“It’s BASSICHIS like MASOCHIST,” they raised their voice loud enough for me to hear. Morgan Bassichis and I were standing to the side of the stage at the Troxy, a 1930s art deco theater in East London. Bassichis was about to go on in front of nearly 2,000 people. I was MCing and wavered over how to pronounce their last name.
The event, called How Empires End, was organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature last December. Bassichis was on after Yara Eid, a journalist from Gaza who spoke about her family and friends who have been killed by Israel and about losing faith in international systems and institutions before rallying the audience into bellowing FREE, FREE PALESTINE. Others in the line-up included Paapa Essiedu, Kamila Shamsie, and Mohammed el-Kurd.
There are jokes, then some anti-Zionism, then another joke.
Bassichis began with “I am so honored to be here tonight as one of hundreds of thousands of anti-Zionist Jews” — HUGE applause — “who proudly join the millions of people around the world rising up in solidarity with the people of Gaza, and in solidarity with Palestinians everywhere struggling for freedom.”
The next morning, on our way from my apartment to a meeting with publishers and literary agents about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, we debriefed about the show. From where I had been standing off the stage, I couldn’t actually hear most of the artists and speakers — except Bassichis.
“Of course you could hear me! I’m Jewish. I was shouting.”
Most people who’ve come across Bassichis at a protest or online recently might not know that they are also a gifted comedic and cabaret artist. Their work is often explicitly political, but their usual mode of address is jokes and songs, a mix of sharpness and invitation. But since the genocide began last October, Bassichis has made countless passionate interventions on stages and at rallies with Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups calling for an immediate ceasefire. As I write this in early March, a photo of them appears on my timeline: raging into a handheld mic, the night sky against their profile as they and other protestors blocked Joe Biden’s motorcade to the State of the Union address in Washington.
Their most recent staged show, 2023’s A Crowded Field, was the third of a trilogy of performances on Jewish anti-Zionism and had a six-day run at the Abrons Art Center (during Passover, no less). In the show, Bassichis moves through the Jewish calendar, holding the mic out to the audience and asking them to shout out words they associate with each holiday. They riff: “I always get a little confused at Passover, like what’s the Seder, what goes on the table, what goes with the horseradish and the boils … do I bring my own boils? Does anyone else get a little confused? OK good, so we’re already establishing a shared experience.”
Bassichis talks about ways that much of Jewish tradition is lost or undermined in the Zionist marshaling of the religion into colonial violence. The Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shvat, for instance, instructs people to plant trees. Meanwhile, Palestinian olive trees are systematically destroyed, part of a larger erasure of life on the land. Which trees, for whom, and on which land, for whom? As they tell the audience, the show is structured like a sandwich: there are jokes, then some anti-Zionism, then another joke.
The success of the show is both in its content and in the seamlessness of the transitions of tone, the roving tension between comedy and militancy. “It’s like a musical instrument between reverent and irreverent; if you’re too precious or too dismissive it doesn’t work,” Bassichis said. “It has to stretch and be taut so you can play it.”
On stage, their comic personas are often a little confused, wide-eyed. One reviewer described them as having the self-deprecation of the comedian combined with the self-possession of the diva.
“Comedy has been baked in as a strategy since I was very young,” they told me as we ate jerk chicken near Waterloo. “I think that that’s also a very queer strategy. If you can get people to laugh, you can get them to listen. I think a lot about disarming people, and demilitarizing, and the connections between the two.”
Bassichis had thought their show at the Abrons Center would be their “last Jewish thing. That would be the final bit of my contribution, and then I could work on other stuff.” But of course, after October, everything changed. “The only thing worse than this moment would be not to meet it.”
The idea of using holidays as a way into talking about anti-Zionism might have come from Bassichis’ first visit to Palestine. “My first day ever in Jerusalem, it was Sukkot, and I was watching settlers marching up to Al-Aqsa. And I was so ignorant, I was like, ‘What is happening here? What are they doing?’” Of course, Palestinians in the West Bank and 1948 Palestine might know the Jewish calendar better than many Jews: Jewish holidays mean checkpoint closures, increased settler zealotry, and, recently, pogroms.
“I think a lot about disarming people, and demilitarizing, and the connections between the two.”
Theater and performance are always a place of self-making, and for Bassichis, who says they were “never not in the play” growing up, it was also a place where they could figure out how to relate to the power of the adults in the room. As a kid in Boston in the 1980s, Bassichis was slightly feminine and talked about themselves as a girl. “There was gender anxiety about me in the world from a young age that I was very aware of, even if I didn’t understand it,” they said. “I had this sense that something in my body was moving wrong, talking wrong, on a very visceral material level. And it was making the adults worry, and the balance between worry and surveillance…”
“My familiarity with shame is my superpower. Or it’s what I’m connecting with. I feel like that comes across a lot in the work.”
In college, they were radicalized by 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. After graduation, they thought they had to choose between art and activism. They chose activism and moved to San Francisco. “Everything I learned, I learned from queer, abolitionist, anti-racist activists,” they said. They interrupted Pride parades that included Israeli propaganda, and they protested in front of the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles in 2009 when Israel was bombing Gaza in the operation it called Cast Lead. The action was organized by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, long considered fringe and conveniently accused of antisemitism in the U.S. and the U.K.
