Danit Ariel

Nayah: Empathy as an Act of Resistance 🔎 thank you angel designer @annamoschioni for always knowing & @terry.bleu for the beautiful riso. and to all the people who grow quicker than society, for your courage and patience. I love you!

continuing my long-term research on empathy, my new book looks at how language and words act as both perpetrators of failed systems that lack imagination and care, and as frameworks through which to create something new. words as polarisers or ‘bringers togethers’. inhumane categorisers or invitations for holding and being held, and all the miscommunication in between. ‘All The Tables Are Brown’, 90 notes on words. above are some of the hope filled ones for a new path 🧄 thank you genius designer @annamoschioni for putting ‘Shabbus’ on the cover <3

Photography+ In at least one dream! #30 Live now! This edition of Photography+ explores the relationship between photography and poetry. Moving beyond the idea of the “poetic” as something vague or unreadable, it foregrounds works that embrace precision, playfulness, and emotional resonance. Featuring: @davidisolo , @hannahgeddes1 , @mitchellroberts0n , @maxpinckers & @thomas_sauvin , @phoebewingrove . Community submissions: @hlskhkknn , @caitlinlorrainejohnson , @manami_eguchi_ , Ruby Rosi, Rosa Cass, @_antoniamayer , and Mickey Smith. This issue is edited by Photoworks Curator, @danitariel . Read the issue now on our website - link in bio.

some Ashkenazi chic, some z’miros, some tsures, the way mum writes her Fs like a Hebrew letter, dad enjoying an ice-cream at the beach and omg - it used to be someone’s job in the shtetl to knock on everyone’s windows and let them know shabbus was coming in - she’s coming, she’s coming!

a million kisses!

love is a deeper season than reason! (no.3: John S. Barrington in A Hard Man is Good to Find! at TPG a few springs ago; no.8: a forever favourite by E.E. Cummings)

open our eyes and our hearts and our hands

overthinking but overloving too

we will always be kids together because we bought our first bikes in a charity shop with a plastic bag filled with 10 cent coins. because we licked too many sheets of rizla and rarely felt guilty. told each other secrets we’ve never told ourselves. cried in each others laps, enough tears to laugh a lifetime together. we will always be kids because we came out together. opened bank accounts and forgot to cancel free trials together. learnt to argue and listen and say sorry together. learnt to fall out of love with old ideas of us and fall in love with new tries together. we stained tens of tablecloths with candle wax and wine together. sat on a bizarre collection of Facebook marketplace sofas together. blessed nieces and nephews together. gave up smoking and started again together. pruned the rose bush in your mums memory together. watched mine go in and out of hospital together. and we still look plainly at each other when a pipe bursts or when someone recommends a scheme for bonds and investments. but I don’t mind what we don’t know cause we make sure to love well enough to stay kids together. (happy birthday little prince)

Grandma Joy tuts on the other end of the line, as though to say it’s un-Jewish to delay a simcha, even in these circumstances. I stand in front of the sea and attempt to scream because I can’t cry. seems my head has already prepared my body for happiness and it’s not yet caught up on the news. under the chuppah I looked into your eyes and recited im ashkachech yerushalayim. then you smashed the glass before Jess pressed play behind her back on Amy’s Our Day Will Come. I lifted my face to our people gathered round us, everyone cheering, shvitzing, smoking, exchanging looks that mean more than words and kisses combined. so much life was lived in that moment that any worry of it being a crass plaster on the pain and suffering in this world burst at the seams. I saw Bar welling up. just the week before she said “don’t worry about us, mami, you must still celebrate; the only thing we have in life is love anyway”.

winter lullabies

grandma’s is for golden soup, whitework embroidery, plaited bread, hot pink nails, and enough tchotchkes to give Snoopers Paradise a run for their money 🐟