“1. For over twenty-five years, you have worked as a sex counselor and educator, using Audre Lorde’s “erotic politics” as a guide. What internalized misconceptions do you often see people, particularly femme folks, bring to these sessions, and how do you address them?”
Audre Lorde’s concept of erotic politics identifies the decolonizing, liberatory practice of nourishing relationships among seemingly contradictory socio-psychodynamic forces, the fluid exchange of autonomy and interconnectedness. Erotic politics are relational, requiring the ineffable, play, and deep inquiry in which binary codes do not dictate our decision-making process. Rather, aporias, ambiguity, metaphor, the eternal not-yet generate Intuition, improvisation, the animal. In this sense, Lorde’s erotic politics reflect Ladino’s proverb and parable. See my Quantum Entanglements: ReAnimating the Embodied Language of Ladino.
However, within the normalized confines of industrial civilization and internalized sexism, instead of embodying a sense of our bodies and minds as deeply integrated, as capable of being fully alive, to “know what a body can do” in Spinozan terms, too often we (femme folks and beyond) orient our bodies through operational categories, problems to be fixed by experts. A prime example of the ways in which modern digital technology has subsumed our unnameable innate body-knowledge is the hyper-media-tized medicalization of women’s bodies. We are too often complicit in our collective self-reduction.
My investigation of socio-erotic ethics generates the following questions: What if sexual and erotic relationships with oneself, one’s environment, and with others, became a condition for a just, humanitarian, compassion-based society? What if our bodies and the experiences they produce became models for active citizenship? Could social justice evolve out of an uncanny vulnerability? This awareness awakens the potential of fully inhabiting our bodies—bodies that pulse with the multiplicity of the ‘I’— bodies as inherently intersectional and interdisciplinary. I am continually delighted to rediscover how many Jewish traditions embody Lorde’s practice of erotic politics.
“2. Tell us about your journey as a writer.”
Before I found reprieve in image-making, I wrote incessantly about the manipulative psycho-sexual power relationships I encountered on the communes and farms in Belgium, Tunisia, and then in the South of France—where I developed an intimate relationship with Philippe Comette, a visual artist who had just been released from a psychiatric hospital. I was 19, Philippe was 26. We each had lost all distinction between self and other—a complete collapse and erasure of boundaries—an embodiment of the uncanny. Not an ideal situation for the mental health of a nineteen-year-old. This blurring of reality, this promiscuous crossing, allowed me to engage with my subconscious both on the page and in my body without inhibition, without self-censorship. Writing became critical to my survival as I experienced an acute loss of the illusory wholeness of self. I had written my journals in English, not French, so that Philippe could not decipher my attempts to escape, albeit through the written word. Now, thirty-two years later, I still write to survive. Weaving academia and the deeply intimate, the personal and the political, my writing continues to be my lifeline—particularly as it dances with my visual art: photography, performance, and video practice.
“3. What genres do you write, and what topics are you passionate about?”
Rooted in intersectionality and the vulnerability of the body as a strategy for social justice, my writing is equally an extension of my visual artwork as it reflects how I live my daily life. In his endorsement for my Jews of Color, climate-justice book, Henry Giroux writes: Alhadeff “reclaims the power of language as both a poetic intervention into politics and storytelling and as a powerful force for reclaiming the radical imagination. [She] moves across disciplinary borders, collapses genres, unsettles how we think about the planet…” Arun Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi) wrote of my work: Alhadeff “…launches a new genre of book called edutainment…” Exploring subjects from sexual politics to Sephardic histories, from mutual-aid economies to Surrealist art, from convenience-consumer, corporate-induced ecological devastation to human rights, my writing allows me to think and act relationally, to take creative risks that lead to collective transformation.
“4. Your first book, Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, and the Ob-scene embarks on a multi-faceted philosophical and visual discourse, “explor[ing] embodied democracy as the intersection of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity…through the lens of vulnerability.” Is there a particular moment or experience that you consider to be the genesis of this book?”
Following our unassisted homebirth, I wrote Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-Scene while breastfeeding my son, Zazu. The book covers a vast spectrum of socio-political and personal subjects woven throughout 522 pages of theoretical text and over 600 footnotes that present parallel, overlapping narratives, including 92 of my analog color photographs and video stills. This fusion of theory and image explores the social and material body as a permeable membrane integrating the private and public—illuminating a recognition of difference, the familiar within the unfamiliar—a visceral, socio-political connection with the other, all increasingly urgent issues in our media-saturated age. I engage this complex web as a process of polyvocal storytelling in which the concept of ambiguity offers a multiplicity of clarities—a quintessential Jewish practice. Viscous Expectations is presented in an exegetical Talmudic format.
