I’ve been at the club for 20 hours when I decide to make one last trip down to the main floor. I pull my earplugs out of my pocket and stuff them into my ears; the back left speaker is thumping. Immediately I run into my friend E. just in front of it. He hands me a Chupa-Chup, dropping to one knee and offering it as if it’s an engagement ring. I laugh and accept. He first gave me a lollipop in the toilet queue on my birthday, and after running into him again a few weeks prior at a dinner party, he’d promised to bring me another one this Sunday — it’s become our little thing. He asks how my night is going and I ask about his, taking my earplugs out and putting them back into my pocket before they’ve even had a chance to settle into my eardrums. Talking to anyone with them in makes me feel like I’m drowning.

It’s a cold night in November, two weeks since the 2024 US presidential election. A heavy air hangs over the already-dark Berlin winter. But as soon as I step past the building’s door my chest feels a bit lighter. Viel Spaß, the bag checker says to me as he passes back my bag, items in disarray after his thorough search. As I change my pants for a miniskirt in the garderobe it strikes me what a privilege it is to be able to dedicate a Sunday to having fun.

The building — its quiet corners, angsty toilet queues, packed dance floors — is a mirror. When I find my surroundings unsettling, it’s an opportunity to sit with a part of my heart that isn’t at home. But tonight everything sparkles. Time folds onto itself, the equivalent of two working days passing by in a blink. Baby hairs slick with sweat against my forehead as I dance with A., mesmerized by their blood-red beret. At 4:08 a.m — four hours into a closing set by Cormac I’ve been eagerly waiting for— I pull out my Notes app. By this point in the journey, my vocal cords are often strained and so I resort to communicating in writing. I tap out a message that I then wave in front of the faces of my two current dance floor companions.

Neither of them seems to understand why I’m writing about Republicans. To be fair, the link is opaque, but to my blissed-out mind it makes total sense. All this hate, when you could choose to have this much love.

I’ve received news alerts in the club before and it’s always a strange dissonance, like receiving a telegram from Jupiter when you’re living on Mars. Fadi Mohem was playing in the garden when I suddenly received one from every news app on my phone that Joe Biden had stepped aside. I tapped a friend from Texas on the shoulder, showed them the message. “We’ll always remember where we were when we saw this news,” they say, even though I think both of us know deep down that there is no good to come from either side of the aisle.

Back on the November dance floor, realizing my friends won’t grasp the significance of what I’m trying to convey, I laugh to myself and tuck my phone back into my bag and don’t touch it again for hours. To my left, I see the same person I saw in front of the DJ booth at Cormac’s last set, the same day I first kissed a woman in public for absolutely nobody’s pleasure but my own.

R. leans in and tells me she wants a prosecco cranberry, so we go to the bar and venture back to the dance floor, following each other through the thinning crowd like penguins. A strobe flashes over S. at the exact moment that she lights a joint. I think to myself that she looks beautiful. I catch her eye and she catches mine. I jokingly use my fingers like a picture frame and take a mental snap.

Cormac finishes his set with There Must Be an Angel by Eurythmics.

The blinds open. Everyone looks so beautiful bathed in the unusually keen winter sun. I love the idea that in an hour’s time, a good chunk of these dancers will be rolling bleary-eyed into offices around the city, fighting to stay awake through Monday meetings. I fold my plastic fan, stuff it into my waistband, and use both hands to rummage through my bag to find R. a cigarette. I put it in her mouth and light it for her.

A moment in time and when I close my eyes in the backseat of the taxi home, it already feels like a dream.

A month later, back home in Barcelona, I’m on the metro with O. and H., in town from Berlin for a warmer New Year’s Eve. As we steady ourselves around a pole, I see the woman seated in front of us is crying, hard. She looks so alone, so sad, that for a second I’m overwhelmed by the desire to distract her. I rummage in my bag and come up with the Chupa-Chup given to me in front of the speaker by E., which I’d been saving for a sugar hit.

Don’t do it, O. and H. shake their heads, sure that by offering it to her, I’ll make her feel worse. Quite a masculine way of wanting to be seen in the world, I think to myself; the idea that having your pain acknowledged by the world is a sign of weakness, that leaking into your surroundings signals an unbecoming porousness. When the crying woman looks up, I search for her gaze and smile and hold my hand out with the lollipop in it. She takes it and smiles back. Two metro stops later, she gets off with my small relic of that November night; I’m happy that it has the chance to live on, hoping that it will make the rest of her day just a tiny bit sweeter. All this hate, when you could choose to have this much love.

Isabela Bonnevera is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.

Alex and I go way back — she was the first person I spoke to at the initiation day of our Master’s program in 2015 — and it’s been beyond exciting to see what she and Canelle are creating with Project Coven, which officially launched late last year. They highlight women-made wines through shared storytelling on Instagram, host small tasting gatherings, often in collaboration with wine shops and restaurants led by underrepresented groups, and eventually, hope to maintain a living database of women winemakers to make discovery easier and more accessible. The ultimate goal is to create an inclusive, curiosity-driven space where conversations around wine, feminism, and regenerative food systems can unfold, and to build visibility and community around the women driving the natural wine industry forward.

Today’s interview traces their personal journeys into low-intervention winemaking, the founding of Project Coven, and the motivation behind their mission to amplify women in a traditionally male-dominated industry. It also dives into the possibility for natural wine to be not just a product but a cultural and political practice which embodies queer, feminist, and agroecological values. We hope you enjoy it!

-Isabela

FOLLOW PROJECT COVEN

Reply acronyms: AK (Alex Khripko); CM (Canelle Mengual); PC (singular response by Project Coven)

Isabela: I’m so excited to have you both here to chat about your new project! Before we get into it, can you tell me a bit about your personal and professional backgrounds?

AK: I was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and immigrated to Toronto at the age of five.

After completing my Bachelor’s of Public Affairs in Ottawa, I moved to Berlin for my Master’s of Public Policy at the Hertie School, focusing on gender diplomacy and international relations. I then began working in the climate and energy sector after graduating, primarily with startups and cross-sector innovation initiatives globally at the German Energy Agency (where I met and worked with Canelle on the same team!)

Over an almost-ten year career, I grew increasingly frustrated about how often equity, diversity, and justice were overlooked in a sector preaching a better future. In some ways, I felt like we were losing the plot. We’re seeing in real time that climate innovation doesn’t automatically translate into universal prosperity, and I wanted my work to reflect that reality.

After leaving my climate tech job last year, I decided to channel my energy into addressing this through Bloom Climate Studio, as an independent consultant helping organisations design more grounded, effective & inclusive climate innovation programmes.

In between this career pivot, I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks doing wine harvests at two different women-owned (Glow Glow, Soma Vines), low-intervention vineyards in western Germany (grape picking, pressing, preparing for fermentation, bottling,etc). This solidified my already-growing desire to start a project amplifying women making and working in natural wine, having already completed my first level of WSET (Wine & Spirits Trust), and doing a Climate Farm School course focused on regenerative practices in 2023.

CM: I grew up in a rural area just outside Paris, close to the Champagne region and its vineyards. As a child, I spent most of my time outdoors, surrounded by animals. That early intimacy with nature stayed with me, even as I moved through cities and institutions. I studied Applied Foreign Languages and International Business at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, spent a year at Lehman College in New York City, and eventually earned a Master’s in Marketing and Strategy from Université Paris Dauphine – PSL.

As a teenager, I briefly bought into the consumerist and capitalistic dream, but soon realized it wasn’t fulfilling. I knew I needed something more: a way to have a positive impact on society. That thread runs through my career. I started in marketing and communications with organizations like Lemonaid & ChariTea, then joined Alex at the German Energy Agency (dena) working on Start Up Energy Transition, connecting innovators pushing against the fossil fuel status quo. Today, as an Impact Manager at Phineo gAG, I support nonprofit organizations to increase their positive impact on society.

Over time and through the experiences, I noticed a gap in the mainstream sustainability and feminist movements: a lack of intersectionality. I began to see how systems of oppression are interconnected and realized I needed to connect the dots to rethink them. This perspective led me to co-found Reclaim, a Berlin-based ecofeminist organization working at the intersection of gender justice and climate protection. For five years, we’ve organized an annual one-day event where people can come together, create, and engage.

Now, I’m taking that same spirit of connection and regeneration into a new chapter: co-founding a natural wine project in Berlin with Alex! It feels like a return to my roots — bringing together people, nature, and community in a way that honours the land and the people who work it.

Isabela: What first attracted you to the world of natural wine?

AK: I generally got into wine in my early-mid 20s due to my dad, who got into scouting out amphora wines from Georgia or finding the best subscription boxes available in Ontario. Every time I visited home, he’d be excited to share a wine he found with me and it was and still is one of our connection points.

Natural wine came into my life a little later, and my first experiences with it weren’t the greatest. I happened to stumble across the more extreme, funky expressions from the early days, when many European winemakers were just beginning to transition toward low-intervention methods. It was a period of heavy experimentation, and the results were, at times, decidedly strange. However, the (re)emergence of natural winemaking continued to develop exponentially over the last years, and after trying some really amazing, expressive natural wines, it was really hard to go back to drinking conventional wine.

During this time, I also went to a lot of natural wine tastings and began learning more and more about the stark (and shocking) differences between natural and conventional wine production. This realization also pushed my professional interests further into the regenerative, nature-based side of things within the wide climate realm.

Especially after taking part in wine harvests in western Germany, I really began to notice the community, the collective, which manifests itself around regenerative wine production. Whether it was winemakers lending a hand to their peers in the final sprint of their harvest, or the chefs coming in from the city to cook for the harvest team, it was really beautiful, really special.

So then, after talking about doing something in this space for what felt like years (to the likely annoyance of my friends), we started Project Coven.

CM: Growing up, wine was always on the table, first conventional, then organic. My parents instilled in me a deep sense of responsibility regarding what I consume. We were the “organic freak” family, though back then, it was not about natural wine.

Ten years ago, when I moved to Germany, I discovered the white wines of the Rheingau, where my partner’s family lives. Walking through those vineyards and working the harvest gave me a profound appreciation for the work behind the fruit. It was then that I began to dive deeper into winemaking, fascinated by the process and life and stories of the makers. That’s when I started drinking natural wine and fell in love with it.

The taste reminded me of the Cidre Brut from my childhood in Brittany. But what resonated even more was the mindset behind it: it is all about the collective. This is why I’m bothered when natural wine is only seen as a hype or a luxury for superficial drinkers. It’s the opposite. Natural wine is a return to the roots of how we made wine before the industrial era. It is about simplicity.

In French regions like the Ardèche, natural wine isn’t a trendy label or a luxury item. There, you see small-scale farmers, often women leading the way, who reject the industrial, extractive model that treats land, animals and people as resources to be exploited. Instead, they practice a form of agriculture that is deeply relational: listening to the soil, working with the seasons, and valuing community over profit.

As an ecofeminist, this is the ultimate alignment. It’s a rejection of a system that seeks to dominate nature and a choice to live in partnership with it — to honour it.

Isabela: The conventional wine world is heavily male-dominated. What is the state of women and LGBTQ2+ representation in natural wine? How has this evolved over the years?

PC: The conventional wine world has long been male-dominated, and natural wine isn’t entirely exempt from that reality, but based on our conversations and initial research, there does seem to be a meaningfully higher presence of women in the natural wine space compared to conventional. That said, they’re still the minority, and there’s a pattern worth noting: women are often not the front face of the brand, with many occupying admin or back-office roles rather than being positioned as the winemaker or figurehead.

That’s slowly changing, though. There’s a growing number of initiatives dedicated to highlighting and celebrating women in natural wine, with books like We Don’t Want Any Crap in Our Wine by Camilla Gjerde and professional collectives like the Female Wine Collective in Austria helping bring more collective organisation and visibility to the women who are shaping this world. It feels like the natural wine community, with its generally more progressive ethos, is at least more open to that conversation than the conventional side.

As for LGBTQ2+ representation, it’s honestly something we’re still exploring ourselves. It doesn’t yet seem to be as prominent a public conversation within natural wine, but there’s definitely a real subculture there and it’s something we’re excited to help support.

