Rimonim: Ritual Poetry of Jewish Liberation

“Aurora Levins Morales's poetry radiates wisdom, warmth, and fortitude. A prophetic, life-centered guide for times of tumult and struggle.” —Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents 

Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. 

Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice. 

Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was “ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is.”

Aurora Levins Morales is a cuir Ashkenazi Boricua writer of poetry, essays, and fiction. A child of blacklisted communist parents, she grew up immersed in social justice movements and the poetry of liberation, and came into public voice as part of the collective eruptions of radical art of the 1970s and ’80s. She is the author of nine books, including Medicine Stories, Kindling, Remedios, and Silt. Her poetry is widely used in synagogues and churches, in schools and at rallies, painted on walls and recited at weddings, translated into seven languages and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. After forty years in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives at Finca la Lluvia, an agro-poetry project in the western mountains of Boriken, also known as Puerto Rico.The Story of What is Broken is Whole: An Aurora Levins Morales Reader will be published in 2024 by Duke University Press. Find her on Patreon and at www.auroralevinsmorales.com.

Born in 1953, Juana Alicia had many rich cultural influences growing up in Detroit, near Diego Rivera's Industry murals, in a Spanish and Yiddish-speaking household within a majority Black neighborhood. In her teens and early 20's, she was swept up by the Chicanx Movement, particularly the United Farm Workers struggle. She was recruited by Cesar Chavez to work with the union in Salinas, which she did from 1971-76. This was key to her education as an artist and activist. She has worked as a muralist, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter since then. She worked for forty years as an educator: elementary, migrant, and bilingual education, in arts academies and universities, before retiring seven years ago to dedicate herself full-time to her artwork. Her experience as a mother and a grandmother has also informed and given greater meaning to her artistic production.

Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work is frequently inspired by literature.

She has moved back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border for many years, and since 2006, has resided part-time in Mérida, Yucatán, and in Berkeley, California. She has created murals in both places, and her binational experience has inspired the project which she is currently completing with her author husband, Tirso González Araiza: to illustrate the Yucatec Mayanfolktale, LA X'TABAY, which will be exhibited this summer at the SanFrancisco Arts Commission Gallery and in the fall at the Museum of Anthropology in Mérida. Working in both countries has enabled her to form connections and create projects with artists, environmental activists, feminists and indigenous communities in Mexico and the United States.

Roan Boucher is a trans disabled Jewish artist, parent, and facilitator. In 2010 he cofounded the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA), a worker co-op of facilitators and strategists supporting movement organizations. He makes art about movements, queers, Judaism, and liberation. He is rooted in the Southeast, on Eno, Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, Shakori, and Tuscarora land.

Olivia Levins Holden (She/They) is a queer, mixed Boricuamuralist, organizer, artist, and educator living on Dakota homeland, Mni Sota Makoce, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Olivia's work explores many ways that the arts can transform and support movements, tell stories, plant seeds, and combat toxic narratives. They center processes of community involvement and collective design, drawing from conversations and people's history to create collaborative murals and public art, believing that the process is as essential as the final artwork. Since 2009, they have created and led the creation of murals Waves of Change/Oleadas de Cambio (2015), Defend, Nurture, Grown Phillips (2019), Wiidookodaadiwag/ They Help Each Other (2019), and Ritmos y Raices de Resistencia (2021). With her artist collective, Studio Thalo, Olivia created live painted mobile murals to reflect conversations and events.

Olivia is a 2022 McKnight Fellow for Community Engaged Artists, was a 2015 recipient of the Forecast Public Art project grant and has served as facilitator and mentor for project-based learning through programs such as Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio (CLUES), Latinx Muralism Apprenticeship, Studio 400, and is a founding member of the Creatives After Curfew collective. She serves as the Art of Radical Collaboration (ARC) Manager at Hope Community, Inc where she has trained artists and led community murals with youth and adults through the Power of Vision (POV) Mural project since 2017 and facilitates the Transformational Creative Strategies Training (TRCSTR). She has a BA in History from Smith College.

Ayeola Omolara Kaplan is a Black and queer Atlanta based pop-surrealist painter. Through depicting the intersections of identity, class, and spirituality, she hopes to contribute to the moving canon of revolutionary art. She creates with the belief that art can be weaponized as self-defense against an anti-truth culture plagued by unhealed generational trauma. Her work features empowering and electrifying imagery created to energize people, as well as celebrate marginalized folks carrying themselves with clout. The pieces exist as spiritual tools created with the intention to manifest a blissful and equitable future.

