The Non-Meditative Jew Tries a Havdalah Meditation
Last night I went to a Havdalah meditation.
Late.
I arrived damp from the second cold rain of the season, after going to the wrong location first.
All of these lovely people sat in a circle, looking more beautiful than I had remembered. I stood at the door, letting the cold air in, struggling with my facemask. The group was sharing ways of marking this time as we approach the days of awe. Telling us of these lovely things they do to mark this time of year when we approach the end of the Torah and prepare to roll it back to the beginning, which you would think would mark the head of the year, but doesn’t.
10 days of questioning, letters written between generations, meditations, dreams of voice and stillness. The meeting of the final letter of the Torah, ל with the first letter, ב, to make the word לב, the Hebrew word for heart.
And I wondered what I do to mark this season.
What is my beautiful practice? What is my transcendent emotional state? I didn’t know.
It turns out that I have no special practice other than longing for ancestors to annoy and family to encircle.
I was born on Yom Kippur, two years after the death of the grand matriarch Esther Toba, who brought her beautiful children from a village in Poland so small that the ship that they boarded to take them to North America was larger.
Imagine, a shtetl smaller than an ocean liner. No wonder people broke down with awe when they caught their first glimpse of it.
And 19 years before I was born, when the Jewish and Gregorian calendars sync up, more than 33,000 Jews were massacred on the outskirts of Kyiv.
I wonder what the Kabbalists have to say about the number 19? 18+1?
As I sat cross-legged, trying to get lost in the moment, I realized something about myself. I am not the Jew who sits in a circle giving you beautiful tradition because I am angry and grieving and whiny.
This time of year reminds me of violence and death, and yes, of course, birth. Most of all, it reminds me of how existentially furious I am with Gd. It reminds me of massacres and despair. It reminds me of betrayal. It reminds me of my beloved grandfather who died a week after Simchat Torah, a week after my luminous Bat Mitzvah, where I read directly from the Torah scroll and led the entire service in the basement of repurposed bank.
And then I remember that I am angry because I love so much.
And how being Jewish is wrapped up in these people I met and did not meet, that I loved and that I didn’t even know. That I will always be walking to my death with the Jews of Kyiv and always be celebrating the survival of my glorious ancestors – the beloved, loving, bitter, charismatic, deep voiced, many. The generous imperfect mess of them.
This is my tradition. What I pass on. It’s not beautiful. It’s not neat. It’s not transcendent.
Design Updates!
Because it’s easier to add a few examples here than to constantly update my portfolio.
My first ever animated gif was made for the good folks at Ranking Digital Rights to mark their new brand launch. The animation begins with the old logo and then shows the new logo and logo elements. I loved making this. And the logo has so many fun elements to play with.
I also made a quick explainer of dual class shares for Ranking Digital Rights, which you can view above. I, myself, was really surprised by the ways in which companies like Meta and Google create multi-class or dual class shares to prevent investors from having a say and to give more power to insiders. As well as avoiding shareholder accountability, these types of schemes also shift the risk of poor decision-making onto other shareholders. Hmmm…quite sneaky. You can read all about it here: It’s time to bring down the barriers blocking shareholders on human rights, by Jan Rydzak.
I recently started doing design work with Oy Vey, which means a mishmash of things from social media posts, print design, to site design (maagal.eu), and temporary branding and a new placeholder site for Het Joods Manifest.
Bring It On, Babylon
Who brings it on better than the multi-lingual, multi-generational, and multi-practice descendants of Babylon? I really don't know.
Over the past year, I have studied Torah with a wonderful group of misfits. They have literally changed my life, allowing me to nourish ancient roots and giving me the kind of friendship we all dream of. In exchange for the learning and the friendship, I designed a book of our commentary on the Talmud tractate Yevamot. It's a love letter to Ze Kollel and everyone who makes it possible. They know who they are.
Take a look at the digital version of our commentary. We're bringing it ancient city style. You can also buy a gorgeous print version on Blurb. Go. Now. I'm selling them at cost.
Featured image (detail) by Tamar Grosz
So you want to oppose fascism...
How to become an anti-fascist
Once, I did not understand the aims or tactics of anti-fascists. They seemed childish and violent to me. Now I am an anti-fascist. How did I get here?
It was slow going.
But fascists have radicalized me. And they should radicalize you too.
Anti-fascists are loose-knit and often unorganized. (The ADL has more info you can read) There is no central leadership and no central organization. Not all political beliefs are shared. The big overlap comes in agreeing to oppose fascism.
If only the antifascists would be more peaceful, then I could support them.
The anti-fascists of the past, fighting Mussolini and Hitler, are routinely held up as heroes. In the present, every tactic is criticized.
I used to be critical as well, so I know that you can untangle your thinking. You just have to step outside yourself for a moment. Ask yourself, is a window worth more than a life? Is vandalism worse than racism? Is a harmless cup of paint thrown at the door of a fascist political party worse than spreading misinformation that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.
And then ask yourself: are people opposing fascism really the same as fascists?
Essentially, antifascists exist on the margins of society because the center allows fascism to grow unchecked until it’s too late to turn it back. And then, in some fictional future, when millions have died in unnecessary violence, the center claims an affiliation with those who resisted. Dissent gets sanitized and idealized. (See how the civil rights struggle in the US has been idealized, as well as the resistance of Martin Luther King, Jr for details)
Questions to help you on your journey
Here are some questions I mulled over for the past few years that may help you make the transition. I won’t give you answers, just questions.
- What happens when we start holding institutions rather than individuals responsible for theft, deprivation, and murder? (Check out what happened to a lawyer who won a court case against Chevron)
- What happens when we no longer assign intentions to murder? What if, instead, we wonder if it really matters to the murdered whether their death was due to bad intelligence or to intentional terror?
- What happens to most people who are victims of rape and abuse when they report the crime to authorities? What good are the authorities if they don’t protect them? Who are they really protecting and why? (You can listen to this CBC podcast tracing one woman's experiences in Canada)
- Who is in prison and why? Why is torture acceptable in our societies? (You can start with some of the stories on mass incarceration in The Atlantic)
- Which nations outsource their human rights abuses and why do we constantly laud them as peaceful and nice? (Listening to Jun and Mitchy Saturay talk about the violence of foreign mining companies against local populations in The Philippines changed the way I thought about human rights.)
- Why are so many indigenous women victims of violence and murder?
- What lies do we tell ourselves in order to justify dehumanizing others?
- What happens when you stop thinking about marginalized people and start thinking about HOW people are marginalized? (I recommend finding disabled activists to follow. Begin with Imani Barbarin. Here's her website: Crutches and Spice)
- What happens when you center the needs of people who are most marginalized by society?
- What happens when borders are open to multinational corporations but closed to people fleeing the devastation brought about by those same corporations?
- What happens when you stop justifying acts of state and capitalist violence?
My Core Values
- Everyone deserves to age and to age safely.
- Everyone deserves a safe place to be alone and a safe place to come together.
- Everyone deserves enough to eat.
Egherman Does Design
You know what I really love?
I love to take a mess of information, find its core, and then describe it both visually and in words. It gets my brain whirring like nobody’s business.
Sit back, dim the lights, put on some yummy sounds, and enjoy a taster of some of my work.
An amuse-bouche if you go in for such delightful little bites.
A few examples, if you prefer a more straightforward way of description.
I know what you’re thinking: how can I hire such a delightful person who shows no fear of bright colors? Where do I find such a brave soul?
It’s easy. Contact me.
TORI EGHERMAN
tori@magaliec10.sg-host.com
+31 621 99 36 65
Research, writing, design
egherman.com
If you need references, my mom is always happy to provide. Oh, professional references? Did you see the home page with all those testimonials? Because, I tell you, there are a few. There are even more on my LinkedIn profile, if you’re curious. All the links are right there for your viewing pleasure.
And by the way, if you prefer to view as a pdf, knock your socks off. Go for it. Be bold and take control.
It’s not up-to-date, but it does include polka dots.
You know what’s great about the PDF? You can make it full screen and actually read the text.
Design Updates!
Animated gifs, social media, logos, and infographics! Because it's easier to add a few examples here than to constantly update my portfolio.
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Bring It On, Babylon
Designs for print magazine and optimized for digital viewing. Bring it ancient city style with contemporary commentary on ancient texts.
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Egherman Does Design
A few examples of work done for clients who wanted clarity, joy, theatricality, sobriety or some combination thereof. Good for what ails you.
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Coaching Through Transitions
One Degree Changes
A change of one degree will completely alter your destination, my friend Jasmin tells me. This is the theme of her coaching work. By looking at past transitions and seeing patterns, you discover more about your current location. With her guidance, you can better understand the nudges and the leaps that marked transitional times. This helps you understand how one degree of change can alter the destination.
I am documenting the experience of being coached through these transitions in a series of posts. This is 1 of who knows how many.
Week One
Recently a friend gave me the gift of her coaching services. She's from South Africa where she was involved in conflict resolution and the anti-apartheid movement. When she moved to the Netherlands, she had to find a whole new way of being in the world, so she combined her skills in conflict resolution and transformation to helping individuals set a course towards the future.
She does this by helping you map out 3 past transitions and identify patterns. By identifying patterns in your behavior, you can identify your strengths and weaknesses and make the small changes you need to in order to meet your current goals.
I am writing this because it's been such an amazing gift. In just one week and with just one transition story, I gained more insight into myself than I expected. I've always thought of myself as a fairly open book, but I have kept secrets from myself. What a shocker!
In the first coaching session with Jasmin Nordien of One Degree Changes, I used the term “unmoored” to describe myself. She asked me spend the week leading to our following session journaling about this term.
When I was moored
There was the gentle roll of sand sometimes coming together to form a dune, sometimes collecting against the rusting barrier that held contained the grass covered yards of the people like us who called this place home. At one time this would have been the home of the Pottawatomi and not us at all, the children and grandchildren of working class immigrants, who made a living from steel and the lake.