Isabela: You recently co-launched Project Coven, a collective to champion women winemakers. What motivated you to get this going, and what are you hoping to achieve?

PC: Project Coven came from recognizing a gap that felt impossible to ignore mixed with a thought of “where can we best put our skills to work here?”. There are women making incredible natural wines, but they’re often not the ones being talked about, featured, or discovered. We wanted to change that by creating a dedicated platform and community to amplify women-made natural wine.

In practice, that looks like shared storytelling on Instagram, small tasting gatherings hosted in collaboration with wine shops and restaurants led by underrepresented voices, and longer term, building out a living database of women winemakers to make discovery easier and more accessible. But beyond the practical, we’re also trying to create a genuinely inclusive, curiosity-driven space where conversations around wine, feminism, and regenerative food systems can happen openly and inspire something bigger. We like to say that the natural wine part is sometimes a ‘gateway’ to getting people more interested in regeneration.

Isabela: How does intersectionality factor into your work?

PC: Intersectionality is central to how we think about this work. Supporting women in natural wine means nothing if it only centers one kind of woman. We’re already building that into how we operate, whether that’s who we collaborate with, who we choose to feature, or how we design our events. We’re also committed to learning from and working alongside BIPOC and queer collectives already doing this work, to understand where Project Coven can genuinely add support as the platform grows.

For example, Lauren Johnson-Wünsche, a wine and food writer here in Berlin runs a 300+ member Black Berlin Women Wine Group. That kind of community building is exactly the spirit we want to be in mutual support with.

Isabela: Let’s talk a little bit about the synergies between natural wine and agroecology. How does natural wine production differ from conventional production in terms of climate and environmental impacts?

PC: The synergies are deep, and honestly undersold in most conversations about natural wine. At its core, natural wine is simply how wine was made for most of its 8,000-year history. The mix included grapes, wild yeasts, minimal intervention, and a winemaker working patiently with their land. Back then, no lab yeasts, synthetic pesticides, or additives to correct color or texture were used. That also applies to the standardized flavor profiles we know today (meaning for example, with the right mix of additives, i.e lactic acid, you can make a French Chardonnay taste exactly like one you’d find in Napa Valley). With natural wine, the drink tasted like its home, and every year tasted a little different.

Of course, the 20th century changed all of that. Just like other commodities, as wine became a global product rather than a local tradition, industrial methods took over: synthetic pesticides and herbicides, cultured yeasts for uniform flavor, 49-plus additives in some conventional bottles, heavy filtration and stabilization to ensure consistency at scale.

The goal shifted to efficiency, uniformity, and mass profit stability and in that process, wine became fundamentally disconnected from its land, its labour, and its ecology. Even the mechanical harvesting techniques used in traditional industry, though time-saving, compact soil and bruises vines in ways that quietly degrade the land over time (and take all the living beings living in the wines with it).

Natural wine, by contrast, is a return to something older and more ecologically honest. Land stewardship, biodiversity, transparency, and a relationship with the land rather than extraction from it. And we think that’s where the agroecology connection becomes so clear: both are rooted in the same principle that farming systems should work with natural processes, not override them.

Isabela: As you highlight, natural wine-making uses techniques that are very close to nature (no lab-made yeasts, no additives, etc). Yet — as we can both attest to, having lived in cities like Berlin and Barcelona — natural wine bars are often exclusive spaces that appeal to a certain global aesthetic and sensibility. How do you explain this contradiction?

PC: Ouf, it’s a real contradiction, and one we’re very much aware of and honestly concerned about. The principles underpinning natural wine are fundamentally anti-capitalist: working with the land, rejecting industrial systems, preserving traditions that prioritize ecology over profit. At its core, natural wine is for the people. It has always been.

But then obviously the market responded to the opportunity rather than the ethos, and that’s where things got complicated. The spaces natural wine became associated with were often designed to differentiate, to carve out a niche that was neither old money Veuve Clicquot on the Ku’damm nor your local dive bar, but something else entirely. And in doing so, they created their own kind of exclusivity. There’s a whole aesthetic that developed around it which we all know and probably succumb to as well… the orange wine, the olives in metal industrial bowls, the sourdough and butter, the Instagram-ready corner table. Ironically, a lot of these spaces that were trying to stand out ended up looking exactly the same.

At the same time, as with other fairly produced products, there’s also a real and legitimate tension around price. If you’ve ever worked a natural wine harvest, you understand pretty quickly why a bottle can’t honestly cost three euros. That kind of pricing only works if you’re squeezing the land, the workers, and the soil itself. Regenerative, low-intervention farming is labor-intensive, lower-yield and higher-risk by design. So some of the cost is real and justified. But that doesn’t mean the cultural gatekeeping or hip aesthetics around it are.

What gives us hope is that this isn’t the universal story. In parts of France, for example, natural wine isn’t a statement, it’s just what’s on the menu next to the beer, in unpretentious countryside bars and neighborhood spots in Paris where it’s simply normalized rather than sensationalized. That’s what we want it to be everywhere, because only then, with mass public acceptance, does the natural wine industry move out of its somewhat niche and pretentious status. Just to hammer home: the aesthetic capture of natural wine is a market phenomenon, not an inherent truth about what it is or who it’s for.

Isabela: I like that, because at the same time, we do see that many natural wine bars are proudly queer or women/femme-owned. How does natural wine embody feminist and queer values?

PC: In more ways than we could ever fully list. To start with the uncomfortable truth: women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people still face very real sexism, racism, and homophobia across the entire wine chain, from the vineyard to the bar. And while many conventional wine spaces do try to source interesting, quality-driven wines, the ethical rootedness that is quietly expected of natural wine production doesn’t tend to travel with them. That’s not to say every natural winemaker, distributor, or bar is actively embodying these values. But there’s an underlying current there, an expectation of integrity that perhaps creates a sense of safety and belonging for historically underrepresented groups.

There’s also something deeper at play. Natural wine, at its core, is a movement of resistance to mass industrialisation and ecological destruction. And it feels entirely coherent that a movement pushing back against the capitalist, largely male-led, over-extraction of land would find common ground with communities who have long been resisting the same structures of dominance and extraction. The oppressors, if you want to put it plainly, tend to overlap.

That’s actually part of why we named this Project Coven. The history of witches and witchcraft is really a history of the persecution of women, queer people, healers, and anyone who fell outside the white male colonialist status quo. People who had deep relationships with land, with plants, with community knowledge, and were punished for it in various ways. That lineage felt very relevant to us.

Isabela: Any winemakers whose work you particularly want to highlight?

PC: Our first interview series we did was with Šárka Betke, founder of Vinofactum, a distributor of Eastern European wines in Berlin. As of the last two years, she is also a winemaker herself, making wine in the village of Kobylí in the Czech Republic under The Lacery. She originally comes from a winemaking family in this village, making the choice to work with her native land a natural way to honor her roots. Though she took quite the indirect route to get there, with a career in tech across Europe and Asia, before pivoting to the wine world in Berlin and eventually finding her way back to the soil she grew up around. As she explained in one of our interviews, she founded Vinofactum to put Eastern European natural wines back on the global map and dismantle the misguided assumption that Eastern European = low quality.

Then there’s the incredible Maryam Hariri of Azizam Wines, who, after a global career in climate policy, decided to make natural wine in Baja, Mexico. She launched Azizam, meaning “darling” in Farsi, in 2022, focusing her work on climate-adaptive, uniquely Mexican varietals, sourced from old vines and small-scale sustainable farms. She’s actively working to challenge and decolonize the conventional perception of a winemaker, investing in the next generation of women in the industry. To us, she’s as much a talented winemaker as she is an advocate and a strong proof of concept for diverse leadership, dry farming, and resilience in viticulture.

We also love Jule Eichblatt, co-founder of Kommune 3000 and the entrepreneurial force behind Weingut Schätzel, a 650-year-old natural wine estate in Rheinhessen. Jule grew up on a crop farm in northern Germany and came to the estate originally for harvest in 2020, where she met winemaker Kai Schätzel. They’ve transformed the estate into a future-facing agricultural experiment, planting thousands of trees between the vines, grazing sheep for biodiversity, and producing naturally stable, unfiltered Rieslings. Kommune 3000, which Jule leads, brings young people from across Europe to live and work on the estate, supporting them in farming and personal development alike.

Isabela: What Project Coven initiatives should we keep an eye out for next?

We’ll be coming out with more winemaker and wine professional spotlights and interviews in the coming months, and hope to host our third event sometime in the Berlin summer. We’re also chatting with other collectives in the background regarding some exciting collabs. Follow us on Instagram at projectcoven.wine

If you’re keen to collaborate with us, we’d love to hear from you. Send us a mail to alex@bloom-climatestudio.com or reach out via Instagram.

A final note from FFJ: Last week, Steph Marsden of our FFF collective hosted an incredible event on the intersection of food and play. For those who couldn’t make it, she shared some of the prompts we used in a recent newsletter — check it out below!

Amuse

Fruit melodrama, grocery lists & speculative food futures

Yesterday, I hosted a workshop about playing with food. It was also about playing with words…

Read more

21 days ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · Steph from food/play/food

By Jesse Roth for our CELEBRATE issue

“Music, dancing, buffet, ‘Marseillaise,’ and other hymns against Satan.”

So read the ticket to a 1890 Yom Kippur Ball in Brooklyn. Thousands of Yiddish anarchists met at a hall on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar — and they did so in London, Montreal, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago, too. But at these events, there was no fasting or atoning for sins. On the buffet? Pork. On the agenda? Sermons satirizing Jewish liturgy, a protest against the intrinsic bond between religion and the state. And the rabbis proved them right; enraged by the sacrilege, they called in the cops.

More than a century later, the Israeli ethnostate is committing genocide against Palestinians, having killed at least 72,469 people in Gaza over the last two years (the death toll, according to some experts, could be as high as 680,000). With backing from the US, they’ve also attacked Iran and Lebanon, with the violence threatening to escalate into an even larger war.

In fealty to this genocidal, apartheid nation state, many US Jews are allying themselves with the neo-nazi-enabling Trump government. Mainstream Jewish institutions are choosing state violence (at home and abroad) in an attempt to secure (fleeting, false, conditional) “safety” for the Jewish people.

As fascism, white nationalism, and geopolitical crises escalate across the globe, more and more people across identities will be offered this devil’s bargain: turn on “others” to (supposedly) save yourself. But some of these Yiddish ancestors knew — in picnics and parties, mutual aid groups and worker coops, schools and libraries, assassinations and streetfights — a safety greater than Empire. They understood that pleasure and celebration are fertile soil for revolutionary organizing; we have so much to learn from them today.

A key figure of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century left (and a frequent Yom Kippur Ball attendee) was the revolutionary Emma Goldman. In 1899, at twenty years old, she arrived in New York City with just five dollars, a handbag, a sewing machine, and three addresses — one of which was for the office of a German anarchist newspaper, the Freiheit, or “Freedom.” Emma had come to New York to immerse herself in the rapidly growing anarchist political scene, newly radicalized by news of the Haymarket Affair.

The Haymarket Affair took place in 1886 in Chicago, when workers, immigrants, and anarchists demonstrated for an eight-hour workday. 180 police brutally attacked the protestors. Amidst the attack, a bomb of unknown origin exploded. Chaos ensued, including police firing on demonstrators and each other. The bomb and police crossfire killed an untold number of demonstrators and eight police officers. Eight anarchists were prosecuted for conspiracy to murder a policeman, though it became clear throughout the trial that they had had nothing to do with the bomb.

Emma was not alone in radicalizing in response to the brutality: as one organizer and historian wrote, “Anarchism in America received its baptism in the blood of the Chicago martyrs.” Anarchism, a political tradition born from Eastern European socialist organizing in the 19th century, fundamentally opposes domination and hierarchies of all kinds.1 While socialism and anarchism have a shared enemy in capitalism, anarchism also opposes the domination of a centralized state. For over a century, anarchists have fought against private property, borders, nation-states, police, prisons, patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism.