After years in San Francisco, Bassichis moved to New York to pursue theater — that part of themselves needed space, and they had the sense not to abandon it. “Also, I love being on stage, and I would use those skills leading support groups and workshops, but it was almost like ‘Let’s let you get that need met in a more direct way. If you need applause, let’s get that met out of the support group.’”
On their way to New York, they made a detour to Poland to understand the weaponization of Holocaust tourism. “They take Israeli high school students to Poland and take them to the camps directly off the plane, wrapped in Israeli flags. Then they put them right back on the plane back to Israel. And I thought ‘That’s the place I wanna learn about.’” They felt it was important to go to the sites of mass Jewish death before making a trip to Palestine.
“I remember feeling really angry that this important part of our history had been taken out of history and disconnected from a broader network of ethnic cleansing … this experience connects us to people around the world who have faced horror, and yet, it’s been used to disconnect us and have our suffering become the only legible one. We can’t even grieve this without it being turned into a weapon that erases and does this weird violence to other genocides. I felt a struggle; I couldn’t have a direct relationship to this grief because it’s been so mediated by how it’s been weaponized.”
At the camps, you can have a more direct relationship with what happened than in memorials and museums. “You’re in the materiality of these infrastructures of death, which is what we’re up against,” Bassichis said. “In the museums, the experience is overdetermined with the conclusion you know is coming. Yad Vashem [Israel’s official monument to the Holocaust] literally opens out onto Jerusalem and onto the site of the Deir Yassin massacre [when Zionist paramilitaries massacred 107 Palestinian villagers]. It’s curated to say: Israel is the solution; this is the solution.”
Intergenerational dialogue and transmission flow across Bassichis’ work. In 2017, they staged an adaptation of the 1970s fantastical manifesto, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, about the lives of out gay men and their friends (feminists, lesbians, Radical Faeries, and drag queens) as they wait for the next uprising against male power. In one part of the performance at the New Museum, the audience read from parts of the book by Larry Mitchell, and Bassichis sat at the feet of a group of elders, asking them about communes and quaaludes (“Do you have any left?”).
“We can’t even grieve this without it being turned into a weapon.”
Questions to ask before your bat mitzvah, which Bassichis co-edited, is another example of this future-oriented work. The book came together as part of an exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Virginia last fall, which was titled More Little Ditties and featured solo and duet songs and videos by Bassichis. The book is made of very short essays with titles like “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?”, “Do I have to give a speech?”, and “What does the key symbolize to Palestinians?”, written by Jewish and Palestinian theater makers, artists, writers, and rabbis. The book does what it promises: lays out some questions that young, particularly American Jewish people might have and gives them a way to start understanding how their religion is connected to the occupation and to Palestine. One essay is titled: “What does my bat mitzvah have to do with Palestine and Israel?”
Journalists and politicians often describe the shift in American Jewish views about Israel as a generational split. Anti-Zionism has grown more popular, more articulate, and more forceful, thanks in no small part to the steady organizing work of groups like IJAN, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace, which took a public position against Zionism in 2017. But Bassichis is careful to assert anti-Zionism within a long Jewish tradition in which people opposed it along with other forms of oppression, both in Europe and in the U.S. At one point in A Crowded Field, they tell the audience: “Some people have called me a self-hating Jew, and I wholly reject that. Obviously, if I’m self-hating, it’s because I’m gay.”
Bassichis’ comedy plays with embarrassment, inadequacy, with not-getting-it, turning these feelings out to the audience without appeals to sympathy or empathy, both of which can be weaponized and diminish the subject receiving them. Partial, conditional humanization of others at the service of our own conscience is easily made violent. As I write this, five Palestinian children have been killed by American aid packages dropped on them from the sky.
Bassichis seems to have cultivated an early understanding of this and of art and comedy’s ability to relate to others — and to power — in a way that doesn’t turn us into targets of these self-serving emotions while orienting us toward the future. Their next show, Can I Be Frank?, revisits a 1987 show by Frank Maya, one of the first queer comedians on network television — once again, Bassichis’ work begins with a summoning and interpretation of the past.
“Time and place are the beginning coordinates of a joke. Where we are is probably weird, and when we are is probably weird. The joke is already in motion; it’s around us,” Bassichis says.
The “About” page for Bassichis’ show, which will be on in June at the Club in La MaMa, where Maya himself performed, says Maya was on “the precipice” of mainstream success before he died of AIDS-related complications. Bassichis, too, gives the sense of being on a constant precipice, of a person “about to” — about to go on stage, about to get the next laugh — a person who moves between generations, between struggles, and between forms. They are keeping up with the world and its crises but also trying to keep up with themselves.
“There was a deal with God where nothing happens the way it should happen,” they said. “It’s never the thing I go for that ends up happening. You end up in some good places, but it’s never what you planned. You’re somewhat adjacent to the room you thought you’d be in, looking out the window.”
Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, editor and a co-producer of The Palestine Festival of Literature. She is the author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution, published by Verso in 2022.
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