Fund, Rhonda Caldwell and Justin Farmer who hold public office, and others from around the state that would be important relationships for her years of organizing to come. Eight years later and Ochumare is still attending educational programs and has created her own anti-rascist workshops.

Something that motivated Ochumare to dedicate so much time to education was encountering the important distinction between “activist” and “organizer”.

When we spoke, Ochumare identified with motherhood, magic, healing, and queerness just as much as she did the title of “organizer,” explaining that “activism and organizing are two different lived experiences that are dependent on each other.” She described activism as the first step, like attending a protest, calling a local representative, or writing about an issue; all of this is being, in some sense, activated.

“Organizing is the next step past activation, it’s galvanization—the sharing of education, creating small spaces, sharing language, recreating language, doing

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"We are here for four years...there are people who have been here before us and will be here after us, so the number one thing we can do is listen to them and support them..." the one on ones, the phone calls, the interviews, et cetera,” Ochumare continued. She noted that this distinction does not separate the activist and the organizer, but instead calls attention to the sacrifice organizers make in the fight for social justice. They not only organize others; they educate themselves, and they are constantly at work in the background of every movement.

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s students, the role of organizing comes with its own set of difficulties. As Zoe Hopson, an organizer and junior at Yale, explained: “You need to plan out every single detail of a protest, even if you have an exam the next day. If we can’t figure out how to get people to x, y, or z, there’s not gonna be a presence or a protest. Organizing would be a lot easier if we knew why Yale was saying no; it’s really frustrating to be doing all this work, and [there’s the] potential for Yale to ignore it and just be waiting us out.”

Some people view Yale as a closed ecosystem, saying that the University rarely has to answer to the New Haven community despite its position as the largest land-owner and employer in New Haven and the owner of the Yale Police Department, which has jurisdiction over the entire New Haven area. “If Yale is gonna have such a huge presence in New Haven and such an intrusive presence, the community needs to have more of a say in what’s going on and have more access to the resources and things that we students have,” Hopson said.

This relationship between Yale and New Haven further complicates the role of activism at the University.

“I think Yale students were really good at forcing help on New Haven and not asking what they needed.” said Hopson. “Disarmament was something that was voiced

by New Haven. We are using our privilege and our

resources to get that need met. This is an organization where we get all our energy, all of our ideas, all our collaboration, all of our power from the New Haven community and we do what they want.” She added that when planning actions like their recent online teachins, or the protests in June, BSDY reached out to organizers to plan and collaborate.

For BSDY board member and Yale junior Isaac Yearwood, there is a clear reason why these organizers should be centered in the conversation: “We are here for four years... there are people who have been here before us and will be here after us, so the number one thing we can do is listen to them and support them and do everything in accordance with what’s best for them.”

As BSDY heads into the new school year, Hopson says the organization is looking to collaborate with other college campuses in Connecticut and national organizations to form coalitions. It is also working to finalize multiple written reports, including a proposal to the Yale administration explaining how their new demands could be implemented. Jaelen King ’22, another board member, is excited to take to the streets with New Haven now that school has resumed. “With COVID-19, of course our first priority is keeping people safe, so we really have to get creative. But the goal is to keep pushing and pro-

Photo from Branson Rideaux

viding pressure.”

Hopson, Yearwood, and King have all been involved in BSDY since its founding last April and as rising juniors, have taken on leadership roles. Over the past year, they have learned from New Haven community leaders and grown as organizers themselves. King, who serves as the executive director, centered the idea of person-to-person connection.

“Sometimes principles and ideas get lost, but at the end of the day we are fighting for this individual person to be able to live and be happy,” he said. King also said that he has learned how women of color and queer/ trans folk of color have led the movement both nationally and in New Haven. “It’s really powerful to watch black women especially be centered and the leaders of this movement,” Hopson added. “I want to mirror that on campus—where black women’s voices are being heard and listened to and respected.”

“New Haven organizers have taught me how to love and how to love unconditionally in the face of absolute rejection,” Yearwood said. The action chair of BSDY, Yearwood has taken what he has learned from organizers and combined it with his experience in Yale’s Educational Studies program, organizing online teach-ins open to Yale students, New Haven residents, and any-

The early days of BSDY organizing.

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one following BSDY on social media.

He said of these events: “The most beautiful part is seeing the passion people put into research—you see people owning this information making it personal, making it their own so when they give it to someone else they can do that as well.” As conversations around police abolition and defunding enter mainstream conversation, he sees education becoming an increasingly important part of BSDY and the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole.

Callie Benson-Williams ’23, the finance director of BSDY, is excited for what’s to come. “I feel like 2 months ago no one would have thought defunding the police was a realistic idea at all,” she said. “Police abolition is something I learned from the New Haven activists we worked with. Even before the recent push for that, New Haven activists were talking about police abolition, prison abolition.”

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et as much as the BSDY is looking towards the future, its founding as an organization is inextricably tied to recognizing the work of organizers that came before, specifically the work of black women and black queer folk, both at Yale and in New Haven.

After the shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon, Kerry Ellington came to the Afro-American Cultural Center and recounted her own long fight against an unjust act of violence over two years prior.

In 2017, fifteen-year old Jayson Negron was shot four times at point blank range by Bridgeport Police officer James Boulay. Despite a year of intense organizing and fighting by Kerry Ellington and the Connecticut organization People Against Police Brutality, the Bridgeport police cleared the officer of all charges. Ellington connected the feelings of outrage BSDY had to the shooting of Stephanie and Paul with her lived experience as an organizer.

On the student level, BSDY benefited from the experience of student organizers involved in NextYale back in 2015, an organization of primarily black and POC women of Yale who organized in response to the actions of what some POC on campus called the “Racepocalypse.” In 2019, NextYale organizers Nia Berrain ’19, Erika Lopez ’19, Maya Jenkins ‘19 and alum Eli Ceballo-Countryman ‘18 led BSDY’s initial conversations in the Afro-American Cultural Center. “This is how I’ve seen the class of 2018, 2017, 2015 do things, and I know exactly the language they used to get people together,” Berrain recalled.

At the time that BSDY started, the Yale semester was also at its typically chaotic end. “I don’t remember studying for finals because most of my nights were

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"New Haven organizers have taught me how to love and how to love unconditionally in the face of absolute rejection."

Isaac Yearwood '22 Action Chair of BSDY

spent in the house organizing; every other day there was another thing to do,” Hopson said. In April of 2019, BSDY collected and delivered over 1,000 complaints to YPD, marched with Kerry Ellington and other community activists, and joined Hamden and New Haven residents in demanding accountability from their own police departments and cities. “In the midst of turmoil, pain, and suffering and a lot of people going through things emotionally, mentally, and physically, we used those emotions as a rallying cry,” Yearwood recalled.

Days before the term ended, an assistant to President Salovey emailed BSDY and invited them to meet with the President’s Taskforce on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. “That’s not who we were trying to speak out to,” King recalled in response. “We weren’t just trying to

improve campus life for black students, we were trying to improve the New Haven community overall because the YPD are terrorizing the New Haven Community.”

The students who were part of NextYale had seen this response before. After a NextYale protest during an admitted students event in 2016, another subcommittee called the “President’s Task Force” was created and invited members from the organizing group to join. NextYale’s members recalled that this committee was quietly dissolved and no real action was taken. After the #sleepingwhileblack incident in 2018, when a white student called YPD on a black graduate student who was sleeping in a common room, Yale created another President’s Task Force.

Recent Yale Law School graduate Samantha Grayman, who led graduate and professional students during the April organizing effort, said the students in BSDY might have been blindsided, had they not known the history of Yale’s previous responses to student-led organizing.

“The school will often promise certain things, students get pulled into all these meetings with the president, the president writes a letter, all these performative things, and then a year later nothing changes,” she described.

“When people waste their time with the performative thing, they forget that the institution, regardless of your allegiance or attachment to it, has done, unfortunately, some great harm to the New Haven community...and has an intentional process of separating students from the community.”

BSDY declined the meeting with the President’s Taskforce and reconnected with the New Haven organizing community when school resumed in the fall of 2019. “At the end of the day the whole reason BSDY was started was to support community activists and organizers,” King said. “So as the fall came, I was trying to check in, see what people were doing, how they were organizing.” When in October, New Haven, Hamden, and Yale fell short of demands that local organizers had drafted, BSDY’s members held press conferences, attended police commission meetings, and protested alongside community activists.

Now, over a year later, members of BSDY have been continuing their community relationships, and, on a personal level, have grown them into real friendships.

During their interviews, Ochumare and Tay separately recounted running into each other at Stop & Shop.

There was joy in their voices as they described the warm feeling of seeing a friend in the often lonely time of quarantine.

King hopes these person-to-person relationships continue to drive the organizing, anticipating a time when community organizers can get meals with students in dining halls, or when they can meet on or off campus

and hang out informally as friends as well as fellow organizers.

Ochumare also hopes students will continue to enter into the community, and she can see very concrete ways to make that happen. “Get involved in some of the work I’m doing around educational equity, go to the legislative building when we’re doing statewide work, figure out ways to create economic reparations at Yale and spread those funds among grassroots organizations in New Haven, do the flyering for our back to school drives, do membership drives for People Against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter New Haven, and intern at places like City-Wide Youth Coalition for free,” she listed. “Do the extra labor that would allow people like me to continue to be in all the spaces that I’m in.”

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t times, activism at Yale can feel the way activism on social media felt this summer—self-aggrandizing, cathartic, and ultimately in a vacuum. As a black student, I found it particularly difficult to live with the concept of the “Yale bubble”, to be around residents that look like me, in a place that should feel like home, and yet be led to believe that I am somehow astronomically different from those around me. The mirage of the “Yale bubble” has always caused internal dissonance in me and in others—and yet there’s real action we can do to challenge this concept. I believe every student who enters into community with New Haven will gain a valuable education, unique friendships, and powerful memories—all the things we hope to get out of our time in college. These community organizers deserve our support, our collaboration, and to have their own voices heard; as students, we can do more than protest with New Haven—we can give New Haveners a seat at the table they have been excluded from since Yale’s founding three hundred years ago. If the Yale bubble exists, it is only because we as students have not realized the immense power we have to not only step out of that bubble, but to destroy it entirely.

—Branson Rideaux is a member of the class of 2020

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CRITICAL ANGLE

LEFT OUT IN THE COLD Non-tenure-track faculty at Yale with expiring contracts find themselves jobless during the pandemic.

by Mirilla Zhu

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or Timothy Kreiner, a lecturer in Yale’s English department, the second Wednesday of April began just like any other quarantine morning. From a sparsely furnished room in his East Rock apartment, he opened up the Zoom for his Directed Studies class and watched his students tile his screen as they logged in from all across the world.

Time zone differences and pandemic stressors were all but forgotten as they debated the merits of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, exchanging ideas as freely as they had within the oak-panelled walls of Linsly-Chittenden Hall.

But Nietzsche wasn’t the only thing on Kreiner’s mind as he watched the conversation unfold—the university had just announced a hiring freeze that left the employment status of instructional faculty uncertain in the midst of a global pandemic.

The message arrived in Kreiner’s inbox the previous afternoon, with the same blue heading that had come to distinguish all official communication from the Provost’s office. Following other universities across the country, the email declared that Yale would be extending the university-wide hiring freeze that had been enacted at the onset of COVID-19 into the summer of 2021. The hiring freeze didn’t affect tenure-track faculty, who had recently been given a one-year extension on their tenure clocks, but it was less clear what it meant for instructional faculty employed on short-term contracts like Kreiner. “Technically, what happens for those of us on one-year contracts is our contract ends, and then we get hired anew,” Kreiner told me. “Because of the hiring freeze, nobody could say whether that was going to happen at all.”

With his contract set to expire at the end of June, Kreiner had to act quickly. Together with three colleagues in the humanities, he drafted a petition requesting the same one-year contract extension for lecturers that the university had granted to tenure-track faculty in March. “Faculty on expiring contracts are compelled to apply for jobs that have never been so scarce,” the lecturers wrote. “These acts could literally be lifesav-

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ing.” By the time they submitted the petition to President Salovey and Provost Strobel on April 17th, they had gathered 875 signatures from students, researchers, and faculty members across the university.

Two days later, Dean Gendler announced that contract renewals for instructional faculty would be determined on an individual basis—essentially the opposite of what Kreiner and his colleagues had requested. Though Salovey and Strobel thanked them for their petition, they too remained silent on the possibility of a universal extension. But at the end of April, the administration appeared to change course, declaring that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) would be issuing reappointment letters to “every instructional faculty member who had been part of [their] curricular planning prior to COVID-19.”

In some ways, the announcement was a “complete oneeighty” from the case-by-case renewals that were previously announced.

Still, it was not the universal extension the lecturers called for. The policy excluded the nearly eight hundred instructional faculty who taught in Yale’s other professional schools, and even within the FAS, it didn’t specify who had been included in the pre-pandemic planning.