From the ashes of these systems, anarchists seek to build a world based on mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, direct action, and collective decision-making. Yiddish anarchism, in particular, came from the Jewish experience of statelessness, of being a diasporic people who always lived (until the invention of “Israel”) outside of and beyond the nation state. As scholars Kenyon Zimmer and Claire Ehrlich say, “Jewish anarchists didn’t have to unlearn nationalism.” Instead, they turned toward language, literature, and culture to create communal bonds — a praxis encapsulated by the late Yiddish Anarchist and newspaper editor Ahrne Thorne’s assertion that “Yiddish is [my] homeland.”

Contemporary Yiddish Anarchist scholar Anna Elena Torres writes, “Some people might assume that because anarchists believe in the abolition of borders, they also believe in the abolition of difference.” Yiddish anarchists fought fiercely against assimilation and universalism. Their understanding of Jewish-ness was fluid and self-determined: many anarchists were avidly anti-religious, others grounded their anarchist beliefs in the holy texts. Some weren’t actually Jewish, but were welcomed into Yiddish anarchism, like Rudolph Rocker, a gentile, who comrades called an “anarchist rabbi.” The Yiddish anarchists practiced building culture without policing its borders.

In the decades after Emma’s arrival in New York, Yiddish anarchists played a crucial role in the labour movement in the United States, organizing large-scale strikes. Some, including Emma and a great number of other anarchist women, also protested military action, agitating against WWI in a campaign that led to decades in prison for many organizers and Emma’s eventual deportation to Russia.2

In the meantime, they also threw good parties.

On September 24, 1890, Emma and 5,000 other Jewish anarchists arrived at the Labor Lyceum in Brooklyn for a “Grand Yom Kippur Ball. With Theatre.” On the ticket, the Yiddish Anarchists invited their comrades to celebrate the beginning of the Hebrew year 6651, satirizing the actual new year 5651. Yom Kippur closely follows Jewish New Year, and is traditionally a holiday of atonement, fasting, and piety. Yet on this occasion, men walked down the street with cigarettes in their mouths, pork in their hands, “growling the Marseillaise.” They were anticipating a reading of a satirical Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur Liturgy) from leading German anarchist Johann Most (who soon became Emma’s lover). Like at other Yom Kippur balls being held around the country, there was to be music, dancing, food, and drink.

But Emma and her 5,000 peers never made it inside. They were turned away by “brutal obstruction of the police” and a bevy of angry religious Jews. The source of the leak? Local Rabbi Marcus Friedlander, who, upon hearing of the ball, translated the Yiddish flyer into English, but not without adding mentions of “dynamite” and “bombs.” He then handed that flier to the cops and riled up his own community to shut the ball down, resulting in a “pitched battle” of a street fight.

The Brooklyn Yom Kippur ball wasn’t an isolated event, nor was it the only one to rile up controversy. Over other luxurious buffet tables, these Yiddish anarchists took on organized religion as their enemy #1, believing it to be a primary barrier to people rising up in revolution. Joseph Cohen, one of these anarchists and a historian, wrote:

We have the historical record that the church served the rich and the powerful everywhere and at all times and helped to keep the people enslaved and in ignorance, poverty, and need. Religion in this sense is really the opium of the people — the worst and most harmful infestation, from which we must try with all our might to free ourselves before we can begin to think about changing the political and economic structure of society.

In 1891, at a Philadelphia ball, a religious Jew and a Jewish cop (Cohen called him “a red-baiter and a rat”) falsely accused five men of inciting violence against politicians in their speeches.3 In 1890, in Baltimore, they served ham sandwiches at a “town hall” where an Orthodox Jew and an anarchist were to debate “Are religion and socialism compatible?” before an audience of 1,000. The Orthodox Jew spoke first, but before the anarchist could respond, someone yelled “Fire!” and the audience fled in chaos. A “lavish spread of ice cream, pickles, cake, and cream puffs” was served at a 1905 Chicago Ball, where famed anarchist Lucy Parsons was a keynote speaker.4 Just as Parsons was about to step onstage, the police arrived and intervened. She backed down. The following day, a headline in The Daily Inter-Ocean read “Anarchists Have Degenerated into Eaters of Ice Cream Puffs Instead of Drinkers of Blood and Throwers of Bombs.”

Though many (then and now) have scoffed at Yom Kippur Balls as frivolous and counterproductive “tomfoolery,” these joyful, militant, and cheeky celebrations revealed the intrinsic collusion between “State and Synagogue;” rabbis were repeatedly willing to turn to state violence to protect their institutions. Though the ball organizers were anti-religious, they were deeply Jewish, riffing off of and having fun with Jewish traditions.

These events were valuable places for base-building: radicalizing young people and bringing them into the movement where they would study, organize, and struggle together. Tasked with helping organize young women into a strike, Emma helped assemble “concerts, socials, and dances.” She writes that “at these affairs, it was not difficult to press upon the girls the need of making common cause with their striking brothers.” Emma felt she was “one of the most untiring and gayest” at the dances — until one night when a boy called her “undignified” and “frivolous.” In return, she made a ferocious speech, decrying ascetic radicalism and calling for an anarchism full of life and joy. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things,” she said. In her memoir, Emma matter-of-factly states that parties were the easiest place to organize young women, and she quickly rebuked anyone saying that the movement should be less fun.

Emma and her comrades understood that the means and the ends were one and the same: The act of making a revolution must be as fun and delicious as winning one. This philosophy applied to the support they built into everyday life, too. Along with the balls and parties where they would gather to riff on Jewish traditions, Yiddish anarchists created an “anarchist minhag,” or “way of life:” libraries, schools, housing and worker coops, newspapers, mutual aid associations. These organizers built institutions that wove radical politics into their everyday lives, creating spaces for cross-pollination and politicization over food and drink.

In her autobiography, on her very first day in New York City, Emma ended up at Sachs café, the “headquarters of the East Side radicals.” Before she knew it, she met her future beau Alexander Berkman, as well as two other soon-to-be lovers and a roommate — all dedicated comrades. She later went on to found her own café (with Berkman and Feyda, one of the other lovers): an ice cream parlour in Worcester, Massachusetts. With ice cream, sandwiches, coffee, and “dainty dishes,” the polycule5 used their earnings to fund Berkman’s attempted assassination of strikebreaker Henry Clay Frick.

Joseph Cohen describes how elsewhere in the city, Annie Netter, an “indefatigable” organizer (and a participant in a Baltimore Yom Kippur Ball) and her parents opened their home to ensure that “not only to comrades but to anyone in need” could have a helping of soup (with plenty of meat) for just a few cents, nurturing young radicals and supporting intellectual exchange.

Yiddish anarchists also organized cooperatives for housing, work, and mutual aid, prefiguring the kind of collectivist life they dreamed of. The primary organizing force behind these co-ops was The Workman’s Circle, an organization founded in 19006 that served socialists and anarchists across North America and, at its height, boasted more than 80,000 members. The organization provided healthcare, unemployment, life insurance, elder care, housing co-ops, and burial services to its members. It also operated a Philadelphia cooperative bakery and shoe store, which opened with an enormous parade, scored by a marching band and led by bakers in white aprons “displaying on a cart a challah as big as a house.”

For several years, some Philadelphia organizers also created a Yiddish anarchist summer camp full of celebrations, art, play, and food, which took in the children of women picketing during a textile workers’ strike in New Jersey.7

In essence, these organizers used care infrastructure and hospitality to build a base. With songs, ice cream, ham sandwiches, cafés, cooperatives, and thousands of comrades, these organizers built culture to fight against the state.

Over the first half of the twentieth century, the anti-state politics of these anarchists would be tested, however, by escalating anti-semitism across Europe and the growing popularity of a supposed saviour: zionism.

Today, the dominant cultural story is that all Jews have always supported zionism. But mass movements of Jews across the world — including many Jewish anarchists — opposed this ethno-nationalist movement since the beginning. Zionism and its supremacist promises, however, were unfortunately seductive to some leftists. A sect of Yiddish anarchists fully abandoned their anti-state politics and became zionists, imagining that this nation-state would save them. Other anarchist “cultural zionists” or “labour zionists” attempted to create an anarchist/socialist “utopia” in Palestine, forming the beginning of the kibbutz movement on stolen land, systematically excluding Arabs and creating the key building blocks of what would become the Israeli state after the Nakba of 1948.8

Even Emma Goldman herself insisted that while she opposed zionism as a capitalist project, Jewish workers had “reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens,” (repeating the zionist myth of “making the desert bloom”).9 “The land should belong to those who till the soil,” she wrote, claiming that in her understanding of socialism, Jews have as much claim to the land as Palestinians. Emma’s fantasy of a socialist utopia made her unable to reckon with the ways zionism, as a colonial project, uses working-class Jews as pawns. Even while opposing zionism, she repeated its propaganda.

Other Jewish radicals opposed zionism at first, but later abandoned their politics as Palestinian’s (rightful) resistance to zionism grew more militant. In the midst of the Palestinian Arab uprising of 1929, the editors of a leading anarchist Yiddish newspaper changed sides, writing, “Our last and only hope — a sad and regretful hope, there is no question — is to create within ourselves, in our own people, the power to strike back and fight violence with violence.” In the same letter, they call Arabs “savages” and spread the rhetoric of Palestine being “a land without a people”.

Not everyone jumped ship. In the same newspaper, a group of Polish anarchists struck back, arguing that the anarchist paper had “granted a reactionary ideology citizenship in their minds.” They argued that the British Empire was practicing “its colonial murder and politics of theft” and that the “Zionist devil” was doing their dirty work for them. They decried the “foolish chutzpah against the Arabs” they saw in Jewish settlers. They underscored that Jewish immigrants were stealing land from Palestinians, “land which they and their ancestors worked for generations.”

Meanwhile, the Jewish Labor Bund, a Yiddish leftist group prominent in Eastern Europe, centered its politics around the Yiddish concept of “doykeit” or hereness — building liberation, solidarity, and comradeship in the here and now, without dominating others in the process. Grounded in this concept, the Bund was fiercely anti-zionist. While many other Eastern European Jews turned to zionism and fled as the Nazis gained power, the Bund demanded — through political organizing, culture, and armed struggle — their right to freedom and safety right where they were.

“[Zionists] forget all the lessons of history that have been written with rivers of blood over the last two thousand years,” wrote Joseph Cohen in his 1945 book The Yiddish Anarchist Movement in America. “Sooner or later, humankind will have to come to the conviction that the state cannot solve the serious problems of society because the state is itself a contributor to social problems.” In Cohen’s view, the state — armed, powerful, and privileged — was the root of oppression. Its rulers would never understand the challenges faced by their subjects; the only alternative was to create a network of voluntary organizations that would build an egalitarian society without exploitation, force, or hierarchy. Any state, even a so-called Jewish one, was not to be embraced.

Despite these voices of clarity, Yiddish anarchism’s eventual demise came through a cocktail of assimilation, zionism, and repression. Post-war, in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were offered more and more benefits of whiteness in exchange for leaving Yiddish (their homeland) and culture behind. The US government also took aim at the left through both Red Scares (periods of intense public anxiety over the supposed rise of communism), including targeting Jews in the US for both supposed and actual communist organizing. Meanwhile, the zionist movement out-organized our anti-state comrades.10 Many Jews, including those on the so-called “left,” joined the state-building project that became “Israel”— killing, stealing the land, and attempting to destroy the culture of Palestinians.

Our present moment is a continuation and escalation of the zionist project. While it has been over a century since the Yiddish anarchists and the synagogue boys faced off at the first Yom Kippur Ball, these contradictions between and within Jewish communities remain as a parable for our times. Like over a century ago, while some Jews fight against the state, others ally themselves with its violence — the cops, the Neo-Nazi aligned Trump administration, the Israeli army, and the international frameworks that protect them

On April 28, 2025, in Brooklyn — where the Grand Yom Kippur Ball was hosted over 130 years prior — a group of pro-Palestinian activists, led by the group Within our Lifetime, protested a speech by Itamar Ben Gvir (the zionist regime’s national security minister and a key architect of the genocide). In response, over a hundred conservative Jews chanted “Death to Arabs” while threatening, hitting, and throwing garbage cans and traffic cones at protestors. Outside the synagogue where the speech was being held, they shoved a Jewish woman on the Palestinian side to the ground, where she lay bleeding from the head. (Some reports say they attacked her with a brick.) In a post on Instagram, the attacked woman writes, “The only thing that gives me some joy is that while zios were celebrating and laughing at me i’m over here thinking yall hit a Jew w. A damn israhelli passport!! Great job.” She shares a photo of her bloodied face with a keffiyeh over her head, cowering as the men surround and attack her.

