Signal Fire Radical Jewish Artist Cooperative creates and distributes collaborative art projects, individual members’ work, and creates sustainable community for radical Jewish artists and our accomplices. We launched in 2025/5785, growing out of ten years of co-creating the Radical Jewish Calendar, joining with Dreaming the World to Come Planner and Pushcart Judaica; we are artists, writers, organizers, and more. We are excited to, in the coming years, create more art, tell more stories, and be a space that experiments with collaborative self-governance and artists collectively directing how our work is made and distributed.
We are working people gathering around a fire that we build to warm us, to help feed us, to light up the space we share and make it beautiful. We are here to work together; to enjoy our time together; to learn and grow together. To get shit done, but not to hustle. To speak directly and listen openly: about our work together, about our lives, about politics and ideas. Our work together is Jewish: the liberatory cultures we are building, the questions and arguments we are having, the commitments and embodiments we bring, the messiness of diasporist life.
We are different from each other, and live in different relationships to different revolutionary movements. We share radicalism: the desire and necessity to look at the roots, the structures, of the world as it is and the world as we want to make it. Call it “multi-tendency,” or call it moving together, differently. We care for each other while we disagree.
Some of the things we agree must end:
Zionism. Capitalism. White supremacy. Colonialism. Misogyny. Ethnocentrism. Dis/ableism. The Prison Industrial Complex. Miseducation.
Some of the things we agree to fight for:
Blackness. Land back. Reparations. Transness. Queerness. Self-determination. Our varied, changing landbodyminds.
These are not the only words for these things. We care more about the practices than the words.
Meet the Artists
Ayeola Omolara Kaplan is a Black Queer artist empowered by abolition and womanism. Through depicting the intersections of identity, class, and spirituality, she contributes to the moving canon of revolutionary surrealism. Ayeola creates with the belief that art can be weaponized as self-defense against an anti-truth culture plagued by unhealed generational trauma. Her work features electrifying imagery created to energize people and celebrate international working class solidarity. You can support Ayeola and receive monthly stickers and art mail as a subscriber to her patreon.
Bird Barnow is a true freak born to the saltwater and mountains of the Pacific Northwest and has been dancing with their muse and creating art since they can remember. They were loudly called by their ancestors as a young trans person to apprentice to and queer ancient jewish earth based traditions. As a land steward and Temple Keeper at Ten of Cups Farm in the Big Bottom Valley, Bird is a part of a family and community who provide space for those who seek respite, healing, and nature. They love to cook for lots of people, milk the goats, and make sculptures with the land. Being a founding member of Signal Fire has been a wonderful addition to their life.
Elissa Martel is a youth services librarian and artist based on Massachusett land in Boston. She is the Art Editor for the Radical Jewish Calendar, and a founding member of Signal Fire Radical Jewish Artist Cooperative. Check out her art, music, and musings on Instagram and her website.
emma//essra is an astrologer, tarot reader, archaeologist, & herbalist from lënapehòkink phl. always learning from animism, diasporism, & antifascism, they weave ancestral ritual and myth meaning-making into larger tapestries exploring time as a spiral, textures of hope & despair, and the tectonics of land, grief, death, and memory. you can find their art, writings, & book oracle readings through their website꩜
Etai Rogers-Fett is a printmaker and book artist weaving together archival research, oral history, folktales, and speculative imagining in order to visually explore Yiddish cultural transmission. He understands acts of transformative repetition as the connective marrow between the Yiddishist, cultural dimensions of his work and the technical side of craft traditions like printmaking and book binding. Etai currently lives on Cherokee, Yuchi, and Muscogee land in Knoxville, TN.
Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg is a teacher, writer, organizer and calendar-maker based on Dakota land in Minneapolis. She is co-author, alongside Rabbi Ariana Katz, of For Times Such As These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year, and a founding member of Signal Fire Radical Jewish Artist Cooperative.
Nomy Lamm is a multi-media artist, musician, illustrator, and ritualist, and the Creative Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice org. They are an ordained kohenet/Hebrew priestess, a published writer and recording artist, and one of the creators of the Dreaming the World to Come Hebrew planner. They live on Squaxin land in Olympia, WA with their partner Lisa, their dogs Dandelion and Romance, and their cats Primrose and Sage.
Maia Brown is a visual artist, Yiddish musician and dance-leader, writer, translator and educator based on unceded Duwamish, Coast Salish land in Seattle. With a background in oral history and fine art, she is also the founder of anti-fascist Yiddish folk-punk duo, Brivele.
rosza is a cultural worker, agitator, and organizer in northern lenapehoking. never learned how to make art for art’s sake; rarely likes working alone; can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them: outfits, collectives, performances, barricades, meals…just another diesel fem veltlekhe diasporist gendertreyf mischling who identifies with, not as. also part of Rooted In This World secular radical jewish network, Survived & Punished NY, CYCO Yiddish Book Center, and other projects.