“I don’t want to minimize the gain because it probably meant that a lot fewer people were let go than might have been otherwise,” Kreiner said. “But on an individual level, what it really amounted to saying is, ‘We won’t fire you if we hadn’t already planned to fire you.’ And no one knew who Yale planned to fire.” ***

“But on an individual level, what it really amounted to saying is, ‘We won’t fire you if we hadn’t already planned to fire you.’” And no one knew who Yale planned to fire.”

Among the individuals whose contracts had been terminated was Aaron Carico, a lecturer in the American Studies department who had drafted the petition with Kreiner. When I spoke with him at the end of June, he didn’t strike me as the typical bookish academic—he beamed from behind his pale pink glasses as he told me about the two nights he spent at New York’s “Occupy City Hall” encampment as part of the nationwide protests against police brutality.

In some respects, Carico had been the ideal candidate for a career in academia. After earning his PhD in American Studies from Yale in 2012, he had held prestigious fellowships at Princeton and the University of Illinois before returning to Yale in 2015, when he had begun

Design by Annli Nakayama

teaching on a yearly contract. Just before he learned in the spring of 2019 that his contract for the 2019-2020 school year couldn’t be extended, he had landed a book deal with the University of North Carolina Press. “Having a book come out is the key to unlocking tenure for a lot of folks,” Carico said. “For me, it was when I would be kicked out of the job.”

Like many of his non-tenure-track colleagues, Carico received no explanation for why his employment at Yale was ending. “Don’t take it personally,” his department chair told him, “It’s not a departmental thing.”

He explained that the hiring decisions for instructional faculty were made by the deans of each respective school based on factors like course demand and budgeting constraints, directly contradicting what Carico had often been told as a graduate student in the same department. “All the professors said that if you did all the right things, you would land one of these plum positions,” Carico recalled.

For Ruth Koizim, who has worked as a lecturer in the French department since 1983, the contingency of non-tenure-track faculty has been a defining feature of her time at Yale. (She doesn’t like to use the phrase ‘instructional faculty’ because it was a term “awarded to [them] by the administration.”) Even before COVID19, the employment of lecturers was dependent upon the whims of the administration, shaped largely by economic factors outside their control. Koizim described what happened in the early 2000s, when Yale expanded its selection of language programs and caused enrollments to drop across all courses in her department.

“Nobody’s going to say a word about the professor whose class has three students and a teaching assistant,” she said. “But the lecturer, who over multiple semesters has three kids a section, that person is going to be low-hanging fruit. At a certain point, the students will be voting with their feet.”

But the pandemic raised the stakes even higher for non-tenure-track faculty, particularly for those on expiring contracts. The hiring freezes implemented at universities across the country meant that it was nearly impossible to get an interview for another position, let alone a job offer. When April 27th came around and Carico saw that the petition’s request for a universal contract extension wouldn’t be granted, he realized he was likely facing the end of his academic career. “I had known all year and had been preparing for my contract to end,” he said. “But in the midst of a pandemic and, you know, the second Great Depression, Yale and its largess could have done something to ensure that we aren’t without healthcare or a paycheck while everything is going to shit.”

Two weeks after he learned that Carico and another colleague would be losing their jobs, Kreiner reflected on his experience organizing the petition at a virtual teach-in hosted by the Endowment Justice Coalition.

(The second lecturer declined to be interviewed for the article, citing the need to preserve their mental health.)

Sitting behind the same desk from which he had taught his Directed Studies sections, he questioned whether there was anything worth saving in a system of higher education that placed its financial security above the needs of its teaching staff. For Kreiner and many other lecturers, it had come to the point where their situation’s precarity made it impossible to fully commit to the work they had signed up to do. “The vast majority of undergraduate education is now being performed by people who don’t know whether they’re going to be on campus after next year,” he said. “If we have to spend our time looking for other jobs and worrying when our next contract ends, that comes at the cost of things that need to be thought through with online education.”

For Kreiner, the outlook seemed bleak. Even though he had managed to survive the initial round of budget cuts, his employment was contingent upon the more severe measures the university would inevitably take in the coming years. But the teach-in also offered a more positive vision for what the future of academic discourse could be. The free-flowing dialogue that took place between participants after Kreiner finished speaking was exactly the kind of experience that universities charged a premium for, but it occurred without any institutional involvement at all. In a sense, it answered Kreiner’s question in the affirmative by demonstrating that there were in fact elements of higher education worth saving—but that they didn’t have to exist exclusively within the walls of the university.

Perhaps Carico had realized this by the time we spoke in June, which would explain why he was so energized after returning from the protests despite being newly unemployed. While he hadn’t yet found a job to make ends meet, he had several ideas for what he wanted to do next—maybe mental health advocacy or social work, and certainly something that would allow him to keep writing. “I don’t regret my decision to go into academia—while you’re able to keep a foothold there, it’s a really rewarding and magnetic place,” he said. “It’s just that there’s a very sharp drop off a cliff at the end.” Now, at the bottom of the cliff, he was discovering just how much had been waiting for him.

- Mirilla Zhu is a junior in Saybrook College.

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SNAPSHOT

HEALING FROM HOME

By Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

New Haven’s low income, uninsured, and migrant communities shoulder the burden of extra mental health challenges during the pandemic.

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fter shuffling through some pages, Dr. Michelle Silva found the passage she was looking for. “Trauma waits for stillness,” she read. Silva is a clinical psychologist at the Hispanic Clinic of the Connecticut Mental Health Center. The bookshelves in her office—packed with clinical files, tomes of Sigmund Freud and Ignacio Martín-Baró, refugee children’s books, and novels like American Dirt, from which she had just read—neatly framed her Zoom background. “Usually, people can find ways to cope and keep busy,” she said. “But isolation can be stillness in some ways—a forced stillness.” As a psychologist with an interest in attachment theory and liberation psychology, which engages with themes like systemic oppression in marginalized communities, Silva wondered how the current pandemic would complicate an already challenging mental health epidemic.

Quarantine, lockdown, and self-isolation, while essential to viral disease control, can be deleterious for mental health. Humans are social creatures, and the pandemic is forcing people to act against their survival instincts—to turn away from others. A recent epidemiological review by Dr. Mahbub Hossain and colleagues reported that those quarantining in isolation suffer greater levels of anxiety, depression, trauma, and other adverse mental health outcomes.

On March 23, Governor Ned Lamont issued a statewide stay-at-home order. By early summer, New Haven schools and universities emptied. The streets were quiet, the silence broken only by police cars and their projected bilingual recordings of Mayor Justin Elicker urging people to social distance and wash their hands in both English and Spanish. Almost six months later, Connecticut’s consistent and precautious COVID-19 response has placed it among three other states that are ‘on track’ to contain the virus. But the social and psychological repercussions of an indefinite pandemic

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have taken their toll. Although reports like those from Mental Health America rank Connecticut among the states with best overall mental well-being, the pandemic has had a deeper impact on the mental health of New Haven’s low-income, uninsured, and migrant populations, who already disproportionately endure psychosocial stressors.

The pandemic and the economic downturn it catalyzed have incited skyrocketing rates of unemployment, income loss, and food and housing insecurity. Within the New Haven Latin American community that the Hispanic Clinic serves, legal status and loss of community only exacerbates patients’ daily trials. “When we think about legal status,” said Silva, “there’s a real investment, in the current context, for them to try to keep a low profile and remain invisible if they can. The pandemic has heightened that sense of separation, of isolation, and been really, really challenging for people.”

Even procedures like contact tracing, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has signaled as a key factor in slowing the spread of COVID-19, pose a perceived risk among undocumented immigrants seeking treatment. A phone call asking an undocumented person whom they have been in contact with may force them to choose between their public health duty and their family’s security. Having to grapple with a choice between one’s health and legal status, on top of everyday financial stressors, can be an anxiogenic experience.

For Silva, seeing her patients struggle with these issues is particularly personal. Born to Ecuadorian immigrants in Connecticut, she grew up speaking Spanish and English. However, with her bilinguality came responsibility. Her mother has a chronic medical condition, and Silva often had to interpret interactions with doctors and medical staff. “Doing that cultural brokering and being the oldest of two,” she said, “I very early on had experiences of what it feels like to try to access services, particularly health services and insurance, not knowing the language, and being constrained by things like medical insurance.” She feels that this has made

Design by Natasha Gaither her more sensitive to the realities of some of her clients.

“For me, the human connection and the development of interpersonal relationships [is] really important,” she said. After discovering a passion for psychology in high school and “sticking to it” through a master’s and a doctoral degree, Silva feels she “get[s] to combine the personal with the professional in this work. I get to work with the immigrant population and, at the same time, address mental health-related concerns that [...] impact very much people’s overall wellbeing.”

The uncertainty of the pandemic only complicates many patients’ access to medical care. Because many members of the Latin American community in New Haven have low socioeconomic status, they often do not have the luxury of working from home at a socially distanced desk. “This is one more piece, one more stressor,” said Silva. “It’s clearly highlighted the disparities that exist in the system for ethnic minority communities. […] They are the essential workforce, having to go in and work.”

As disclosed by DataHaven in 2019, 94 percent of people in the Greater New Haven area have health insurance. However, for communities disproportionately suffering from mental health issues during the pandemic, having access to adequate and affordable mental health care can be extremely difficult. In 2017, Milliman, a leading consulting firm specializing in insurance and health care, released a damning report stating that Connecticut had some of the nation’s worst disparities for affordable mental heath care access.

Insurance companies denied patients’ insurance claims for mental health treatment at a higher rate than physical health treatment. Out-of-network patient visits are ten times more likely for behavioral health concerns than those for physical ones.

Sean Scanlon, Representative from the 98th district in the Connecticut General Assembly, took it upon himself to right this wrong. His landmark bill, the Mental Health Parity Act (House Bill No. 7125), went into effect in January 2020. It requires insurance companies to treat mental and physical health claims indiscriminately and to submit an annual report for accountability. Although it’s too early to say if it’s working, Scanlon said, he is optimistic because “whenever somebody is watching, people act differently.” According to him, insurance is one of the greatest reasons why people with mental illnesses do not get treatment—a trend that began in the 1960s.

When private insurance was established after World War II, said Scanlon, “the standard practice [for mental illness] was still, ‘Let’s institutionalize these people.

Let’s put them in this big facility and throw away the key.’” After a wave of psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the 1960s brought about outpatient mental health care, insurance companies didn’t cover it. “Only the people who had money could afford to access that [care]. Everyone else was either becoming homeless, living in shelters, or struggling with substance use disorders because they’re using drugs to cope with the fact that they have an untreated mental illness,” Scanlon said.

These patterns of stigma and neglect deeply influenced Scanlon’s family and his professional life. “My

Rep. Scanlon introducing his landmark bill to the Connecticut General Assembly.

father, who is no longer alive, struggled with alcohol addiction in his life, and I saw that up close,” he explained. “I saw that folks like my dad are often the kind of folks we like to sweep under the rug and pretend don’t exist and don’t talk about.”

When Scanlon was elected in 2014, soon after the beginning of the third wave of the opioid epidemic, he focused on reform and destigmatization. “I’ve seen addiction and understand the damage that it causes and the fact that it’s a disease and not a [moral] shortcoming,” he said. For Scanlon, mental health and substance use has always been a personal issue, “and it’s a personal issue to one in four people in [the U.S.].”

The pandemic provides a major stress test for Scanlon’s bill. The Elm City has seen over one hundred deaths related to the virus and almost three thousand more infections, but for the overwhelming majority of the population, the greatest impact on their lives will not be physical. It will be mental. “For people who have substance use disorder [or other mental health conditions] and haven’t been able to get their treatment or see their provider,” argued Scanlon, “[the added] stress

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of this virus or perhaps the stress of losing your job could manifest itself in a relapse.” If someone living in New Haven is dealing with mental illness and is both unemployed and uninsured, the chance of them seeing a clinician to help them cope with their trauma is often “next to none.”

It is precisely this population—unemployed and uninsured individuals—that organizations like HAVEN Free Clinic seek to serve. HAVEN is a student-run clinic that provides all of its patients with medical, legal, and social services, including behavioral health care, completely free of charge. Although it is student-run, a panel of professional advisors supervises each department to minimize patient harm and ensure that the rigorous standards are met.

Crystal Ruiz, a second-year Masters of Public Health candidate in Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, is one of the co-directors of

“For people who have substance use disorder [or other mental health conditions] and haven’t been able to get their treatment or see their provider, the stress of this virus or perhaps the stress of losing your job could manifest itself in a relapse.”

—Representative Sean Scanlon the clinic’s Behavioral Health Department, or BHD, a relatively new addition to HAVEN. “Because HAVEN serves a population predominantly made up of Spanish-speaking refugee immigrants,” remarked Ruiz, “it became clear that they were struggling with a lot of trauma, a history of traumatic events that they didn’t have any outlet for.”

