“The Passover Haggadah is the original Jewish zine!”
That’s the sentiment memeified by writer Chava Shapiro several years ago, which launched the Jewish Zine Archive (JZA) into greater public awareness. The project was formally started in 2019 as a physical and digital archive for “zines made by writers and artists who identify as or with Jewishness and/or Judaism,” according to its website. Shapiro began working on the project in 2018 as a fellow at Arizona’s Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center when her role as curator of community engagement led to the discovery of a Massachusetts-based zine-maker named Ezra Rose.
“I was really excited when I encountered Ezra’s zines,” said Shapiro in an interview with Hyperallergic. “One in particular called Six Songs has writings and illustrations of Ashkenazi Jewish folklore on shedim, or demons. I grew up in a Jewish household, but as a teen, I fell out of love with Judaism and fell in love with punk. Riot girl, anarchy, and zines were a really big part of my life and my development as a person.”
The passion of her youth rekindled, Shapiro’s project has grown over the years to amass more than 100 zines in the physical collection and 120 zines in the digital collection. The JZA has an open call for zine submissions in either form.
“I always responded to the way that zines are a democratization of publishing and art,” said Shapiro. “Encountering Ezra’s zine, it felt really special and exciting, and sparked something that felt very alive — Jewishness and zines can come together, and they can exist in conversation with each other.”
When Shapiro started to look through her personal zines, collected over two decades, she realized that many were made or written by people whom she knew to be Jewish. In January 2021, she began moving ahead with the JZA in earnest as her fellowship ended. The primary driver of engagement and connection has been Instagram, where the JZA account has amassed around 5,700 followers. Including the open call for submissions, this August (during the Jewish month Elul), the JZA finished their second Jewish Zine Fest (5783/2023) — a hybrid of online activities and a series of international pop-ups.
Another thing that Jewishness and zines have in common is that everyone’s definition of each is personal and slightly different. As indicated by the JZA’s cheeky proclamation on the Passover Haggadah — a religious text in booklet form that accompanies the Passover Seder, outlining rituals, presenting prayers, telling stories, and offering conversational prompts and songs — zines have engaged with Jewish culture for a long time.
“A zine is essentially anything that is a self-published booklet of some kind,” said Shapiro. “The term and ‘booklet’ can become broad, but zine-making is distinctly different from bookmaking or book arts because I think bookmaking indicates a specialization aspect. With a zine, it could be as simple as you found some scrap paper, you drew something about, for example, having a crazy menstrual cycle, and then wrote something on there, and then folded it up.”
Shapiro believes that there is a radical redefinition of what self-publishing can mean in an online and digital age — and therefore what a zine can mean.
“I see many more people making zines digitally, including myself,” she said. “I very rarely cut and paste or handwrite things anymore.” In addition to the new tools that facilitate virtual making and distribution, Shapiro attributes this shift as part of a move towards disability justice and accessibility.
“We’re seeing this incorporation of audio aspects into zines,” she said. “Utilizing online platforms to have this component of the zine where you can use a QR code, and it can be read aloud. I’ve seen some people experimenting with fully audio or AV-based digital zines where there’s nothing stapled or paper-based about it. People are using more of a zine ethic, a DIY ethic, to experiment with media digitally.”
Likewise, there is an ethic to the JZA that jumps the banks of strictly Jewish content or creators, to embody a wider and more intuitive definition of what qualifies for inclusion in an archive of Jewish zines.
“Take fanfic, which now is very online, but has origins in the queer community, and in particular, queer fanfic about Star Trek,” said Shapiro. “I make the argument that we can include sexy love stories about Spock and Captain Kirk in the Jewish Zine Archive, because if the content is Jewish, it works, and Spock is Jewish.”
A little nonsensical, perhaps, but quite in keeping with some of Shapiro’s art-historical reference points, including the Dada journals, published by Tristan Tzara between 1917–1921, and the later Fluxus movement and its relationship to mail art.
“I think you can you can trace zines an art history way, and then you can also trace it in a people-got-something-to-say way, too,” said Shapiro.
Of particular relevance in the current political climate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is an image designed by Shapiro in 2022 and made freely available through the JZA for open-access use. The image is a broken chain that features the statement: “There are no prisons in Olam Haba” — a Hebrew term that translates literally as “the coming world” and is generally interpreted as the Jewish version of the afterlife. However, Shapiro sees it a little differently.
“A big part of what I hope to accomplish with this project, or just hope to accomplish in my life, is that we have an obligation as Jewish people to make Olam Haba real now,” said Shapiro. “The world to come is actually happening now at this moment, and we make that real, through acts of justice; we make that real through our creating and defying; and we make it real by not just keeping it to ourselves as Jewish people, but really engaging with the world as a whole and its brokenness and working towards a world renewed and repaired.”
“That’s a really core value for me,” Shapiro added, “but also I think that we can help make Olam Haba through zines, too.”
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