Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience
Published 2016
Dazzle Camouflage offers two profiles of contemporary theater artists, Jenny Romaine and The Eggplant Faerie Players, generating analysis about their shared transformative theatrical strategies. Using oral history, archival research, and experiences working with these artists, the author tells their stories and identifies the roles of Dazzle Camouflage, Re-Mixing History, and Rehearsing Resistance in their work. Both profiles are interwoven with progressive Jewish and Queer culture and politics.
Read the book
Read more
Spectacular Vernacular: An Interview with Ezra Berkley Nepon on New Yiddish Theater, Queer Performance Arts, and “Dazzle Camouflage.” (Interview with Anna Elena Torres in In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2016)
We Have a Past and a Future (Interview with Theodore Kerr in Arts Everywhere, 2016)
“Let’s get this femme on the record” included in the anthology Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy. (2015)
“Zamlers, Tricksters, and Queers: Re-Mixing Histories in Yiddishland and Faerieland” included in the anthology Transformative Language Arts in Action. (2014)
“By evoking and drawing us into these alternative worlds, Nepon’s book helps us imagine a world we want to live in – one of expansive gender possibilities, creative hilarity, and wild justice. Nepon provides a vital service by documenting how these artists remix, recycle, and rearrange traditions and rituals into contemporary queer culture, thus allowing all of us to connect to our pasts as we set out to create more fabulous futures.” Review by Wendy Elisheva Somerson in make/shift: feminisms in motion (Issue 20; Summer/Fall 2017)
Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue: A History of the New Jewish Agenda
Published 2012, Thread Makes Blanket Press
New Jewish Agenda (NJA) was a national organization from 1980 to 1992 with the slogan "a Jewish voice among progressives and a progressive voice among Jews." NJA practiced participatory grassroots democracy with over 45 local chapters and 5,000 members. NJA organized a progressive Jewish voice for every political issue of their decade: working for Middle East Peace, Central America Solidarity, Worldwide Nuclear Disarmament, Economic and Social Justice in the US, and they had a powerful Jewish Feminist Taskforce that included work on LGBT issues and the emergence of the AIDS pandemic. New Jewish Agenda took radical stances on the rights of Palestinians and Queer Jews. Activists from a wide range of religious and secular communities coalesced in NJA, building power and analysis that continue to illuminate our movements today.
The book is a history of NJA and includes afterwords essays by Dr. Rachel Mattson and Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, original art by Abigail Miller, and an appendix of key documents.
Read the book
Read more
Looking Back at New Jewish Agenda (Interview with Ben Lorber, Jewish Currents, 2012)
“We know about the Jewish anarchists, communists, and socialists of the early 20th century. We know, too, that Jews were disproportionately involved in the civil rights and New Left movements of the mid-20th century. What about all the Jewish rabble rousers in the late 20th century? Justice, Justice is a fascinating hidden history of Jewish activism in Reagan’s America. Ezra Berkley Nepon gives us the inside scoop of New Jewish Agenda, both a clearinghouse for Jewish involvement in a range of progressive causes of the 1980s and a bulwark against the din of conservative voices in Jewish communities. Nepon’s careful, critical work is a gift to those who pursue justice in the 21st century.” – Dan Berger, historian, organizer, and author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity and The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism
Selected Other Writing
More recent
No Gala for Genocide (2023)
A Report from LGBTI Philanthropy (Trans Studies Quarterly, Vol 9 Issue 3) (2022)
On Grassroots Fundraising
Fundraising for direct action and legal defense: a case study of the 2000 RNC protests (2015) Interface: a journal for and about social movements (Volume 7:1) and Grassroots Fundraising Journal (Vol. 34:4). [Co-written with Kris Hermes]
Emily Post-Capitalism and the Revolutionary Etiquette of Crowdfunding. (2014)
Grassroots Fundraising Journal. (Vol. 33:2) [Interview with Annie Danger]A Proposed Ethics of Crowdfunding [co-developed with with Annie Danger] (2014)
On Participatory Grantmaking
Letting the Movement Decide: FRIDA Grantmaking Report (co-author; The Lafayette Practice, 2015)
Funding Free Knowledge The Wiki Way: Wikimedia Foundation’s Participatory Grantmaking (co-author; The Lafayette Practice, 2015)
Who Decides: How Participatory Grantmaking Benefits Donors, Communities and Movements (co-author; The Lafayette Practice, 2014)
On Membership-Based Organizations
From the Bottom Up: Strategies and Practices for Membership‐Based Organizations (co-author; Sylvia Rivera Law Project, 2013)
Earlier Essays
Reflections from a Homownersexual. Writing about buying and selling a house with anticapitalist intentions. Published on EnoughEnough.org and reposted on Feministing. (2008)
Wrestling with Esther: Purim Spiels, Gender, and Political Dissidence. Zeek Magazine. (2006)
My Great-Great Grandfather was an Anti-Zionist (and all I got was this 21st Century Quagmire!). Tikkun Magazine online. (2006)