It can sometimes take months to see a mental health professional, said Ruiz. But at HAVEN, people “can come in and request an appointment with us weekly, and we can see them a lot sooner. If they do require a higher level of care, then we refer them to one of our partnering institutions like the Hispanic Clinic,” Ruiz explained. BHD’s volunteer training program reflects its goal of providing more accessible care. The department is inspired by Indian psychiatrist Vikram Patel’s philosophy of making up for a dearth of mental health services by training community members as “lay practitioners” to deliver psychosocial interventions for mild mental health issues.

This commitment to community engagement is at the core of both Ruiz’s work at HAVEN and her studies

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at the School of Public Health. After switching from an undergraduate program in biochemistry to one in medical anthropology, she was “exposed to a lot of the intersectionality that is present in health care,” which encouraged her to learn about “why certain immigrant and refugee communities develop, not necessarily mental disorders, but adopt behaviors that create opportunities for harm.”

Her academic interests, along with a desire to find community within a school that does too little for the underserved populations in New Haven, drew her to HAVEN. In a city where 44 percent of Latinos either received postponed care or no care at all for a health condition in 2018, Ruiz is disappointed that she always sees the impetus coming from students. Given that Yale is a predominantly white institution, however, she is not surprised. “It was just weird being presented with a really amazing opportunity—studying at the School of Public Health—but then not being able to contribute anything to the community.” Considering the amount of physical and economic resources that Yale takes from New Haven, Ruiz wanted to find a way to give back, and one of those outlets was through HAVEN. “I thought it was great because our main population is Spanish-speaking. They’re usually Latinx [community] members, and that’s [...] my community, who I identify with. Being able to provide direct care to people in my community makes me feel like I’m back at home.”

Insurance and a shortage of mental health services aren’t the only limiting factors to accessing care, however. Many living in low-income communities, Silva mentioned, also have unequal or sparse access to technology, which is especially harmful during a pandemic when mental health care has gone virtual. “Challenges include whether our patients even have access to WiFi,” Ruiz started, “if they have a phone that has the capacity to support Zoom or support video conferencing, if they have unlimited versus limited minutes, if they have access to a quiet space to discuss some of their personal medical concerns.”

Both Silva and Ruiz supervised a transition to telehealth due to the ongoing pandemic. While HAVEN’s IT team was able to quickly set up HIPAA-compliant communications systems for the clinic as soon as Governor Lamont hinted that clinics would have to close, virtual health care presents a new set of problems. “It’s very hard to see certain signs and symptoms via a laptop or a phone screen,” Ruiz said. Some changes in therapy have been more prominent. Silva recalls that, in recent sessions, “a lot of our time was spent on just checking in on people coping with COVID: Do they physically

have any symptoms? [Are they] social distancing, mask wearing, [following] all the precautions? [...] We’re still trying to find the balance between that piece plus their ongoing treatment goals.”

Stigma surrounding mental health, especially in Hispanic immigrant communities, poses a significant challenge to providing effective virtual care through

Students consult with a professor at the HAVEN clinic.

the Behavioral Health Department. State-mandated isolation and social distancing measures mean patients spend more time at home with their families, which makes talking about mental health issues more complicated. In Silva’s practice, many patients “enjoy coming to treatment and leaving their homes because a lot of their stress is related to their home environment.” The privacy and freedom to talk in the office is no longer there, which limits how much progress patients make on their treatment plans. At HAVEN, this manifests itself in limited responses on the questionnaires used to screen for symptoms of psychopathology: “There are some things you don’t feel comfortable saying around other individuals,” Ruiz mentioned. “Much of the time when they’re answering our questionnaires, they’ll limit their responses to yes, no, yes, no [...]. They don’t feel very comfortable with elaborating and providing further information.” Ruiz sounded tired over Zoom. After a long day of classes, coordinating BHD meetings, and participating in clinic-wide subcommittees for research and departmental enhancement projects, she understood that her clients were likely also overworked and still trying to adapt to the new telehealth system.

through, the city has slowly come back to life. Over the summer, a socially distant Wooster Square Farmers’ Market reopened, and medical students handing out surgical masks joined the protests against anti-Black police violence. At the Hispanic Clinic, Silva’s team modified an in-person group program with twice-a-week, threehour meetings for Zoom. “Once we were able to use Zoom to get the group going again, they advocated for stuff like more time and more frequent meetings,” said Silva. “There were definitely some bumps along the way, [...] but once they got connected, they absolutely loved it.” No matter the circumstances, people need to feel connected to each other. For Silva, there was a clear lesson learned: “Even if there is some discomfort in the process—like the technology piece—they’re willing to put up with that, to follow through with their treatment.”

Humans are naturally social creatures, but the pandemic has shown that they are adaptable, too. However, as the pandemic continues to rage throughout the country, mental health will not just be a priority— for many, it will become a necessity for survival.

In the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, survivors experienced significant increases in sleeping disturbances, depression, and trouble coping with everyday life for years after the pandemic’s end, Norwegian historical demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund conservatively noted in 2003. Psychiatric hospitalizations also saw an unexpected rise in first-time patient admissions in the following years. If past pandemic responses have any bearing on the future, current epidemiological trends show cause for concern. “Anxiety is way up, depression is way up, suicidal thoughts are way up, [and] using is way up,” said Scanlon. While it’s too soon to understand how much COVID-19 will affect mental health, one thing Scanlon knows for certain is that the psychological ramifications of the pandemic will persist well after we have a vaccine.

—Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits is a senior in Trumbull College and an Associate Editor.

Despite the uncertainty New Haven is wading

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F E AT U R E

Librex et Veritas

By Kapp Singer

A student’s app ignites a fierce debate over anonymity and freedom of speech.

S

itting on my parents’ orange couch while scrolling through Librex one afternoon, I came upon a post entitled “African-American and Ethnicity studies are bullshit.” Tapping on this title, I opened the post, which described how these fields of study are “designed to lure unsuspecting poc…. by majoring in these, students gain no practical skills” and become trapped in “the cycle of poverty.”

The post had garnered a significant number of upvotes that day, so Librex—an anonymous discussion forum exclusively for Ivy League students à la Reddit or YikYak—brought it to the top of my feed.

Responses ranged from firm endorsements—“This is a take I can firmly agree with.”—to dismissive opposition—“Nah you can find a great job no matter what you major in.”

The mission of Librex (“‘Libr’ for libre [as in free], ‘ex’ for exchange”) is to “democratize college discourse and create a space for honest open discussion about what’s going on in your campus community,” per the app’s website. Ryan Schiller ’21, the founder of Librex and currently the only full-time employee, released his product on iOS in September 2019.

Today, the app boasts around 11,000 registered users, 3,200 of which are active daily, spending over an hour on average perusing posts and messaging others (though I recently came upon a post confessing a five-

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hour Librex binge). An Ivy League .edu email address is required to log on to the platform, and once inside, the user is greeted by an infinite scroll of posts.

In an effort to understand the motives behind controversial content on the platform, I matched with the student who wrote the post. On the app, users can send private messages to the author of a specific post or comment.

Only identified by the Librex UI’s pill-shaped badges for each school, the Harvard student explained, “So my post is what we call ‘bait’ here on Librex. It’s definitely not my true thoughts. I’m just happy a lot of people have taken the bait. Although, I’m shocked some people support this.” Eager to incite a reaction, stir up the comments section, and amass attention, people bait all across the internet—this isn’t by any stretch a feature or quirk of Librex. But I was shocked by how shamelessly this person owned up to it.

“So you don’t actually believe any of this stuff?” I asked to clarify.

“No I think it’s dumb. I’m black and double major in African American studies. Just thought it’d be interesting to see what people thought. I also don’t argue with the comments. I’m more interested in seeing how it plays out.” Reticent to disclose even their name’s first initial for fear of being identified, the user vanished back into the app’s anonymous mist after just a few more

Design by Brian Chang questions.

Taking this Harvard student at their word, the post would fall in the category of well-intentioned baiting.

But they just as easily could have lied to me, aiming to be a hurtful troll the whole time. In the end, does the intention even matter when everything is anonymous?

On any given day, Librexers—this is what they call themselves—discuss politics (“Renaming the past”), imposter syndrome (“How is everyone so put together and so far ahead already???”), and sex (“I’ve never had an orgasm”). They express their worries (“My dad is in the operating room rn”) and ask critically important logistical questions (“Is toads closed forever?”), but between the banal is a world that much more closely resembles the digital fringes. Schiller acknowledges that “any time there is anonymous discourse among thousands of people, there will be users who don’t contribute positively to the discussion.” But how does Librex decide what stays and what goes? What is useful, what is hurtful, what is truthful? And who makes the decisions? *** In a February 2020 interview with the Yale Herald, Schiller explained that he felt “isolated and alienated” after his sophomore year, often wondering if others would judge him for ideas brought up in class. He wanted to give students a space where they could air sensitive thoughts without the fear of being called out.

Today, Schiller seems much more comfortable expressing his views on controversial topics. Casually, he revealed to me his belief in the state of Israel (“I’m a big religious Jew. I’m also a big Zionist”), which he surely knows could be an unpopular stance on Yale’s left-leaning campus.

But for those who can’t sit so openly and confidently with their ideas, Schiller brought forth a solution. A Math and Global Affairs double major without any coding skills, he googled his way through every question over the summer of 2019—“how do you make an iOS app,” “how do you get it on the Apple Store”—and ended up with a basic framework for the application.

Along the way, he temporarily sought others to help him with development, outreach, and design.

The app’s user base stayed small for a while, with around 100 daily active users in February 2020, but steadily grew as Schiller expanded piece by piece to the rest of the Ivy League—from Yale he moved to Dartmouth, then came the rest.

As COVID-19 hit, kicking students off campus and sending them home, Librex blew up. The platform teemed with discussion about how schools would respond to the virus, when or even if students could go back to campus, and what Zoom classes would look like.

A contentious point of debate on Librex at this time was about whether or not Yale should enact a universal pass (UP) policy to accommodate the immense range of learning environments at home. Over the phone, Schiller praised the platform for providing a place for “people [who] didn’t feel like they could speak on their opinions [on UP]” publicly. But this open debate, though occasionally productive, also included derisive digs. After Yale converted all classes to pass/fail, a post appeared on Librex and subsequently made the rounds on Facebook and Twitter that simply read “congrats poor people.”

In late May the Twitter account @LibrecksApp emerged. The account owner reposts screenshots of offensive posts on the platform, mocking Librex’s generous content moderation and circulating especially offensive or off-color posts. At the same time, content moderation entered the national discourse when, on May 26th, Twitter fact-checked the President for the first time by placing a label below his erroneous claims that mail-in ballots lead to voter fraud. In the following weeks, Twitter continued to place warnings on the President’s tweets, attaching a notice of violation of Twitter’s content policy for “glorifying violence” over his incendiary re-invocation of the phrase “when the looting starts the shooting starts.” The question arose, where does a social media platform end and a publication begin?

It’s a debate that may never be resolved. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Susan Wocjicki (YouTube), and Steve Huffman (Reddit) are constantly weighing decisions on this question, and some have taken more drastic steps than others. In late June, Huffman banned over 2,000 subreddits including the massive Trump-focused thread “The_Donald” in accordance with a new content policy of no hate on Reddit, whereas Zuckerberg has favored inaction, stating that Facebook won’t be “arbiters of truth.” Many Librexers expressed frustration to me about large social media companies. One anonymous user told me, “I used to love Reddit, but then they caved to the mob” and have now moved to Librex for its anonymity and looser moderation policies. *** Librex is moderated according to three simple rules: “Be legal: No spam, threats, or darknet type stuff;” “Be a mensch: No targeting individual students or professors (excluding public figures);” and “Be specific: No sweeping statements about core identity groups.”

If a post breaks the rules, it’s removed. Repeat offenses or an especially egregious transgression: the user is banned. In theory, it’s a simple rubric.

But stark lines quickly become blurry, black and white turning to a mute grey—a post rarely fits neatly

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into this scant set of guidelines. This is where the moderation gets fun, S. told me.

S., a junior at Princeton, has been a Librex moderator since April. He entered the volunteer role after responding to a Librex posting by Schiller advertising open moderator positions (posts made by Schiller and other affiliates of Librex are signed with a gaudy purple script font “– The Librex Team�). S. interviewed with Schiller via the matching feature—anonymously, of course—and was accepted shortly thereafter.

Speaking to me through the phone over background sounds of his sister playing “FĂźr Eliseâ€? on piano, S. told me that when a post is reported, it is brought to the moderation team for debate. In a Facebook group chat alongside twenty-three other volunteer moderators from across the Ivy League, S. argues for why or why not a post should remain up. The two dozen mods—which Schiller told me represent a diversity of socioeconomic statuses, countries of origin, political viewpoints, and races (over half are PoC)—can debate for hours whether or not a post is against the rules.

If there’s too much disagreement in the text chat, the moderators will have lengthy video calls. Schiller explained to me that the team has built a sort of case law, whereby they compare reported posts with past decisions in an effort to maintain a consistent modera-

“The two dozen mods—which Schiller told me represent a diversity of socioeconomic statuses, countries of origin, political viewpoints, and races (over half are PoC)—can debate for hours whether or not a post is against the rules.� tion scheme. And when Schiller recruits new moderators, he sometimes gives them sample moderation questions to see how they respond.

