Cindy Milstein (they) on Nostr: I’m a worrier. In that (my) Jewish father’s sort of way. Which is another way of ...

I’m a worrier. In that (my) Jewish father’s sort of way. Which is another way of saying: in that ancestral trauma sort of way.

I’ve been slowly, like an inch worm, working my way through a book on Yiddish. Which is another way of saying: a language inseparable from a culture that knew too much trauma for too many centuries, and crafted subversive ways to survive outside states and other authoritarian barbarisms.

Part of the way, according to this book, that Yiddish deals with diasporic Jews’ near-constant worry, based on much lived experience of those worries coming to true, is through insider jokes and gallow’s humor about the Christian supremacist, often deadly social order. Another is by kvetching—engaging in a near-constant critique of “the world that is,” in contrast to striving toward “the world to come.” Yet another is a superstitious practice: phrases that seem to contradict a moment of sadness or happiness, lest one bring forth more misery, on the one hand, or get too comfortable with feeling good and secure, on the other. One reading, for instance, of a glass being shattered at the end of a Jewish wedding is to shatter any sense of pure joy, reminding people that there is much brokenness in the world that needs our mending.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying: There is much to worry about these Christofascist days. Not imagined worries; actual ones.

I was “joking” with a friend the other day that the patriarchal Christo(evangelical)fascists must be deliriously happy: Their apocalyptic prophesies feel like they’re coming true. Meanwhile, many of the rest of us are hurting. Which is a mild way of saying: I’ve never seen so many friends and so many, many others struggling with the bleakest, cruelest of demons, emotionally, physically, financially, state-repression-wise, and more.

So I worry. For beloveds. For humans and nonhumans. Our ecosystem. Our empathy.

Our bodies seem way too small a vessel to take in so many grief and trauma, and not shatter.

Which is my way of saying: Love and rage can—and must—sit side by side. Care isn’t a luxury; it’s one of our greatest weapons, alongside solidarity, against neofascisms.

(photos: “Chinga la migra” and “CARE!! CARE!! CARE!!” handmade prints displayed on a wall at @bibliocafesteikilazone in Athens, June 2026; “RAGE!!” tagged in red on a dreary-gray side of an apartment building in Vienna, July 2026)