Triple genesis:
- 1980: Children in my 4th grade class in rural Texas searched through my big curly hair looking for horns, assuming that as a Jesus-killer I am of Satan; the kids in the school cafeteria would go into vomit-mimicking hysterics because they saw my yaprakas and even chickpeas as dog food, my colorful clothes and elaborate jewelry as Gypsy-like and gaudy—my voice, gestures, opinions were too big, completely out of place. They encountered my Jewish otherness as danger and as a reflection of the abject. My mother and I were clearly displaced, seen as foreigners—trespassing on U.S. territory: “Where are you from?” They would insist…incredulously…“No, where are your really from?” This was my first embodied understanding of the relationship between individual experience and the greater whole, the vulnerability of my “ethnic” body and the vulnerability of my “natural” environment, the private and the public, microcosmic interactions reflecting macrocosmic interconnections. I quickly learned both the extraordinary danger and vitality of difference–the lived intersection between cultural diversity and biodiversity.
- 1989: Moving beyond socially-imposed binaries, my daily life as a mother, writer, artist, social justice organizer, attempts to illuminate possibilities of inhabiting the fertility of seemingly contradictory, interstitial terrain. As a minority within a minority (and, yes, the category “minority” is itself problematic—reifying the ostensible majority as an illusory norm), a Sephardic among Ashkenazim, a multicultural Jewish woman overshadowed by Ashkenormativity, I unequivocally traverse the topography of the uncanny. Julia Kristeva (with whom I collaborated in Berlin, 2009) tells us the uncanny is “the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable…” I have seen myself as a kind of invisible Jew in Christian North America. Appearing Spanish, Italian, or Arabic, Sephardim and Mizrahim are often mistaken as Moslem or Catholic and “pass” into situations where anti-Semitism would have stopped a Yiddish-speaking person. For example, when I was living in Tunisia, for reasons of daily survival, I had to conceal that I am a Jew. Despite the confusion and guilt I felt, I was grateful to be able to pass, mistaken as a Moslem Arab from the city.
- Three years later in 1992 while I was an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, I attended my first Jews For Racial and Economic Justice meeting. The guest organizers, both white-presenting Ashkenazic queer women: Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz asked us to draw on a piece of paper our first experience with anti-Semitism or racism. I tore out the center of my paper and pointed arrows toward the empty space—titling the lacunae as “The Spectacle of the Invisible.” Across campus and across the US, “Oppression Olympics” were in full swing. “Politically Correct” language and behavior dominated how we chose to and chose not to interact with one another on campus. Judgment became the filter through which we engaged with one another. Many activists, ethnically-mainstream Jews (i.e., white Ashkenazic), particularly from New York, assumed that their “white” privilege demonstrated and represented the unchallenged privilege of all Jews living in the US. What these Ashkenazim failed to grasp is that Jews who do not live in New York or other large cities are considered as marginalized as any sub-altern—and frequently even more so because of our “spectacle-of-the-invisible” condition. Sarah Lawrence College, a politically-correct hotbed, left me constantly in a position where I felt cornered, desperate to defend my experience as fact that I am “an other”—an enfoldment of simultaneously accessing privilege while being denied that very privilege (inherently predicated upon ethnocentric exclusion)—again, the both/and—la’am-in Hebrew and Arabic.
“5. Your mother is a frequent collaborator of yours, including the keynote speech at the UCLA ucLADINO symposium in 2023 and many visual/performance art collaborations. What is meaningful about this collaboration for both of you?”
I dedicated Viscous Expectations to both my son and my mother: To my mother, Micaela Amateau Amato, my collaborator, editor, and co-conspirator, you labored with me over every last word, again and again. I am forever grateful for your astounding clarity and your sense of the absurd. From you I learned the courage to trust my intuition. I treasure our intimacy.
My mother, Micaela Amateau Amato, is both my primary collaborator and my best friend. We are allies in the most profound sense—supporting one another as Sephardic, relentlessly passionate, outspoken women. My relationship with my mother grows out of a co-implication of exploring and pushing our own expected limits and unexpected possibilities. Our collaborations interrupt self-destructive dichotomous, reductive thinking because they demand that we both give up ownership and explore unfamiliar territory—expanding within the space of the other. For decades our visual-art and written collaborations have focused on confronting fossil-fuel addicted economies/ mentalities by infusing our work with a Sephardic ethic—for example, in our “Dematerializing Petro-Pharma Culture” diptych series and “The Analog Mother: Collision with the Instant” montage-collaboration series. Throughout these projects our Sephardic heritage and language offer a collective deterritorialization, the possibility of decolonizing our minds and bodies, a collective emancipatory con-spiration. In this series, my mother and I co-generate ethereal, yet corporeally bound, spaces that ricochet between suffocation and ecstasy.
