I have been thinking about anti-carceral feminism. About how I am a survivor of multiple accounts of sexual assault. About how I am a Jew. How in these two seemingly unrelated things, they are still interconnected, not only because both things are happening within my same body, but because both involve and include an experience of being fractured and disembodied. So I have been thinking—especially of late—about this anti-carceral approach to accountability.

As a survivor of sexual assault, my body has been many times disembodied without my consent. As a Jew—even before I was born—my body was set to inherit from generation to generation—l’dor v’dor—a plethora of disembodiment also without my consent, since anti-Jewish oppression and anti-Jewish antisemitism, like any form of systemic oppression, is also a breach of consent.

And as the world rears an unraveling of catastrophic injustice and oppression—especially of late—I find myself scrupulously interrogating my experiences of disembodiment, in hopes it might lead me to understanding the core and crux of what I hope can be a healing accountability.

Let’s start with the word: body.

The English word for body has its origins in Old English, connoting a container for a person, animal, or structure. But one thing that’s unequivocally clear in this etymology is this: a body describes the main or principal part of something. Now, it’s interesting that the word for body in Latin—from which so much of English finds its linguistic roots—is “corpus,” from where we get the modern-day English word corpse. Which we use to specifically describe a body that is dead.

Now, it’s interesting that Latin, which was spoken in Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire at large, which arguably—like their Ancient Greek predecessors—played a role in solidifying the systems of oppression around which we have centered our society in the United States of America (where we have highest rate of mass incarceration in the world), had a word for body that now 2,000 years later is a word we use for death. Which is perhaps to say that the thing we most adopted from our classical ancestors in Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire is death.

And perhaps it’s fair to say that a society that centers its systems around incarceration—and the many ways it creates privatized cash-flow and puts human bodies in cages—is a dead society. If America was ever alive in the first place, given—of course—its being founded on genocide, sexual terrorism, slavery, white supremacy, and carceral imprisonment and punishment.

A place that has the audacity to actively choose—again and again—to treat bodies in this particular kind of way, is a place that perhaps has not yet fully ever embodied itself.

And so what does it look like for a place—a country—to embody itself? How might we bring a place from a dead corpse to that of a living, breathing, liberated, body that can actually survive?

Let’s start with the word: survivor.

I call myself a survivor. A survivor of multiple accounts of sexual assault.

Everyone has their own language. I think that can be part of our journey in reclaiming our bodies after violations and breaches of consent. Some people call themselves victims. Some, survivors, like me. Some, something else entirely. And still plenty don’t have a name to describe whatever it was that happened to them. Lack of language—an entire dialect itself.

I remember a meal with a friend shortly after college at a now-defunct East Village staple on Saint Marks. I used the word “survivor” in the context of sexual assault, since I’m what I like to call a “casual trauma dropper,” and tend to readily talk about trauma over salads at lunch.

He pushed back: Survivor was someone who survived the Holocaust. With a capital “S.”

He, like many of my friends, is a third generation Holocaust survivor, whose grandparents outlived Hitler’s 13-million-person extermination (mass corpsing, mass disembodiment).

And the thing is, given how anti-Jewish oppression works as a multi-thousand-year operating machine, it’s a particularly interesting kind of systemic oppression to survive.

My family are not capital “S” Survivors. My great-great-grandparents on both sides came to the United States from Lithuania and other parts of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s. I’m as assimilated as it can get. For a white American Jew. My grandfathers were in the Army and the Air Force. That was their positionality in the deadliest world war.

And yet, I too am still surviving. My ancestors also fled.

So my body, even without assault, is already a body that has inherited a readiness to flee.

I have worked hard to accept my unsolicited fate as a survivor of sexual assault. I live with a now forever narrative in my body to which I did not consent.

Still, I feel like—thanks to therapy, my art, organizing and activism, my work as an educator and facilitator, communities of comrades of other survivors—I’ve metabolized and integrated my assaults to what for me feels like a relatively manageable degree in my body.

And yet, two and a half decades after my first sexual assaults, 22 years after being raped, I remain fascinated by the ongoing and ever-changing ways my body and mind continue to heal.