A favorite of his, he told me, is whether or not you remove a post claiming that “all men are trash�—a question that Facebook used when they were first creating moderation standards. “There’s no right answer to that necessarily,� he told me, “although I think there are better answers and worse answers.�

The founder said that he would likely message the

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user to let them know that the proclamation is not the kind of discourse expected on Librex and the post would likely be removed “because it’s a sweeping statement against a core identity group.�

Schiller often benchmarks his moderation practice against Facebook’s: in another instance, he justified that a Holocaust-denial post should remain up by saying “even Facebook allows it.� A disgruntled moderator quipped: “ah yes let’s take our moral cues from daddy zuck.�

The whole operation has an air of professionalism to it until you look at the moderation chat itself. In a series of screenshots leaked by ex-moderators, we get a glimpse of the post evaluation process.

Before even examining the substance of the chat, another detail jumped out at me: pseudonyms the moderators had given each other. There is, for example, “Grandmaster’s Padawan,â€? (S.’s name) “Grandmaster Big Brain,â€? “EtErNaLđ&#x;?†,â€? and “Daddy,â€? which is, unsurprisingly, Schiller. The nicknames are transient, continually edited and tweaked by the moderators: at one point Schiller becomes “papi.â€? “The moderators can be silly sometimes,â€? he told me.

The nicknames also hint at yet another layer of anonymity, perhaps spurred by the worry that their identities will be revealed. After screenshots of the moderator chat were first leaked to Twitter in late May by an ex-moderator from Dartmouth, there was a palpable fear in the chat. After Schiller informed the moderators of the leak, S. writes, “Holy [new message] Shit [new message] @Daddy did I get cancelled.� Schiller (Daddy) replies, “I think ur ok for now.� A few messages later S.’s fear returns: “I’m gonna get cancelled.�

The content moderation chat brings to light the debates of what should be allowed to exist on the internet, what is considered hate speech, what is said satirically versus seriously. These questions are asked behind closed doors, which Schiller explained to me is because “these are very sensitive issues and oftentimes issues that involve identity and involve how we see the world. And it’s important that our moderators feel like they are safe to actually speak what they think is like [sic] moral.�

The moderator chat, as Schiller described it to me, is a discourse unencumbered by judgement, a place where moderators feel comfortable to voice their true opinions while discussing the complicated politics of post removal.

But an ex-moderator from Dartmouth, who left Librex over frustrations with the culture of the company, described that the chat is full of slights and disrespect. In a message they told me, “i started to get really tired of the job when there was a conversation in the

mod group chat about racist content and i asked if we should leave up racist posts even if they technically lie outside of the community guidelines and ryan said yes”—a discouraging instance given their impetus for becoming a moderator stemmed from a belief that maybe they could be the one to “change the content for the better & reduce the harassment/ hate speech.”

The ex-moderator expressed anger over an instance in which their moderation decisions were overridden by Schiller. In late May during elections for the Dartmouth Student Assembly, candidate María Teresa Hidalgo ’22 and her running mate Olivia Audsley ’21 were continually harassed anonymously on Librex. The Dartmouth reported they were compared to fascists and that one post “threatened to call Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on Hidalgo… Despite her own American citizenship.”

After Librex announced that Hidalgo and Audsley did not qualify as public figures and therefore could not be targeted by name on the platform—a decision which took several days while the offending statements festered on the platform—the ex-moderator began work on deleting the hurtful posts: “i started taking everything down (very relieved) but [Ryan] put back a ton of posts where only their initials were used.”

After being called “oversensitive for telling someone why the redskins logo was bad and promptly made fun of for defending [themselves],” they finally resigned as a moderator. “it was just like. why do i bother.”

In another instance in the moderator chat, the group discusses a post denying the Armenian genocide. Grandmaster Big Brain takes a hard-line stance: “it’s not sexist, doesn’t attack a class, just reflects the poor state of historical education.”

Another moderator responds, “it’s like… denying genocide.”

Big Brain retorts, “Yes, but it doesn’t go against the rules [new message] Trust me, I find it disgusting—but at the same time we are not policing for facts.”

Schiller affirmed this belief to me over email. I asked how Librex deals with misinformation and he replied, “In general, the Yale community is good at pointing out misinformation through comments and voting.” He believes in minimal regulation: falsehoods should remain on the platform and be downvoted to the bottom of the feed rather than moderated away.

*** Schiller’s platform allows Ivy League students to explore ideas and learn from each other, as many users told me. While matching with people, almost everyone I spoke with loved the app (selection bias, of course), and most accepted the trolling as a necessary inconvenience.

“‘So you don’t actually believe any of this stuff?’ I asked to clarify.

‘No I think it’s dumb...just thought it’d be interesting to see what people thought. I also don’t argue with the comments. I’m more interested in seeing how it plays out.’”

J., a Columbia student who quickly matched with my post soliciting user interviews, explained that he’d actually learned a lot from Librex and had his beliefs challenged and changed. He told me that as a Chinese-American, he often felt resentment towards the ways affirmative action disadvantaged Asian-American college applicants, until he had some conversations on Librex that helped him build a more nuanced understanding of the lasting effects of slavery and prejudice against Black people. “[Librex] helped me be more receptive and less apathetic and self-interested than I was before.”

Schiller’s quest to give students a platform for free speech and debate has been certainly realized: speech is definitely free, debate plentiful. But the extent to how far “free” should go, and whether the outcome of that decision is good, is another question entirely. Although access to anonymous speech on Librex is spread equally across the Ivy League, the bigoted posts enabled by the anonymity tend target certain groups more heavily: Black students, overweight students, undocumented students, transgender students, among other minorities.

One critic of Librex, Anyoko Sewavi (Dartmouth ’23), who posted a YouTube video in July reacting to racist Librex comments from other Dartmouth

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students, told me that she initially witnessed productive discussions and believed anonymity was a “good concept.” But “then came the trolls.” Sewavi, who is Black, told me that “seeing that Dartmouth is the main school writing racist comments is just unnerving, it’s uncomfortable, and honestly it’s just exhausting to see…. I wouldn’t know if I walked across campus and someone felt this strongly about me being Black.”

Our phone call finished on an optimistic note, with Sewavi explaining to me that the relatively small size of Librex enables opportunity for systemic change on the platform, and perhaps social media as a whole: “If they take trolling seriously, and there’s actual consequences for these comments and actions, then maybe in the future it will snowball and set an example for other anonymous social media apps.”

Others have also spoken out against the app, such as the actress Skai Jackson who posted on Twitter screenshots of Librex posts with the caption “This app is called Librex, so sad people are saying disgusting things on here…” The attached posts claimed “Fellow racists. I have a plan to increase racism” and “Black people need to learn grammer [sic].” It’s hard to know if the posts were eventually removed.

Librex as a platform does not create the cesspools of flippant, divisive callouts that sometimes permeate its users’ devices. Rather, the anonymity gives these ideas a convenient breeding ground. The platform is a magnifying glass on the internet—a tangible diorama of the same behavior that permeates the bigger social sites. I recently came upon a post with 22 upvotes confessing: “For a forum filled with Ivy League kids, the content here is remarkably similar in quality to Reddit and 4Chan.” Yet this behavior feels much closer to home when we see it on Librex. We know that the content that so often ends up being debated in the moderation chat is made by the people that live around us, that attend class with us.

On Librex, offensive posts appear often—posts about why undocumented people should just move to Canada, or how the n-word “triggers libtards.”

But despite the occasional moderation blunders, my experience browsing the app has gradually included less and less brazenly insulting content since I downloaded it in April. Perhaps the moderation team has honed their technique in an attempt to balance strict free speech and the app’s role as a useful and good platform. But the internet’s propensity to breed bigots and fuel flame wars, intensified by Librex’s feature of facelessness, may be insurmountable.

Schiller conceded to me that any online commu-

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nity has its bad apples—a statement that felt a bit like admitting it’s the fault of the water and not the holes in the hull that causes a ship to sink. But when a leak does emerge and trolls inundate the platform, anonymity protects and emboldens some while others bear the brunt of unchecked speech.

- Kapp Singer is a junior in Grace Hopper College

PHOTOGRAPHY

BEASIE GODDU

RENEE ONG

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F E AT U R E

ART IN

New Haven’s artscape has been resculpted by the coronavirus pandemic and recent social movements.

ELI MENNERICK

D

aniel Pizarro was eating cereal when I met him, pale sunlight pouring from a window beside him. He sat in his East Rock home that July midmorning while I sat a few miles away at my own apartment, in front of a laptop screen. Even over Zoom, Pizarro’s voice was warm. He had curly, dark hair and a full beard.

Pizarro is a graphic designer. When the pandemic arrived and the shutdown began, he lost 80 percent of his client-based jobs. Luckily, though, he’s found new work through his connections with New Haven nonprofits and grassroots organizations. For the last year and a half, he said, he’s been trying to build a name for himself by using his graphic design skills to further social justice work in New Haven. He’s designed flyers, videos, posters, and graphics for Junta for Progressive Action, Cancel Rent CT, and City Wide Youth Coalition, among other groups. “Some of it’s been paid and some of it hasn’t,” he told me. “But that community has really held me through this pandemic.”

Across the country, artists face a fate similar to Pizarro’s. As of August 24, Americans for the Arts estimated that 94% of artists in the U.S. lost income due to the pandemic—an average of $22,200—and 63% became unemployed. The total income lost, they reported, was $50.6 billion. As author William Deresiewicz wrote in The Nation this May, “The major basis of much of the contemporary arts economy—live, in-person, face-to-face events—has been destroyed.”

This past summer, Pizzaro led a three-week youth program at a local arts nonprofit called Artspace. The program was supposed to be in-person. But after the pandemic arrived, Pizarro and the other program coordinators reimagined the

entire curriculum, reducing the number of students from around twenty to only eight. They purchased iPads, styluses, and animation software for the students. The class met on Zoom and focused on digital art. Miraculously, the transformation was a success. “They’re all making amazing art,” Pizarro said during the second week of the class.

“And they pick up on it so quickly.”

The summer course—Artspace’s Summer Apprenticeship Program—explored graphic design as a tool for activism, using the art of the Black Panther Party from the 1960s and 70s as a model. The curriculum’s focus on the Panthers is

CRISIS one of a few initiatives Artspace has developed this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the New Haven Black Panther Trials, including a gallery exhibition inspired by the legacy of the Panthers and a podcast about the trials in New Haven. Lisa Dent, the Executive Director of Artspace, told me that these projects had been scheduled for a couple years—well before the pandemic, and well before the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. But the projects suddenly became timelier than anyone expected.

Design by Meher Hans

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After the murder of George Floyd, protests swept the nation. According to The New York Times, between 15 and 26 million people had participated in the protests by July 3, making it the largest protest movement in U.S. history. These protests pushed the long-standing injustices of systemic racism and anti-Blackness into mainstream attention and prompted many people to work toward change within their disciplines. For those in the art world committed to broad political change, the questions are, in Dent’s words, “How do artists engage in social justice? How can artists support that work or be supported during that work?”

According to Pizarro, the students in Artspace’s Summer Apprenticeship Program discussed how lessons from the Panthers can be applied to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

“We’re not telling them what to do, but we’re allowing them the space for self-expression, and to contribute to this idea that artists in this moment do have a role to play.”

“Some of the main messaging that [the Panthers] talked about, like police brutality, is directly paralleled with the BLM movement in this moment,” Pizarro said.

But what exactly, is the connection between art and activism? What can art do that, say, protest and community organizing cannot? Pizarro emphasized that art is profoundly personal and expressive and that it can help individuals find their voices within a movement. “The students are trying to figure their place out, and they’re creating work that directly speaks to that,” Pizarro said. “We’re not telling them

what to do, but we’re allowing them the space for self-expression, and to contribute to this idea that artists in this moment do have a role to play.”

It’s one thing to say that artists have a role to play in this moment. It’s another to clarify those terms. What role, and which moment? How exactly should art engage with a protest movement—not to mention a pandemic?

T

he category of art, and even of contemporary visual art, is vast—perhaps too vast to generalize usefully about what role it should play right now. Different kinds of art will inevitably engage with social justice in different ways.

Althea Rao, for example, decided to put her project Vagina Chorus on hold during the pandemic.

Until the end of July, Rao was an Artist-in-Residence at Artspace, which means she had around-the-clock access to studio space owned by the nonprofit.

Vagina Chorus, one of the projects Rao was developing in that studio, involves a group of performers using a “vaginal insertive pelvic floor trainer” combined with a “Bluetooth enabled bio feedback algorithm” to “sonify the internal movements, producing immersive light effects and a symphony of sound waves, forming a chorus,” according to Rao’s website. In other words, the performers create a music and light show by squeezing their pelvic floor (an exercise called a kegel).