Our most extensive collaboration is our Ladino-rich, Sephardi and Mizrahi histories, climate-justice book: Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era. Endorsed by Rabbi Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Shock G Humpty Hump, Eve Ensler, James E. Hansen, David Orr, Paul Hawken, and Bill McKibben among other activists, and scientists, Zazu Dreams unravels the complexities of our climate crisis as it celebrates our interconnectedness through Jewish indigenous wisdoms (specifically Sephardim and Mizrahim), economic, literary, environmental science, and historical resources. Amato’s lush illustrations and my encyclopedic endnotes explore the intersections between the sciences and humanities. Intended to ignite dialogue and collective action, Zazu Dreams is a combination of magical realism and an interdisciplinary resource guide. It includes dozens of Ladino proverbs and a Ladino glossary.
In my “Embodied Encounters: Exploring Irigaray’s Philosophy in Art, Activism and Environmental Justice,” recently published in Body and Religion Interdisciplinary Journal, Special Irigaray Issue, I write about the Mother-Daughter Idiom. Micaela and I ask: How can artists/activists embody non-violent, symbiotic resolutions as we transition from our hyper-industrialized techno-euphoric culture to an economics-of-care and solidarity? How can we joyfully vivify and mobilize collective eco-action?
See also the Mother-Artist podcast: Art as Life, Not a Job – Panel at Elsewhere Studios Artist Residency
“6. Much of your performance art also involves putting your physical body at the center of the piece. Especially given your work in researching vulnerability, why is this important to you? How do you prepare for these experiences?”
I have taught Iyengar yoga for 30 years and have an extensive inversion practice. Being comfortable being upside down allows me to take on awkwardness more gracefully. Improvisation, a mutual commitment to enter unfamiliar territory, give us permission to be acutely vulnerable—a willingness to collectively step into the unknown.
In the US, we continue to live in simultaneously the most sex-saturated and body phobic period in history. Sex and nudity are consolidated into one single category. The naked human body, whether of a five-year-old girl or 95-year-old woman, is interpreted as inherently sexual, thus (apparently) immoral when seen in a public venue. I intend to construct environments that re orient our relationships to the norm—demystifying pregnancy, sex, and nudity while denaturalizing suburban, Puritanical shame.
During my Gestation Project where I photographed dozens of naked pregnant women in San Francisco public venues (such as the zoo, bookstores, night clubs, and theater auditoriums), my models wrote extensive testimonials of their experiences. Here is an excerpt of a testimonial that highlights how we can reposition vulnerability as strength in a collective context:
Cara took what we think we know, what we’ve all seen a million times before, and propelled it out of our comfort zone. Compositionally, Cara shows us a world of intimacy and of distance. We manage to exude a peacefulness and sense of belonging despite the incongruity of being naked in public settings. …We entered record stores and hotel lobbies feeling out of place in our own uncovered skin, and midway through the shoot, we were all usually remarking on how unbelievably normal it had become to be naked with each other.
Asking questions is central to my process of denormalizing fear of our bodies and normalizing our delicious carnal nature. In Yeshiva, the highest accolade is to ask a probing question. This practice of questioning, this self-and-other inquiry in which nothing is taken for granted, is a practice of Freedom. Talmud reminds us that Freedom is lost when it is taken for granted. A Pedagogy of Spiritual Intelligence generates radical accountability. Maimonides reminds us to “Teach thy tongue to say, ‘I do not know,’ and thou shalt progress…We do not know.” This phrase appears almost 330 times in the Talmud. Asking questions is a quintessential Jewish practice. There cannot be questions without vulnerability. Leviticus 10:16 The middle word of the entire five books of Torah is drosh—to inquire. It is said twice. a reminder that the Torah depends on deep inquiry. We ask not to find answers, but to plant seeds of possibility. This is our collective body-mind spiritual intelligence.
Although some of my images have been categorized as pornographic, the censors understanding of how my images actually are pornographic misses the mark. They are not pornographic because they depict naked bodies or fragments of bodies engaged in illicit activities, but because, like pornography, my images fail to constitute a familiar reality.
As a sexuality counselor, a vulnerability facilitator, I highlight embodiment on a collective level–how we metabolize the contradictions of shame and clear communication, fear and exquisite joy. Audre Lorde’s “erotic politics” help guide our process. Through somatic, visual, and written expression, we explore the radical potential of embodiment as a way to counter shame, indifference, and censorship.