For decades, and more intensely every day, the zionist project wields state violence in the name of “Jewish safety”. As former President Joe Biden said dozens of times, “Were there no Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who will be safe.” The zionist state’s public relations apparatus (hasbarah) has made a decades-long project of branding all pro-Palestine speech as antisemitic—all while cozying up to the neo-Nazi-adjacent right wing.11

Just before the 2024 election in the US, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” This strategy, created by Christian zionists and named after a biblical Jewish Queen, targets a “global Hamas Support Network,” including organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Since coming to power, the Trump administration has been running the Project Esther playbook, releasing two executive orders on “combating antisemitism,” giving them a pretense to deport, investigate, punish, and prosecute “anti-Jewish racism,” “pro-jihadist” protestors, and “Hamas sympathizers.”12

Thus, within global Palestinian solidarity movements, the Jewish anti-zionist left has taken up a key role in attempting to refute this zionist propaganda: How can you say this genocide is in the name of Jewish safety, when thousands of us are telling you it’s not? This encampment can’t be antisemitic; hundreds of Jews are lighting Shabbat candles. We argue that Jewish safety comes through solidarity; our safety and liberation are bound together with those of all other oppressed peoples.

While right-wing Jewish institutions might say we are “self-hating Jews,” contemporary anti-zionist Jewish organizing is actually a deep well of spiritual devotion and practice. Perhaps to the chagrin of our cigarette-smoking, pork-eating ancestors, ritual and scripture often guide our efforts for community, nourishment, cultural organizing, healing, reclamation, and civil disobedience. Many actually see anarchism and non-secular Judaism as complementary: In his essay “Of Performing Mitzvahs and Toppling Kings,” Stephen Gee writes, “There is no talk of an afterlife in Judaism; the focus is on what you do while you’re alive.” In a moment when zionists are attempting to equate the Jewish religion with a genocidal project, and Christo-fascists are appropriating Jewish texts to deport our comrades, divinity and ritual are contested terrain; we can’t cede them to the right wing without a fight.

As weight to separate Judaism from zionism, we must also heed our Yiddish ancestors’ mistakes. Over a hundred years ago, though a critical mass of the Jewish left stood firm against zionism, too many comrades — including Emma Goldman — waffled or changed sides, engaging in the Western rhetoric of settler colonialism. Today, the anti-zionist Jewish left falls into a similar trap, often centering modern Western constructs like the nation-state and international law over anticolonial frameworks. We’ve spent countless hours calling our lawmakers; thousands have been arrested for civil disobedience, and we’ve spilled endless ink trying to convince politicians to stop the mass murder of children. We appeal to the supposed neutrality of “international law” to decide what constitutes a war crime or a valid form of self-defense. Like a hundred years ago, when Emma supported Western socialism over Indigenous claims to the land, the Jewish left is making our commitments to collective liberation contingent on Western political constructs.

But the nation-state and its international bodies have no morality. Its leaders — “left”, right, and center — endorse and cravenly send billions of dollars to enact this mass violence. Politicians parrot stock sentences on the state of Israel’s right to defend itself when it is, in fact, an occupying power. Instead of working within these limiting constructs, the Jewish left must, in the words of Omar El Akkad, “look at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalist thing it serves and [say]: I want nothing to do with this.”

If we’re going to walk away from the Western nation-state, then we have to create our own sources of safety, care, and pleasure. In our present moment, it’s tempting to ditch culture in the face of ever-escalating genocide and fascist violence; to pivot to a politics of survival, to treat a library, a newspaper, a dinner, a play, or a poem as silly and extraneous. In the words of a cynical turn-of-the-century journalist, how dare we eat ice cream puffs when we should be drinking blood and throwing bombs?

But our enemies are not so naïve: they are intentionally destroying cultural organizing and social infrastructure because they understand and fear its power. The Trump administration has cut funds to libraries and arts organizations en masse. They’ve defunded public broadcasting and hit newsrooms with FCC investigations. They’ve cut food stamps and food safety investigations. Meanwhile, the Israeli state shells, detonates, loots, and sets fire to libraries containing rare books, hundreds of years of knowledge, precious religious texts, and sheltering families. They’ve slaughtered over 270 journalists, many in targeted drone strikes, while keeping a propaganda chokehold on the Western media. They’re using starvation as a weapon of war. They’re destroying olive trees and attacking Palestinians harvesting traditional foods. They’re jailing and beating theatre directors. They’re targeting Palestinian poets, whose words are, according to an Israeli general, “like facing 20 enemy fighters,” (as quoted by the martyred poet Refaat Alareer).

Yiddish Anarchists understood that cultural organizing is essential to creating a world beyond the nation-state. They built an astonishing amount of movement infrastructure — summer camps, libraries, schools, and newspapers — all while working 13-hour days in garment factories. The contemporary left is working on it: We’ve built popular universities at encampments, drag shows, solidarity economy projects, community gardens, protest kitchens, and the massive web of mutual aid networks that emerged during the early COVID-19 pandemic. But as the feeble support offered by the state for our social welfare erodes under fascism and climate collapse, we need to scale this more than we can imagine. In essence, we must consider how to recreate the concept of doykeit: creating the communities necessary to survive, win, and enjoy each other and our lives in the here and now.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and cook vat after vat of chicken soup, with shmaltz floating on top. Let’s deliver it to drawn-out strategy meetings in comrades’ living rooms; to mutual aid groups feeding unhoused neighbours on freezing nights; spoonfed to activists chained to the doors of weapons manufacturers; to jail support teams receiving cop-battered friends at 4 AM; to fundraisers sending cash to families in Gaza desperate to afford a $300 bag of flour. As organizer Cindy Barukh Milstein writes, “As both an anarchist and a Jew, I’ve long dreamed of do-it-ourselves, egalitarian forms of social organization — ones in which we’re all reciprocally and abundantly cared for, not to mention messy-beautifully whole.” Our bubbes — those women from long ago who cooked for radical summer camps, shilled ice cream to fund assassins, and ate pork on High Holy Days — might be proud.

Jesse Roth is a writer, theatre artist, and organizer of Jewish descent. Her writing has been published in The Stranger and Truthout. She writes I Have a Ribcage; You Have a Ribcage, a newsletter of auto-criticism on art, politics, and the divine. She lives in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood.

By Lira Green for our CELEBRATE issue

It’s after dark on Thanksgiving Day, and I’m standing on the stoop of a walk-up littered with fallen leaves and chips of peeling paint. For the first time since starting my trek across the strip malls at the edge of my new city, I take my hand off the pepper spray clipped to my bag. The stairs creak as I venture upstairs, and before opening Mara’s door, I let out a very shaky breath.

As I step into her tiny apartment, clutching my offering of cream sherry, I hear laughter, rustling chip bags, the sound of Franzia Merlot flowing into glasses. The room is packed wall-to-wall. Haunting electronic music floats through the air, blending with an array of voices I mostly don’t recognize. Under flags and fairy lights, folding tables hold mountains of food. There are buttery, sage-scented kolaches from a recipe my friend Charlotte had held onto while fleeing Texas. There is turkey and gravy, fluffy piles of wheat and cornmeal stuffing, a pan of glistening okra, crisp shrimp cocktail, cheese balls, popcorn, charcuterie, beer, and “gender rolls,” which another friend and I had sardonically kneaded into the shapes of Ares’s spear or Venus’s mirror — more food than I’ve ever seen.

Every guest, like me, is trans. This is a celebration of our own.

What do people like us have to be thankful for? The President of our country has just recently called to ‘eliminate transgenderism’ to cheering crowds. I’m terrified and furious, and have no idea how our potluck could be anything but a dirge of fear and misery under the circumstances. But as I watch, wide-eyed, all around me transfemmes flirt, play, and chatter happily; vibrantly alive. I’ve never attended an event with other trans women before, or even seen more than a couple of them in the same place. Beholding over twenty of them, cuddling, arguing, and keening as each dish is added to the table is a spectacle beyond my comprehension.

Tentatively, I enter the fray, pulling out a chair at the head of one of the tables and setting down the sherry. A pair of warm brown eyes blink at me from the couch, and I turn to see Charlotte waving before nuzzling it’s green curls back into it’s lover. I try not to look at it’s lips or remember the way it’s apron fell over it’s slight frame as it rolled out the dough for the kolaches the day before.

Everyone looks alarmingly attractive, and I’m intimidated. On one side of me, conversations bloom and topics turn towards resistance. On my other side, spontaneous polyamorous couplings paw at each other and vie for the couch. I have no idea what’s going on. Someone pats me on the head and I yip with surprise, then delight. Slowly, as I settle into the evening, my new companions share their food, stories, touches. Some are generous.

Flushed from the gentle attention, I cast around, looking for the first face I’d ever kissed. From the opposite table, August watches the flick of someone’s lighter with their soft eyes, snorting at the way I hold a joint in the tips of my fingers like it might burn me.

I quickly learn how I hold precious things, too, as before long, I find myself wrapped around another woman. Charlotte squirms happily in my arms, and Stella shoots me a smirk from across the room. Instinctively, I embrace it tightly, carefully, like I’m protecting it from some unnamed thing.

Here in this strange new home, I find myself engulfed in trans women and their joy. Banal joys, transcendent joys. Trans women defending the honour of their pan of mac and cheese. Trans women making faces as they swallow gulps of their Franzia. A masseuse offering scalp massages. A glimpse of someone’s arm with a fresh bite mark that makes me blaze with wanting. Flirting and drinking and eating too many kolaches—the pastry flaky, the sausage juicy and rich—and making a fool of myself and whining at the force of my massage and accepting compliments on the sherry and beaming and learning people’s names.

As my eyes swim over the room, warm and drunk and safe, a strange irony occurs to me. Here, in an unremarkable house on a quiet street off the main drag, where strip malls spread from my campus to the green woods of the suburbs, I have the distinct sense that in that very moment, I am standing in the place that matters most in the world.

Just as everyone’s tipsy enough to giggle, with a flash of golden hair, Jeanne stands and raises her cup, eyes bright with laughter.

“Here’s to still being alive!” she cries.

The roar goes up louder than any toast I’d ever heard.

Oh my God, I think to myself. Shivers wring their way out of my back as I laugh and tilt back my last dregs of sweet wine. I’m going to make it, after all.

Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk. She previously wrote a serialized story, My Trans Body Longs for Love and Salt, for FFJ’s BODY issue.

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By Clare Michaud

I woke up this morning with a full heart. We hosted a party for the first time since our wedding, back in August 2022 — and a New Year’s Eve celebration for the first time since the winter my dad passed away. Different friend groups met and mingled; worlds expanded. We spent the evening eating a group-created buffet: corn cakes and cookies, beet salad and roasted carrots and fennel-white bean dip, spreads of cheeses and jams, Champagne jelly and macarons, marinated herring at midnight.

We talked about the milestones and shapes that our lives have taken this year: marriages, babies, home projects, things that define our everyday existences. It was a party that I think would be best described as cozy. When we weren’t comfortably nestled into couch corners, we were relaxed in the kitchen, grazing on food; either way, we were, in multiple senses, at home with each other. Standing at the kitchen counter, four of us eating marinated herring straight out of the Ma Baensch jar, we connected over something only our fathers partook in over the winter holidays (our picky, fearful childhood palates stayed away from the strange jarred fish), and we savored it.

