This Sukkot, we wanted to catch up with grantees doing work with the land. Linke Fligl, taking its name from the Yiddish term for “left-wing,” is a queer, Jewish chicken farm and cultural organizing project in Millerton, New York. They were recently featured in the Forward for their work, and were one of JLF’s Spring 2021 grantees. We spoke with their Co-director, Sol Weiss, and their Fundraising & Program Coordinator, Ollie Schwartz, about being connected with the land as a people, practicing reparations, and, of course, why chicken farming!
So when I started at JLF a couple months ago, Linke Fligl was one of the first organizations on our grantee list that caught my eye. I mean, a Queer, Jewish, chicken farm! Can you explain exactly what that means and what kind of work you do? /Why chicken farming?
We steward 150 heritage breed chickens, ¼ acre of organic herbs and vegetables and 10 acres of land where we gather in queer Jewish community throughout the year. Land stewardship and food cultivation for us is a way that we honor the lineage of socialist Jewish chicken farmers across the US in the 1920s and 30s and enter into reciprocal & regenerative relationships with land and all life.
Over the years we’ve transformed our space from a resting field into an off-grid community home to practice diasporist Judaism. We’ve built infrastructure (our chicken coop, outdoor kitchen, tent platforms, organic garden, willow restoration area, paths through the phragmites, a collapsible shul) and developed a culture of community here at the intersection of land, tradition, healing and justice.
One thing that feels really unique about Linke Fligl is its reparations-focused approach to land justice. How did this come about, and how did it operate?
Linke Fligl was born from a reparations gift and a longing for vibrant rural queer Jewish life at the intersection of Jewish tradition and liberatory political values. (In 2016, LF’s co-founder, Margot Seigle, purchased an 181-acre parcel of land on occupied Schaghticoke territory as a reparations gift to an emerging black and brown-led intentional community and healing village called WILDSEED. In this process, Margot was invited by WILDSEED to share their own dreams of building a radical land-based Jewish community. WILDSEED offered Margot the use of a 10 acre piece of the property to build toward that vision, and the first seeds of Linke Fligl were planted.) The story of this land is part of the complex model of Jewish land stewardship, healing and cultural reclamation that we invite participants to experience through our gatherings.
At LF, we ask: “What is ‘right relationship’ to land as diasporic Jews?” The answers to this question vary greatly depending on the person and their story, and there is nothing monolithic about Jewish relationships and histories with land. We approach this question with a commitment to finding home among the natural world while challenging white supremacy, settler colonialism and zionism. In our gatherings and in our publications, we ask how we can resist these systems, challenge them within ourselves, and still find belonging with the earth. We see reparations for BIPOC land projects as one key aspect of that process.
By participating in individual acts of reparations, we start the process of teshuvah for legacies of genocide, colonization and stolen land and labor. These legacies are inherently present in any process of re-connecting to land, and participating in both spiritual and socioeconomic repair is an essential part of reweaving these relationships.
Why do you believe that reconnecting to land Jewishly is so important? How does this help us build broader movements in today's social justice ecosystem?
We bring together queer and trans Jews to co-create community and pray, learn, cook, sing, dance, schlep and live into the world to come. The land is what makes this possible— there are things we learn and experience outside that can’t happen in a classroom. This is why we think land-based cultural work is a critical practice to building a more just world. Judaism beyond zionism and the impending climate crisis require that we build our literacy and reverence practices with the land. So many queer Jews are hungry to reclaim their inherent connections to the earth through our cultural lineages. Culturally rooted land connection is a key part of challenging white supremacy, healing from assimilation, and partnering with the natural world to resource the massive change required for liberation in our lifetimes.
We're right around the corner from Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival. Do you all have anything special planned? What's something we could all take from this holiday as we move through the world?
This Sukkot we were so excited to welcome folks to our first large group outdoor programming since the pandemic. Last week we hosted Build & Brine, a sukkah build work party featuring theatrical performance “Pickle Soup” from Jewish cultural workers Jenny Romaine and Elana June Margolis, and this week we’re hosting Hallel & Harvest, a day-long Sukkot festival. Our DIY Sukkot ritual guide Ushpi(zine), which we created for Sukkot 5781, offers entry points into celebrating Sukkot as a land based holiday through a queer diaposporic lens.
In many ways the holiday of Sukkot embodies our project’s vision of diasporism. It is a holiday of radical hospitality, dwelling in impermanence, creating home in the most vulnerable circumstances, being close to the land and finding joy in its abundant power.
Linke Fligl recently announced it would be closing its doors next year, at the Shmita. Can you explain, first of all, what the Shmita is, and why you all decided to move on from this project? Will there be any continuation of your work?
Shmita is the seventh year in a seven-year cycle, a biblical year of “release,” when we let the land lay fallow, forgive debts, free slaves, and any food grown is considered “hefker,” or “ownerless.” As a Jewish agricultural project it has always been important to us to find ways to explore & mark shmita in practice. Linke Fligl began at the beginning of this shmita cycle with the intention of checking back in on our land agreement with WILDSEED at the end of seven years, so from the start we knew that shmita would be a moment of transition for us.
LF from its beginning has been a diasporist project to its core. Meaning that we have revelled in the impermanence of place, of community, of life and celebrated the resilience we build as a diasporic people who adapt to new contexts over and over. The last seven years has shown us the enormous desire for spaces like Linke Fligl, as well as the commitment and resources that it would take to create a right-sized container to continue holding this space. We reached the limit of this off-grid space, and it was time for our team to move on. While there is a big loss for us in ending this chapter, we know that honoring cycles and endings is a part of building the world we need.
We don’t know yet what the continuation of our work will look like beyond shmita year and beyond this iteration of LF! We are seeing so many seedlings of new projects, communities and ideas that have been influenced by Linke Fligl, and we are excited to get to see the ways this work will grow beyond us in ways we can’t predict.
To learn more about our decision to close, read our announcement at linkefligl.com/writing.