GJC Book Club: "The Cost of Free Land”
“The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance”
By Rebecca Clarren
As a diasporic people for the past two millennia, Jews have the trauma of displacement and our mistreatment by people of many lands baked into our prayer, our calendar, our telling of our story, and our DNA.
Since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., Jews have had a complex relationship with land. In Europe, it wasn’t until “modernity” in a Jewish historical sense (around the end of the 18th century) that Jews were even allowed to own land in many of the countries where we lived, nor were we considered "citizens.” Living in diaspora and dispersion over the course of centuries and generations has had a profound impact on our relationship with Eretz Yisrael, ha'aretz/the land of Israel, both the biblical land and the modern nation-state.
For so many of us in the United States, our Jewish story is that of immigrants fleeing persecution and the hateful antisemitism of Eastern Europe, Russia, and then Western Europe. We learn the stories of our ancestors and a collective story of Jewish perseverance, hope, strength and faith. When faced with unimaginable hardship, our People rose to the challenges and came to America to start a new life.
Earlier this year, I encouraged us to read a book that sheds a new light on this American Jewish narrative. In "The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance," Rebecca Clarren offers us a revealing look at her family’s Jewish American success story. Her ancestors fled Russia and found their way to South Dakota where their rising prospects as immigrants were entangled with the reduced possibilities of the Lakota who were forced off the land by the same government that offered “free land” to her immigrant ancestors. Clarren draws on Jewish values and practices to take a deep dive into the difficult truths she unpacked from examining and researching her family story and how it intersected with the stories of others.
Please join me for GJC's virtual summer book club on Wed. Aug. 6 at 5:30 p.m. – you can email here to RSVP.
As we wrestle with conflicting narratives around individual success and collective responsibility, this book feels especially timely. In Jewish time, we are in the three weeks that precede Tisha b’Av/9th of Av. Tisha b'Av — a time of collective Jewish mourning, cracks us open so that we can begin to do the work of being ready for teshuvah/turning to repair relationships and re-aim ourselves to align with our values. I hope you will join me in using this meaningful book to think about our own stories, what we tell ourselves and how that influences our sense of responsibility for others and for the land we share. Perhaps this conversation will influence your new Jewish year — 5786! At the very least, it will be a great opportunity to get together with GJC friends and do a little learning and sharing.
Here is a link to the author’s talk with congregations who read this book earlier in the year as part of this year’s Reconstructionist Book Club. This page also includes other resources that you may find meaningful.
This discussion between Clarren and Sarah Podemski, an award-winning actor with mixed Jewish and Indigenous heritage, hosted by the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, is also a helpful resource for those looking to tackle some of the book's themes.
We are looking forward to growing a GJC book club that can carry us through the seasons, allowing us to gather even when our community is more dispersed. If there are books you think would be a good fit for our Glacier Jewish community, please let us know.
I look forward to seeing you soon!
Rabbi Jessica