I’ve seen a sentiment floating around social media over the last few weeks — as genocides rage on to serve the invasive ideals of settler-colonists and the extractive ideals of capitalists and as these evils seem to become increasingly flagrant — scolding Americans for celebrating the new year while our government bolsters Israel’s decimation of a place and extermination of a people. I try to remind myself that this is the genre of post that keeps the Internet running, existing as a hot reaction to be interacted with through more hot reactions. I sympathize with the sentiment, though, since I, too, deeply hate and am deeply disturbed by my country’s actions, by my country’s ethos. Rhetoric like this gives me pause, forces me to think about how much we really can do to resist and agitate for better policies, for better lives at home and abroad. Often, it feels like we live surrounded by grief: collective grief driven by mass loss and destruction by things like racism and Covid-19; climate grief, as we lose coastlines, seasons, all forms of flora and fauna; the grief associated with the abundant clarity that our society isn’t so democratic after all; we all likely hold some personal grief, too, and maybe these other forms of grief amplify it. Should we not gather for age-old rituals, or find joy from spending time with the people we love?*

The feeling of deep satisfaction, of love, of joy, that I woke up with had everything to do with sharing my home with friends. It’s a seemingly small act with poignant measures that combat how isolated our lives can become — and how isolating our society tries to construct them to be. As people arrived earlier in the evening and then departed after midnight, they thanked us, expressing gratitude and love in words and hugs. Of course, it’s our pleasure, I would reply, my Catholic-raised Midwestern tongue afraid of the shape my mouth would take to say you’re welcome. But I think both turns of phrase ring true: welcoming friends into the home is a pleasure.

What kept my feeling of good cheer running into the morning had so much to do with our party’s democratic spirit. Though we hosted, our table was overflowing with our friends’ generous contributions. A friend who stayed the night eased the initial round of cleaning up at 1:00 in the morning, a task made joyful by drinking remnants of punch and Cava and dancing to Talking Heads and New Order while we washed dishes and put away food.

Marosia Castaldi’s prose-poem of a novel, The Hunger of Women, follows Rosa, a widow beginning to navigate her life as her daughter matures and prepares to leave her home. Rosa finds new meaning through making food that she grew to know through her mother’s cooking, and her mother’s mother’s cooking (and so on) during her childhood in Naples, and opens a trattoria in her Lombardy home. The restaurant is a spiritual site: to Rosa, cooking is a God-like art; it’s also an opportunity for her to connect with others, forming intimate friendships that are nourishing, caring, and romantic. She writes, “Life is ferment battle struggle joy torment It’s never still It is a glorious eternal churning movement in which we were absorbed and celebrated along with our sacred repasts”.

A key component of Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy is rooted in the distribution of the senses: how are our politics shaped by how each of us touches, sees, hears, tastes, smells? Sensability (centering the senses) and sensuality are at the heart of Rosa’s navigation of the world: we see this in the lavish dishes that she prepares for her trattoria, in how she cares for her friends and neighbors, and in how she treats her lovers. By the end of the book, she’s clear in her wish to bring us, the readers, along with her to pursue a life of joy and pleasure, to build new ways of living with her. Life’s challenges and pains are not lost on her: they are the encouragement to care for others and to resist falling into a trap of isolation.

Rosa’s meals — the descriptions for which sometimes span whole pages — connote a sense of wonder and ecstasy that Henri Lefebvre writes about in Critique of Everyday Life: “The mysterious, the sacred and the diabolical, magic, ritual, the mystical — at first all of these were lived with intensity. They were part of the real lives of human beings — thoroughly authentic, affective and passionate forces. Then, with the appearance and development of rationality, they were doubly modified, along with their relationship to everyday life.” When life’s demands don’t slow, and the powerful continue to push on, how can we reincorporate some of the magic and awe that Lefebvre laments? Rosa’s trattoria seeks to do just that, I think. In doing so, she reimagines networks of care, support, and love.

I feel the importance of incorporating joy and wonder into our lives now more than ever. It feels like a resistance to the ways that our society pushes us to be ever-more transactional in our relationships, a society that is desensitizing us to pandemics and genocides. We can’t ignore the world’s grimness, but who’s to say that something radical can’t come out of moments of joy and pleasure with our loved ones?

Previously a baker, Clare Michaud is a PhD student studying culture and landscape through the lenses of environmental studies and folklore. Her writing has appeared in Kitchen Work, the Rose Books Reader, and previously in the Feminist Food Journal.

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This week we’re sharing our first-ever audio story, ‘A Treasure for My Daughter’, originally published in early 2022 as part of our MILK issue.

From our MILK issue

Through the lens of her mom’s non-kosher kitchen — and some of her favourite celebratory Jewish foods — editor Isabela reflects on what it means for mothers to sacrifice for their children, and reckons with her narrow early-20s idea of what feminist praxis should and can be.

You can listen to the audio embed above or check out the version on our podcast via the link below. It’s also available on Spotify, Apple, and other podcast players.

A transcript of the story is available here.

By Riana Austin

“Treat yo’self” winks the neon sign behind the patisserie counter of Cream Dream café in London’s Covent Garden, where the candy-hued, fantastical desserts make me feel a little like Alice in Wonderland. At this point, I should probably disclose I’m already a fangirl. As an ex-professional baker and vegan-about-town, I find that Cream Dream is one of London’s best bakeries; for a while now, I’ve been following its owner, Yelyzaveta Tataryna, on Instagram. At the age of 23, Tataryna, a Ukrainian refugee, founded Cream Dream after living just four months in the UK. Her café’s aesthetic might be an ode to princesscore (think cascading blossoms and pastel pink walls and chairs), but from the giant illuminated map of Ukraine by the entrance to the jar of FUCK pUTIN wristbands by the till, it’s clear there’s more to her branding than meets the eye.

Scooping my first bite of her miniature Kyiv cake, I discover velvety creams, crunchy-chewy layers of meringue, and a serious commitment to hazelnut. But I’m not just here for a taste test: I’ve come to learn about those looking to reclaim sweet treats and baking — commonly considered outside politics or a creed for tradwives — as a means of resistance. It’s the autumn of 2025; Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine, while Israel expands its genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, London has recently witnessed one of the largest far-right protests in British history; in the days preceding the march, a Sikh woman in the Midlands was raped in broad daylight and told during the assault, “you don’t belong in this country,” and in Bristol, a nine-year-old girl was shot repeatedly in a racially-motivated attack. With the hard-right party Reform UK leading the polls, our Prime Minister’s response has been to tighten restrictions on migrants’ right to remain, to propose the use of army barracks for housing asylum seekers, and to ban protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.

In such painful times, eating cake may seem like an empty gesture, but getting to know both Tataryna and Sara Assad-Mannings, a London-based baker with Palestinian roots, piqued my curiosity. What role might sharing desserts play in building community and resilience? Join me in criss-crossing the capital to trace the stories of two bakers, mindful of violence raging both near and far, but choosing all the same to open spaces that foster connection, joy, and hope.

Fittingly for a story about love, we start on Valentine’s Day 2023, with the grand opening of Cream Dream. To the sound of whooping, Tataryna steps through the doorway of her newly opened café, framed by star-shaped balloons, to greet the growing crowd. Wearing a pink tulle dress and chunky trainers, she covers her face with her hands as the press go ape and well-wishers, mainly Ukrainian women, wave mini national flags. BBC News appears, as does a representative from the Ukrainian embassy. 500 customers buy everything: not just the cakes intended for that day, but her entire stock. When the footage airs that night on BBC London, you can tell the anchor is being genuine when she calls Tataryna a “remarkable woman.”

The accolade is fair, but the journey to the opening was unsparing. While studying for a mathematics degree in Kyiv, Tataryna realized she wanted to open a café — so she taught herself to bake by watching YouTube videos in between classes.

Moving to London was never part of the plan, but war changed that. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Tataryna was forced to flee. She went first to Poland, where, despite her own hardships, she worked to support Ukrainian women traumatized by loss and weaponized rape. Germany came next, then Türkiye, and finally, the UK. When she arrived, she knew no one. She lived in a tiny room where the landlord demanded six months’ rent in advance (compensation for housing a refugee), sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Tataryna longed only for the war to stop.

But those early weeks in London were a crucible that caused something to shift. “I was so, so mad at Putin,” says Tataryna to me as we share Kyiv cake one day at Cream Dream and discuss her journey. She’s wearing a quilted bed jacket covered in tiny roses, her mermaid-like chestnut hair spilling down to her waist. “I thought, what else can happen? I decided I have to live now.” Reanimated, her café concept fused with a mission to provide a safe landing for Ukrainian refugees by offering them employment, a network, and sisterhood. She wanted the space to stand in opposition to all forms of violence, including by offering a 100% vegan menu.

At first, bringing her dream to life was tough. Tataryna struggled to find financial backers, impaired by the double stigma of being a refugee and a woman dreaming about a pink café. Eventually, a Ukrainian investor stepped in, allowing her to set her flag down in London’s prestigious Covent Garden. For Tataryna, sharing cake not only became a tool for healing her community, but as per her slogan — “desserts, self-care and smashing stereotypes” — it was also a delicious way to clap back at haters.

Joy and uplift guide Cream Dream’s decor; there’s something charmingly DIY about it, and I mean that in the best possible way. It reminds me of a women’s refuge I’ve stayed in, where poetry, affirmations, and butterflies arc up the stairs, and there’s a room filled with storybooks and toys for those of us with children. At Tataryna’s, you can’t help but smile when you enter the riotous bathroom. Hot-pink tiles jostle with irreverent artwork (“the cats and I talk shit about you”); the cubicles are painted with flowers, and the mirror is emblazoned with the message “you look absolutely stunning today.” Upstairs in the cafe, there’s a portrait wall of sheroes: it includes famous Ukrainian pioneers, Tataryna’s mum, and a mirror. “For you! Because you are enough,” she explains, and it’s the same generosity I see when I watch her work alongside the fellow refugees that staff her cafe. “Yes, I’m big sister,” she nods when I ask how she perceives her role in the community.

My favourite delicacy at Cream Dream is the honey cake. The sour cherry at the centre is a Tataryna-family twist. I have it with Carpathian tea that comes in a rose chintz teapot. Tataryna says they serve everything as they do back home, “family style,” which I know is a code for “with love.” As I rehearse the ritual, pouring the tea into my dainty cup and using my miniature cake spoon, I’m suddenly returned to childhood.

It’s time now to cross the river to South London. You’ll feel the tempo change; thronging tourists give way to a village vibe, and the flavours we are seeking out also head south, from the Black Sea to the Levant. Our destination is Bunhead Bakery in the leafy burbs of Herne Hill, opened by Palestinian-British pastry chef Sara Assad-Mannings on the day of her 30th birthday in May 2024. Floor-to-ceiling windows flood the space with light, while framed snaps of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, bright graphic prints, and a smiley-face plushie put us in a mellow mood.

Although she is most well-known for her plus-sized, artisanal buns scented with rose water, orange blossom, or cardamon, Assad-Mannings also sells cake, finish-at-home knafeh, and riffs on focaccia (some days featuring za’atar, others perhaps some red shatta hot honey). Within days of opening, the bakery went from a local gem to South London’s worst-kept secret; on weekends, queues snake around the block, and by 1 pm, they are often sold out.

Chatting with Assad-Mannings on Zoom one morning after she’d finished baking, she explained that Bunhead Bakery started as a passion project during COVID, out of her one-bedroom flat. She went on to describe how her journey to a bricks-and-mortar site dovetailed with her rising advocacy for Palestine, where the majority of her family lives. After Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023, Assad-Mannings increasingly found herself gravitating toward Palestinian flavours and using her social media accounts to raise awareness and share resources about Palestine with her 21K followers. Though she’s adamant that her buns are meant to foster and reflect joy, representing the things that make her motherland beautiful, they’re also a vital platform for resistance — as she underlines in her tagline #srslydough: a reminder of the need to act as well as enjoy. Opening a permanent home for her bakery both allowed her to fulfil a professional ambition and increase the visibility and impact of her cause.

From the beginning, merch has been a key element of Assad-Manning’s business strategy. To get Bunhead off the ground, she first sold t-shirts, starting with one that reworked Cyndi Lauper’s pop classic: GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE BUNS. Another read WE ARE ALL PALESTINE and was accompanied by an image of a watermelon and a smiling bun waving a keffiyeh. They sold so well that Assad-Manning was able to open her first physical bakery space, and later, to support charities delivering on-the-ground projects in Gaza and the West Bank. Wearers spread the portable slogans online and IRL, in the process marking themselves out as a tribe of “Bunheads” and raising thousands of pounds to supply people in Palestine with urgent supplies like tents and water.