My middle name, Judea, has positioned me as a kind of Trickster that elicits multiple colliding vulnerabilities—like the Sephardic Joha, Goha in Arab stories—a practice of both/and, yes/no, la’am. Similarly, I consciously embody my syncretic Sephardic, Arab-Jewish identity—this is my vulnerability as strength. I embody a polymath consciousness that I have internalized from my ancestors. We are many: “Jews are an amalgamation of many peoples.” Douglas Rushkoff
“7. Your activism also explores the intersectionality between Judaism and fighting the climate crisis. Do you have any advice for parents who are trying to inspire environmental-conscious values in their children?”
My dedication to Zazu in Viscous Expectations was also part of my parenting practice: To my baby boy, Zazu, joy beyond anything I could have ever imagined. You remind me in every moment where I can find home. I thought your life entering mine would be the culmination of this work; it turns out we are only the beginning. I began this ecojustice-conscious-parenting commitment while Zazu was in the womb. Even though I was 39 years old (Zazu was born, an unassisted homebirth, on my 40th birthday), I refused all medical interventions and trusted my own body’s capacity. My body’s capacity expands because of its relation to other bodies. Rabbi Seidenberg shares a criterion of biophilia: by “binding ourselves to other creatures (…), we are enriching the meaning of our own humanity” (171).
We practice the Blessing of going to the bathroom—Asher Yatzar, as well as the critical importance of our excrement as part of the cycle of life. “Waste” (death) and fertility (birth) join. Most Jewish holidays can be framed in an eco-justice context. Most relevant for our time today is Sukkot where we practice “just enough.” We also practice pausing together. The pause pulsates throughout Judaic lived philosophies:
- Selah in Hebrew translates pause, and includes a mindful practice of decolonizing our relationship to homogenizing linear-time.
- A radical pause in what we think we know;
- A radical pause in our habituated tendency to seek technological alternatives or solutions to climate crisis;
- A radical pause in order to learn from the non-human world around us: exploring cultural biomimicry as a “solution.”
I am emphasizing radical so that we can acknowledge the roots of what we are pausing from and pausing into.
- Mitzrayim translates as narrowness, constriction—originally referring to our flight from Egypt, but relevant now in how we get stuck in our linear habits of assumptions, refusing to ask questions, refusing to seek connections, refusing to witness our interdependencies.
- Shmita, the year of letting go, Sabbatical or Sabbath Year in an agricultural context (soil regeneration) and economic (debt relief) invokes possibilities to help lay the foundation for a profound paradigm shift away from our consumer convenience-culture toward a biocentric, mutually beneficial society.
Ladino Proverb: trokar kazal, trokar mazal (a change in location, changes one’s fortune or fate)
Multiple overlappings and gaps are inevitable; I am distinguishing between ecologically-integrated parenting/ parenting with the planet in contrast with petroleum parenting: what I identify as the Anthropogenic market-driven choices parents make that contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices. I am also distinguishing between ecologically-integrated parenting (how we model to our children how to live our ecological ethics) and ecoparenting (too often hypercommodified and enacted through techno-consumer-adaptation).
Representation of Jewish histories, perspectives, and languages (such as my paternal and maternal language of Ladino), a connective storytelling rooted in bal tashchit, can elicit deep self-inquiry and lead to individual and group creative risk-taking. Storytelling in conjunction with historical research about our diverse Jewish pasts and present co-creates a vital sense of earth-based, ancestral interconnectedness.
When we weave ancestral Jewish stories and histories (specifically those of Jews of Color), we can empower ourselves to confront complexities of climate chaos and environmental racism. I seek to incite curiosity to unravel our entangled ecological, spiritual, social crises. Through call-and-response storytelling and co-reflecting (an exegetical, Talmudic exchange), an investigation of our interdependencies plays between the personal and political, local and global, microcosm (our families/communities) and macrocosm (mazalot). Our explorations can offer insight into a Diasporic kinship of Commons—the human and more-than-human world as our extended family.
“8. Another project of yours, the Love Bus, exists in this intersection of art and climate justice. This involved another collaboration with your family, as your child helped with the bus’ construction and decoration! Did they have any insights during this process that surprised you or guided the process in a new direction?”
Committed to the Jewish principle, do not destroy or waste—bal taschit, my family and I built our biocentric art installation tiny home using 100% repurposed materials.
In the context of Shmita, Rabbi Arthur Waskow z”l tells us “restraint is not self-denial,” but an opportunity for joyful individual and community expression. Rather than “living simply” we are living in radical amazement (Rabbi Heschel). Last year at the age of 12, Zazu wrote “A Foot in Two Worlds” exploring his confusion as he straddles what he calls the modern-convenience world and the barefoot, natural world. His story is at the heart of why our home and living our ecological, spiritual ethics feels so vital.