During one particularly cold winter, the waves of the lake froze, stuck in time.
This is the place I am moored to. It holds the landscape that grips my soul and contains all that is me: the Jewish me, the American me, the optimistic and happy me, the pessimist me, and the me who is rooted in justice. This is where I was nurtured...
When I was unmoored
When I was unmoored from this place, I lost a sense of the place of home for good. I found home elsewhere: in a particular chocolate cake or a bowl of chicken soup, in an aroma or a song. But not in a place.
The entries from my week of journaling began with negatives. I was looking at what I lacked and what felt lost. When we moved from northern Indiana, I lost my sense of place. When my grandfather died, I lost my belief in God. I have lost dreams and ambitions and even irreplaceable documents. When I moved to the Netherlands, I lost my career.
I have often felt like I was flailing, a constant potential caught in my heart, unable to escape.
And then, the morning of the second session, I woke up and wrote this:
So...
The sense of being unmoored, is also one of being attached to something deeper and more long-lasting: the intimacy of family and siblings, the call to justice, the longing for peace.
Maybe this sense of being unmoored is how I not only weather storms but also enjoy them. Maybe it’s the gift of acceptance, of meeting people where they are.
Being unmoored is about movement. It’s what makes it possible for me to let go of bad ideas and keeps me learning and growing and changing.
So, although I sometimes feel untethered, I feel deep abiding connection to these values that cannot be broken.
The script flipped. I realized that unmoored did not mean without a core. I have a core. It burns inside me. It keeps me honest and dedicated.
So another week of thanks.
How Can Our Communities Heal from Abuses of Power?
Photo by Eduard V. Kurganov, CC 2.0
What can communities do to heal from abuses of power? How can we make leadership more accountable? Ideas from the Kink community.
What Activists Can Learn from the Kink Community about Creating Safer Spaces
When I was nineteen, I worked as a janitor. My bosses were older men who I slowly came to adore. One was also a small-town sheriff who often borrowed our colleague’s student house for trysts with married women. He was handsy and inappropriate, but my colleagues and I laughed it off. We never felt threatened.
When I told another student about my work, she insisted I was experiencing sexual harassment. I told her to get a life. I was not being sexually harassed.
Turns out , we were both right. I was not being sexually harassed because I didn’t feel sexually harassed. My job was never threatened. I was never coerced into anything. I never felt unsafe.
But over the decades, I’ve come to realize that laughing off bad behavior may have put more vulnerable people at risk. We might have been making it seem okay and normal, which could have contributed to an unsafe work environment for others.
***
Not too long ago, I was part of a small activist community that was scandalized by reports of abuses of power. To many, the man in the center was likable and charming. To others, he was an abuser and a charlatan.
The stories of his behavior circulated for years. Each person told was sworn to secrecy. The non-disclosure agreements guaranteed that the whisperings couldn’t go public.
Ours was a small community and the network was crucial to my work. The events it held were fun, engaging, and useful, primarily for connecting with peers. Because of the events, we got to know the individuals behind the work and it helped us in our pursuit of common goals. Even so, I never stopped wondering what we could do to bring back those of our peers who had disappeared and had been victimized. Why was it, I wondered, that the abuser was protected by an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and still an active member of the community, when the people he harassed were no longer welcomed?
The diagnosis
Once the abuse was publicly known, I hoped that we would openly discuss what we could do to make our community safe. I hoped that we would have rich and rewarding discussions about what had happened and why. I hoped we would interrogate ourselves. Most of all, I hoped that the organization at the center would strive to welcome back those who had been exiled.
As of this writing, there have been no organizational efforts to reach out to the people directly impacted by the abuse. Yes, they brought in a great consultant. Yes, they had an internal review process. Yes, they published statements, and yes they made their new guidelines public. But it didn’t feel like enough to me. It felt legalistic and shallow.
In order to learn more about healing networks after abuse, I began speaking to people, asking them what it would take to make the events and network feel welcoming and safe.
While talking to others, I came in contact with people in a kink community somewhere in North America. They had recently gone through an egregious breach of trust. I spoke with Carol (not her real name), who was one of the people who took on the task of reforming the community to make it feel safe again. As we spoke, it became increasingly clear that the dungeon she was a part of and our activist network had several things in common.
Primarily:
a) both have security issues that often require that the identities of people are protected;
b) both communities are demonized by the outside world and seen as threats to society;
c) both communities have reason to be concerned that the acts of a few can tarnish the entire group;
d) both communities are small and intimate, making it difficult for people who want to stay involved to find other networks.
In many places, being outed as belonging to a kink community can get you fired from your job and ostracized by the community. It’s true that the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey has created a more positive view of kink in the the media, but that is a very recent development.
If you think kink is demonized, try advocating for human rights. One only has to turn on the television to see how human rights activists are portrayed in popular culture. Fictional human rights activists are seen as barriers to justice or depicted as hiding their own evil natures. On screen (and in real life) human rights activists can seem shrill and annoying. In real life, human rights activists can be surveilled, stalked, tortured, killed, and imprisoned.
It is understandable that members of both these communities are protective of identities and shy of public accountability. Both communities depend on networks of trust in order to be effective, despite the fact that this may mean extending that trust to predators.
The human rights community is especially vulnerable to divisions that would make it less effective in pursuing its end goals. It’s not unusual for outside forces to try to disrupt and discredit activist networks. For the BDSM community, consent and how it is enacted are absolutely crucial for maintaining health and well-being.
This post looks at what small networks can learn from one particular kink community about recovering from an abuse of power. It does not cover widespread systematic harrassment and abuse.
The flip-side of security
Both the activist and kink communities require security precautions and the protection of identity. Taking these precautions protects community members from retribution from abusive governments and intolerant societies. At the same time, they make it especially difficult to enforce accountability.
The pressure to keep a space safe from abuse needs to come from the community itself. So the question becomes what can organizations that depend on privacy and are demonized externally do to ensure that the community remains safe?
Factors that lead to abuse
There are some factors that can make abuse possible:
- The community lacks of a culture of accountability. This makes it difficult for people to understand what’s ok and what’s not okay and and means there are no guidelines for dealing with abuse, especially those types of behaviors that could have different interpretations for different individuals.
- There is one leader who is unchecked by a board or by others on the team. Usually this person is charismatic and seen as “someone who can make things happen.” This person can be particularly good at manipulating the situation to their own benefit and making it seem as though they are indispensable.
- The target of abuse isn’t always as likable as the abuser. Often, the person targeted may have already had their contributions hidden, suppressed, and outright stolen. This can mean that they are less visible to the community as a whole and less likely to be protected and supported.
- The target of abuse is dependent on the abuser for funding, work, and/or community.
The challenge
Consent is key to the success of any kink community, as is permission for and acceptance of difference. You join a dungeon to “let your freak flag fly.” When your freak flag includes behaviors and symbols many in the community find emotionally traumatizing, you have to find a way to respect their limits. It turns out that the line between permission and consent is not as clear to some as to others. Carol explains:
“All of kink can be inherently traumatic to people - it explores power dynamics and violence. However, there are some kinks that are described as ‘taboo’ in the community because they have a higher tendency to be disturbing to swaths of the community, or make people feel attacked because of their identity. Things like raceplay, dark ageplay, or Nazi roleplay are especially sensitive. These kinks can in and of themselves be healthy to explore among consenting adults, but dungeon leaders and psychologists tend to agree that they are not for everyday shared spaces because one person’s healing cannot come at the expense of another person’s trauma. Especially if the trauma is related to unethical crimes that involve identity, like child abuse or hate crimes. Many dungeons segregate or prohibit taboo play, and those that don’t often foster very unhealthy cultures as a consequence.”
For awhile, the dungeon had been losing ethnic and religious minority members. The reasons were many, but underscoring them all was a lack of respect for boundaries and particularly for very real historical pain. The dwindling number of non-Black minorities made people of color feel especially vulnerable and without allies. Many had expressed their discomfort, only to be ignored.
Eventually Carol published a piece about the conflict in her dungeon on a popular fetish forum. She stated her case, explained how the consent of the community was violated, and demanded an end. “I was terrified of publishing the post, but I immediately got support from people around the world,” she stated.
This gave her the confidence to build alliances within her local community.
Building alliances
Crucially, there was already broad support for making the dungeon more inclusive. Most members simply did not know how to make that happen.
The case for changing policies was brought to the owner of their local dungeon. Carol stated: “I told him: the way you handle this will determine what you will be in the future. If you don’t create safety now, the club will not be safe in the future.”
The owner had to consider a number of factors when making the decision to change the workings of the dungeon. Each decision meant losing clientele. This was particularly the case because taboo play had become normalized and those involved were very much a part of the running of the dungeon. Eventually, it was likely profit that made the difference. Would the dungeon be more profitable if it could create a safer, more inclusive atmosphere? Would it continue to lose members or would it be able to revive its community?
The owner gave Carol and those supporting her efforts for change the space to test their ideas for making the dungeon safer.
“Of course power relationships are important aspects of BDSM play, but who knew how important those same relationships would be in building alliances to change the nature of the dungeon and make it more consensual?” Carol told me. “The good news is that people are more loyal to sex than to taboo play.”
Reaching out to those harmed
The next step was to reach out to those harmed by the abuses of consent within their community. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Carol said. “This wasn’t easy.”
Private discussions were held. People were given the space to express their grievances and together they worked out solutions for ensuring that their boundaries were respected.
The dungeon actually changed its policies based on the content of those discussions.
What changed
The first thing to change was the education committee. It was dismantled and a new one was put in place. The new committee required that each new member go through training that not only ensures physical safety, but psychological safety as well. Carol explains:
“All volunteers in positions of power or who interact with the clientele have to become aware of power structures in place in larger society that make certain individuals more vulnerable to abuse, and learn how to create an environment of safety for them. Once educated, they are held accountable for acting upon this education and can be removed for breaches.”
