Drawing on Jewish wisdom and artivism, on hope and grief, on energy and vision, Dayenu’s Young People Organizer Rocky Stern hosted a virtual session for young people to Craft & Kvetch in early July. Participants from across the country gathered to share, process grief about the climate crisis, and create art that would help envision a livable future.
Rocky noted that “Jewish wisdom actually has a great precedent for the power of imagination as a force for creating a new world.”
The session started by giving people the space to have a kvetch. “We all come to the climate movement from a place of personal resonance, and I wanted to hear about what’s resonating with people right now,” Rocky said.
They welcomed people to share something personal happening in their lives — locally or nationally.
“The hope was that by the end of the session they’d be ready to channel their rage into creativity and imagining new solutions for these problems.”
The session reflected the intertwining of visual art and artivism, and highlighted Jewish artists who are making good art and building out the creative vision of a climate just future, including Peter Schumann, Sol Weiss, and Ricardo Levins Morales.
Then the participants spent 15 minutes using the tools of their choice to make art that focuses on solutions to that one specific thing they talked about at the opening of the session.
Some of the questions participants tried to answer: What does a climate just future look like? What do you want to see there? How do people practice Judaism there?
Rocky is building the guiding document for the session into a template that others can use to hold similar artivism events.
For more information, get in touch with Rocky! rocky@dayenu.org