Our home is a form of healing from centuries of enforced migration, a kind of ecological storytelling. Not an anonymous space that we walk into and out of without awareness, our home provides a place for giving and receiving. This reciprocal refuge reflects our ecojustice values. The resiliency of home embodies the potential to remap our symbiotic interconnectedness. The Greek for home, or whole house, is oikos—the root of eco-logy and eco-nomics.
It turned out that building our eco-art Love Bus inspired the perfect homeschool opportunity for Zazu. His participation was invaluable; how he learned was central to both our home and to Zazu’s psyche and body awareness. It spurred a beautiful hands-on opportunity to teach him about co-responsibility and living wisdom. The word educate means “to draw out;” we called our learning opportunity “Adventures in Ideas; Adventures in Action.” Our bus-to-home transformation began with curiosity and further built on body confidence and creative experiments.
Our topics of study included physics, engineering, math, chemistry, art, geography, history, current affairs, writing, reading, creative visualization, inquiry-based challenges that encourage real Zero Waste in which all by-products are reintegrated into use-systems. We explored how to live with a sense of playful responsibility through deep empathy; what it is like to live within a human-scale economy, how to question, think relationally, research ideas and problem-solve using unusual challenges—not having electricity in our home, or how to creatively incorporate water-access challenges and weather extremes, and most significantly, how to positively function in a world that resists creative-alternatives to mainstream fossil-fuel addicted economies. Since Zazu has been witnessing me lecture and perform about ethnic, economic, and ecological diversity since he was born, he is acutely familiar with interdisciplinary, creative educational models. He is used to actively working out “solutions” (social-seeds) that are rooted in cross-cultural historical, literary, mathematical, scientific examples of symbiosis and collaboration.
Amid these aching ethical struggles, each morning we laid out our daily plan to include demolition, redistribution, and reconstruction using hammers, drills, and crowbars, researching reclaimed materials, designing furniture, measuring and cutting local woods, installing floors, walls, decks, second-hand solar power panels, batteries (every aspect of solar-power-for-home system. All used, all shared, all reclaimed. At the end of each day we review what had been accomplished: Who do we impact in our immediate communities? Who do we impact in “unseen” communities?
For example, if we used a circular saw, we asked how does it work? Where does the power come from? Is it “dirty” energy or a combination of “clean” and “dirty” energy? What are other options or different choices we could have made? Another series of questions came from the materials we used—Where do the objects come from? Are any of the materials toxic to humans and/or the ecosystem? What are the pros and cons of buying new and reusing these particular objects?
“9. The vast intersectionality of your work speaks to the moment we are in, where there is so much to fight for and so much, we wish to see changed in the world. I know there are people out there who feel so overwhelmed by the enormity of injustice that they do not know what they can do or where to begin. What would you say to those people?”
Pirkei Avot, Chapter Four Ethics of the Ancestors, the ancient collections of rabbinic writings “Do not separate yourself from the community” reminds us of our collaborative potential. Once we can (returning to Spinoza’s “what a body can do”) embody the equilibrium between how all forms of climate chaos are interconnected and all forms of environmental justice are equally interconnected, we can begin to take collective action.
Diane Ackerman writes: “A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” Václav Havel invokes: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” Both Ackerman and Havel’s call-for-action echoes the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We/they use(d) our imaginations because we have to, because we must live with integrity, not because we will win: “This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history” Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism. This collective imaginary is quintessentially Jewish.
For over 30 years, I have offered educational trainings with Jews of Color international organizations. I am a guest lecturer, workshop leader, and exhibiting artist in Jewish Studies’ and Middle Eastern Studies for graduate and undergraduate classes, Interreligious Studies’ university departments, Muslim-Jewish dialogues in educational and activist contexts, interfaith organizations/symposia/conferences. Brit Hazon reminds us: “Just as there are 70 faces to the Torah, so too are there a myriad of ways to understand our climate issues and approaches to solving them.”
This practice of hospitality and nourishing the stranger within asks: How we can explore the familiar within the unfamiliar—illuminating the significance of difference. Perceiving and being in relation to all objects as sacred (this includes petro-chemical objects upon which we depend) Cross-cultural Jewish values found in the Torah—such as debate/education/inquiry, diverse perspectives, hospitality, social justice as a collective spiritual practice.
I live and parent these ideas of joyfully taking nothing for granted and living as locally/ subsistence-based as possible. Because I believe in the impossible, I must embody the impossible.