Enforcing change
It isn’t always easy to get people to change their behavior. It is crucial that leadership stand firmly behind any new policies.
“In other subcultures, those who violate others would be thrown out. We cannot do that because our collective safety depends on people not bitterly attacking us from the outside. We have to keep everyone in, which means finding ways to incentivize good behavior and reward those who look out for others.”
Complaints process
The first thing to do is to ensure that there is shared leadership of the community. Ideally leaders must answer to a board and to the community. In the case of the dungeon, there was no board, so the community had to take on this role. It’s the community that has to ensure that management has a clear policy for breaches of trust and actually acts on that policy. Carol states: “The people in the middle must keep management accountable while keeping the trust of the people who have a conflict. It’s a delicate balancing act. One we still don’t have right.”
A system for dealing with complaints must be put in place. And this is not an easy thing to do. Especially when some complaints may actually be criminal. [1]
Break down the barriers between cliques
A very important aspect of ensuring the long-term health of a community is to actually foster friendships. Create opportunities for people to reach out to each other across the cliques that tend to emerge.
This takes work. It doesn’t happen naturally. So the community actually has to commit to reaching out and building unusual alliances. In the dungeon, that means looking at the subgroups of kinksters who are naturally more inclusive and figuring out what they’re doing right and then giving them the power to spread that attitude throughout the community.
Share leadership
Charismatic leadership is dangerous.
Charismatic leaders come to represent the community and are often viewed as indispensable. They can have a history of complaints against them, yet remain in power. Why? Because people seem to think that the community would fall to pieces without them.
To stay healthy, leadership needs to be shared, and it needs to be shared with people who are NOT natural leaders.[2] You want people leading who are naturally cooperative and egalitarian. And because those people are not natural leaders, you need to have a process in place ensuring they are respected and heard.
Be patient
The best intentions won’t make the community safe. Training won’t change things quickly. There will be missteps and mistakes. It’s best to acknowledge that the process of recovering from predatory actions will be difficult and painful. The community will change as a result. Some people may never feel safe enough to return. Others may not be comfortable with the changes.
Maintaining a safe space and a safe community is a continuous project. Expect challenges and blunders.
Wrap-up
Sexual harassment is the abuse of power. It’s not misinterpreted flirtation. For this reason, it can damage the entire community, not simply the people targeted for harassment. Those people who come forward with complaints, or who leave the community entirely, are signaling a larger problem. Watch out for absences and departures from the network.
It might not be possible to avoid all abuses of power in a community, but we sure can try.
[1] For more on setting up a conflict resolution protocol, see How-to Recognize and Deal with Conflict http://www.civilsocietyhowto.org/10-tips-for-dealing-with-conflict/
[2] See Building a Network with No Masters, No Leaders: http://www.civilsocietyhowto.org/network-no-masters-no-leaders/
Love will tear us apart ... or not
On Friday, March 15, 2019, we wake up to the news of the white supremacist attack on Muslims in New Zealand. Kamran and I find ourselves one in anger and in grief, connected to people far away from us, but not far away from our own experiences of the world.
Kamran was born into a Muslim family in small-town Iran, and I was born into a Jewish family in small-town US. Revolution, refuge, art, and New York brought us together.
Pre 9/11 New York, of course. Today’s USA would prevent us from meeting. Today’s Muslim ban would have altered his life forever. Mine? Who knows what I would have become?
With all the forces trying to tear us apart, including our own personal idiosyncrasies, it is a testament to our incredible hardheadedness that Kamran and I remain together.
We are torn at by history, culture, and war. From our very different starting points, and our very different world views.
Kamran and I are torn at by the way the world sees us: as victim, perpetrator, pitiable, terrorist, threat, Muslim, Jew, man, woman, hateful, powerful, refugee, atheist, immigrant, revolutionary, and impossible.
We are torn about by the way the world treats us. We are torn at by the ways that treatment has been invisible to each of us.
Over the years, I have been slow to see the patterns that discriminate.
I have dismissed Kamran's experiences of being treated worse in the Netherlands because of his background. This is true even though I saw a letter from a potential employer telling him that they already had "too many foreigners" on staff.
For his part, Kamran has been slow to accept my fears that our current times rhyme with the rise of Nazi Germany. When I told him that I saw signs of growing violence that echoed the rise of the Nazis, he told me I was too worried. “The Holocaust was unique,” he told me. “Nothing can be compared to it.”
Now he says, "I was naive. I believed in western democracy. I believed in the strength of checks and balances. I was a naive immigrant."
On Friday, March 15, 2019, we share our fears. We cry as though tears matter. Kamran tells me that he is afraid that the violence will spread like a contagion.
...routine bites hard
Over the past ten years, Kamran has been researching the Holocaust, visiting sites of violence and suffering both in documents and in physical spaces.
He did not grow up in Europe. The Holocaust did not erase his history or have much of an impact on his society. Yet studying its history opened a vein of grief in him that allowed me to honor my own.
His witnessing gave me permission to unmute my generational pain. It had been bottled for so long. I felt I didn't have a right to it, that I was imagining it, that I should be grateful to have so many living relatives made safe by their good fortune.
Society says, Get Over It. And when you listen, you pack away your rage and sadness in a container too small to hold it. Eventually it breaks out. My childhood Rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, told Kamran that he built a cement wall inside his brain to keep the memories at bay. Even that didn't help. But it was the only way life was possible.
Love, love...
On Friday, March 15, 2019, Kamran whispers that he has so much reason to be optimistic. He sees the Jewish and Muslim communities in the US and New Zealand reaching out to one another in solidarity and compassion. He sees students marching for the climate, eager to make the changes we need to continue our lives on this planet. He sees love from others. Oh love...
I whisper back, Love is not enough, and think back to the dockworker strike that brought Amsterdam to a halt just after the Nazi occupation. At the time, one Jewish woman wrote in her diary that her heart sang with joy at the thought of the support of Amsterdam’s citizens.
I think back to a testimonial from a woman who survived Kristallnacht. She remembered going to school the next morning because she did not want to cower at home. She wanted to show her face. When she arrived, the other children formed a circle of protection around her and the other Jewish classmates.
This broke my heart. It somehow would have been easier to hear that the other children shunned her.
Love is what will be remembered by survivors of our hateful times. But it is not enough to stop what’s coming. It's not enough to stop what's already here.
Love is a gesture. A gesture we need. Don't stop loving.
And don't empty that gesture of meaning like Amsterdam did by projecting a flag of New Zealand on Central Station and calling it solidarity. That just hides our own complicity in platitudes. It won't stop the next attack. It won't change the gleeful cruelty we see around us. It doesn't help name the condition: supremacism.
As 16-year old climate activist Greta Thunberg says: we need to panic. We are in a burning building, and we are so afraid of naming our condition that we ignore the flames.
Tear us apart
It is so easy to destroy. Anyone who has slung a sledgehammer at a wall can tell you that it can fill you with power. It can be such fun.
Kamran and my other Iranian friends taught me the perils of revolution. How it eats its children. How using violence gives power to the violent.
And here we are. With violence in power.
...we're changin' our ways...
These are the times my elders warned me of.
Unknowingly and knowingly they taught me the omens. They taught me the signs of dehumanization and the patterns in "disorganized" violence.
They taught me how easy it is to destroy. They taught me that home can betray you.
And then they fed me chocolate cake and kugel and filled me with love.
Love, love will...
For comfort, I remind myself of the notion of Tikkun Olam: repairing the world. Imagine the big bang as a universe inside a vessel. When the vessel breaks the light of that universe goes everywhere, even into our souls. It is love, love that is torn apart. And now that love and that light lives inside us. We use it to repair what is broken. No light is too small. No repair too insignificant.
When I need to remember things can heal, I remind myself that my childhood included rivers on fire and so much pollution that we thought we'd all be walking around with oxygen tanks by now. The rivers were cleaned. The lakes were cleaned. We can repair our world. We must repair our world.
As recently as last year, I would ask my friends to imagine this Europe from the midst of World War I. It is unimaginable. Now I am not so confident in that analogy.
We must never forget how broken the world is and has been. And then we must repair our world.
The repairs will take generations. We make them. We don't finish them.
That's the best hope I can give.
Love will tear us apart
"Trickster Crumb"
One day I woke up to discover that the imp in my story is a quantum being. It just occurred to me in a dream. The imp doesn’t travel in time. The imp is not measurable at times. When the imp is not measurable, strange things happen. Time changes shape. The imp divides into many. Unpredictable movement becomes possible. When no one is looking, imps ride photons.
Quantum mechanics shows that particles like photons behave differently when they are observed than when they are not observed. I always thought “observed” referred to being watched by our very own two eyes. In fact, observation refers to the act of measurement. We are continually being measured, whether it’s by a ruler, the eyes of onlookers, or the air particles we displace.
The very week I realized that the imp was quantum, physicist Paul Coxon sent out a message on Twitter that went viral:
“Hello my name is Paul, I have a PhD in physics and thanks to a random brain freeze forgot the word for photon so had to call it a “shiny crumb” in front of my colleagues 😐”
Paul Coxon on Twitter
Clearly a sign, right? I love that he called the photon a “shiny
crumb.” Thanks to Dr. Coxon’s brain freeze, I’ve taken to calling the imp in my
work in progress a “trickster crumb.”
The Imp in the Stone
Today I completed a story that tells of a time when the imp
locked their multiple selves inside a stone grotesque.* On display in a public park overlooking Lake Michigan, the stone imp encounters a
Holocaust survivor. Here is an excerpt:
“I saw Harry again? You know what he talked about? The camps, is what. Like we were some 1965 twelve year old reminiscing about summer camp. Like we remember when we all went canoeing and told ghost stories around a campfire. Like we weren’t the damned ghosts our own selves. Only, it’s oh, remember the time everyone taller than the unnamed asshole was shot, and I survived because I am so short? This is what he wants to talk about? He has diarrhea of the mouth, this one. And you know what else? He still keeps the spoon from those days. Never goes anywhere without his god damned spoon. Harry. He’s a piece of work. You know what he says to my grandkids? Here’s what: make sure you always wear a good pair of walking shoes. Your shoes are what stand between you and survival.”
