Hello and welcome to Issue 003
We’ve got so much to share with you this week:
The first look at Molly Crabapple’s epic social history of the anti-Zionist Jewish Labour Bund, eleven years in the making.
A profile of one of the best Palestinian rappers working today, Haykal.
A new poem from Nasser Rabah, one of Gaza’s most necessary voices.
And an in-depth Q&A with Ta-Nehisi Coates, out tomorrow.
Thank you for being a paid subscriber to The Key. We’ve had a great start to life and are depending on you to forward this email and share with your friends to turn us into a self-sustaining outlet.
In 2015, we were honored to welcome Molly Crabapple to the Palestine Festival of Literature. She toured the West Bank and ‘48 with the festival and wrote a deeply affecting dispatch for Vice News from Gaza.
When she returned home, she began excavating her family’s history and her great-grandfather’s involvement with the Jewish Bund - a revolutionary movement that was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist.
Now, eleven years later, she is about to publish Here Where We Live Is Our Country, an epic history of a Jewish movement that refused Zionism’s pressure to colonize and subjugate another people. It’s been largely erased from history, Molly argues, because of its opposition to Zionism - and her new book is an attempt to ensure it’s not forgotten.
We’re proud to have been a small part of this book’s journey, and to now offer a first look to readers of The Key. We also sat with Molly for the PalFest Podcast, and are offering her book to our Bookshelf subscribers - with an exclusive artwork postcard.
Subscribe today at the Bookshelf level or higher to receive your book and artwork postcard.
Artwork postcard by Molly Crabapple featuring her illustration above an election flyer from Volkovsyk in 1938: “The Jewish masses must clearly and openly declare: We are not foreigners! We will not leave! We will fight for our freedom and rights, together with Polish workers and peasants. And if the Zionists … raise a hand to hinder our struggle, then we will kick them off the Jewish street.”
Haykal is a Palestinian rapper from Ramallah who is becoming a fixture of New York City’s underground scene. Alex Siber spent an afternoon with the artist, who he describes as “one of the most talented lyricists of his generation, a rapper’s rapper.”
The crushing conditions of the occupation made it increasingly difficult to put on gigs, and forced Haykal to seek medical care in New York after he developed a lung condition. But that has not slowed him down, and he is making the best music of his career. The conversation takes in everything from the risks of self-orientalization to the rappers who inspired him when he was coming up and the linguistic nuances of rapping in Arabic.
This story features photos taken by Zakaria Hussein, commissioned by The Key.
Photo by Zakaria Hussein for The Key
“Every time it feels as though there is no language left to describe the devastation inflicted on Gaza and its people, he finds new ways to articulate the collective experience.”
So Wiam El-Tamami writes in her introduction to Nasser Rabah’s The Cage, which she also translated. One of Gaza’s most essential witnesses, we are honored to be publishing this new poem by him.
We will have even more for you tomorrow, when our new, extensive interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates will land in your inbox. He sat down with The Key to reflect on the year since he published his best-seller, The Message. We talked about Israel’s genocide and its effect on the US election, the rise of anti-Israel rhetoric from right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson, and the urgency of supporting the boycott movement.
Finally, a note to share: the links in our email for Issue 002 were broken in the process of ironing out some technical back-end issues. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and we hope you visit the website to read / those / pieces, just in case you missed them.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, and pitches, please write to me at [email protected].
With gratitude,
Sara Yasin
Editor in Chief