Born in 1953, Juana Alicia had many rich cultural influences growing up in Detroit, near Diego Rivera's Industry murals, in a Spanish and Yiddish-speaking household within a majority Black neighborhood. In her teens and early 20's, she was swept up by the Chicanx Movement, particularly the United Farm Workers struggle. She was recruited by Cesar Chavez to work with the union in Salinas, which she did from 1971-76. This was key to her education as an artist and activist. She has worked as a muralist, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter since then. She worked for forty years as an educator: elementary, migrant, and bilingual education, in arts academies and universities, before retiring seven years ago to dedicate herself full-time to her artwork. Her experience as a mother and a grandmother has also informed and given greater meaning to her artistic production.

Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work is frequently inspired by literature.

She has moved back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border for many years, and since 2006, has resided part-time in Mérida, Yucatán, and in Berkeley, California. She has created murals in both places, and her binational experience has inspired the project which she is currently completing with her author husband, Tirso González Araiza: to illustrate the Yucatec Mayanfolktale, LA X'TABAY, which will be exhibited this summer at the SanFrancisco Arts Commission Gallery and in the fall at the Museum of Anthropology in Mérida. Working in both countries has enabled her to form connections and create projects with artists, environmental activists, feminists and indigenous communities in Mexico and the United States.. Roan Boucher is a trans disabled Jewish artist, parent, and facilitator. In 2010 he cofounded the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA), a worker co-op of facilitators and strategists supporting movement organizations. He makes art about movements, queers, Judaism, and liberation. He is rooted in the Southeast, on Eno, Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, Shakori, and Tuscarora land.. Olivia Levins Holden (She/They) is a queer, mixed Boricuamuralist, organizer, artist, and educator living on Dakota homeland, Mni Sota Makoce, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Olivia's work explores many ways that the arts can transform and support movements, tell stories, plant seeds, and combat toxic narratives. They center processes of community involvement and collective design, drawing from conversations and people's history to create collaborative murals and public art, believing that the process is as essential as the final artwork. Since 2009, they have created and led the creation of murals Waves of Change/Oleadas de Cambio (2015), Defend, Nurture, Grown Phillips (2019), Wiidookodaadiwag/ They Help Each Other (2019), and Ritmos y Raices de Resistencia (2021). With her artist collective, Studio Thalo, Olivia created live painted mobile murals to reflect conversations and events.

Olivia is a 2022 McKnight Fellow for Community Engaged Artists, was a 2015 recipient of the Forecast Public Art project grant and has served as facilitator and mentor for project-based learning through programs such as Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio (CLUES), Latinx Muralism Apprenticeship, Studio 400, and is a founding member of the Creatives After Curfew collective. She serves as the Art of Radical Collaboration (ARC) Manager at Hope Community, Inc where she has trained artists and led community murals with youth and adults through the Power of Vision (POV) Mural project since 2017 and facilitates the Transformational Creative Strategies Training (TRCSTR). She has a BA in History from Smith College.. Ayeola Omolara Kaplan is a Black and queer Atlanta based pop-surrealist painter. Through depicting the intersections of identity, class, and spirituality, she hopes to contribute to the moving canon of revolutionary art. She creates with the belief that art can be weaponized as self-defense against an anti-truth culture plagued by unhealed generational trauma. Her work features empowering and electrifying imagery created to energize people, as well as celebrate marginalized folks carrying themselves with clout. The pieces exist as spiritual tools created with the intention to manifest a blissful and equitable future.. Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and social justice warrior/ healer. He is from Maricao, Puerto Rico and works out of a storefront studio in Minneapolis in the US. He closely connected with artists, activists and organizers throughout the social justice ecosystem.

Website: www.rlmartstudio.com. Wendy Elisheva Somerson is a non-binary white Ashkenazi Jewish somatic healter, writer, visual artist, and activist who helped found the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. They facilitate Ruach, body-based Jewish healing groups held in an anti-Zionist, anti-racist, and feminist framework.

Instagram: @wendyelisheva
Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/CorvidCrossingStudio. Arielle Tonkin is a queer mixed Moroccan and Ashkenazi Jewish artist, educator, and spiritual director working to dismantle white supremacy through arts & culture work and Jewish and interfaith education work. Arielle weaves relationships and materializes conversations: the Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzadek Lab, SVARA and Inside Out Wisdom in Action are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care. Arielle's artwork and social practice presences, queers, and formalizes the belief that healing through relationship can shift the fabric of social space and eventually, one braided thread at a time, shift the structure of the physical world.