Many years ago, I was working with Jewish fraternities around consent education. While I’d been publicly writing, speaking, and performing poetry and other art about my assaults for two decades, while I’d had audience members at previous gigs ask questions ranging from “why didn’t you press charges?” (a female student at my former high school) to “how did you let that go on for a year and a half” (an adult woman at a college), while I was so used to retelling my story again and again, I experienced a new aspect of my trauma surface and take up space.

Let’s start with the phrase: “nice Jewish boy.”

A “nice Jewish boy” is a catch-all phrase in the contemporary Jewish diaspora to describe a male—presumably Ashkenazi, but not necessarily—who is smart, and good, and performing his version of a “good Ole boy,” aka an assimilated Jewish boy who is upholding Western ideals. He’s someone you want to date. Marry. Bring home to your nice Jewish family and friends.

My high school perpetrator was considered a “nice Jewish boy.” I realized during that aforementioned year of gigs—amidst rivers, seas of other nice Jewish boys—how much that fucked me up.

How for some reason, being sexually assaulted by a “nice Jewish boy” feels like a betrayal not only from my perpetrator, but like, from all Jews at large.

But I can’t say that out loud, because that’s not good for the Jews. Which, by the way, is often my first thought when a well-known Jew is publicly called out for abuse.

My first thought: this is not good for the Jews.

Because it will fuel anti-Jewish tropes. The Jewish part of the abuser’s identity will receive the loudest blame. That’s what happens in a predominantly rich, white Christian world.

Even though all sexual violence is entrenched with patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy at large. And lest we forget that anti-Jewish antisemitism too is a byproduct of all of these things.

So I am in the business of being fractured. That is the disembodied space I have to live in as a Jew. I’m not only carrying the things that have been done to my body. I am also carrying the way the world has disembodied me. So I expect more from my people, because they too arrive with a history of fractured disembodiment, regardless of the rest of their social identities. Maybe it’s unfair of me to expect better from my people. Especially cis straight white-bodied Jewish men.

Which brings me back to anti-carceral feminism. Carceral—from the Latin “carcer,” prison, jail.

Disembodiment is part of why I didn’t press charges against my perpetrators when I was assaulted and then raped. I did not want to involve myself in the criminal legal system and myriad carceral systems that by no means treat survivors of sexual assault and violence well. That work hard to further disembody survivors, and then fracture perpetrators too.

For instance, the man who raped me was Black. And our criminal systems do not treat Black men in America humanely. Those same systems—like this entire country, like this entire world—work to further disembody Black men. The impact of incarceration and state-sanctioned violence on anyone—regardless of race or identity—can be detrimental for individuals, their loved ones, and their communities; from mental health to challenges around societal reentry and job retention to suicide, self-harm, addiction, and more. So I didn’t press charges. No part of me wanted to thrust him into carcerality and perpetuate more cycles of violence within more cycles of violence.

It doesn’t mean I excuse his behavior. It means that I am not interested in putting a body into a carcer, which can then turn a body into a corpse. I am interested in finding a pathway that can both hold him accountable for his actions, while also making space for both of our healings.

As for my former friend. I held him accountable in the social work office midway through sophomore year of high school after I had a panic attack and locked myself in a bathroom stall and cut my leg. I told my mother. She called his father. I told my therapist. I told several friends. I somehow made space to understand that in the fabric of high school popularity and social hierarchies, there were friends who were going to remain friends with us both.

Because that’s how the world we’ve thus far set up works. Everyone would rather listen to a male in a position of socially contracted power than a female who cuts herself. Popular, sure, but by all social standards: set up for silence.

That’s how social hierarchies work.

So add to that that I’m a Jew—even though my high school perpetrator was too—and it’s awash.

My birthright makes me a wanderer, a person without a finite homeland, because even in the United States, I have to assimilate into whiteness in order to survive. So I feel angry at my perpetrator that he somehow complicated my being able to feel at home within our Jewry.

Especially with white Jewish men.

Which is the thing I started to unravel and piece together while performing at frats.

Like me, he also had to assimilate into whiteness, into Christian hegemony, in order to survive. But because of the history of the emasculation of ancestrally European Jewish men via the kinds of jobs they could and couldn’t hold in Eastern Europe and other global regions hundreds of years ago—itself a byproduct of anti-Jewish antisemitism and anti-Jewish oppression—his assimilation takes on additional kinds of tropes. In Eastern Europe—and elsewhere—it became engrained in white America that Jewish men—of any race—are still not “man” enough.