Doris is wearing gold slippers. Her toenails are painted bright red. Her hair neatly combed. The scarf with the flowers looks happier on her head today. She leans towards me, “I am never wearing sensible shoes again. Even if it kills me.”
Then she stands as still as I do and we listen to the children in the playground laughing. This is a good day.
*(BTW, GROTESQUE: isn’t that a wonderful word? It’s the word for the carvings we often think of as gargoyles but that do not double as gutter spouts. I love it.)
The most wonderful thing of the month
My friend Christopher shared a dance routine from the film
Stormy Weather. Just watch the Nicholas Brothers own every dancer in all of
history with their acrobatics, grace, and sheer joy:
Things to read
Trevor Noah’s book Born a Crime is an absolute must. It’s cruel and smart and funny and compassionate.
I’m a huge John Le Carre fan. Pigeon Tunnel is a fascinating account of his life as a writer. He shares so much without revealing anything at all about himself. For anyone who is a fan of his many spy novels, that should come as no surprise.
Bob Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol is the poem of the month. Here is an excerpt:
Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears
Podcasts I love
I love to be read to. I subscribe to Pseudopod, Escapepod,
and Podcastle as well as Selected Shorts. One story I loved this month was
Suddenwall by Sara Saab: http://podcastle.org/2019/02/05/podcastle-560-suddenwall/
The Selected Shorts episode Dangerously Funny was a hoot: https://www.symphonyspace.org/selected-shorts/episodes/dangerously-funny-george-saunders-carrie-brownstein-guest-host-josh-radnor-1
Don’t forget to share!
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“Dina, it’s time we moved to America.”
A few years ago, I stood in front of a small group of people in an attic space in the heart of Amsterdam. I was telling the people gathered for an afternoon of storytelling about the day my six year old grandmother learned that her family was about to move to the United States. I was using her words and her rhythm of speech. My grandmother was six and was in the market with her good friend, also six, when strangers attacked the shtetl where she was born. They set angry pigs loose in the streets, killing her friend right in front of her. My grandmother was unharmed. When she returned home, her mother looked at her and said: “Dina, it’s time we moved to America.”
Any adult hearing this story immediately understands that it is a tragedy and not a comedy. Yet I was a child of six the first time I heard it, and it sounded like a joke to me. It had the rhythm of comedy. The understatement, the lack of drama, everything made it seem like a joke. The humor is what I held on to for decades. I knew there was a happy ending to all this because I was an American child with a grandmother who was funny, warm, and enduringly optimistic. I was not afraid for my life and had never experienced antisemitic violence.
In Amsterdam, however, something fundamentally changed
inside of me. The people in the attic space were all immigrants and refugees. That
hadn’t been planned. It was an accident. As I told the story, I was overwhelmed
with the pain and the trauma of the familiar words. I watched as everyone in
the room recognized themselves in the story. Their eyes filled with tears. My
voice caught in my throat and all of a sudden, I was six years old, uprooted,
traveling to an unknown destination. I was on a crowded boat, hungry and
desperate.
I started to think of that particular moment in time, when
the borders of nations were fluid and before Europe’s wars became unimaginably calamitous.
I had always joked that I was lucky to have my roots in a place where the
dangers of antisemitism were apparent early on. My relatives were lucky to have
made the journey to North America when immigration was open.
As I began contemplating this history, Europe brimmed with
stories of the “refugee crisis.” Xenophobic public figures demonized the people
fleeing their homelands. They shared pictures of young dark haired Middle
Eastern men walking together in large groups. “Where are the women?” They asked
rhetorically. “Where are the children?”
When I found some of the entry documents from my own family,
I had the opposite question: where were the men? All four of my grandparents
accompanied their mothers on the journey to America: from Lithuania, Romania,
Poland, and Austria. Think of what it must have been like for those mothers
bringing a slew of children first across Europe to a port in Hamburg or
Rotterdam, and then on the long sea journey to the US. For the first time I
realized that they left their own mothers and fathers behind, never to be seen
again. The families would have had little food, little access to sanitary
facilities, and very little fresh water. These women must have been tough and
brave and desperate.
Lucky me, to be the grandchild of the desperate.
Just a few years after the last of my grandparents arrived,
the US border would be closed. The influence of the fledgling eugenics movement
in both the United States and in Germany would increase. Jews would be seen as
mongrels, dirty, and seditious. And things would get a lot worse.
For everyone. Everyone knows this.
I dug deeper. It turns out that Nazi death squads and
Lithuanian collaborators marched those who remained in my grandfather’s shtetl
into the woods and shot them. Children.
Old People. Men. Women. Everyone.
The Jerusalem of the North
Just four hours south of the shtetl was the capital of
diaspora Jewish life, Vilnius. Its population was 45% Jewish with over one
hundred synagogues and was known as the Jerusalem of the West. Its Yiddish
library was filled with over one hundred thousand texts and even included
translations of Arthur Conan Doyle. This was a culture that was alive,
thriving, and fearless well after so many of the Jews living in the countryside
had taken a chance on a new life across the ocean to the west.
I had always imagined unceasing misery, punctuated with humor,
creativity, and sarcasm. I had never imagined a life fearlessly led or a
culture so fearlessly dominant.
This made me wonder about the years before the genocide when people could not imagine what was coming because it was unimaginable. The fundamental questions I’m asking in the book I am writing are these: what would it be like to be Jewish without the Holocaust? And what does it mean to know what’s coming and to be unable to change it?
A couple of articles:
This past year I received feedback from about 30 non-Native Dutch residents about their experiences with the Dutch way of welcoming Santa. The article based on their responses was published on Global Voices: How do non-native residents of the Netherlands view Zwarte Piet, St. Nicholas’ blackface servant?
Like many of you, I was overwhelmed by the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh. I had much of the same despair as when African American worshippers in Charleston were attacked. I reread my own article, A Home Safe From Fear: My American Dream.
What I’ve been reading:
I learned so many fundamental things about what it means to be a family from Karen Joy Fowler’s book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. It was a revelation. Please don’t find out anything about it before reading it. You’re welcome.
I also loved the Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra.
And horror stories! I'm a wimp, but I still love a good horror story. I collected some of my faves available online in this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ETori/status/1052817649044836352
Dear Beloved by Sumita Chakraboty explores the pain of losing a sister suddenly and forever. It touched me deeply.
Podcasts, lectures, and music
Check out Jewish History Matters: Roundtable on the Attack in Pittsburgh with Lila Corwin Berman, Maja Gildin Zuckerman, and Jacob Labendz.
Rabbi Ruti Regan talks about why Judaism is so autism-friendly:
“We are a wonderfully autistic people,” she says: https://youtu.be/qocZbokOgag
Finally Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues has been on repeat this past week. What an album!
Featured photo at the top of the post from a Jewish wedding in Ushpol from the site https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/dusetos/dus092.html
Tradition! Tradition! Who Has the Right to Ritual
Who has the right to ritual? That’s a question my entire life is asking. Does someone who keeps kosher and the Sabbath have more of a claim on defining what is or is not Jewish than I do? Or is it enough that my bones hum with Jewish identity? Is it enough that when I was ten years old and caught a high fly ball to centerfield I thought, “Hmmm, I wonder what it would feel like to catch this ball if I wasn’t Jewish?”
The novel I am writing is filled with Jewish characters living complex lives that are both in harmony and in opposition to tradition.
In that sense, my characters are living out lives that are not all that different from others in the mid-1700s. Jewish life was changing. Recently passed laws limited land ownership and access to professions. Hasidism was on the rise. It was manifesting in diverse manners: from rule bound to mystical to imitations of royal courts. There was an explosion of new tradition and new myth-making. There was also opposition to the new ways of expressing Jewishness. Identities were formed as a result of the opposition.
What a time. Not so different from now. Just take a look at all the ways that expression of Jewish identity is taking. It’s an exciting time to be a member of the tribe.
Writing this book, I became curious about the history of women scribes in the Jewish tradition. Women certainly copied many texts and worked on marriage certificate. The notion that a trans man might have written a Torah at some point is not out of the question. But it’s only recently that women have begun writing Torahs. There are not many of them. In this article on Tablet, Marjorie Ingall writes about “the women of the deerskin:” a small group of women who are now writing Torahs. My favorite part of the article was when one of the women described how she sourced her own hides for the parchment:
She explained how she avoided the problems other women had in getting klaf, parchment, and supplies, which religious vendors wouldn’t sell to women. She didn’t want to send a male emissary to buy for her like the other women did; to her, it felt like starting a spiritual project on a note of inauthenticity. So she decided to tap the huge number of hunters who live near her to get skins so she could teach herself to make her own klaf. (My jaw was on the floor at this point.) “During deer season, bucks are plentiful, and where I live, everyone’s a hunter,” she said. “Skins are worthless; they just throw them in the woods. So, I put out the word that I wanted skins and I got so many. I’m impressed with the ethos of hunters; they don’t want anything to go to waste. I get all the hides I could want. I just throw them in the chest freezer in my garage and process them over the following year. That was after my kids were all, ‘Mom! You are not allowed to hang hides in the laundry room!’ ” She added serenely, “Hides do smell terrible.” *
The requirement for a hide used for the Torah is that it come from a kosher animal, not that it be ritually slaughtered. Dozens of hides are needed to create just one Torah. And kosher hunting is quite a challenge given the fact that the animal, hunted or not, needs to be ritually slaughtered in order for the meat to be considered kosher. This may account for the paucity of hunters in the Bible. There are just two: Jacob’s brother Esau and Nimrod who was a “mighty hunter…”
I’m learning all this because one of my characters is a time traveling hunter who provides hides for the writing of a Torah. Imagine a 21st century person going back to a time when the Holocaust is not a defining feature of Jewish life. That’s why she’s there, to observe a relatively peaceful time for Europe's Jewish population, even in a time of upheaval and change.
