Reimagining Home
acrylic on canvas,
24 X 36”
November 2025
November 12, 2025
I’ve been taking the bus a lot.
In Los Angeles, that’s a big deal. It started on one of those days when I pulled wearily into my driveway, churning with negativity, preparing for an impending rant, seething with resentment after realizing I drove three full hours of carpooling that day. My brain scrambled to figure out how to change this, and an idea popped into my head- we could take the bus! The homeschooling centers were straight down Pico, 40 min away, hopping on the 7 right down the block from us.
When you’re on the bus in Los Angeles, you’re part of a different underworld. There’s a lot to beware of. The poverty and the mental Illness does indeed confront you, and your eyes must be alert, calibrating the world differently.
I don’t know if it’s more dangerous to take the bus, but I think you’re just more aware of the danger that is all around you. I think it’s more that it opens your eyes.
The danger isn’t coming from the unhoused, but something else. When you’re on the bus, you see the social game we play here in Los Angeles, the subconscious and protective need to differentiate yourself from the struggling classes.
Los Angeles itself is a city that wants to go deep, and honor the spirit. It is a town busting with artists who, let’s be honest, teeter in between different realities. There is often such a thin line between brillance and insanity, and it’s often hard to know, even if you squint really closely.
It’s like when you see someone talking and you don’t know if they have a headset on or are mumbling to themselves.
It’s the thin woman in yoga pants and a taut tank top . How sun scorched is her face, how weary is her body? Is she walking hurriedly to her next undoubtably important appointment or is she stumbling about? These clues will help you ascertain whether she woke up on silk sheets or on the side of the sidewalk this morning.
The line is thin and that itself must be terrifying, how close we are to collapse, how fortunate are we with solid walls and a door that locks and stores filled with food and friends to talk with and complain to and share our errands with.
—
Lots has shifted since I wrote last. Last I wrote was the night before the Israeli hostages were released. Hours before Simchat Torah.
I wrote that I was relieved but not euphoric.
The next morning, I awoke and rolled directly over to YouTube to watch the releases. I watched incessantly, tears rolling down, relief cascading. How amazing it felt in the body, how euphoric it was, indeed.
I wanted to just sit in that joy for a day, reveling in that hope and salvation just for a moment. I wanted to lounge in the knowledge that sometimes beautiful things happen and people feel whole again. I wanted to walk around the Jewish part of my city and feel what it felt like to be there, on that day. This joy was happening to all of us.
That night was the last night in the Sukkah, and I gathered with friends, all of us emotionally hungover from watching the same clips, many staying up all night to see the release in real time. The conversation rolls around in a bit of a propoganda hasbara kind of way to how there is no people like the Jewish people , and I decide to say nothing. That night, we keep it celebratory. We don’t discuss the complicated nature of it all, we don’t go into the continued suffering. We don’t point fingers. For one night, we exist in an imagined state of history and okayness and heightened chosenness. Our bodies relent that for one night, we can live in that world.
—-
A couple months prior, I was editing my website. It had been so long since I had added to it, so the website felt old; old series, old interests. I had done assorted random paintings in the last couple of years, so I wanted to see if I could incorporate them into my site.
As I sat there looking at my collection of random paintings in the last two years, I realized that there indeed was a through-line. They were all done after October 7, and they were all continual grapplings of the pressure and coping of an American Jewish body as it was pushed and pulled by the experiences of the Israeli/Palestinian international and national discourse and conflict, and Trump’s second rise to power.
—
Without conscious intention, all the pieces I had done before in the last two years were of solitary figures just sitting, waiting (with the exception of the ICE one, which is about imprisonment, anyways). Despite my love for dance and movement, it seems like my subconscious struggled with the isolation and stuckness of the Jewish community as it waited and waited and had the same conversations again and again. A couple weeks after the hostages were released, I returned to the studio to work. For the first time in the last two years, I painted figures with movement to them, multiple people together in a frame.
With the hostage release, I feel a shifting. I feel movement.
We have so far to go but I feel like something was torn open so that we can at last take steps forward.
I started listening to the podcast The Long Answer, from Standing Together, the important Israeli Palestinian movement on the ground towards a new tomorrow. It’s a hard listen but an important one, and after the first podcast, I felt the need to close my series before I listened to the next one .
The last painting I did in the series, called Reimagining Home, was made while listening to the first podcast. It is of two friends embracing and the power of the empty space around them.
———
One of the special things of watching the hostage release videos was being able to listen to the families and friends erupt in Hebrew, hearing the familiar cultural expressions and tonal vacillations.
Beyond its impact as a military or intellectual force, we don’t have enough collective conversations about what Israel is to the world. About the beauty and gifts of Israeli culture. For those who are privileged in all senses of the word to experience it, it is something to behold. It is part of the unspoken conversation about what many are afraid to lose.
Each culture is cruel in some ways and abundantly kind in others. Sit on a Los Angeles bus for ten minutes and you will see that clearly.
If we cancel out an entire culture and people, we lose the abundant riches there, riches that I for one am desperately thirsty for. There is no people like the Jewish people and there is no culture like Israeli culture, just for the simple fact that each culture and people have something unique to teach and add to the world.
The ways in which Israelis build community for one, and the unique patterns of honesty, humor, and communication, are presents for the collective Sanctuary of our world.
So when we reimagine home we must adorn it with the gorgeous depths of gifts that each culture and people bring to it.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe was asked once how he could stand for hours in his eighties and hand out dollars to thousands of people gathered. “Every soul is a diamond,” he replied. “You don’t get tired when you’re counting diamonds.”
Each life is so precious. The hostage release was a closeup into the fragile reality of our precious lives, the diamonds that surround us constantly. The diamonds we have lost. The diamonds we can recover. Each person is an entire universe. We have lost so many worlds, let’s not lose anymore.
It’s hard to see the diamonds on the Los Angeles bus. it’s hard to imagine that each bedraggled person stumbling around was once born in a moment of miraculous exaltation. As one woman mumbled as she entered the bus this past week, “I’m sorry if I smell like poop.” But the dichotomy of tremendous wealth and tremendous destitution is just two sides of the same coin.
It’s just us. There’s no people like us.
I close out this series and look forward to a rest from it. I look forward to a new chapter. One that builds on all the chapters that came before it.