With many of her family still living in Palestine, everything to do with Bunhead Bakery is personal for Assad-Mannings. Her love of food is intertwined with memories of feasts carefully prepared by her teta (grandmother); Bunhead is decorated with photographs taken by her father, and on Instagram, there are pictures of a dungareed little Sara chillin’ by the Dead Sea. Being forced to watch as Gaza is starved has been “gut-wrenching,” but for Assad-Mannings, who has inherited what she terms a “Palestinian mindset,” despair must be countered with fight. And she sees baking as part of hers: it is a way to help ensure the survival of her culture.

Sourcing balady1 (local) produce from Palestine is an important part of Bunhead’s concept; Assad-Mannings family members send over what they can, though the war has made this extremely difficult. These ingredients are the secret to Assad-Mannings’ most powerful tool: flavour. Tentative customers are lured in by her original cinnamon buns, before being pointed towards her bestselling baklava buns, or the “advanced-level” buns flavoured with grape molasses and tahini. Being greedy as I am, I’ve sampled the gamut, discovering new pleasures in pomegranate jallab, almondy mahleb, and the tangy pop of strawberry sumac (the fruit is known as “red gold” and has been a vital crop in Gaza for over 50 years, but is currently threatened by Israel’s widespread destruction). Assad-Mannings aims to use taste to foster cultural understanding and hopefully lead others to political engagement, pinning up Free Palestine flyers for customers to read as they queue for the till.

The culinary savants amongst us may notice that buns are not a traditional Palestinian dessert. Indeed, they are a distinctly Sara Assad-Mannings innovation: a feat of skill and creativity, and a celebration of her mixed-race identity (her mother is from Palestine, her father is white British). Having grown up with fragile links to the diaspora and minimal representation, freestyling with the flavours and techniques of both cultures has allowed her to own her story and encourage others to find their own way in telling theirs, too. The buns also raise a joyous middle finger to an industry that continues to pigeonhole global majority chefs while their white colleagues are permitted to experiment or borrow wholesale from whatever culture they like. Though a handful of customers have criticized Assad Mannings’ hybrid approach, the risk has paid off, with Bunhead making it onto the Good Food Guide’s 2025 list of best bakeries in Britain.

Like Tataryna at Cream Dream, Assad-Mannings invokes the domestic sphere to build community. Running the business with her Black-Sri Lankan British best friend, Georgia Wickremeratne, along with a seven-woman team, she manages to imbue the grab-and-go set-up with a sense of intimacy. The two business partners are often pictured together, and they always look so happy: leaning in or unconsciously mirroring each other, covered perhaps with flour or in mid-guffaw. Their joy is infectious, and the rest of the Bunhead staff exude just as much warmth. “I want you to feel like you are coming into my home,” Assad-Mannings explains. In the same way that Tataryna’s desserts are served as if you are family, so Assad-Mannings’ buns are rooted in the principles of nafas — Arabic for the secret ingredient of love.

I carry my box of buns to the park opposite the bakery. Settled on a bench, I am tickled to see a brown woman like me sitting nearby; she’s also polishing off a bun. We both smile. The sun is bright, I lick sticky icing from my fingers, and marvel at the lightness of the dough. In these difficult times, there is much dividing us; the work ahead will be tough, but by regrouping with my sweet treats, I take hope in the continued will of individuals and communities to push for change.

Alright, there’s just one journey left. Take my hand and let’s return to the Thames for one more celebration as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve 2024.

We’re packed like sardines, and our necks are craned as fusillades of red, white, and blue shoot into the sky. The strains of the track “Apple” by Charli XCX set the mood, and a gigantic LED pink heart lights up the London Eye. The night explodes with tunes and rockets, and a voice clip from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan booms over the crowd: “No matter what happens, London will always be a place of hope and a place for everyone.” Elton’s classic “I’m Still Standing” begins to play, and then Paddington Bear, patron saint of migrants, pops up in the Eye and wishes us a heartfelt HAPPY NEW YEAR! The mood is 100% London: it’s joy and colour and a backbone of Blitz spirit, reminding us to stand together, as we did in 1936 against British fascist Oswald Mosley’s army of blackshirts when they thought they could own our streets. A tear runs down my cheek as a deep pain finds itself tended to with care.

I remember this night as a choice.

It’s not that I’m downplaying the current political situation in the UK, as we wrestle with a terrifying lurch toward the far right. During the summer of 2025, London saw a spate of protests: from targeted demonstrations outside hotels housing migrants, to continued attacks on our Mayor (most recently by Trump in his September UN address), and the emergence of “the Pink Ladies,” a concerned group of (white) mothers and grandmothers calling for mass deportation to protect children from an imagined invasion of migrant paedophiles. Then, on September 13, 2025, we had the Unite the Kingdom rally. Attracting between 110,000 to 150,000 “patriots,” it was led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson and featured a video-link speech by Elon Musk, warning that “violence is coming” and “we either fight back or die.”

In this darkening hour, food and the hospitality sector have become a focus point for hate. The government has paraded footage of restaurant raids on illegal workers as proof of their action towards ridding the country of “illegal” immigrants; parliament has debated the cultural compatibility of halal slaughterhouses and considered whether pie and mash, a symbol of beleaguered white identity, should be granted protected status; and our Prime Minister has instigated a crackdown on illegal food delivery drivers that has disproportionally targeted “ethnically diverse and economically deprived” areas.

I know this, but I choose to focus on the light as an act of faith in the sense of the word described by bell hooks, renowned writer and intersectional feminist theorist: a quality “not rooted in utopian longing” but borne of an awareness of history and the “many individuals who have offered their lives in the service of justice and freedom.”2 We can acknowledge our fear, but we will not be broken.

In London, pushback is being led by a fierce cohort of women. Olia Hercules and Alissa Timoshkina spearheaded the global #CookForUkraine campaign, raising £2.5 million (US$3.9 million). Great British Bake Off winner and national treasure Nadiya Hussain spoke out about Islamophobia and published a cookbook celebrating Ramadan and Eid. Entrepreneur Lorraine Copes continues to grow her respected not-for-profit Be Inclusivity Hospitality, which tackles racial inequality, and cultural commentators Jenny Lau and Anna Sulan Masing released landmark books exploring British-Chinese and ESEA identity through the lens of food.

As for the two heroes in our story, we need to add a note on difference. The challenges Tataryna and Assad-Mannings face are not the same. For starters, London is not Tataryna’s home. Though she is proud that she realized her dream of opening a bakery, returning to Ukraine is always on her mind. “Of course, I am so grateful!” she quickly adds when asked about her long-term plans in the UK, but it’s clear her precarious, second-class status as a migrant takes a heavy toll. In Assad-Mannings’ case, by speaking out about Palestine, she is wading into a major conflict in the culture wars (there were 890 people arrested at the September rally against the ban on Palestine Action in London). As a mixed-race woman in an increasingly ethnonationalist climate, she will have to deal with racism on the streets and in the media. Despite these dissimilarities, Tataryna and Assad-Manning’s objectives are beautifully in sync: sweet treats + sisters united = a renewed social contract, and a fuck-you to strongmen.

Given how hard our two bakers work and how much they offer, of course, I want them to be surrounded by community and love. Bunhead Bakery has a diverse fanbase — locals, hipsters, and the Palestinian diaspora — and while Assad-Mannings is a diehard South Londoner delighted to represent her hood, it’s this last group’s approval that means the most to her. Back in Covent Garden, I’ve noticed hipsters don’t really go to Cream Dream. I don’t know why — maybe they’re snobby about the colour pink. But Tataryna says her bakery has a very loyal following: mums and their young daughters out for a treat, or women celebrating something special. Life has got a lot better, she tells me, since her little sister has also migrated to the UK: “She is my rock.”

When I leave Cream Dream after an afternoon of chatting with Tataryna over sweet treats, I give her a gift to thank her for everything she does: a small bottle of French perfumed oil.3 The next day, Tataryna texts me:

“I smell like a princess thanks to you ”

and I think to myself — GOOD, you absolutely deserve it.

One final thought — which you could think of as an invitation. We often speak of the importance of breaking bread. We recognize it as a transformative act that draws us into a fellowship of heightened responsibility and openness to the other. But what of the power of treats that are sweeter than loaves? Having spent time with Assad-Mannings and Tataryna, I’m calling for a new culture based on breaking cake: glacé cherries, sprinkles, liqueur. Ours will be a sisterhood; a jamboree with high heels, elasticated waistbands, and a groaning table (you bring your flava, and you can taste mine). We’ll dance, laugh, get impassioned, and eat. Together, I believe we just might put the world to rights.

Author’s note: Many thanks to Sara Assad-Mannings and Yelyzaveta (Lisa) Tataryna for giving up time in such busy lives to talk with me.

Born in Jakarta but a long-time Londoner, ex-baker Riana Austin writes about plant-based dining and the intersections of food and power. She was a 2025 Vittles mentee.

Queer communities in North America have uniquely embraced potlucking throughout history as a means of celebrating the goings-on of their lives. But potlucking, as a way of eating together, is a celebration of queerness itself.

By Nina Katz for our CELEBRATE issue | Editing supported by Apoorva Sripathi (who has also illustrated this piece and the remainder of the CELEBRATE issue!)

Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading of this essay by the author.

I was in college when I went to my first potluck. It was during the fall semester, following a morning of volunteer work pulling weeds at the community farm on campus. The email to volunteers had asked us to bring a dish; so when the farm work was done for the day, we all gathered at a picnic table beneath a large gingko tree to eat.

Potlucks are supposed to have originated in sixteenth-century Europe.1 The word originally meant no more than “taking your chances with whatever was available from the pot on the fire.” Having now evolved to signify communal meals where participants bring food or beverages to share, especially in North America, potlucks tend to pop up in times and places where sharing is caring — and this one under the gingko tree was no exception.

I was a sophomore without a kitchen, so I brought chips and salsa purchased at the student center using dining points. But older students who lived in the sought-after housing with kitchens brought fresh zucchini bread, pasta salad, and baked squash with a sticky, sweet nut topping. It was the first time in weeks I’d eaten anything homemade.

The year of my first potluck was also the year I came out, professing my love to a girl on a walk through the woods around campus. At the time, I didn’t yet know that food and sharing meals would eventually become an indicator of feeling full in my queer life, nor that potlucks — which allow me to draw on a long politicized history with the radical potential to build a better world — would be the main source of much of that fullness.

I remember the first time I saw a group of lesbians in public: I was seven or eight years old with my parents and brother at a seafood shack in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which I was, of course, unaware was also a port for gays. I was downing a bowl of clam chowder after a day of whale watching when I noticed a group of four women with boyish clothes and hair at a table next to ours. The way they sat in pairs, closely nestled into each other, caught my attention. It is one of my most vibrant memories of noticing queerness as a child, and the memory is accompanied by the sound of crunching oyster crackers and the smell of boiled red lobster. Perhaps this was one of my earliest memories of food and queerness, which for me are deeply intertwined.

In my early years of college, just after the potluck, I was still learning the basics of cooking. I seemed to have inherited my parents’ penchant for dinner party perfection: a balanced taste for both delicacies and heirloom family recipes, but also an obsession with getting it right, knowing no greater satisfaction in life than cooking something that makes someone else say, “Oh my god, that is so good.” If I were hosting dinner, why would I let anyone else do the work when I derived such joy from being in control of the meal? As I became more adept in the kitchen, food quickly became my way of making meaning of my queer life: taking food over to a friend who just had top surgery, or throwing big fundraising parties featuring soups made by queer chefs as the organizer of my local chapter of Queer Soup Night.

In my early explorations in a kitchen of my own, I was bridging my queerness with my love of food, though at first, I wasn’t thinking about it. Still in college, when I was living in an entirely queer house, my roommates and I invited our favourite professors from the philosophy and religious studies departments to dinner using a haggadah from the organization Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (a bit different from the Maxwell House haggadahs I grew up with).

We made roasted carrots instead of the traditional brisket, an ode to the previous semester’s class on ecofeminism. This dinner was a coming-of-age, where food allowed us to take ownership of traditions that had always been special and to make them part of our queer adulthoods. But it was through potlucking that I was introduced to yet another kind of tradition: one where I didn’t have full control over the kitchen, and that was the point. Potlucks, like the first one I experienced under the ginkgo tree, expanded the potential I saw in communal eating, one that would later be reinforced by my research on queer potlucking history.