That's why I'm there too. Writing this book is as much an exploration of possibility as it is of plot. It's a ritual. It's a call to our ancestors. It's a lost path.
More...
Just to prove I think about ritual quite often: Who Has the Right to Ritual
Here’s an interview with Julie Seltzer who is a scribe (sofer) and has created a Torah for the Contemporary Jewish Museum:
https://youtu.be/a5Brbqgngrc
My friend Simon introduced me to the Emergence Magazine podcast. Breathtaking prose and big ideas. Start here: Mud and Antler Bone
Speaking of podcasts, cousin Jacob Siegel hosts a podcast with Phil Klay called Manifesto. I always feel the need to talk more about the ideas they discuss. Start anywhere: Manifesto
This past week I listened to an engaging episode of Jewish History Matters with David Biale, the co-author of Hasidism: A New History. I can't wait to read the book in case anyone wants to buy me a gift.
My partner Kamran Ashtary has been studying the Holocaust for the past nine years. Yes, he *is* a lot of fun at parties ;-). The artwork he is creating as a result is breathtaking. Please check it out: kamranashtary.com
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The Rhythm of Tragedy
When I was little I fell in love with the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, rereading our copy of Zlateh the Goat dozens of times. Poor Zlateh was getting too old to give milk and the family that kept her was flailing financially. They needed to eat. A decision was made to sell Zlateh to the butcher so that the family could survive the winter. On the way to town a snowstorm trapped the goat and the young boy taking her to the butcher. Zlateh kept the boy warm through the storm and provided milk.
Spoiler alert: they survived the storm and turned back to the house where Zlateh lived out her life as a valued member of the family.
Don't Let Me Read Miss Understood
When I needed more stories, I reached for the adult novels of Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. I under-understood them, like so many of the other books I read as a child. I wasn’t ready for the layers of plot and emotion and character. I wasn’t ready for the way that the comic became tragic. I wasn't ready for demons that weren't harmless. What I was ready for was the rhythm of the sentences and the shape of the words. And that's what I read for.
There is a rhythm to tragedy—especially Jewish tragedy—that feels comic. It begins with a set-up and ends with a punchline. This is the way that we pass our lore through the generations and relate our horrors to children without traumatizing them. The stories are four-dimensional, beginning with humor. With time, the stories unfold, revealing a new dimension of pain and tragedy. The stories unfold again, warning of coming harm and providing hints for survival. They unfold again, and the humor feels fresh and sparkling.
The imp in the novel I am writing is desperate to warn of coming harm. But does anyone listen? Of course not. Who listens to warnings? Not even the characters in my stories listen. See:
“We’ve had it up to here with the warnings. Everything is a warning with you. And nothing can be changed. Fires come when they come. Hunger comes when it comes. Sickness comes to the hail. We run and run and run and still Death finds us all. Who knows what to do with warnings?”
If fictional characters won't listen, who will?
An Epitaph
Everything I come across during the research for the novel makes me wish to be a small part of a big community that can make the world laugh. On my worst days, I am afraid that humor numbs us and keeps us from acting or taking danger seriously. On those days I treat myself to a few episodes of Brooklyn 99, and then I go back to the work of trying to repair the tiniest cracks in the world. I remind myself that there are other ways to communicate and that humor renews us.
This brings me to Sholem Aleichem's grave and the epitaph he composed for himself:
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- Do ligt a Id a pashutier - Here lies a Jew a simple-one,
- Geschrieben Idish-Daitch fur weiber - Wrote Yiddish-German (translations) for women
- Un faren prosten falk hot er gewein a humorist a schreiber
- - and for the regular folk, was a writer of humor
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- Die ganze lieben umgelozt geschlogen mit der welt kapures
- -His whole life he slaughtered ritual chickens together with the crowd,
- (He didn't care too much for this world)
- Die ganze welt hot gutt gemacht - the whole world does good,
- Un ehr - ohoy vey - gewehn oif zuress - and he, oh my, is in trouble.
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-
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- Un davka de mohl gewehn der oilom hot gelacht
- - but exactly when the world is laughing
- gecklutched un flegg zich flehen - clapping and hitting their lap,
- Dought er gekrenkt dos weis nor gott - he cries - only God knows this
- Besod, az keyner zohl nit zeiyen - in secret, so no-one sees.
Oh how fortunate he was to have died before the world burned.
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Using Personas to Gain Understanding and Focus
How Can Global Voices Use Personas to Move Forward?
View this on Medium, please...
Global Voices is asking its community to engage in defining its future path. Are we a community? Are we news? Are we media? All of the three? Something we have not yet imagined? The community council brings together a range of people with deep roots in Global Voices, including some of the founding members. It also brings together more recent members, without in-depth knowledge of the organization’s history and mission.
One way to look at the future, may be to employ design practices pioneered by Alan Cooper and the interaction design team (UX, Human Centered Design, whatever you call the discipline today) at Cooper Interaction Design. Those practices bring together research, communication, persona development, and design. As an early member of the Cooper team, I saw how powerful and prescient the process was. I have done my best to employ the process in communication work since then.
tldr:
No one can design for everyone. Specificity is what makes a product or service appealing. Taking time for research and persona development can ensure that what you want to offer is specific enough to be interesting. This article discusses the process further.
Personas bring the mission to life
The pressing questions facing Global Voices are what and who. What will we be in ten years and who are we trying to reach? What can we do best and who are we?
Developing personas can help answer these questions.
Personas are fictional characters that represent segments of the target audience. They help to better communicate an understanding of the audience. Personas are not averages, but archetypes. There is just enough detail in persona descriptions to make them seem like real people, but not so much that they are quirky.
Even when working in a new domain, it is possible to develop a deep understanding of the people involved by combining research and persona development. I’ve seen this time and time again. I’ve worked on projects with audiences as specific as chemical buyers for the paint and coatings industry to as wide as people who use online photo services. In each case, the clients were surprised by the depth of knowledge of their audience that the personas revealed.
What do Rollaway Suitcases, a Moby Song, and Denim Jeans have in Common?
Hint: they were all created with someone in mind.
Understanding the target audience well and specific people who make up that audience produces surprisingly effective results. This is repeated time and again. For instance, roll-away suitcases were designed specifically for flight crews, but it turns out that we all can use them. Denim jeans were designed for gold prospectors, but that does not stop us from wearing them. Moby writes songs with one specific person in mind, and his music is among some of the highest selling music of all time.
Here is what Moby had to say about his process in the March 17, 2002 issue of the NYT magazine:
“It’s weird, maybe, but every song I write, I imagine this specific kind of person who is listening to it alone, always alone, sitting by himself or herself,’’ he said. ‘’I have written a song where I imagine it’s being listened to by a woman who’s just come home from a hard day’s work and finally has a moment to herself. I’ve written a song where it’s a student in Germany on a train, coming home from school for the holidays.’’
Knowing who will eventually use the product being designed whether it is a website, a software application, a song, or a physical product keeps teams focused and productive. A clear understanding of the target audience helps to build consensus quickly.
So how do we start?
Start with Empathy and Understanding
Frankly, not everyone is cut out to develop personas. Here are some characteristics that could lead to creating good personas:
- Listening without judgment
- A love for fiction and reading
- Experience writing fictional characters or actual biographies
- Multi-generational life experience
- An ability to set aside your own personality to understand others
- Curiosity
Continue with Research
One of my favorite design research stories illustrates that people often cannot verbalize what they need. A product development company asked people with limited mobility how their walkers could be improved. No one had any ideas. Yet, nearly all of them had made modifications to their own walkers:
Yet when the group members were excused and got up to leave, the researchers saw that several participants had rigged home-made carrying pouches to their walkers, ranging from a bicycle basket tied with shoe strings to an automotive cupholder. A good researcher lets the information tell a story instead of imposing a story on the information. This is a key difference and not as simple or as clear cut as it sounds. (From: When sparks fly: Igniting creativity in groups)
Although most of us won’t ever be as good at observation as Sherlock Holmes, there are things we can do to improve our research skills. This includes reading, interviewing, and observing.Research with design in mind means combining skepticism and innocence. It demands listening to what people do and do not say.
Ask Yourself Questions
Working with a partner and sharing observations can make the process go even faster. At the end of every day spent on research answer the following questions together:
- What recommendations would we make based on what we learned today?
- What do we need to know more about?
- What questions can we ask that will help us discover more?
- What’s missing?
Look for Patterns and Outliers
Researching for design can use traditional methods of narrative research, surveys, observation, and literature reviews. In the analysis it’s important to look for patterns and for the outliers that break the patterns. Outliers are particularly important when it comes to design. They can show the way forward.
Patterns are part of everything we do and build. When we do research, we look for similarities in what we hear, observe, and read. What is connected to what?
Codes are a way of visualizing the patterns and turning patterns into statistics. This requires an initial identification of the patterns and then naming these patterns. The coding process requires at least 2 people. It requires several reviews of the material to be sure you have the fewest named codes necessary to describe the patterns without ignoring anything.
When something doesn’t fit a pattern, it may be an outlier. Outliers fall far outside of the statistical norm. For design, outliers can be more important than the norm.
For more information on research practices for design, please read: Extracting Meaning from Research.
Create a Mental Model
Have you seen the elaborate models some fictional detectives use to visualize and put together evidence? Images, articles, strings crossing from wall to wall and picture to picture? I love those.
When you are doing research for personas, it’s useful to learn to do this inside your own head. Ask yourself how the research is helping you understand the people and imagine the future. How is it helping you re-imagine the end product? This is very important and very difficult.
You can practice your mental modeling skills by imagining something you know very well. Take it apart and put it together using your brain alone. Practice as much as you can!
