Rafael Rachel Neis

Zines

A zine (derived from fanzine or magazine) is a small, independently published booklet, usually made on paper and reproduced with a photocopying machine or printer. Its formats, genres, and contents can vary widely. Historically, people and communities outside mainstream power structures (from punks, anarchists, to people of color, to queerfeminists) have made zines. Zines, their reproduction, and their circulation, offer an alternative to commodified or hierarchical forms of conventional print publication. The same is true for zines’ ability to circumvent and bypass the constraints of contemporary art markets.

I am drawn to the zine format for its reproducibility, its punk, DIY, DIT, intersectional feminist aesthetics and ethics. The zine becomes a critical alternative not only to the sometimes exclusionary sanctity of religious sources, but also to what can sometimes be the rarified and gatekeeping practices of scholarship on those sources. The zine format recalls tiny books of Psalms that pious people might carry around and recite, or small nature handbooks (e.g. on birds), straddling ritual and pop-science artifacts. The zines I make or co-create are under the imprint of Queer Review.

Talmud-Zine Project

The Mishnah was a compendium of the teaching of the Jewish sages (the rabbis) from the first to early third centuries in Palestine, comprising 63 tractates. The Talmud was the commentary of the later rabbis (ca. 3rd to 7th cents CE) on the Mishnah. The goal of this project is to create and co-create an alternative commentary or Talmud, using the format and genre of the zine and covering all 63 tractates (some with multiple zines, but each with at least one). I will be collaborating with scholars and artists on several of the Talmud-Zines.

Hamapelet or Niddah-Zine, the inaugural volume, gives a small window onto a chapter of the Mishnah’s Tractate Niddah on menstrual and gynecological ritual purity. Rather than merely translating a few of its oddities to the contemporary eye, I critically intervene creating images and snippets of text that pull out its potentials to unravel human-centricity and encourage a multispecies approach to reproduction. At the same time, using a queerfeminist lens, I seek to critically, redraw, & rewrite the exclusionary dimensions of this ancient Jewish text, drawing it into conversations and imagery related to reproduction, disability, and human/animal boundaries.

The Antiqui-Zine Project

This project involves collaborations with scholars of ancient and premodern sources and, like the Talmud-Zine Project seeks to critically engage those sources, cross-cutting them with constructive, creative, and speculative elaborations and images. Su-Zine, a pilot for this project, co-created in collaboration with Chaya Halberstam, reads the apocryphal Book of Susannah as an ancient #metoo narrative with a shape-shifting heroine. Next up, in collaboration with Clara Bosak-Schroeder, is a zine on Semiramis in Diodorus Sicilus’s Library. So far our anitqui-zines have a through-line of ancient womxnplus superheroes, who are not without their problems.