The project is designed to address urinary incontinence, which, as Rao told me, “is closely tied to childbirth, menopause, all of these physical events that a person who has a uterus might have over their entire lifespan.” The major symptom of urinary incontinence is leaky urine. Rao said that while urinary incontinence has been stigmatized and ignored for too long, it was understandably overshadowed by the pandemic. “It’s just a matter of urgency,” Rao said. “If someone is worried about, ‘Okay, I don’t even know where I’m going to live tomorrow, I cannot physically socially distance, and I might die if I get [Covid-19],’ and then you’re talking to them about, ‘What about your leaking problem?’ they probably won’t want to talk about that. It’s not as important.”

How should Rao’s project engage with the current moment? The question sounds misplaced. If your art is about urinary incontinence, then it’s about urinary incontinence — not the pandemic, and not necessarily the BLM movement.

Though the pandemic has halted performances of Vagina Chorus for a while, it’s also provided

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Rao an opportunity to reimagine her project in a form that respects social distancing measures. “I’m resisting the idea of having this be a virtual performance,” she told me. “So if I’m still doing an in-person performance, can social distancing be an intentional element of blocking the stage? Can this parameter, instead of preventing a meaningful engagement, become something that’s challenging and exciting?”

She imagines something like a silent disco party at sunset. Inside a glass building, the performers will do their kegels and execute “pelvic floor exercise-inspired choreography.” Sitting outside, audience members will hear the music through personal headphones and watch the light show through glass windows. “As daylight fades away,” Rao writes on her website about the reimagined project, “Vagina Chorus will illuminate the audience’s view and mind.​​​​​​​” “Without the parameters of social distancing, I wouldn’t even have thought of [using headphones or performing in a glass building,]” Rao told me.

“And now, these technical elements have become a very interesting add-on.”

Other artists have been creating new works more or less directly in response to the pandemic. Artistic partners Aude Jomini and Eben Kling are working on a custom modification (a ‘mod’) to a videogame from 1993 — and, in the process, leaving behind more traditional gallery spaces. Jomini, an architect, and Kling, a painter, are frequent collaborators who have contributed to multiple exhibitions at Artspace over the past few years. The game they’re customizing is called Doom and it normally involves shooting your way through hordes of demons. In the nearly thirty years since its release, fans have made countless mods for the game. The mod Jomini and Kling are designing is set in New Haven and uses original drawings by the two artists for the characters, buildings, objects, and weapons in the game. Jomini and Kling gave me a tour over Zoom; it’s a surreal landscape. We walked around a pixelated Long Wharf, the screen-share jumping and lagging every so often. Kling’s carefully handdrawn characters looked slightly warped on the screen, and Jomini’s original buildings, towering above the streets, were gray and a little grainy.

The two artists see their project as a refuge from the pandemic. When they couldn’t safely go downtown in real life, they made their own digital downtown. It felt too passive, Kling said, to spend these months just waiting for the pandemic to blow over,

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creating paintings and other physical artworks that couldn’t be shown until a safer time.

“I think both of us were already slowly drifting away from more traditional gallery spaces,” Kling said. “Making art-objects or traditional kinds of paintings and putting them in a gallery and having people come in and look at them and talk about them — it just doesn’t sound very exciting to me anymore.”

Their Doom project is in many ways the opposite of traditional studio art. It’s a democratic medium— anyone can make a mod, with little technical skill required. More importantly, it escapes what Jomini calls the “baggage” of traditional art. When you make traditional studio art, “You’re always pigeonholed within a certain discipline and what you’re referencing within art history, and there’s a way in which that’s so deadly to me,” Jomini said. “It’s a kind of death-making—this collecting and selling and pouring all your thoughts into this object, which then becomes precious. That is not really interesting to me.”

This idea of art as a precious object, which dwells in the dim, regal hall of a museum, is similar to the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura.”

Aura, Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is the reverence we have for “authentic” works of art—the awe we feel, for example, in front of the original Mona Lisa and not a copy of it. Like Jomini and Kling, Benjamin believed aura was outdated—and that it would be destroyed by the advent of photography, film, and other modern forms of mass-producible art. For Benjamin, rejecting aura was a political choice. In his preface he declares, “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows… are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism.

They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”

But when I asked Jomini and Kling whether they saw their artistic practice as political, they answered cautiously. Kling called it a “slippery term.” “I do think a lot of previous work that I’ve made is social commentary to a certain extent. But it’s not really political in any kind of partisan way,” said Kling.

Jomini agreed, saying that she’s wary of thinking of art as “a tool” for political messaging. “Yeah, I’m wary of that kind of utility, too,” Kling said. “The line at which you cross into the world of propaganda is pretty fucking thin.”

I asked specifically about the Black Lives Matter movement—had it prompted any thoughts about

how art can or should engage in political movements? Kling, who is white, said that the question is what’s useful to the movement and what’s not.

For example, he said, “If there is going to be a large-scale painting project, [since] I have designed and realized large scale murals in the past, that’s the kind of thing I would like to utilize in those moments. But I don’t know if I’m somebody to go back into the studio and make a bunch of paintings about the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Jomini, who is also white, agreed that art was not the best medium for her to engage with the BLM movement—in part, she said, because it shouldn’t be a priority to make white artists a central “part of this discourse.” It’s better, she said, to attend physical protests, and to work for broader, systemic change within organizations. “It’s about doing the hard work of sitting on these committees, getting up earlier, talking to my boss and talking to other people at work and doing outreach to the Yale School

of Architecture… all these larger organizations are what will change the tide.” But, she emphasized, that work isn’t part of her artistic practice.

It seems true that institutional change is more important than making art about the BLM movement. But it seems equally true that art is not outside politics—it’s always implicated in politics, because politics pervades all life. Does this mean that all artists committed to social justice have an obligation to use their art as a form of activism? It’s a tricky question. Forcing artists to make art about politics won’t lead to meaningful progress—not least because they won’t make good art if their subject is prescribed. But let’s assume you’re an artist who wants to use art to aid social justice. What should you do?

B

enjamin ends “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with a call to action.

Humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree

Local Artist Kwadwo Adae stands in front of his Women’s Empowerment Mural in October 2018

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that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order,” he writes. “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

If this sounds melodramatic, it’s useful to remember that Benjamin was writing in Germany during the 1930s. But his main point could be universalized: to resist fascism, we must politicize art. Do Benjamin’s theories apply today? Should artists, in response to the momentous events of the summer, politicize their art?

What would that mean?

I asked Pamela Lee, an art history professor at Yale, to explain how art can do political work. “It’s a great question, and it’s also a question that, if you’re going to pursue it, will take you several decades,” Lee said, laughing slightly. At the simplest level, “art represents something,” she said—and that something can be political. “The most famous example is Picasso’s Guernica, the work that monumentalizes the catastrophes of the Spanish Civil War. And the question that always follows is, ‘Well, did that ever save anyone from dying? Did that stop fascism from taking hold in Spain?’” But in Lee’s opinion, those questions are misplaced. “In 99 percent of cases, I don’t think there is such a direct causal connection between how art produces politics,” she said. It’s ridiculous to ask Picasso’s canvas to halt Franco’s tanks.

Art can also be political if it’s “pure propaganda,” Lee said, the classic example being the socialist realism of the Soviet Union. But Lee pointed out that the art commissioned by the Popes during the Renaissance was also unabashedly political—it was intended to “advance [the Popes’] position on the geopolitical stage.”

Ultimately, Lee said, “art is always political,” but that doesn’t mean the subject matter of art must always be political. Art is political “in the sense that it’s a kind of occasion… the occasion for a whole complex of social relations.” Who gets to see this piece of art? Who owns it, and how was it produced? How much is it worth? Who determines its worth? “For me at least,” Lee said, “these are political questions—not by way of partisan politics, but by way of access and power.”

Lee makes an important distinction; to say that art is “political” can mean two different things. It can mean, on one hand, that art participates in an activist project. But it can also mean that art is just one more part of our vast social world, its histories, and its complex relationships—all of which is inevitably implicated in politics. All art is political in

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the second sense, but not in the first. And, in Lee’s opinion, that’s okay. We shouldn’t critique artists, like Jomini and Kling, whose art isn’t explicitly engaged in activism. “I think that artists should do what they want to do,” she said. “If you want to paint flowers, why shouldn’t you? … I can say that all art is ideologically or politically stratified, but I don’t think that means that an artist is under any pressure to conform to some perceived notion of what constitutes the political.”

“Art,” she emphasized, “can be speculative.” It’s important for artists to have the freedom to experiment, to imagine what “the political” can be. Art’s power rests on this unfettered creativity. Dictating a “proper” way for art to be political risks stunting art’s ability to imagine new ways of being in the world—and, counterintuitively, its potential to imagine political change. “I think this is the bottom line here: artists are not just reflecting society and culture, they’re producing it,” Lee said.

“It’s about doing the hard work of sitting on these committees, getting up earlier, talking to my boss and talking to other people at work and doing outreach to the Yale School of Architecture… all these larger organizations are what will change the tide.”

P

izarro and his students met every day on Zoom for three weeks. Sometimes guest speakers visited. Addys Castillo talked to the class about her role as the Executive Director of Citywide Youth Coalition, a nonprofit that focuses on getting young people involved in anti-racist organizing in New Haven.

Art is political “in the sense that it’s a kind of occasion… the occasion for a whole complex of social relations.”

Nontsikelelo Mutiti, a graphic designer and a friend of Pizarro’s, also visited. One day during the program, Pizarro assigned the students a documentary about the Black Panther Party to watch for homework. The next day, as a surprise, Pizarro announced to the students that Ericka Huggins would be visiting class that day. “They were starstruck,” Pizarro said. The students got to meet a real-life, former leader of the New Haven Black Panther Party, just after learning about the Panthers’ historical significance. Huggins spoke to the students about Black female leadership and the importance of “taking time to heal” during the labor-intensive work of activism.

Some days, the students worked on self-portraits. Others, they practiced digital typography, or creative writing. They even did theater exercises together, all without ever meeting in person.

“With any environment where you meet new people, you’re sort of shy in the beginning,” Pizarro told me. “But I think that is particularly true with how young people behave in a digital space.” His students, at first, didn’t want to show themselves on camera. “We’re sharing our intimate spaces, like our room. Some people might be a little shy about that.” But over the three weeks, Pizarro said, the students blossomed. He encouraged them to have breakout sessions so they could get to know one another without his help. The theater exercises, especially, helped Pizarro and his students break past their discomfort. They forgot their lines, they did silly improv skits, they laughed together. “It

was really a joyful experience that I didn’t expect,” Pizarro said. “You know, I’m a graphic designer.

Graphic designers tend to be more shy, more introverted. And I do exhibit some of those things. If I embrace something like theater, I’m able to come out of my shell as well.”

The pandemic has created new challenges not only for Pizarro’s classroom, but for his broader philosophy about art’s role in society. “I see artistic practice as a social practice, as one that contributes to this idea of movement building,” Pizarro said.

“Take protest for an example,” he continued. “We can discuss how protest actually is an art form, right?

It’s a performance. It’s a performance to inject the necessary conversation, because the media is not covering it in a way that we want it to.”

Not only are protests a form of communal performance, they’re also a collective of individuals using visual art. Protestors make signs, design shirts, paint banners, and generally use a visual language (a fist in the air, kneeling in silence on the street) to express their demands. “It’s such a beautiful thing, to understand art as communal,” Pizarro said.

“We’re taught that art needs to be separate, that it’s this precious object we just stare at on a wall. And it feels so distant, and we don’t see the artist. But in protest, you see all the artists; we’re all there. We can dialogue. We can see each other. We can smell each other. We can touch each other.”

Of course, the pandemic makes this harder. One of the challenges with moving everything online, Pizarro said, is figuring out how to preserve a sense of genuine human connection. “We have to pour more of ourselves into the Zoom process,” he said.

“We have to open up more, to open up faster, and not be afraid to share deep parts of ourselves.”

I met Kwadwo Adae outside his studio on a misty, humid Friday in July. He wore a lab coat covered in paint splatters of all colors, along with boxy glasses, gray slacks, a blue face mask, and orange gloves. He gave me a light fist-bump in greeting. Inside his studio, potted plants sat on window sills, and paintings lined the walls—vast canvases of flowers, and portraits, many half-finished. Adae creates these paintings in his studio, but he also normally teaches four or five classes a week here through the Adae Fine Art Academy. Children’s classes are on Saturday, adults come during the week. Normally, he also teaches art to senior residents at local assisted living facilities and to young adults at the West Haven Mental Health Clinic.

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The assisted living facilities shut their doors in February. Adae closed his art academy in March.

“All of the teaching, all the in-person teaching I’ve been doing for the past fourteen years, was just unavailable,” he told me. Suddenly, without the income from teaching, he was at risk of losing his studio space.

Adae began to rely on selling his paintings.

Luckily, they’ve been popular. “People have been coming out of the woodwork,” he said. “A lot of the floral paintings have been going.” He allows customers to pay in installments because so many have lost jobs. He also started teaching online classes.