The science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker has all sorts of stories of using mental models/imagination to imagine four-dimensional spaces. His book, The Fourth Dimension, is online for free.
Turn all this into a persona
Write a persona like a character. Think about these things when making your sketch:
- Demographic info: i.e., gender, age, nationality, education, etc
- What characteristics are salient for the particular project? For instance what about this persona is interesting for Global Voices to know?
- What does the persona hope to achieve?
- How does Global Voices help the persona?
- Why would the persona interact (or not) with Global Voices?
- What does this persona want to do with the interaction?
- A picture and a name: these are helpful.
When I worked at Cooper Interaction Design, we employed a method called Goal-Directed Design. Essentially, each persona had a set of goals. We would design for one persona with one set of goals. When the goals of the personas differed, we knew that different designs were necessary. This is a very powerful tool.
Let me give an example from a project I worked on for a new pharmaceutical. From our research, we knew that people with chronic diseases would become as expert — or even more expert — than trained healthcare professionals. They learned the language. They read the research. Their goals were the same as healthcare professionals. As a result, they would seek out the same information. There was no need to create two sites with two different sets of information for caregivers and people with chronic diseases. One was enough. On the other hand, people newly diagnosed and those caring for them (family/friends) needed a completely different interaction with different information.
Don’t Forget to Share
It’s not enough to go through the motions of creating personas. The personas won’t work if the logic for creating them is not communicated to the team. They won’t work if their descriptions are not shared with and embraced by the team.
In the best cases, the team has a poster of the personas pinned to the wall by their desk. They are continually reminded of who they are creating content for, who they are designing for, and why they are doing it.
Many might feel uncomfortable and awkward using personas at first. Some may resist the use of personas completely. But if people can make a small effort, a tiny leap of faith, then personas can be a great tool. They streamline conversations and focus ideas. Using them gives diverse teams common ground.
In conclusion, don’t just develop personas, use them and share them.
Ask me questions about anything unclear.
I’d love to hear from you.
Resources:
Egherman, T., & Anderson, G. (2018, March 21). Extracting Meaning From Research. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@etori/extracting-meaning-from-research-1cb4304d22b7
Kraus, C. (n.d.). Inside Goal-Directed Design: A Two-Part Conversation With Alan Cooper. Retrieved from https://www.cooper.com/journal/2014/04/inside-goal-directed-design-a-two-part-conversation-with-alan-cooper
Leonard, D. A., & Swap, W. C. (2005). When sparks fly: Igniting creativity in groups. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.
Marzorati, G. (2002, March 17). All by Himself. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/magazine/all-by-himself.html
Rucker, R. (n.d.). The Fourth Dimension. Retrieved from http://www.rudyrucker.com/thefourthdimension/
Big announcement: I am writing a novel
Well, it's about time, right? It's not as though I haven't wanted to write a novel since I first took pen to paper way back when I was seven years old. So what's taken me so long? Where do I even begin to answer that question? Maybe with this list:
- I started so many novels just because I had good ideas, but they lacked heart, and I lacked the perseverance to muddle through
- I didn't trust myself enough
- I was never compelled to write the way others are: now the demand is greater
- Every word I typed was like drawing blood.
So what changed? Essentially, I changed. The biggest part of me that changed was the corniest part, the part realists will laugh at, and that is this: I finally allowed my ancestors to start helping me. It's not like we hadn't been in conversation for decades. We had been. We'd been talking, quietly, since I was four.
When I was four and my great-grandmother died, my mother explained that people live on in our memories. I was a completely literal child and took that to mean that I was responsible for remembering my ancestors, even if I didn't know them. From that day on, I began a memory project with imagined ancestors. I imagined the grandfather who died when I was two as Colonel Sanders. I imagined my great-grandmother the way she was photographed in a hat and wool coat. I imagined people I knew and people I didn't. I still feel responsible for the memories of the dead and now there is a cacophony of voices in my head. It includes friends and loved ones who died of cancer and car accidents, old age and heart disease, suddenly and slowly. They all live in me. They are me.
At a low point not too long ago, I was talking to a friend who sensed that I wasn't paying attention to my ancestors. He counseled me to light a candle and ask for help. I did.
Yeah, yeah I know half of you think this is ridiculous. I used to be you and that was exactly my problem. I no longer see any value at all in denying a connection to the past or in silencing a kind of genetic memory that has been undeniably part of me since childhood. I wonder now why I did so much work to suppress my connection to the past. Who did I impress by rejecting the magic inside me? Who benefited?
I'm done with that part of my life. And now I'm writing. I will be blogging about the process here. If you'd like to be part of the conversation, sign up for the newsletter:
Who Has the Right to Ritual
Who has the right to ritual, to define what is and what isn't appropriate or appropriated, to declare themselves as a member of the tribe?
Mourning the more than 33,000 Jews executed at Babi Yar isn’t the only reason I am collecting recordings of Kaddish. I am also trying to claim tradition and ritual and to grapple with a religion I’ve loved and hated, but never quite shed.
The right to ritual isn’t something I’ve come to contemplate only recently. It’s just that now, I am realizing that I can stake a claim to a tradition that isn’t always, or even often, friendly to me or people like me.
Who am I? I’m a rootless mongrel like so many of you. How far back do my Jewish roots go? I used to care, but no longer do. Who cares? What I know is that right below the center of my breastbone is something that is and always has been physically and psychically connected to centuries of Jews that came before me. It is undeniable and unshakeable.
Yet, walking into a synagogue fills me with anxiety. I feel unrecognized and unwelcomed when I stray from the congregation I grew up with. I feel judged for the decisions I’ve made, for the love I’ve chosen, for the laws I flout and for those I’ve forgotten or never known.
I’m bored by impersonal rituals that lack heart and services that seem to be more for entertainment than for participation.
I’m more scared by rejection from the community than by threats of terrorism that the bag checkers and security guards pretend to protect me from.
What has made the synagogue feel unsafe to me is not outside its walls. It’s inside.
I understand that we are a threatened community. This makes us want to diligently protect our borders. It makes us want to protect our traditions. Yet that protection can go too far. It can become like an auto-immune disease that kills off exactly what it needs to be healthy. (Full disclosure: allergy sufferer and asthmatic speaking)
I say it’s time we let down our guard more than a bit and find ways to welcome strays and mongrels like me. There are more than a few of us.
Here’s my first challenge to you who are part of active Jewish communities. Find a way to welcome newcomers and strangers. Assign the extroverts among you the task of being friendly. Give some space to loners. Try it. Tell me if it works.
And please send me a recording of Kaddish. Instructions are here: Prayers for Mourning
Thanks.
Prayers for Mourning
Kaddish
Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for mourners. It's said every day for eleven months after the death of a family member. After that it is repeated yearly on the anniversary of the death.
It marks a completion. Its meaning is unimportant. The sound of the words, spoken in ancient Aramaic, is what is important. The rhythm. The melody. The comfort of the words.
In Night Elie Wiesel wrote of men reciting Kaddish for themselves as they approached their deaths. He wrote about his anger with G-d. Why should he sanctify a G-d who allowed the crematoria? Still the prayer rose inside him.
I need your help
I am collecting recordings of people saying and chanting the Kaddish for a soundscape.
Make a sound recording or video of you, your friends, your minion, your congregation, your family saying Kaddish. You can use the microphone on your phone. You can use a better microphone if you have one. It's okay to send me video files even. Whatever you can do is welcome.
Sending your files to me
You can send me files from your computer or smartphone using the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/request/8abXNn6Gj6CGxT540xku
Record your reading from your telephone
You can also make a recording of your prayers of Kaddish using your telephone. Here’s how to record your message:
1) Call LifeOnRecord, +1-800-437-3009 by May 1, 2017
2) When prompted, enter your Invitation Number: 33848
3) Record your message after the tone. When finished you can either hang up or press the # key. If you press the # key you’ll be given options to listen to your recording, accept your recording, or re-record it.
If you are not in the US and Canada, find a local number here: http://www.lifeonrecord.com/
The flower burning in the Day—and what comes after...
Babi Yar (Babin Yar) 2016. Nineteen years before I was born 33,700 Jews were killed in a massacre 2 miles from the center of Kiev in a wooded area called Babi Yar.
A few days after the Germans took Kiev on September 11, 1941, signs began appearing ordering Jews to appear near the site of the Jewish cemetery.
Failure to do so, the signs read, would result in being shot on sight.
The Jews thought it was for resettlement. Another resettlement. It wouldn't be the first time.
Eighteen days after the Germans took Kiev, the massacre began.
This was one of the first huge mass executions of Jews by the Nazis. It was the beginning of the Final Solution.
The killing continued throughout the war. An uncounted number of Roma and Ukrainians were also killed there.
Who was killed at Babi Yar and how many exactly, may remain a mystery. When whole families are wiped out, there is no one left to count them.
Towards the end of World War II, the bodies were dug up. The bones smashed. What was left, burned. The history of the place was repressed first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets. Still, it would not remain a secret.
Today it is a rambling park. Construction crews work to reshape it. Kitsch sculptures mark the locations where Jews were killed. A menorah. A child with a headless doll. A stack of heroic bodies.
A highway borders the site. There is no west or east. No south or north.
The prayers you share are for them. They will be part of a soundscape (like a landscape painting, but made of sound) that I am creating specifically for the site.
Thank you for participating.
Please share with others.
Iran Talks Give Peace a Chance
A perspective on the nuclear talks with Iran and what it means for Iranian people, human rights, and peace. This post originally appeared on Harry's Place.
“Nuclear energy is our indisputable right”
Eight years ago when I last lived in Iran, the slogan: “Nuclear energy is our indisputable right” had become the punchline to a joke. When I shopped for fish at a popular market on Jordan Street in Tehran, the staff greeted me by chanting it in a friendly manner. On a trip to Kermanshah a Kurdish family asked me: “Is nuclear energy only your indisputable right, or is it also ours?” When then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the provinces, he was met by people chanting, “A public swimming pool is our indisputable right.” During the 2009 election campaigns, people sent text messages to each other that read: “Sorry I woke you up at this time of night. It’s nothing special – I just wanted to say that nuclear energy is our indisputable right.”