So in order for him—and Epstein, Weinstein, Steinhardt, Allen, Ratner, Rudin, Hoffman, Toback, Blaine, Schneiderman, Douglas, Schultz, Jeremy, Carlebach, Dreyfuss, Wieseltier, Cohen, Gutin, Toobin, Tambor, Singer, Shulman, Copperfield, Kramer, Friedman, Franco, Franken, Stein, Levine, Horovitz, Moonves, Kriesberg, Wiesel—to assimilate into whiteness—in order to attempt to survive anti-Jewish oppression, the Holocaust, pogroms, America, all and any systemic cycles of abuse—he had to fully become white. Which means rape, pillage, power, breaching and pummeling consent.

We Jews are a buffer race. That’s how anti-Jewish oppression and anti-Jewish antisemitism work. When the people in power (i.e. cis, straight, rich, white, able-bodied Christian men) are met with any resistance from any marginalized group—including Jews—Jews serve as a scapegoat in between, especially those of us who have assimilated into, or benefited from, whiteness and a proximity to the ruling class. It helps keep white supremacy safe.

So who am I to trust, if I cannot trust my own? If I cannot trust a “nice Jewish boy”? If even the trope of assimilated survival is a lie?

Because herein lies my birthright: I am not only a buffer for society to uphold and enable imperialism, I must also hold the conflicts and dualities that live within my skin.

Both white and Jew. Both simultaneously experiencing and benefitting from white privilege and at risk of anti-Jewish oppression and antisemitism and death by white supremacy at any time.

Both cisgender and straight while wanting to and working towards dismantling patriarchy.

Anti-capitalist in a capitalist world.

Upper-class-raised, but spent my early 30s on Medicaid and could barely pay my rent.

I carry these dualities. These narratives of survival. When all I want to do is live.

And I choose to hold extra space for not perpetuating the disembodiment of others while simultaneously working to more fully embody myself.

But I am tired of inheriting survival.

I am tired of inheriting the trope of the disembodied Jew.

I am tired of being disembodied.

I don’t want to assimilate anymore.

Because I am tired of a world where we have not, instead of disembodying bodies, disembodied the language instead. Bodies as corpses like our Latin-speaking predecessors does not have to be our fate. It is possible to build a world where our process of healing and accountability is embodiment. Co-creating systems, structures, and modalities rooted in harm-reduction, anti-oppression, and healing-informed approaches to accountability, as well as working in concert to eliminate the systems and structures that lead us to mass carceral punishment in the first place.

In Judaism, we have something called pikuah nefesh—saving a soul, or saving a life. We also have an annual practice of spiritual and emotional guttural accountability by way of Yom Kippur, which is a day to atone and take stock of our missteps, and hold ourselves accountable for the past year, and set intentions to do better and be more intentional in the year ahead.

And it is during that day—Yom Kippur—when we recite the al chet. The long confession.

Where we recite and recount our sins.

Where in community, we hold ourselves accountable without adding further punitive harm.

And I think where these things meet—pikuah nefesh and al chet—might be a key to helping us figure out how to keep bodies intact, regardless of the fracturing they may themselves experience. Or that they may themselves cause. Regardless of if they’ve been fractured too.

Because if we keep fracturing each other, there will be nothing left to survive.

I’ve never been interested in my assaults being weaponized to justify or cause further harm towards my perpetrators or anyone else. I say “further” because I have to imagine my perpetrators must already live or have lived with enough of their own pain. They were there during the assaults. And if they didn’t have language for what they were doing and did at the time, I made it very clear to each of them in the aftermath that there was nomenclature for it.

I’ve also never been interested in my body being weaponized to justify or cause further harm.

And so I ask again: what does it look like for a place—a country—to embody itself?

Is it actually embodiment if that embodiment is contingent on disembodying other people?

On turning other bodies—corpuses—into corpses?

Let’s end with the word: corpse.

Whose lives are we really saving if we are turning any bodies into fractured ashes and dust?