Potlucks, though not necessarily an invention of queer people, have been so embraced by queer communities in the US since the mid-twentieth century that to me, potlucking is queer itself. Throughout history, potlucks have been a way for queer people to use cooking, food, and sharing meals to make meaning of their lives. The potluck has not only allowed queer people to join together in the face of loneliness or exile, but find identity and joy in the partaking of a meal that in many ways reflects what feels liberatory about being queer in the first place. Just as being queer can mean the rejection of heteronormative hierarchies, the potluck often feels like a rejection of domestic conventions that can reinforce rigidity in eating together.

Potlucking was my entry point to understanding how performance, rituals, and experimentation with food can be a means of forging a queer life, a way to taste queer histories, and, by design, a way to be in community. Craft nights, mutual aid fundraisers, community meetings, birthday parties, memorials, weddings — no matter the occasion, it can be potlucked.

While researching queerness and food for my Master’s in Food Studies, I dove deep into the queer archives2 for any glimpses of gay food culture. I began noticing the recurrence of potluck flyers published in the final quarter of the millennium. A 1983 issue of Onyx: Black Lesbian Newsletter said to “call Midgett or Billy for the address” of the bi-monthly Bay Area Black Lesbians and Gays soul food potlucks. A November 1990 issue of Gay Community News advertised three totally separate potlucks in their community calendar.

One potluck flyer stood out. In simple, black and white print, it read that on Saturday, May 7th, 1994, the East Coast Female-to-Male Group (ECFTMG) hosted a “very special FTM get-together” at the Western Massachusetts home of the Sexual Minorities Archives for a meet-and-greet and dinner with transgender activist and author Leslie Feinberg. The occasion was the afterparty for the Northampton LGBT Pride March, where Feinberg was the keynote speaker. “Come celebrate… Dinner is potluck,” the flyer read.

This potluck took place less than a year after the release of Feinberg’s groundbreaking autofiction Stone Butch Blues, a rightful cult classic (that happens to contain a lot of excellent food writing focused on the communal aspects of lesbian working-class life). When I came across the flyer 30 years later, I found that it stirred within me a nostalgia for a time I never experienced. Blues was a book that I had first read cover-to-cover a few years earlier. Upon finishing it, I immediately flipped back to the first page and started it over again.

When I saw the 1994 flyer, I couldn’t help but wonder what Feinberg had brought to the potluck — or indeed, what everyone had brought. I imagined a table full of food, with every dish representing some part of each attendee’s life, and it made me feel a bit closer to queer generations that came before me. Holding these flyers and imagining the shared meals made me yearn for a taste of these queer pasts.

Much potluck talk in the queer discourse refers to potlucks held by and for lesbians — also known as lesbian potlucks. Though it’s hard to imagine a queer history that didn’t include gathering around a meal, The Daughters of Bilitis, the first known lesbian civil rights and political organization in the US, is credited with that first stab at an organized queering of the potluck in the 1950s. While queer people often felt rejected from the church communities or family reunions where potlucks or covered-dish suppers really got their start in America, this meal of the commons was swiftly adopted as a covert and nourishing get-together by lesbian communities across the country.34

In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking affirms this omnipresence by suggesting that lesbians are “often [narrowly] associated with what [they call] a rhetoric of potlucks and protests,” however, “the actuality of everyday lesbian-queer life is, obviously, more complicated.” But so too are potlucks. Just like any social gathering, potlucks are not necessarily always as peaceful and harmonious as one might idealize them to be — they can also include stirred-up drama, inedible goop, or difficult confrontations.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the auto-fictional characters in Cheryl Dunye’s 1993 short experimental film The Potluck and the Passion, which leverages food and the dynamics of sharing a meal at a potluck to highlight race and class differences in an urban American lesbian community.5 The tensions that unfold throughout the film are foreshadowed at the beginning, when one of the hosts worries that the guests, who include some friends and some tag-alongs, “might not get along because they are from different schools, different worlds.”

Throughout the meal, superiority complexes, nefarious flirtations, and microaggressions are all on display. This isn’t exactly the egalitarian dinner party laid out by some potluck theorists,6 and yet, the meal is still democratized — it is a space for queer people to come together and create a shared meal that is their own.

The flyers stayed with me, and were the nudge I finally needed to become a potluck host myself. The first occurred at the 100-year-old house on a hill. I was sharing a lease with two friends, one elderly chihuahua-Jack Russel Terrier mix, and a neighbour’s cat we let hang out in our living room most days. The house overlooked our beloved Pittsburgh, and thus we named our potlucks “Pittlucks” and set out extra card tables in our living room for friends, exes, and lovers to place blueberry cheesecake bars, charcuterie, focaccia, cauliflower gratin, gloppy noodle salads, and gluten-free Double Stuf Oreos.

Potlucking connects us with queer ancestors whom we’ve been barred from knowing; beyond the snippets I find in the archives, so much of queer history goes undocumented. At the potluck, I feel their lives layered into my own.

My potlucking practice hit its height in 2022, when this friend group of mine in Pittsburgh potlucked monthly. We started at my house, then rotated to someone else’s; over time, we all took turns hosting. New faces would pop up each time: a friend of a friend new in town from Ohio, Sonny’s mom, who was visiting for the weekend from Massachusetts, Emily’s new co-worker, the person who stood next to Vinny at last night’s concert, Eve’s regular at the coffee shop. At the queer potluck, you look around at a room full of people you may not know, and yet know that they are your people — that when your rights are threatened, when the world feels like a less safe place to be yourself, these are the people you can turn to, who celebrate your identity.

This is not to say that conflict does not happen in a room full of queer people eating casserole. Though there is potential for real harm, conflict can also lead to change that is good and constructive. As Dunye portrayed in Passion, conflict over food and ways of eating together causes real shifts in the character’s perspectives. Last summer, I experienced queer potluck conflict at a daytime Pride event with some friends on the patio of a restaurant in Old Town Albuquerque, about a fifteen-minute drive from where I now live. Rainbow flags swayed in the breeze as we sipped iced teas, listening to a local band sing about revolution on a pallet stage. At one point, I looked up to see an older, Gen X woman standing at our table, asking me if I was the Nina who throws potlucks. “Yes!” I responded, always excited to connect over something food-related.

“Nice to meet you. What are your pronouns?” she continued.

“They/them,” I replied. “Yours?”

“She/her. And, well, unfortunately, you can’t come to my potluck. It’s only for lesbians.”

Damn, I thought she was asking my pronouns to be cool, not to size me up.

“But I am a lesbian,” I retorted, my two friends’ eyes widening.

“Interesting! I’d love to talk more about that,” she replied.

There was an empty chair at our table, but instead of taking a seat and engaging me in conversation about generational shifts around gender identity in the 21st century, she picked up the chair and walked it back to her table.

This, as with most of my encounters with lesbian separatism, left me with complicated feelings. I think affinity spaces are good. But I do not like assumptions made about which affinity spaces others belong to. The interaction may have temporarily dampened my mood, but in that moment, my feeling that potlucks are representative of a queer ethic felt more alive than ever.

Had she not stolen our chair and rather sat down with us, I could have laid out my understanding of the potluck to problematize her exclusionary tactic. I would have made my case that, as a meal that lacks hierarchical norms and embraces difference, potlucks teach us that attempting to essentialize what it means to be a lesbian is an impossible feat.

As enriching as potlucks have been for queer communities over time, I cannot help but draw connections between queers at potlucks and the queerness of potlucks. I do not mean to oversimplify queer realities, but to offer the potluck as a playground for a conscious exploration of queer values.

Potlucking has helped me grow as a community member, and has provided me with a space to evolve away from the patriarchal norms that feminist and queer theories orient away from: it has helped me reject hierarchical and binary thinking and to challenge norms like the one that dictates that a dinner party must be ruled by a host/guest dynamic or gendered and heteronormative expectations on the labour of organizing a dinner party. Potlucks have helped me explore queer kinship or “chosen family,” embrace fluidity, and value difference. So much so that the potluck itself is a celebration of the values many queer people strive towards, and perhaps manifest, in these occasions of eating together.

At a birthday potluck for my friend Olive, as we finished up the food, we pushed back her blue velvet couch to make room for dancing. Olive’s black cat slept curled up on a throw pillow, her tail twitching. I found a seat beside her to quickly rest my legs. I smiled at the group taking up the rest of the room. Fearless, exuberant queerness all around. I sang along to the lyrics7 playing from the speaker:

If it feels good to me

It feels good to me

Ooh why couldn’t it be?

Ooh why wouldn’t it be?

I jumped up for the chorus, singing along as loud as I possibly could, electrified by the energy of my fellow potluckers, radically baring our queerness. When the song ended, the room exhaled. Ruby ran into the other room and returned with her homemade blueberry focaccia. We caught our breath between bites of the bread.

“So, who’s hosting the next one?” Olive asked the group.

Nina Katz (they/them) is a writer and educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they are the chapter lead of Queer Soup Night New Mexico and constantly begging their friends to join them for fro-yo. @ninatummyache

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We hope you enjoy this first piece, which takes us to the splendid food tables and complex catering kitchens of southern Nigeria. Having stood both behind the cooking pots and among the guests at Nigerian celebrations, writer Tracy Egbele examines the ways in which party food reflects complex gender dynamics and intricate social hierarchies. - IJbV & ZJ

Takeaway: The Politics of Nigerian Party Food

By Tracy Egbele for our CELEBRATE issue | Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading on our podcast.

In gatherings and celebrations, Nigerians are extra — especially when it comes to food. Any occasion, even a funeral, is one for a feast. At my grandfather’s burial in the southern city of Emu, the offerings were abundant and varied: from jollof rice (the undisputed star of Nigerian events) to black soup with pounded yam, egusi soup, ogbono soup, peppered meat, and suya.1

Behind the food stood a formidable team. Among my people, it’s customary for women from the family or clan to come together to cook during funerals, as a means of supporting the grieving family. At this particular event, the cooking duties were divided among my mother and her catering team; one of my aunt’s friends, whom she had brought to help her, and our kinswomen. My mom and her catering team prepared jollof rice and peppered meat. Our kinswomen assisted with the black soup and pounded yam, while my aunt’s friends took on the egusi soup. Once the cooking was done, coolers were brought out for food meant for the community elders and certain groups. But before any of that was shared, my mom made sure that every woman who helped, including our kinswomen, received a generous portion of the dishes they worked on.

I remember watching the women who made the egusi soup serve themselves first. This is fairly common — but they didn’t stop there. They quietly took nearly all the meat used in the soup. Later, when it came time to serve the rest of the guests, we realized they had taken more than half the pot. Such are the politics of party food in Nigeria, where hierarchies and preferences are enforced over plates of food. While the preparation of food for these events is often labelled “just cooking” or “a woman’s job,” the women behind the pots wield their serving spoons with intention, deciding what is served, how much is served, and to whom. In Nigeria, catering is a form of power — one that reveals not only tensions over gender norms but also social inequalities, favouritism, and corruption.

Growing up as the daughter of a caterer, I was often assigned simple tasks in my mother’s catering team: fetching water, picking vegetables, helping to wash the pots, or tasting the food or adjusting the seasoning (my favourite). As I got older and more experienced, I began participating fully — cooking large batches of banga rice, pepper soup, and coleslaw.

Around me, I watched my mom and other women transform open, bare spaces into bustling kitchens alive with the sounds of crackling firewood, laughter, gossip, and the occasional argument. Each woman had her role: arranging the firewood, rubbing the big pots meant for cooking with detergent, oil, and sand (to ease washing off the black stains from the pot when the cooking is over), washing the bags of rice (because what is a Nigerian event without rice?), or seasoning the meat.

We were cooking, but we were also doing more. In a society where women are expected to focus on domestic tasks, the kitchen is a space where women who might otherwise be invisible in their homes or public life take centre stage. Knowledge is passed down, women gossip about their husbands, share dreams of their daughters marrying or giving birth (so they too can host the celebratory events we were often cooking for), and even boast about their cooking prowess.