Framework agreement
On April 2, as Iranians were celebrating the closing day of their two-week New Year’s holidays, the news broke that negotiators had at last come to an understanding about the framework for a nuclear agreement. That framework includes replacing the core at the Arak heavy water plant and decreasing its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 95%, as well as intensive inspections. It also means that Iran won’t leave the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Vocal hardliners have been quick to point out the framework’s weaknesses, with some in the US and Israel arguing that it is too soft and those in Iran claiming the country is surrendering. Some have interpreted the celebration of Iranians as meaning that the P5+1 negotiating team cut a bad deal. This shows a lack of understanding of Iran. People there take to the streets to celebrate World Cup losses. Any opportunity for public celebration is welcomed.
What many in Iran seem to particularly long for is rapprochement with the West and with the United States in particular. According to an article by Narges Bajoghli, the majority of those in Iran’s Basij and Revolutionary Guards also look forward better ties to the West. She writes:
In over nine years of on-the-ground research with different factions of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij, I have found that an underlying concern for many, regardless of political leaning, is a desire to create an Iran with more opportunities for their children, and that means the removal of sanctions and better relations with the world.
The role of sanctions
Tough sanctions may have brought Iran to the negotiating table, but what kept them there was the knowledge that the people of Iran wanted engagement with the West. This was made clear in 2009 in the wake of the disputed and flawed presidential elections and again with the election of current president Rouhani. Iranian voters overwhelmingly rejected the candidate seen as representing the Supreme Leader’s foreign policy, then nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili. Jalili ran for office specifically on his record of standing firm on Iran’s right to its nuclear program.
There is a strong sense of nationhood and national pride among most Iranians inside and outside the country. The nuclear program, which has been a cause of so much pain and deprivation in Iran, represents accomplishment and security even to those who would seem to be its natural detractors. For a final agreement to be successful, the people of Iran need to have some evidence that their suffering under the sanctions regime was not for nothing. This means lifting sanctions that hurt them the most and making sure to do it with great fanfare. For instance lifting the sanctions on refined petroleum, which have contributed to a dramatic increase in pollution in cities like Tehran, may immediately contribute to cleaner air.
Sanctions also camouflage corruption. They allow profiteers to drive up prices on items such as medicines and create false shortages. They give power to the corrupt and dangerous in society. I saw this every day when I lived in Iran. I saw how poorly the US and Europe communicated both the scope of and the reason for the sanctions to the Iranian people.
Human rights
While most human rights advocates and Iran’s civil society welcome a negotiated agreement, there is concern that hardliners will seek to establish their control by increasing oppressive measures. Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran says:
Iran could be roiled in political tension in the wake of the agreement, and even more so if a more permanent agreement is reached in June. Hardliners will push to maintain political relevancy, while pent up demand for basic rights, long frozen as Iran locked horns with the West, will rise to the surface.
The Iranian government’s record on human rights is disastrous. Ethnic minorities face severe discrimination and suppression of their rights. The rate of execution per capita is the highest in the world. Religious minorities, particularly the Baha’i, suffer. The Baha’i face arrest, harassment, and barriers to education. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, stated that pressure on Iran is especially important: “Iran is the country in the region with the biggest gap between potential [for respect for human rights] and reality.” People in Iran are ready to claim their own rights and are chipping away at the structure that limits them. As one Tehran professor recently wrote in an open letter to the spokeswoman for Iran’s foreign ministry, defending Dr. Shaheed:
The fact is, even if in all of the almost 200 member states of the UN, human rights are violated, and Western countries keep silent against all of them, violations of human rights in the 201st country are still unjustifiable.
A successful agreement that relieves the state of near-war means that civil society and human rights defenders will gain more space. The state of conflict with other powers and the isolation of the country are often used as excuses for tamping down dissent and arresting human rights defenders. They face charges such as “compromising national security” and “spreading propaganda against the state.” With a final agreement, these spurious charges will become more and more ridiculous and harder to defend. A successful agreement also means that human rights defenders can lobby other powers for support without hearing the response: “All we care about is a nuclear agreement.”
Give peace a chance
Some of you may think I’ve been “irantoxified” as a result of my four-year stay in Iran. I can tell you that I was, indeed, fundamentally changed by the experience. I felt real oppression for the first time in my life. I had to learn to control myself emotionally, physically and verbally. I also became passionate about human rights, not just in oppressive countries like Iran, but in free countries like the United States and the Netherlands. I saw what war does to family and friends and watched as my sister-in-law trembled uncontrollably at the news that American warships were in the Persian Gulf. I met Basiji who valued democracy, a judge who opposed the nuclear program, observant women who railed against forced hijab, a transgender man who read tea leaves, and ruthless profiteers. I was met with kindness and hospitality that were both unexpected and comforting. I buried people I loved there. I left the country wanting nothing less than the best possible future for the people who had welcomed me so unabashedly.
There will not be a linear path to reform and an opening of society. There never is anywhere. Iranians will have high expectations that an agreement will solve their economic and social woes. This is true even as they make jokes about expectations of buying whiskey in supermarkets and going into the streets in shorts.
In summation, if this agreement is to work and if the government of Iran is to be persuaded to permanently give up any efforts to build a bomb, the people of Iran need to be convinced they’ve made the best of all possible agreements. In the wake of the agreement, sanctions need to be lifted quickly and loudly. By publicly clarifying what is no longer sanctioned, the US and Europeans can give the people of Iran the information they need to hold their own government accountable for economic malaise. The sanctions will no longer be cover. The benefits of being part of the international community must be made clear to the people of Iran. They are certainly aware of the suffering that comes from isolation.
Trauma Can be Passed Down in Our Genes
Below is a post I wrote for TEDxAmsterdam. Reproduced in full:
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is something we are now accustomed to attributing to the effects of war. We used to call it "shell shock." Today we know that trauma is not only experienced individually, but shared through generations as well. Researchers have known for awhile that trauma experienced by mothers during pregnancy can affect children and even alter the way DNA is expressed without changing its sequencing. A recent study shows that it can also alter microRNA in the sperm of mice, causing anxiety and depression in offspring. The experiences of your parents and grandparents may influence the person you are today.
You can inherit memories
Scientists Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf have proven that the experiences of female rats could change the DNA passed on to children without altering its sequencing. Now scientists in Zurich have shown that the father also contributes to passing on the effects of trauma to his offspring.
A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience conducted by neuroscientist Isabelle Mansuy and her colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland showed that the offspring of mice who experienced high levels of trauma experienced high levels of stress and depression. The sperm of traumatized mice had a higher expression of microRNA (small RNA) linked to anxiety, depression, and stress. The scientists showed that the stress and depression were passed on genetically, rather than socially, by injecting sperm into mice who had not undergone trauma.
The notion that traumatic experiences influence the children of survivors is not entirely new. Writing in Nature, Virginia Hughes notes that:
People who were traumatized during the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia tended to have children with depression and anxiety, for example, and children of Australian veterans of the Vietnam War have higher rates of suicide than the general population.
Post 9-11 Babies Pre-Disposed to PTSD
About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack. In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD -- an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.
"Trauma is a great equalizer"
In a talk given at TEDxYYC, Dr. Megan McElheran discussed her experiences dealing with veterans returning to Canada from war in Afghanistan. She warned against the current flirtation with what she calls the "happiness myth," stating that it leads to increased alienation because of the notion that "...if you are not happy there is something wrong with you..."
She finds it important to understand the full range of human experience. "We are all capable of anything," she stated. She urged us all to operate with empathy:
If, on a day-to-day basis, we as individuals and as members participating in our communities are better able to operate from a position where all experience is valued, I think we will be healthier and better able to address the challenges in our lives from a place of being willing and able to have an experience whatever those challenges should entail.
Can PTSD also be contagious?
As the family members of veterans with PTSD increasingly show signs of the disorder themselves, researchers are asking if PTSD is contagious. In an article in Mother Jones, Mac McClelland writes:
"Trauma is really not something that happens to an individual," says Robert Motta, a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at Hofstra University who wrote a few of the many medical-journal articles about secondary trauma in Vietnam vets' families. "Trauma is a contagious disease; it affects everyone that has close contact with a traumatized person" in some form or another, to varying degrees and for different lengths of time. "Everyone" includes children...
Trauma is not only experienced individually, but shared in families and through generations.
#Recipe: My Grandmother's Chocolate Cake
My grandmother was famous for her chocolate cake. Some relatives joked that the secret ingredient was cigarette ashes, but I'm here to tell you that's not the case.
When she died, many of her loved ones still had her cakes stowed away in the freezer. One passover, my sister found what she thought was the recipe hand written inside a haggadah. It turned out to be a grocery list.
Recently one of my cousins shared the recipe with us. I admit I was a bit scared to make it the first time. I was afraid it would not live up to the memory. There was nothing for me to fear. The very act of making the cake was enough to bring my grandmother back to life. It didn't matter whether it was delicious or not.
Those of you heard the KFJC discussion between me and DJ Ruthie might be interested in the chocolate cake we talked about.
The cake (all the measurements are American style):
1 cup butter (I use about 3/4 of a block of butter for this)
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
3 cups self-rising cake flour (I find it's best when I replace one cup of flour with one cup of cocoa powder -- yum)
1 large bar (or a little more) of good quality dark chocolate -- melted (about 7 ounces--more for chocolate lovers)
5 eggs -- separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 mashed bananas (when I make layers, I use 3 mashed bananas and put one between the layers)
Cream together the butter and sugar
add melted chocolate (I put a little bit of olive oil in a bowl and then put in the chocolate and microwave it)
Add the buttermilk and flour
Beat the eggs separately add the yolks
Fold in the whites
Bake at 180 C/350 F
Bake a deep cake about 45 minutes
If you are making layers, 30 minutes
I am not a huge frosting fan, so I don't add any. It's delicious with raspberries or powdered sugar on top.