On Tuesday evenings, he heads to his studio, sets up an Instagram livestream, and records himself giving lessons on figure drawing. He asks those who watch the video to donate via Venmo. “People have been generous,” he said.

Adae had a tight schedule when I met him.

Artspace had commissioned him to paint nine portraits of protestors and community organizers in New Haven for their “Revolution on Trial” exhibit, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the New Haven Black Panther trials. A few of the portraits sat beside us on easels while we talked. Each protestor stood defiantly in the exact center of a canvas, staring straight ahead. The backgrounds were solid colors, one bright red, one orange, one blue. A mass of people with raised fists and protest signs crowded each horizon.

Adae, who is Black and the son of Ghanaian immigrants, is often out in the streets with the protestors he paints. In 2017, he became heavily involved in the activist group Justice for Jayson, which emerged after Bridgeport police officer James Boulay shot and killed 15-year-old Jayson Negron. At one protest, Adae saw Negron’s little sister speak to the crowd. “She was 13, tops,” Adae said. “And she got on the mic and addressed the protesters and it was extremely inspiring—and heartbreakingly sad. She should be hanging out with friends. None of this should be her life. But because of this incident, it’s her life.”

“I cannot just sit and do nothing and watch people that look like me get slaughtered,” he said.

Since then, Adae has continued to be involved in local activism. By attending protests over the years and around the city, he has gotten to know a handful of other regular activists in New Haven—many of whom became the subjects of his current portrait series.

“These are people that I see in protests, people

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that I’ve linked arms with against cops. And I’ve had the thought in my mind, ‘Okay, if this police officer swings a baton at this person… I’m getting in between them,’” Adae said. “I would take a nightstick for this person.” And yet, Adae said, even after all this, he realized he didn’t know his fellow protesters. He called it “a strange but beautiful relationship.”

For Adae, art and protest overlap. “Everyone can do something to be heard and to stand up against an injustice,” he said. Since Adae is trained as a painter, he uses those specialized skills “to make murals about activism, to paint activists.” Much of Adae’s art is community-oriented; it aligns with Pizarro’s belief that all art should be a form of “social practice.” For example, Adae has painted many murals across New Haven — art that is resolutely public, not tucked away in a museum or a gallery. He’s currently working on a mural in Dixwell in response to the shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon by Yale and Hamden police officers in 2019. The mural depicts four brown sparrows taking flight—small, everyday birds, painted large enough to cover the side of a building. Sparrows, to Adae, symbolize peace and freedom—the very things, he said, that police violence robs from a community. His mural, he hopes, will be a reminder that “We all deserve peace; we all deserve freedom.”

A

t the end of their program, Pizarro’s students produced an exhibit of digital artwork. Actually, there were two exhibits—one online, and one in-person at Artspace’s physical gallery, which is publicly showing the “Revolution on Trial” until October.

Online, the works are subtly animated. In Abdulrahman Elrefaei’s project, a TV flashes, declaring the phrase, “The media does not cover the whole story.”

In Natalia Maria Padilla Castellanos’s piece, protest signs jump gently back and forth, emblazoned with phrases like “No justice, no peace” and “Las vidas negras importan.” The work depicts a Black Lives Matter protest “ascending through the streets of Antigua, Guatemala,” in the words of the artist’s statement. In the front line of the protest are real people: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Rigoberta Menchú, Nontsikelo Mutiti, Addys Castillo, Ericka Huggins.

At Artspace’s physical gallery, in one room of the “Revolution on Trial” exhibit, each student’s project is duplicated many times, each replica stacked vertically, like a film strip. I thought of Benjamin’s

concept of reproduction and how it undermines aura.

“We talk about the crisis versus the chronic. What These projects weren’t sacred; they were accessible, is an incident, and what is an ongoing condition?” lively, and engaging in their directness.

Vapor trails cross a light blue sky.

Kwadwo Adae’s portraits hung in the next room of “It seems all states are equally permanent and the gallery, and, according to his artist statement, he elusive: emergency, revolution, attachment, care, had a similar accessibility in mind: “Adae’s painted peace.” tributes align the subjects with honorific portraiture, a genre typically associated with elite classes,” the notes read. “However, here the centralized formats —Eli Mennerick is a senior in and streamlined backgrounds retain a sense of ease Ezra Stiles College and a Senior Editor. and immediate accessibility.”

This was democratic art—“the People’s Art,” according to the subtitle of the exhibit. And it brought to mind something Pizarro had told me. It was something, he said, that he hadn’t quite worked out for himself: a half-formed thought. “I don’t know at what point the term ‘art’ became separate from ‘culture,’” he said. “Growing up, my parents had what you would call ‘art’ all around our house, but these were cultural artifacts… whether it was cultural instruments, or certain small sculptures we would have around our house. For me, art isn’t separate from culture. Culture is art.”

What would it mean to fully believe that art is no different from culture? It would be a radical revision.

Although we refer to “the arts and culture,” we understand them to be fundamentally different. Art is inspiration, innovation, genius. Culture is the organic, unthinking collective. Viewed this way, the very word “art” seems tied up in antidemocratic ideals.

So, what role should artists play right now? The same as non-artists, I guess. For some reason, we separate art from culture, from social life. We place it apart from us, then we ask it to justify itself by demanding it does political work. We don’t worry about whether “culture” can bring about political change—the question barely makes sense. Culture is life, sociality, community. It can’t be reduced to political usefulness because it is the basis for politics, the reason for politics. It is political in the sense that all life is political: in a society with deadly intentions, the only way to really live is to fight for change.

At the “Revolution on Trial” exhibit, there’s a video piece by the artist Chloë Bass. Slow-motion footage from the 1970 May Day protests on the New Haven Green plays on loop. We see a close-up of Ericka Huggins’ face. A narrator recites, delicately: “Extraordinary moments and movements and things come out of all these normal moments that are really kind of boring.”

A banner painted with the words “Power to the people” hangs from a building.

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F E AT U R E

The Still Small Voice of God Observant Jews in New Haven distill beauty and closeness from socially distanced religious practices.

by Ko Lyn Cheang

A

t 10 a.m. on the Fourth of July, Esther Nash arrived at the parking lot of Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven for Shabbat service. For three weeks, with new COVID-19 cases declining throughout the state, the synagogue at Harrison Street had been able to hold services in-person, albeit outdoors.

That day, the summer sun was high in the faultless blue sky. Nash carried a leather-padded brown folding chair from a cart, which the synagogue staff had wheeled out earlier that morning, and took a seat in the shade of a large sugar maple tree.

People sat dispersed across the parking lot in twos, threes, or fours, half their faces concealed behind masks.

At the reader’s table, the Rabbi’s teenaged son, Noam Benson-Tilsen, was chanting from the Torah. As he chanted, letters became words, words became song, and the sonorous melody flowed through the listeners’ ears.

Congregants bowed as they prayed, rocking their knees, the red bound book of scripture and smaller blue book of prayers clasped in their arms. Before the pandemic, the synagogue’s Rabbi, Jon-Jay Tilsen, led services in the synagogue’s sanctuary. His voice would reverberate off the laminated wood panelling and fill the high-ceilinged, sunlit space. But now, for the 35 people present to gather in the sanctuary together, breathing the same air, would be a health and safety risk.

Outdoors, Benson-Tilsen’s voice was muted by the wind, dissipated into a low call. From twenty feet away, he sounded as though he was standing behind a thin wall.

“God now wants us to sing quietly,” Nash said after-

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ward. She was reminded of the prophet Elijah, who was sent fleeing South from Queen Jezebel through the wilderness of Judah for defending the Hebrew God against the prophets of Baal. Through mountain-splitting winds, rock-shattering earthquakes, and vicious fires, he did not see God. He did not hear Him. Then, in the silent aftermath of the blaze, he heard the “still, small voice” of God address him. That morning, in the synagogue parking lot, Nash thought now was the time to listen to the still, small voice of God. When he was finished, Noam returned the Torah scroll into its blue velvet cover and carried it to the holy ark of law, an ornamental chamber which houses the scroll. Before the pandemic, a procession of five or six people would carry the scroll counterclockwise through the sanctuary. The act is symbolic of “bringing the law to the people,” Tilsen explained. That day and during every outdoor Shabbat service so far, however, the task belonged to the Rabbi’s son alone.

When the pandemic prompted many religious groups to convene online, with Zoom worship sessions and Friday prayer live streamed on Facebook, the same transition could not be applied in certain Jewish communities.

Orthodox Jews, who adhere most strictly to Jewish law, refrain from using electronics during the Sabbath because it is prohibited by Jewish law on the day of rest, along with thirty-eight other activities. Some members of the Conservative Jewish movement, which believes that Jewish law, while binding, should evolve historically, also do so.

Many of the Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel’s

Design by Annli Nakayama members, including Tilsen’s own family, fall into this category. The reasons Tilsen offered for avoiding technology on the Sabbath are varied: it is a religious commitment, a way of being a good Jew, and a personal way of serving God. And so, when the synagogue closed for the first time in its 128-year history on March 16th to help contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus, Rabbi Tilsen did not hold Shabbat services online. “If you’re going to do all these things, then it removes the beauty that we created by adhering to constraints,” he said.

In the post-pandemic world, some things can be moved to Zoom—calling into a wedding, practicing daily prayer, and singing songs together during the seder, or the ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Many others cannot—hugging a loved one, holding Shabbat service in observant Jewish communities, and, depending on who you ask, forming a minyan, which is an assembly of any ten Jewish adults (in the Orthodox tradition, specifically men).

A minyan is required before certain religious rituals can be performed, including reading from the Torah and reciting important prayers like the kedusha and kaddish.

The Rabbinic definition of a minyan is unequivocal that the ten adults need to be physically present in the same space for the group to constitute a quorum, explained Tilsen. “So a group that is connected only by being ‘on-line’ by zoom or phone does not constitute a quorum,” he said. That said, many reform and modern synagogues are holding full services, including Torah reading and Shabbat services, on Zoom.

Rabbi Fred Hyman, who leads the Orthodox Westville shul in New Haven, said, “The kedusha and kaddish is a very meaningful part of the service, and we still don’t allow it [to occur online]. We don’t just follow an emotional response. That’s how strict we are, and I think the virtual minyan is misplaced.”

In 1999, Rabbi Maurice Lamm warned presciently of a “crisis” in the introduction to a reprint of his 1969 seminal textbook on deathcare, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, that would pressure Jewish people to succumb to “commercial,” “American,” non-Jewish ways. “The crisis will come, ready or not,” he wrote.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to be one such “crisis.” The story of religious Jewish communities during the pandemic has been one of finding beauty in constraint. There has been more continuity, rather than change, in their practice of Judaism even as stores are shuttered, synagogues are closed, and people are quarantined.

The dozen Jewish people interviewed for this article explained how they have adapted, resumed, and in some cases, coped without the rites of birth, life, and death that generations before them practiced accord-

ing to Jewish law. Seven of them referenced the specter of the Holocaust and enduring antisemitic hate in the United States and Europe as something that informs their understanding of the pandemic’s impact on the practice of Judaism.

Andy Sarkany, a 84-year-old Westville resident and Holocaust survivor, does not think the pandemic has changed his Jewish faith at all. He was a child in the seventh district of Budapest during the Holocaust and could not openly observe religious practices at that time. And when he was a teenager in Soviet-occupied Hungary, religious observance was practically forbidden. His mother still lit candles at home every Sabbath.

Now, every Friday night since the pandemic began, Sarkany’s wife Aniko lights candles at home. He recites the kiddush, a blessing said over wine or grape juice to sanctify the sabbath, read from his prayer books, and does individual prayer at home. Although social distancing has reduced many Jewish practices to private worship at home, Sarkany does not think it matters.

“When you have a certain level of belief, the environment around you will not affect that belief,” he said.

1. Birth Rachel Somerstein’s baby, Jonathan, had fallen asleep on the dining room table even before the brit milah began. His mother guessed that it was the sugar water-tylenol mixture that the mohel had given him, but newborns sleep a lot, and Jonathan was only ten

Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen in the empty sanctuary at Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel on a day in late June. (Photo by: Ko Lyn Cheang)

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days old. Soon, the circumcision ceremony would take place, welcoming him into the covenant of Abraham and to his family. It was the ideal situation: Emily Blake, his mohel, said with a laugh that her definition of a ‘perfect bris’ is one where the baby doesn’t cry but where the parents are moved to tears.

Jonathan’s father nearly passed out as he observed the procedure. The mohel placed a Gomco clamp, shaped like a steel bell, on the baby’s penis. It would protect the head of the penis during the procedure and limit blood flow to a minimum. Blake took a scalpel and cut straight along the foreskin, easy and simple. It is a ritual of blood, one that Blake strives to make as painless as possible.

Jonathan is an easygoing baby. It took him a few moments to cry when he was first delivered from the warm womb into a hospital room. Giving birth during a pandemic wasn’t easy, said his mother. The virus was ravaging her home state of New York and she worried that she may have to give birth alone. As Jonathan kicked inside her, more than 100,000 people around the country died from COVID-19.

