When All of Our Homelands are One
Written, designed and printed by Sol Weiss
Case bound artist book and slipcase, linocut relief print and hand-set type.
10.5” x 12,” Edition of 10, 2025
Printed at In Cahoots Residency, Petaluma CA. Bound at Penland School of Craft, Penland NC.
When All of Our Homelands are One is a poem about home, land and Jewish lineage that reads as a children’s picture book. Written as a letter from an elder to a grandchild, it asks: “Can I give you a culture to be proud of?” The book invites the reader into an intimate relationship between generations that is both incredibly personal and speaks truth to a collective grappling. Through this work, I explore book-making as a sacred Jewish ritual art and core tool for cultural survival, past, present and future. The process of book-making is as important and central as the finished pieces, and is, itself, a doorway to new and needed next iterations of Jewish life. This work is inspired by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz’s theory of Jewish Diasporism and the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “doykeit” meaning “hereness” in Yiddish. Based in diasporic and nomadic lineages, the book offers a vision of a collective anti-national Jewish relationship to land made of relationships with many places.
In 5784 it is a time of great sorrow, and from sorrow we cherish our hopes for a different future.
We resist and imagine because all life is sacred and must be protected. I hope that I live to see Jews begin to repair the harm done to Palestinians, and to each other. May it be so, swiftly and in our days.
If we are to do that, we need different sources of Jewish safety, home and liberation that will take the place of Zionism in our cultural imagination.
Diasporism* believes that Jews have allies, and are allies to others. It centers our diasporic truth as a people of many lands, rather than that of a nation state built on an idea of a singular ancestral homeland. This moves our definition of safety away from the dominance, ownership and isolation of modern Zionism to solidarity with our neighbors, as both guests and stewards with rich complex histories. In this way, Diasporism offers a needed doorway to the next iteration of Jewish life.
Books, too, offer a doorway to Jewish home-making and transformation. As a refugee people with a long history of oppression and relocation, transitioning from a temple-based practice to a text-based practice was critical to our cultural survival. Books have been our sacred space of adaptation and resilience.
Drawing on that lineage, this book is a letter to our descendants. In a time when many of us are giving up on each other, this book is also for those of us who need help remembering what is at stake, and a reminder for myself of the grief and preciousness of our people.
These images honor some of the lands and stories that have made me. In visiting the vastness of our diasporic homelands, I ask how embracing this might help us make it through the radically changing landscape of our times.
* Jewish Diasporism is a political framework coined by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz z"l and developed by generations of Jewish feminist thinkers in resistance to ethno-nationalism and totalitarianism.