Prayer Goes Out; Food Goes In: Plum Chicken with Bibi Kasrai
The day I spoke with the author of The Spice Whisperer, Bibi Kasrai, she was busy with her new enterprise, a cooking camp for children. She had left a career as a corporate executive to do what she loves: cooking and teaching.
That day the children were making hummus, croque-monsieurs, and popsicles. It’s this mix of cultures that makes Bibi and her cooking special. As she describes in her book, her journey from Iran to the United States took her all over the world, learning to cook, falling in love, and encountering a wide range of cultures.
Five years after the revolution in Iran, when Bibi was a teenager, her family went into hiding. An arrest warrant had been issued for her father, the well-known and well-loved poet Siavosh Kasrai. The family moved from house to house, not wishing to put friends and supporters in danger.
“My family had helped the Jews, the Baha’is and royalist friends escape, but now it was our turn," she writes in The Spice Whisperer. "My mother came up with a plan to hire smugglers that would hopefully take us to France where all our European dreams would come true; except we ended up in Moscow via Afghanistan.”
Before they left Iran, as a last refuge when they had nowhere else to hide, her maternal grandmother took them in, saying, “If they are going to take you, let them take all of us.”
“My grandma was comfort,” Bibi recalls. “She was pure love.... Even when she wanted to teach a lesson, she was mild. Like she would say to me, ‘Bibi, you have a hot temper. When you get really angry take a glass of water and hold it in your mouth.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because when water is in your mouth, you cannot say anything.’”
Read the entire article on The Guardian
Plum Chicken photographed by Sanam Salehian
Iran Elections: Celebration Now, A Long and Unpredictable Path Ahead
Photo from Instagram user alirezamalihi of celebrations in Tehran
This is an excerpt of my latest piece on Global Voices.
In the past few days there have been threats against the families of BBC reporters. The Internet in Iran was slowed to a crawl. The Iranian Cyber Army launched botnet attacks against a number of media sites including BBC, Radio Farda, and Radio Zamaneh. Pundits predicted a win for Saeed Jalili, calling him the Supreme Leader's favorite. Others predicted a run-off between the conservative mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Qalibaf and the most moderate candidate Hassan Rouhani.
VOA reporter Negar Mortazavi tweeted:
Analysts who think slower than the People, should change their career. #Iran #IranElection
— Negar Mortazavi (@negarmortazavi) June 15, 2013
Which prompted this response from the director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center Gissou Nia:
.@negarmortazavi maybe i'll career switch TO an analyst cuz i called Rouhani win in our office bet... now my colleagues owe me free lunch :) — Gissou Nia (@GissouNia) June 15, 2013
Well...no one was more surprised than Iranians themselves by the results (except for Gissou Nia). Today, Hassan Rouhani was declared president with more than 50% of the votes. The Internet is back on and images and videos are flooding out of Iran.
Four years ago today we were on the street in disbelief, chanting 'Where is My Vote'. This is a different kind of disbelief. #iranelection — Tara Aghdashloo (@taraaghdashloo) June 15, 2013
Financial Times Journalist, Borzou Daraghi writes on Facebook that hardliners had so thoroughly convinced themselves that they really "won" 2009's elections that they were completely caught by surprise:
When you begin to believe your own lies, you become extremely vulnerable.
Khabar City shares images of voters on their blog along with this tidbit:
به گزارش خبرنگار خبرگزاری فارس از شهرستان ساری، مردم ایران بار دیگر با نشان دادن شناسنامه و حضور در انتخابات لرزه بر اندام دشمنان انداختند. 90 درصد مردم مازندران در انتخابات شرکت کردند.
The Fars News stringer reporting from the city of Sari said that just by voting, the people of Iran have made their enemies shake in their boots. 90% of voters in Mazandaran cast their votes.
Read the rest on Global Voices.
Bare Bones Overview of Iran's Election System
Here is a bare bones overview of the structure of Iran's election system that I am presenting in Amsterdam on June 14, 2013. Hope you all enjoy it.
Taste of Iran: Lari Kebab Made as a Stew
I loved the concise flavors of this dish, but learned that in order to replicate them I had to have the best ingredients.
Taste of Iran: Lari kebab recipe
Iranian student in Italy recreates a traditional dish – with a twist
Lari kebab served with salad and
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is lit against the night sky, the square empty save for a couple walking hand in hand and a man with a dog by his side. In a top-floor apartment a few blocks away, Peyman Majidzadeh is putting the finishing touches on his favorite dish, Lari kebab, made on the stove instead of the grill and with chicken instead of lamb. It might be a stretch to call it Lari kebab, but that's what Peyman calls it and so will I.
During the four years I lived in Iran, not only did I never eat Lari kebab, I had never even heard of Lar, the county seat of Larestan in Fars province. Four hundred kilometres from Shiraz, the province's best known city, it's not one of the more visited corners of Iran.
Larestan sits in the desert, close to the other Arab countries of the Persian Gulf. It has its own dialect, but it has no oil and little in the way of other mineral resources. It has no sites of particular interest to tourists or pilgrims. Very few Iranians from elsewhere in the country have ever been to Lar. Any who do go are likely to be surprised by the small city's wealth and the fact that it is served by an international airport and a six-lane highway.
Read the rest on The Guardian
Blast from the Past: Thoughts on Rafsanjani's 2005 Campaign
I wrote this piece in 2005 when the elections for Iran's next president were in full swing. During the campaigns, I walked through my neighborhood with my headscarf around my shoulders. Music blared from black SUVs. A three-story banner of former president Rafsanjani graced the corner building that housed some of his campaign staff. It was a strange time and a bit of a break from the relentlessness of the Islamic Republic. You'll note I don't even mention Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His campaign was nearly invisible in Tehran. It wasn't until the run-offs that I noticed his candidacy. This was originally published on Marketing Profs.
The Hashemi Brand in Iran's 2005 Elections
The elections in Iran are in full force, with only a few days left until the Friday ballot. Iranian television is filled with interviews with the candidates, sound bytes and advertisements about the vote. Movies are interrupted every few minutes by voting reminder message; in the middle of intense emotional scenes, bells ring and an animated ballot dances across the screen.
Candidates' web sites tout the politicians' credentials and attributes, while blogs debate who is genuinely democratic-minded--or, conversely, true to the tenets of the Islamic Revolution.
The presidential campaign in Iran is short: about one month. There are a lot of rumors and discussions before the official start of the campaign season, but it really goes into gear once the Supreme Council announces the list of approved candidates. This year there are six.
One of the candidates, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (www.hashemirafsanjani.ir), has done more than the others to market his particular presidential brand. In this brief article, I discuss the tools that his campaign has used to create the Hashemi brand.
Guerilla Marketing
Jay Conrad Levinson is often called the father of guerilla marketing. He defines it this way: "It is a body of unconventional ways of pursuing conventional goals. It is a proven method of achieving profits with minimum money."
While I cannot speak for the actual costs of the Rafsanjani campaign, the methods that the campaign is using are, indeed, unconventional. They are particularly unconventional for post-revolutionary Iran.
The Rafsanjani campaign has employed Iran's hip youth as its army of unpaid campaign workers. They wrap themselves in Hashemi stickers, tape his poster on their backs, celebrate soccer success in his name, attend performances at the candidate's Tehran headquarters and participate in skating events. They wear Rafsanjani campaign materials like fashion accessories.
This army of hip youth may be politically apathetic in large part, but that does not really matter. The Rafsanjani campaign has grabbed the image of youth and energy for itself. You might say that the Rafsanjani generation and the Pepsi generation are one. In other words, it may not matter to Pepsi whether the Pepsi generation drinks Pepsi, as long as Pepsi's sales are robust; similarly, as long as Rafsanjani wins the election, who cares who voted for him.
The Graphic Image
Rafsanjani is his own brand. Because of his uncommon looks, he is, arguably, the most recognized cleric in the world. As with every other candidate in Iran's presidential election, his image covers entire walls.
The campaign puts forth several images of Rafsanjani: the official site features a photo album [no longer available] that highlights his revolutionary achievements, while the popular photo-sharing site Flickr displays a very different view of the candidate.
The posters with his image are conservative and traditional, while the popular Hashemi sticker is really quite radical. On it, the Iranian flag is reduced to an abstract mark. His name, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is reduced to Hashemi.
In a country where wives often call their husbands by formal names like Engineer (Mohandes) or Mister (Agha) and young girls are often called Little Miss (Dokhtar Khanum), the use of a name other than the surname is more than familiar: it is intimate.
With the plastering Hashemi stickers on ankles, across foreheads and on motorcycle windscreens, the Rafsanjani brand has come to mean that it is offering intimacy and friendship.
Will It Work?
Only time will tell how truly effective the Rafsanjani campaign has been. One thing is for certain: Political campaigns in Iran have changed. The Rafsanjani campaign is just one of the many signs of that change. (Check out the Flickr photo tag Election84 for a sense of this visual election.)
The campaign of former police chief Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who is number two or three in the running, also targets the youth. With his casual and stylish clothes, chic glasses, and sponsors such as Efes Zero Alcohol beer, the Qalibaf campaign directly competes with the Rafsanjani campaign for the hearts of Iran's youthful population.
The biggest difference between the two marketing styles is this: Rafsanjani's campaign is fueled by the images of teenagers and 20-somethings wrapped in Hashemi accessories, while Qalibaf's marketing team has chosen to make the candidate himself the symbol of youth with his new fashionable outfits and attractive image.
We'll Be Watching
It isn't just the presidential candidates who are seeking to brand and re-brand themselves--it's the entire country of Iran.
Plans are in the works for a tourism campaign that will target CNN's international audience. Payvand News reports that the country is ready for foreign tourists and investors.
Well, we'll be watching.