But as soon as she found out she was having a boy, Somerstein knew she had to have a bris, a circumcision ceremony done according to Jewish law and with kavanah, which refers to a mindset of sincere intentionality that must accompany Jewish rituals. Although her husband is not Jewish and has not yet converted, the couple keeps a kosher home, practices Shabbat, and says the Shema prayer with their daughter before she goes to sleep each night.

Somerstein had envisioned renting a place downtown in their small village of 14,000, nestled by the Shawangunk Mountains in the Hudson Valley, and inviting all their siblings, parents, and close friends. But because of the pandemic, the guest list dwindled to just five: Jonathan’s mom, dad, sister, and grandparents.

“At one point I felt so sad about it,” she said while watching over her son and 4-year-old daughter. “It’s so sad that we couldn’t introduce our son to our families the way we wanted to.”

But having a brit milah was important to Somerstein.

She wanted to give her son the freedom to decide how he wanted to practice Judaism when he grew older and this was a way to give him that agency, she said. Jewish men who do not have a bris done by a mohel with the proper blessings, in the proper time frame (not before— and ideally on—the eighth day of life), or with the proper intention, must have a ritual drop of blood taken from their penis to make the circumcision “kosher,” as Blake calls it.

The baby’s grandparents, father, older sister, and mother, said prayers over him. One of the blessings they recited was the birkat hagomel, spoken after someone

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has survived a dangerous journey—in this case, childbirth.

Four years earlier, Somerstein had survived a C-section for her daughter without anaesthesia. This time, she had gone into prodromal labor five days days before Jonathan was born. She was dilating and having contractions, her body was preparing for a baby that was coming but not ready yet. Jonathan was finally born at 9:17pm on a Tuesday, with big cornflower blue eyes and pudgy legs. In early August, Jonathan was just over a month old, “figuring out who he is as he figures out the world around him,” says his mother.

During the bris, after they said the prayers, they gave Jonathan his Hebrew name—Yonatan. It was the name by which he would be called to the Torah, his covenantal name. On a laptop screen, Jonathan’s aunts, uncles, and grandparents said blessings. They each drank grape juice and wine, in lieu of a celebratory meal that could no longer be held in person.

Now that many brises have to be celebrated over Zoom, Emily Blake, Somerstein’s 64-year-old veteran mohel who has dedicated more than three decades of her life to this work, likes to begin the ceremony with a pun: they’re doing this “chai-tech” (“Chai” means life in hebrew).

“We are accepting things we never thought we’d have to live with, in this pandemic,” said Blake on the phone one morning as she drove from New York to New Haven for a bris. “I think people are just so happy they’re getting a joyous moment to celebrate, that there’s this new baby coming into their family. It’s a moment that you can step out of the incredible sadness of being stuck in lockdown, to have the sunshine break through that dark cloud.”

2. Survival As a child growing up in the Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn, New York during the 1950s and 60s, Esther Nash carried with her a message, forged by her parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors, that the world is not a safe place. Her mother, Eva, had been plucked from her rural town in the Hasidic belt of Transylvania, Romania and deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. She was trapped there when the camp was at capacity and eventually was moved to work as a slave laborer at a Krupps munitions plant where she worked on an assembly line making grenades.

Eva would later tell her daughter about how on Yom Kippur, the Nazi guards in the concentration camp would deliberately offer more rations throughout the day of fasting, “to let the Jews know they no longer had a religion, no longer had a culture, no longer had a life,” said Nash. But Eva always fasted on Yom Kippur even

though she was near starvation. In the spring of 1945, the Russians liberated her and other Jewish prisoners.

In 1948, Eva, then a 24-year-old Hasidic Jewish survivor of Auschwitz with shoulder-length dark hair and a shy smile, found herself in a displaced persons’ camp in Pocking, Germany. Her own parents had been gassed immediately on arrival in Auschwitz.

At the displaced persons’ camp, she met a fair-haired young man named Chaya Rosenberg who was four years her senior. He was almost six foot one and Eva found him very good-looking. One Friday evening, she walked into his family’s room as they were preparing for the Sabbath. Years later, Eva told Esther that they were celebrating it in much the same way they did in her own home: a white tablecloth laid out, lighted candles, prayers recited. When Eva saw that Chaya had a home, parents, and a family, and were revelling in the “beauty of the sabbath,” she knew she wanted to marry this man.

They got married during an “epidemic of marriages” in displaced persons’ camps all over Europe immediately after the war. Nash said that people were trying to recreate the family they had lost. Eva wore a white wedding dress with long peasant sleeves and deep skirt folds that were circulated among many brides in her displaced persons’ camp. The rings were second-hand.

Chaya’s was engraved with somebody else’s name: Linda, inscribed with the date 07.01.37.

Their wedding photo was taken in black-and-white in an area of the camp where weddings were held that the refugees called “Cafe Tel Aviv.” Fir trees decorated the backdrop. There was no bouquet, so Eva held potted flowers.

“My parents were traumatized people,” said Nash, as she looked at the photograph, now colorised and digitized on her computer. “There was always the message that it was dangerous to be a Jew, but you should never, can never, give it up. It’s part of your identity and existence.”

Her parents arrived at Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy Airport) in June 1949, carrying with them their Yiddish tongue, the trauma of the Holocaust, and their 3-month-old daughter Esther. Her father spoke no English. By then he had long been accustomed to working on the Sabbath because he had done so while working as slave labor in a special settlement near Novosibirsk, Siberia, and then on a kolkhoz in Tajikistan during the war. When he arrived in New York, he continued to work on the Sabbath because he needed to make money. But every Sabbath, he would recite kiddush over challah and wine in a silver kiddush cup. On holidays and festivals he attended the synagogue across the street with his family.

For the first three years of her life, Nash only spoke Yiddish, the common language used at home with her

Eva (left), Charles (middle) and Sara (right), Eva’s sister, at the Pocking displaced persons camp in 1948.

Romanian mother and Polish father. Every Friday night, her mother would prepare a Sabbath meal—challah, gefilte fish, chicken noodle soup, roast chicken, and sometimes stuffed cabbage. Eva would light a candelabra with glowing Sabbath candles and recite blessings. But there were many things her mother kept to herself—what happened in Auschwitz, what she had seen, what she had survived. “More was revealed in her inability to speak about it,” said Nash.

When the coronavirus began infecting scores of Americans and people worldwide earlier this year, Nash was not at all surprised, owing to her years of professional experience as a physician. But she had also grown up with the heavy lesson, first borne by her parents, that had prepared her for this.

“The pandemic showed that there was a chance the world could change in a heartbeat because it did for my parents,” she said one afternoon in July. “You wanted to know about how other such difficult times adapted Judaism—I would say it’s the reverse. Judaism allowed us to adapt to whatever times we found ourselves in because of the values, because of what it tells us about humanity, about people, about the tenuousness of life, and the important things.”

Three-year-old Ruthie Frosh loved to sit with her grandmother in the front row of the synagogue’s balcony, overlooking the central nave, in Vienna’s sixth district. From that point, she could see everything—the beautiful neo-gothic architecture, the colorful stained glass windows, and the oil paintings in the interior. She could see the ark, the lectern and the Rabbi chanting from the Torah. On special Jewish holidays, her grandfather would carry her in his arms downstairs and bring her to the Torah scroll. It is her first memory and the

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one that she conjures today, as 89-year-old Ruth Weiner, and one that speaks to the strong sense of Jewish identity she had even at that young age.

She learned to read by age four, and by age five, she was reading the newspapers, finding out about “all kinds of stuff not appropriate to my age level.” When the Anchluss happened in 1938, she was seven years old.

Germany and Austria had formed a union. Hitler and thousands of Nazis marched into Ruthie’s home city of Vienna and “the welcome could not have been more wholehearted or widespread or complete,” she said.

Buildings were draped in red buntings with swastikas.

In the streets, everybody was in uniform.

Ruth Frosh aged seven and a half.

“On that day I stopped being a child,” said Weiner.

It became clear to her that to be Jewish meant you could be arrested or shot in the street for no reason, or made to scrub the sidewalks until your hands were bloody. She had to learn how to make herself invisible.

One morning in first grade, a close friend came to school, looked at Ruthie, and spat on her. She said, “You’re a Jew. I didn’t know you were a Jew,” Weiner remembered. “That just slashed me to my core and made my new status very clear to me.”

In 1938, at first, young Jewish children could still attend public schools and receive Jewish religious education there. Ruthie learned Hebrew and prayers.

Whenever Ruthie and her family went to the district’s elegant synagogue with its balcony and its bare-faced brick turrets, they were on guard. “There was a great sense of foreboding, you were prepared for something bad to happen at any point,” she said. Months later, during Kristallnacht, a brutal two-day pogrom targeting Jews, the Schmalzhoftempel synagogue would be

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burned to the ground.

Weiner explained that Judaism is a very portable religion, a characteristic that would become important later when she fled Vienna to England as a refugee child in the kindertransport, a rescue effort that transported 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied territories to safety just ahead of the war.

“Being Jewish goes beyond religious practice,” said Weiner. “Judaism is both a body of ceremonial practices, either in the home or in the synagogue, and equally a practice of everyday values, of how you see yourself in terms of what you expect of yourself, in terms of your own character, and more importantly how you interact with your community at large.”

On November 10, 1938, the day that would become known as Kristallnacht, Ruthie took two streetcars and walked four blocks to school in the Jewish quarter with her best friend, as she had done each day for months.

Something was seriously wrong. Jews were huddled in streets filled with broken glass and crowds of people were throwing rocks. At 10 a.m., the teachers dismissed them out of a side door, ordering them to hold hands. If you see a group of more than two Nazis, cross the street, they told her. Stores were looted. Fires were burning in the street. That day, more than 91 Jews were murdered.

All but one of Vienna’s synagogues were incinerated.

When Ruthie arrived home, her mother was waiting for her. By then, her father had been imprisoned for a month because of “political crimes.” A non-Jewish Nazi lawyer who was his father’s friend had protected him from being sent to a concentration camp.

Her mother rushed her into the house, past two Gestapo officers standing outside. Five minutes later, they heard an “unbelievable banging” on the door.

Her mother made a motion for Ruthie to remain silent.

For seven hours, they stayed seated in one spot, not making a sound, unable to eat or drink or use the bathroom. Every half hour, the telephone would ring. Ruthie’s mother was terrified, but remained silent: Was it a trick? Was it somebody in the family calling for help?

She did not know what to do.

By 9:30 p.m., the intervals between the pounding had grown longer. The phone rang and her mother finally picked up. The voice on the other end told her not to say a word. It told her to dress herself and the child. If she heard three taps on the door, it meant the gestapo had left and they could come out. It was the lawyer who had protected her father and was now rescuing them. That night, Ruthie shared a bed with the lawyer’s daughter, in his house.

Over the next few months, Ruthie’s mother worked on finding a way for them to gain entry into the United States. She managed to contact very distant family

members—descendants of cousins of Ruthie’s grandfather—who lived in Texas. They banded together and issued an affidavit, promising to take on the responsibility for financially supporting Ruth and her parents, should they come to the U.S. Eighty-two years later, Weiner sat on an old sofa at her home in Bloomfield, Connecticut. At her age, she still has a twinkle in her eye and an exuberant energy in her voice. After all that she has witnessed, she said she still believes in God but that “I’m sometimes quite angry with him.” She has lived through periods of deprivation and rationing, learned how to make cake out of sweet potatoes for Shabbat when she had nothing else to use, and shared the last of her sugar with a neighbor because “that was just the thing to do.” In light of her experiences, she said that the inconvenience of the pandemic can be dealt with. “This is nothing compared to that.”

But she added, “I feel for people who are alone or are not in comfortable housing. I feel for the people who are experiencing illness or loss or deprivation, or who’ve lost their job.” She said that people reveal who they really are in times of crisis, pointing out that during the pandemic, some people truly rise to the occasion, such as her neighbors who offered to deliver groceries to her. Yet others refuse to wear masks, and some big businesses take advantage of economic relief loans, yet fire their employees.

“It is incumbent upon us to care for each other,” said Weiner. “This goes back to how the Jewish religion operates in times of crisis.”

3. Death “Everything that is done in a Jewish funeral stems from the word respect,” said James Shure, a Jewish funeral director who works out of a Dixwell neighborhood funeral home founded by his father. You do not let a person die alone. You light a candle near their head.

In the pandemic, many family members could not enter hospitals to visit their Covid-infected family members, let alone sit by their side as they died.

Each member of the chevra kadisha, translated ‘holy society’, looks more like a surgeon than practitioner of Jewish law when they enter the room at the George Street funeral home. They are volunteers who give their time and energy to do the tahara, or the sacred washing of a dead body, which is intended to return a person departing this world to the same pure, clean state they were in when they entered it as an infant. They wear face shields, masks, goggles, gowns and double-layered gloves. It is one of the greatest mitzvot, or good deeds, a Jew can perform. In the pandemic, the deed is even greater.

James Shure at his funeral home in New Haven.

“These people put themselves at risk without batting an eye,” said Shure.