In other public and private spaces in Nigeria, women are generally excluded from positions of authority and decision-making. Across geographic communities in many parts of the country, only men can be king (see endnote). Nigeria also has a huge gender gap in politics: out of 36 ministers in the National Assembly, only 6 are women, and the national average of women’s political participation in Nigeria is just 7% in both elective and appointive positions. Women also account for over two-thirds of the country’s extreme poor. In the workplace, they earn 45% less than men in similar roles on average.

The impact of these statistics was visible in the lives of the women around me when I worked in my mum’s catering kitchens. While we cooked, many women spoke about their struggles, particularly in their youth. One told us that she wanted to start her own printing company, but her family refused, insisting she focus on her marriage. Many others shared stories of how they had been pushed to marry after completing secondary education, which put a halt to other ideas they had for their lives. I would eventually encounter the limitations of gender myself: as a young adult, I felt called to start a farm of my own in my hometown, only to discover that it was not customary in my village for women to own land.

In a society where power is systematically denied to women, catering is one avenue where we have been able to wrestle back a modicum of control. Most of the women who worked for my mother had, at one point, been housewives whose husbands never allowed them to work — but either due to the death of their spouse, divorce, or financial issues, they had decided to earn for themselves. And even if their wages were much less than what their husbands currently or used to earn, catering paid well. Someone on my mom’s team had been a private school teacher, but quit after she realized she could earn more from two days of catering than in one month of teaching. Others owned small-scale businesses on the side and used catering to top up their earnings. When I graduated from university, catering helped me with my expenses while I considered what else I wanted to do. For youth in Nigeria, with the pressure to get a job and find one’s footing immediately, this post-university period can be difficult — but for me, catering was a cushion.

Through catering, women also gain autonomy in other ways. Like at my grandfather’s burial, the cooks have a great deal of freedom to allocate their own portions. Women in Nigeria are more likely to be food insecure than men, as are women-headed households. At my great-grandmother’s funeral, I caught a woman hiding fried meats that were meant to accompany the food they were cooking in her bra. Amidst the bustle of cooking, the chatter, the chopping of firewood, and the flurry of preparing to serve guests, this particular kinswoman discreetly tucked pieces of hot-fried meat into her clothing. She twisted and squirmed as the meat burned her before dashing home with the excuse of needing to relieve herself.

Perhaps it was gluttony — or perhaps it was something else. I’ve seen and heard women talk about starving just so their children could eat, or women whose husbands insisted they eat first since they were the head of the household, and needed more physical strength and energy. Catered gatherings become uncommon spaces of abundance where the women behind the pots can treat themselves.

In Nigeria, we have a popular saying: “‘I know the bride’ does not equal party jollof.”

The way food is shared at weddings, funerals, birthdays, and naming ceremonies can reveal much about a guest’s relationship standing in a highly stratified society. Usually, guests who receive generous portions or are served quickly are those with close ties to the hosts, strong connections with the people running the kitchen, or influential social status. At a wedding I catered for, a man rejected his food because it only had one piece of meat. I was left staring at the generous chicken thigh, trying to understand his dissatisfaction. The bride’s mother quickly explained that the man was a chief (a titled man), and therefore, he deserved more than just one piece of meat.

Party food is a mirror for other social inequalities, and “takeaway” culture is another phenomenon that exemplifies these hierarchies. Nearly everyone who attends a Nigerian event hopes to secure a package of takeaway — extra food given to an event guest to take home. Receiving this package is considered a mark of privilege or favour: while some people leave events empty-handed, those who depart with multiple takeaway bags walk out with their heads and shoulders raised high and a gleam in their eyes.

It may seem like harmless favouritism, but preferential portions and takeaway culture highlight the stark contrast between wealth and poverty in Nigeria. While Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy, it’s mainly a small group of elites that enjoys the burgeoning wealth: someone in the top 10 percent of earners can expect to earn nearly as much as 14 people in the bottom 50 percent. This deep economic divide influences daily life, determining which children attend quality schools, who can afford decent healthcare, and who gets access to jobs or political appointments. In rural areas, especially in northern Nigeria, communities often lack well-equipped health centres and trained personnel, contributing to high rates of preventable illnesses and maternal mortality. Teachers are underpaid, and infrastructure is poor.2

To enjoy access to most essential services, it is easier if you “know somebody.”3 Leadership roles in these institutions are usually dominated by individuals with strong networks, making it difficult for ordinary citizens to influence decisions or benefit equally. A friend of mine once visited a government hospital for eye pain. Normally, patients endure long queues, but because he knew someone in administration, he was issued a card and seen quickly. Similarly, during my university admission process, a girl I had just met in the queue and struck up a conversation with was pulled out of the long screening queue by a relative of hers who worked inside, and she took me with her. Within minutes, we were screened, while others waited for hours.

This reality is mirrored in the way food is allocated during events. Those with close ties to the hosts or individuals of higher social standing receive preferential treatment, such as larger portions of food or dignified seating positions. Others may find themselves marginalized, receiving less or even being overlooked entirely. Many Nigerians, especially women, belong to social clubs; at community events, club members often get bigger portions of food, meat, and drinks.4 At the same wedding where the chief requested that I serve him more meat, the bride’s mother made sure to set aside eight large coolers of fried and jollof rice for her club members. Those who got little food to take home (or, in some cases, none at all) may have perceived it as a subtle indication that they didn’t matter all that much to the bride’s family in comparison.

These dynamics mean that people jostle and negotiate for status, not with all-out wars or treaties, but with small strikes and bribes around the food tables that disrupt traditional inequalities. Upon serving the food, women caterers are the orchestra conductors of the parties, doling out portions to those in their favour and denying those who aren’t. This control is a quiet yet impactful way to assert influence in a male-dominated society. It’s common to see DJs, emcees, and photographers trying to stay in the good graces of those working in the kitchen just to secure a plate. In fact, there are jokes that if you upset the caterers, you might go home hungry. At one of my cousins’ weddings, for instance, the groom’s friends refused to help pound yams for the black soup. When it was time to serve, the women made sure none of them got a taste of that dish. It was their way of reclaiming respect through the food they had laboured to prepare. At a wedding ceremony we once catered, the cake maker approached us with a proposition: a sizeable slice of the decorated cake in exchange for extra plates of some of the food we made. She was hungry to build connections — and to secure her portion of takeaway.

As someone who has stood both behind the cooking pots and among the guests, I know that the way food is handled at Nigerian celebrations isn’t just cultural tradition. Whether it’s a plate of jollof rice at a wedding or a bowl of egusi soup and pounded yam at a burial, food is never just food — it helps us see how privilege, access, and inequality show up in everyday life. These dishes carry the weight of a community of women, a bit of favouritism, and silent struggles. And despite the struggles, there is joy. A plate of food served at a Nigerian event is infused with the laughter shared between aunties and mothers in cooking spaces, their quiet pride of serving food sought after by guests, and the spirit of celebrating life. Nigerian parties are loud, colourful, and full of flavour, underpinned by the stories of women whose cooking brought them to life.

At the same wedding where I accidentally served the disgruntled chief too little chicken, I eventually became very thirsty. However, the group handling drinks refused to give my catering team a single drop, saying we would have to wait until the end of the celebration. When the event wrapped up and I returned to ask for our share, they claimed the drinks were finished. Perhaps they thought that was the best way to show their power.

Not long after, the man in charge of the drinks came to us asking for food. I smiled and replied, “It’s finished.”

Tracy Egbele is a Nigerian writer who focuses on telling stories about everyday life, especially stories that are rarely spoken about. She loves food and cooking as much as she loves to read and write.

Endnote

The woman kings of Nigeria

As mentioned in this article, women are rarely allowed to serve as king in Nigerian communities. There have however, been instances where women ruled as kings in certain kingdoms and tribes across various eras — and their stories are fascinating.

One such woman king was Ahebi Ugbabe of Enugu-Ezike, who ruled as a Warrant Chief and king (Eze) for thirty years. She was exiled at a young age, and she moved to Igala land, where she engaged in sex work, brushing shoulders with powerful men in Igala leadership and British colonial officials. She used this opportunity to become fluent in pidgin English and other Nigerian languages, a skill that proved relevant to her future political ambitions. Her lifestyle gave her access to the Igala King and the British divisional Officer, who helped her return to Enugu-Ezike, and supported her to return to the office of headman, warrant chief, and later king (Eze). As Nwando Achebe writes in The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, “as king, she [Ahebi] performed female masculinities, and superceded all existing male political hierarchy and authority.”

Another king was Alaafin Orompoto, the first and only female Alaafin (political leader of the Yoruba people) of Oyo. The Council of Chiefs refused to make her king after her brothers passed away without an heir, claiming a woman had never ruled as Alaafin. She insisted they allow her to prove she was man enough to be king. According to oral tradition, the council granted her seven days to prove her merit; on the seventh day, she stood in front of the council of chiefs and stripped naked. To the astonishment of the council, she had the body of a man, and that was how she became Alaafin.

Perhaps the most well-known female ruler was Queen Amina of Zazzau (Zaria), who ruled from 1576 to 1610. Queen Amina was born into a royal family; her brother became king after their father’s death, and when he too passed away, she was crowned queen. From an early age, she was immersed in military training, court politics, and diplomacy. She is one of the most popular female leaders in Nigerian history and is highly revered among the Hausa people.

These tensions sit at the heart of our next issue, CELEBRATE, which will launch early in the new year. The issue explores what it means to celebrate in our current moment: to come together, to mark time, to honour both the sacred and the everyday, and to pursue pleasure without losing political clarity. Celebration, we believe, is not frivolous. It is a site of labour and power, of care and exclusion, of possibility and contradiction, and, at times, a radical act.

In the months ahead, CELEBRATE will explore celebrations of all kinds: from queer potlucks to Nigerian weddings to meals enjoyed alone. It will challenge you to consider commensality as a tool of resistance and of oppression, asking how celebration can build community or draw lines around who belongs and who doesn’t.

To whet your appetites before we officially launch the new issue, we’re sharing some pieces from the FFJ archive that we hope might help spark conversation at your next festive event, fill the table at your next holiday gathering (or quiet night in), or offer some company if this season feels lonely or complicated.

CELEBRATE FAMILY

FFJ editor Isabela loves a good family-focused tearjerker: check out her family’s recipe for festive lobster cantonese, imagined from her mom’s childhood growing up in Jewish Montréal with parents who have long since passed on.

Similarly, her “A Treasure for my Daughter” podcast for our first issue, MILK, digs into the personal and political complexities of maternal sacrifice through the lens of her mom’s fluffy Passover matzo balls.

CELEBRATE TASTE

In past holiday seasons, we’ve shared editor and contributor-curated recipes for everything from Canadian butter tarts, Icelandic flatbreads, chickpea confit, latkes, and pies. Did you know that butter tarts were invented by the Filles Du Roi, young women sent to Canada in the late 1600s by Louis XIV to marry, cook, clean, and procreate in support of France’s efforts to colonize New France?

If you’re looking for a festive dessert worthy of your politics, check out this recipe for sea moss panna cotta developed by Elise Schloff for our SEA issue. Elise reimagines coastal foodways by shifting the focus from seafood to seaweed — with delicious results.

CELEBRATE LOVE

There’s a reason we all reach for romcoms at this time of year, and two pieces in particular from our archive put love front and centre. Tender Seas by Megumi Kowai probes gender roles in Japan through the story of a man who lost his wife in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami and is sure to make you want to hold your loved ones a little tighter this week.

Meanwhile, Bottomless, written by Shena Cavallo for our BODY issue, makes the case for an unashamed form of self-love: putting oneself — one’s whims, intuitions, and appetites — first. Both of these pieces have audio readings by the authors available for premium subscribers.

We also want to take this opportunity to let you know that Zoë will be stepping away from her role as co-founding editor for a year, starting in January, to focus on a new project involving diapers, milk, and very little sleep. While you won’t hear from her while CELEBRATE is being rolled out, the issue has very much been shaped and edited collaboratively — and with the support of our amazing guest editors, Apoorva and Austin.

And finally, as we move into the last days of the year, we want to say thank you. We’re deeply grateful to be in community with you. So, however you’re moving through this season — celebrating loudly, quietly, ambivalently, or not at all — we wish you many moments of warmth and nourishment. See you in the new year!