An Interview with Kayla Cohen, author of "The Full Severity of Our Connection"

By Ronit Sholkoff

An interview with Kayla Cohen, a UC Berkeley student writing a book on the Jewish Diaspora called "The Full Severity of Our Connection."

Photo of Kayla Cohen

Can you summarize your book?

That’s such a hard question. [laughs]

A large portion of it is about my gap year between high school and college. It recounts the stories and the places that I visited. I spent six of the eight months of the program living in Jerusalem and studying about Jewish history starting from ancient Greece all the way up to modern Israeli political history. The other two months were spent traveling to different Jewish diaspora communities that once held really vibrant and lively centers for Jewish life, including Salonica, Greece, Cordoba, Spain, and Magador, Morocco. And what's really interesting is, a lot of these communities are unknown and their legacies have been forgotten by the world, even by the Jewish community. Even those who were fortunate to have a Jewish education and have been raised in the Jewish educational system their whole life like me. So primarily this book seeks to share the stories of the people in these communities. The book has a second goal of trying to synthesize these experiences and make sense of them in relation to Israel, as a Jewish center for Jewish life, and in relation to my experiences here at Berkeley, where Israel and Jewish identity and Diaspora are all highly-politicized buzzwords..

How did different aspects of your identity inform the way you approach the text?

It's a real question but I just, I'm so sick of thinking about identity because it's just so diffuse. Wow, it's just like everywhere, it affects everything!

[Laughs]

I know it’s a genuine question. The light rail separated the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem— a starkly different world — from the Jewish Israeli English-speaking side of west Jerusalem, which is where I lived. So I constantly entertained questions about what it meant to be living on a border, because I was literally.

And I think that definitely speaks to my personal experience and my identity. It’s not coincidental that I was interested in questions about conflict on a macro scale — conflict in Israel’s identity, conflict in the Jewish people’s identity — because conflict really relates to my own experiences of being mixed. I'm Persian and Jewish. There are people who go to school here who’ve never even met a Persian Jew before, most probably because the Islamic influence of my family's culture and the way that they practice their Judaism seems to be at odds with ideas of how Judaism has manifested itself in communities under Christianity or Communism in Europe or America. And then there's also larger tensions and questions of what it means to be mixed and to actually have a mother who is not of the same culture and was also not born Jewish and converted to a standard of Judaism that is not recognized by all denominations. So I think these questions of conflict and otherness feel really personal.

The project is clearly deeply personal. How has your family reacted to the book?

I haven't disclosed much information about the book, but I think they've all been fully supportive of it. And like super, super excited. They also have a history of disagreeing with me about Israel politics, so I don't really know how much they’re overlooking. But overall, I think they're very proud of me. My grandpa was a journalist so I think they see this as like an extension of his literary legacy.

What do you think were some of the biggest challenges you experienced while writing? Any experiences you found most rewarding?

There are many days where I just want to bang my head against a wall because writing can be such a painful process. I think the book is very ambitious in terms of its scope. And I think that's something that I've really been struggling with, trying to communicate all of these different experiences of all these different people. We’re not a monolith, so how can I, as an American Jew, speak on behalf of all these other Jews who lived such totally different experiences from me? Really trying to find the words to explain and distill what I saw and felt and heard is super complicated. And your second question?

What do you find most rewarding?

When I do find the words. [laughs]

I started an interview blog in Jerusalem so this project has been going on for longer than I've been in college. I also think I really found the experience of interviewing people, of reaching out and hearing them share really intimate parts of themselves, to also be really rewarding.

This is a book written by someone Jewish, about the Jewish Diaspora. What do you hope Jewish readers take away from the text? Non-Jewish readers?

That’s actually another thing, to answer your last question, I’ve been struggling with trying to actually reach all of my audiences. I do think this book is intended for both Jews and non-Jews. It seeks to educate both Jews and non-Jews about Jewish history, since, as I said, many Jews who received secular educations and even Jewish educations are misinformed or don’t even know about the Diaspora. But it’s still been hard to balance both of those audiences at once.

To answer your question: First, I hope that Jewish institutions and my teachers who hopefully read this book will start to reassess Diaspora curriculum and how they teach the Diaspora because there's a dominant narrative of the Diaspora being filled with existential dread and threat and persecution and while that is definitely true, and I do not by any means seek to diminish that, it also created us. It created our literature and our liturgy and all of these different books and different languages and this history of a debate. It's not coincidental that so many different communities have different halachic interpretations. It’s not coincidental that some Sephardic communities eat different foods on Passover that are considered not kosher for Ashkenazi Jews.

I'm really hoping that Jewish readers will firstly take away this idea that we're not one singular monolithic people that has totally withstood change, and has also been kind of separate from the the host cultures that they found themselves in. The second thing I hope readers will take away is that Jewish identity is a meeting point. It really circumscribes the experience of interaction between the self and other. I don't think the Jewish experience can be solely described as existing in the realm of self, meaning totally innate and totally separate as I think a lot of Jewish institutions made it out to be. I want Jewish people to reassess how we relate to other people, and trace the lines of interaction of how much their own Jewish experience and identity have been informed by majority culture. And that's not to say that there is no such thing as a Jewish essence. But I think we need to think more about how we've interacted with other kinds of people and how much of that essence is one that is informed by others.

And non-Jewish readers?

This isn't a book about anti-Semitism. I think my book offers a way to think about Jewish identity. I really try to grapple with all of these different dichotomies of privilege and power; what it means to be seen as the scum of the earth and what it means to be called a white supremacist and a white-settler colonialist. I hope by grappling with how Judaism kind of teeters on the self-other dichotomy, I can widen non-Jewish readers’ understandings of how fragile Jewish identity is and how vulnerable it is.

Do you have a favorite part? Or section that was particularly enjoyable to write about?

it. There's a whole section dedicated to vignettes just about Israel-Palestine. I enjoyed writing about these subtle interactions I observed between people. That was really interesting. I wrote it in the second person so it's like “you see this, you do that.” It's inspired by the book Citizen by Claudia Rankine. It’s in a totally different context, it’s about race relations in America, but I enjoyed implementing her style.

Did any other writers influence you during the writing process? And more generally, which writers inspire you?

Yehuda Amichai, for sure. The title of my book is a play one of his poems, “The Full Severity of Compassion.” Everything that my book touches on, especially this idea of being a collection of all these different people, that's very central to his poetry. Or he problems of war. Amichai talks about that and criticizes war-centered Israeli culture. Claudia Rankine’s style initially influenced the first section of the book. When I started writing the project, I read The Insecurity of Freedom by Heschel and it also inspired me. I’m trying to think of what’s on my desk right now… Oh also Levinas. He writes about how the Self can't exist without the Other. He's a Jewish French philosopher, and he talks a lot about how the Self is defined and countered by responsibility to the Other.

Do you think you’ll write another book?

I can’t even imagine because I'm not even done editing this book, so we’ll see. Hopefully.

Pre-order Kayla's book here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-full-severity-of-our-connection-by-kayla-cohen--2#/