After death, the body of a person who died from coronavirus might still be contagious, although scientific literature on post-mortem contagion is still nascent. Since the outbreak of the virus, the shomer, who watches over the dead body, has to stand at least 20 feet away from the body in Shure’s funeral home.

As soon as the pandemic was declared, it took only two phone calls—one to California and one to New York—for Shure to determine how to carry out the tahara in a way that protects the people who are doing it while respecting the ritual and the dead person. The duration of the washing was halved. Instead of leaving an infected body on the washing table, they would be carried directly into the casket. But all the prayers are still said—prayers for forgiveness and prayers for eternal peace.

Jewish burial law requires that the casket be lowered into the earth and covered with soil. They recite the Tziduk Hadin, a prayer, right after the grave is filled.

They chant the El Malei Rachamim, asking for rest for the person’s soul. It is a moment of reckoning with the finality of death, Shure said. “It somewhat brings closure to the family to see the casket lowered and very often, that is when the family becomes rather emotional.”

Now, safety regulations mandate that Covid patients have to be lowered prior to the family’s arrival at the cemetery. “It’s not cathartic,” Shure said.

He has witnessed many funerals happen without those present being able to say the mourner’s kaddish, an Aramaic prayer that is often said at Jewish funerals.

To recite the kaddish, a minyan must be formed, something not always possible with the Connecticut state rule allowing no more than ten people at a gravesite.

“The kaddish does not mention death at all,” said Shure. “Rather, it installs and magnifies God’s name again as our world has fallen apart as we know it. We merely boldly, boldly, put our faith in God.”

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“The repercussions of the disease did not stop at death. It absolutely affected, I think, the well-being of the mourner,” he said. “I do not believe to this day, and it’s sad, that [families] were able to at least begin their mourning in a meaningful way.”

Yaron Lew has known Shure for 21 years but has never needed to use Shure’s funeral home until now.

Lew does not believe in God. He doesn’t believe in the afterlife. His wife, Liora, believed in God. She grew up with a very orthodox Jewish grandfather and an observant mother who emerged from the Auschwitz death camp believing that her survival was due to divine intervention (her father, after surviving the Dachau concentration camp, became an atheist). Lew grew up on a secular kibbutz, a collective community, in Israel.

Lew speaks with a commanding voice and laughs a lot, smile lines visible through his thin-framed glasses.

Over the course of his 36-year relationship with Liora, he went from being a Jew who never went to synagogue to becoming the President of his local synagogue, BEKI. Lew met Liora underwater, beneath the Mediterranean shore, in an Israeli military submarine in the city of Haifa, where Lew was serving as a naval officer and where Liora had grown up.

Yaron Lew’s wife and his brother passed away within a week of each other in June this year. Lew was by his wife’s bedside when she passed, while his brother was in Israel. He had been sick for over two years; she had only been sick for two months. Neither of them passed from the coronavirus. He was buried according to Jewish law without a casket, so that his body may return to ash and dust in the earth. She was buried according to cemetery rules in a casket. Lew sat shiva, the seven days of mourning that commence upon burial, in his home,

Liora and Yaron Lew.

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in person, to mourn his wife. He called his family on Zoom for a few hours a day as they sat shiva for his wife and then for his brother.

The cemetery told him a maximum of 30 people could attend, so 30 people gathered at the gravesite for the burial. Everyone who attended had to wear a mask, and the funeral home tried to live stream the funeral for those who could not be present. But that sweltering day, with the temperature in the high-80s, the equipment overheated and the live stream failed. Each person donned a pair of latex gloves to pick up a shovel and scatter dirt onto the casket. The act is symbolic of saying goodbye, said Lew. At the shiva, Lew and his family used the outdoor deck and backyard of his Westville home to ensure the safety of the mourners. They didn’t kiss, they didn’t hug, they didn’t shake hands; he mourned within the constraints. Each day, more than the ten people required to have a minyan attended evening service so that they could say kaddish. They held a Zoom call for those who were unable or uncomfortable with travelling to Lew’s home for the shiva. Up to 50 people attended virtually, including his wife’s sister and Lew’s siblings, who live in Israel.

He found himself on the opposite side of the screen when he sat shiva for his brother. He could not travel to Israel for his funeral and shiva. When I asked him how it felt, Lew paused for a long time and sighed. “Very distant. Very difficult,” he said.

In mid-June, when Liora was hospitalized for the final time, the doctors called Lew. During her previous hospitalizations, Lew and their children were not allowed to visit due to COVID-19 regulations. He snuck packages of letters and chocolates, cookies and flowers, in for her—“so at least she could have the smell and taste of home.”

“They said, ‘It’s good news and bad news. The good news is we are letting you and your daughters into the hospital, the bad news is we only let relatives of terminal patients go into the hospital,’” Lew recalled. She was moved into a hospice room a week later. “I spent the whole last night with her, and then she passed away in the morning,” he said, eyes sparkling with tears behind his glasses.

I asked him what mourning means to him. “I talk about her a lot,” he said, smiling slightly. “I have pictures of her. I cry in the shower in the morning. I talk to her once in a while. I talk to friends about her. We talk with the girls about her, what she would think and what she would say. I’m not sure if that is remembering or if that is mourning.”

This April, two weeks before Liora was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, the Lew family celebrated the Passover Seder together. Instead of the usual

40 people gathered in a rented clubhouse, it was just Lew, Liora, and one of their daughters around the Seder table at home. Liora made chicken soup and butternut squash soup and brisket, Lew made gefilte fish (it was a three-day cooking event), and their friends delivered the sweet, sticky traditional Passover dish of haroset, homemade. The families were physically separated, but they were together––eating the same food, singing the same Passover songs, reciting the Haggadah. “Mah nishtanah, ha-laylah ha-zeh, mi-kol ha-leylot,” they sang. “Why is this night different from all the other nights?”

As a non-believer, Lew had always seen going to synagogue as a non-spiritual affair. But since the pandemic hit, Lew said he has started providing more spiritual support to the synagogue community. He writes to the congregation once a week. In those letters, he reminisces about returning to the kibbutz where he grew up, and how when he walks through the gates, he sings a song about how he is just a visitor in the landscape of his childhood. He writes about how he has felt a little like a visitor in the synagogue of late, and of how the pared-down Shabbat service in the parking lot was familiar. “It led me to reflect on the evolutionary road we travelled during these quarantine months,” he wrote in one letter. “We started to adapt and we reinvented ourselves.”

When Esther Nash’s father was on the frozen tundra in Siberia, freezing and close to death, he would pray to God that He should let him live. “I think he would have been very happy back then if he was told that he would live to ninety-two,” Nash told me on the phone on a sunny day in July. Both Eva and Shaya Rosenberg lived to be the same age. Until her last days in a nursing home, Eva always wore a gold Star of David, an engagement gift that Shaya had made by his brother-in-law.

Since the pandemic began, Nash has begun taking long walks through Woodbridge walking trails, and kayaking down the Housatonic River. “I think I’ve become more spiritual in some ways,” she said. “I’m in nature a lot more. I’m taking time to be in the moment a lot more. I’m trying to put this in perspective, thinking about life, and the frailty of life, and how things can change in a heartbeat.”

Rabbi Tilsen said that he’ll never know how different Jewish people are responding to the turmoil of the pandemic. Some people turn toward religion and God in times of crisis, others turn away. “Jewish theology is not doctrinal; so much theology is implicit.

We don’t have a formal vision or idea of what God is,” said Tilsen. “Judaism has to do with the search for truth and it means rejecting ideas that are clearly falsifiable or clearly wrong. God often just comes from a sense of

The Lew family Zoom seder this year. awe at the world.”

On the Fourth of July at noon, as Noam returned the Torah scroll to the ark, those present rose from their chairs and praised God a final time before the service closed. “The voice of Adonai stirs the wilderness. The voice of Adonai strips the forest bare…” they sang in Hebrew as one voice. Above them, thick foliage rustled and the sun stung their skin.

In ones and twos, the faithful took their leave, stacking the chairs and tomes of scripture and prayer books onto the cart as they went. Nash’s low heels clicked on the baked tarmac as she walked away. The synagogue staff wheeled the trolley, heavy and laden with the Law, back into the cool sanctuary, where it would wait seven days until the next Sabbath.

- Ko Lyn Cheang is a senior in Grace Hopper College

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ENDNOTE

DISPATCH FROM THE BOOK TRADER CAFE WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE

A coffee lover reflects on the rebirth of New Haven’s roasted bean scene.

ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

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t the beginning of shutdown, in early March, I used to venture out for long walks, bundled in my purple coat. The city was quiet and cold, my fingers losing feeling within fifteen minutes. In such weather, I longed for a cup of coffee to smooth over the day’s rough edges—my coffee shops of choice are Willoughby’s and the Book Trader Cafe. I like to joke that I was the Book Trader writer-in-residence: until this past March I had finished every final paper underneath their hazy glass ceiling. But after spring break, Book Trader closed its doors. The rickety brown tables were upturned and placed on the counter. Willoughby’s window soon sported a hopeful sign, saying they would open someday soon. Both Blue State cafes featured a sign saying they were closed indefinitely.

Koffee? looked abandoned, frozen in the days when we might brave the cold for a cigarette smoke. When Duda spoke about his employees, I thought briefly of the nice barista who used to joke with me about milk alternatives at the Book Trader counter. These people, like the Yale employees who brighten our day, are as much part of our college experience as the individuals we learn alongside.

Some of the first coffee shops to return this summer were Koffee? and Willoughby’s Grove Street

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location, which both opened in July. Atticus, too, opened up its doors in late July, though the bookstore section is now separated by a pane of glass, and the seating area is blocked by shelves of sourdough and local craft beer. Blue State opened their York Street cafe on June 17th. Since students started arriving in New Haven, I’ve seen more people sitting inside, their masks off. There’s something strange about peering into the York Street Blue State. It’s a familiar sight, students with laptops open and black coffees in hand, but it looks off, foreign, a kind of looking-glass into the campus world we knew before. Absorbing the image of barefaced students indoors, it takes me a few moments to remember we’re in a pandemic, and then my mind reaches for anxiety: how can people be allowed to sit inside with their masks off?

While Blue State on York may be stuck in a notso-distant past, other coffee shops have altered their expectations. Koffee’s Goodall says that “one thing that has really become clear in this pandemic is: innovate or die.” For Goodall, this has meant working with nearby buildings to secure outdoor space that fits tables that are at least six feet apart. For Willoughby’s, it meant closing down their York Street

Design by Natasha Gaither

branch until students returned in late August. “The store on York Street is highly dependent on Yale. It’s in the architecture library, which is closed. It’s in the midst of dormitories, which have been closed,” says Levine. Willoughby’s branch on Grove has a market including coffee-buyers across Connecticut, but its York Street location, like the Book Trader Cafe, still relies on Yalies for business. In the pandemic, Levine says, relying on this demographic “is just not a sustainable business model.”

As we turn to the fall, many business owners find themselves at a loss. “It’s such a difficult time for anybody to know what to do,” says Willoughby’s Levine. Koffee?’s Goodall had considered investing in plexiglass to create little cubicles for Koffee? so that students could resume studying there the way they used to. But ultimately, it was much more expensive than Goodall anticipated. Unlike Booktrader and Willoughby’s, Koffee’s Goodall has been exploring indoor options. “I’m hoping to open the doors for customers within the next month or so, before the weather turns,” says Levine. “But again, we’re only going to have seating for about 18 people.”

In college, students flesh out their niches with the coffee shops we frequent for hot beverages and studying. Memories form around seasonal drinks.

Relationships flourish between us and the baristas who witnessed us enter their coffee shops as first-years and walk out, into the world, as 23 and 22-year-olds, a favorite cup of coffee in hand. It’s the fall of my senior year now, and the traditions I might’ve looked to––meeting friends to study in Book Trader, getting coffee and sitting outside of the Willoughby’s on York––seem like those of a faraway place. In their place, I’ve had to make new traditions of my own, which has meant identifying roast names through conversations from 6 feet away at Willoughby’s, and finding out why some coffee demands heavy cream and others no dairy at all.

When I got back to New Haven after briefly visiting family at the beginning of August, I saw that a friend who was passing through New Haven to collect their things had left me a gift: a small bag of Willoughby’s coffee. Anticipating a strange ending to my time at Yale, they gave me some advice: “Drink lots of coffee – I finally bought you some from Willoughby’s.” My last first day of classes, I woke up early and made coffee in my kitchen. I pressed my nose into the still-fresh bag of coffee grounds, remembering briefly what it meant to be a first-year, so unsure of the world, standing outside

the Willoughby’s on Grove street. It seems right to end this world where it began for me, with Willoughby’s coffee. I make a note for myself: to buy intentionally from Willoughby’s and Book Trader. I know that if I want these local businesses to have a life of their own outside my sentiment, I have to act accordingly. It feels the most appropriate way to say goodbye: with a thank you.

—Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is a senior in Berkeley College.

Illustration by Sydney Zoehrer

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