Tracing a Dispersed Homeland; Ukrainian Hassidism, Palestinian Judaism, Brazilian Zionism, explores fictional constructs of nationalism and self-determination, critically examining the phenomenon of Homeland. Rooted in my family's migration and displacement, I question the validity of the nation-state as an imagined political form.

 

Tracing a Dispersed Homeland juxtaposes the shtetl in western Ukraine, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, and the synagogue in Niteró, in order to examine contemporary forms of nationalism. As I trace my family's footsteps, their journey is abruptly pulled into the present. It becomes impossible to deny the inherently sectarian and violent performance of national identities. 

 

My movement through these geographies is never neutral – my body is an Implicated Subject, entangled in the very ideologies this work critiques. Within the spatial formation of nationalism and identity, my body itself becomes a political playing card, a bolt in the war machine. I am not an unbiased storyteller, and I refuse to perform neutrality in the face of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and state violence. 

 

My words do not offer solutions. They will not stop the blood from seeping into the roots of the ground(s) I call home. As we enter the third year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the twelfth year of Russia’s imperial invasion of Ukraine, and increased state violence in Brazil, we are forced to face not only the colonial, murderous, aspirations of Zionism, and, by extension, self-reflect on the legitimacy of global colonial nation-state projects.