DTS: Burn centers around the Jewish colony movement--an episode of American history I had previously known nothing about. How come this history never seemed to come up in my high school?

JNF: I would characterize it as the intentionally, violently repressed counterhistory of American socialism.

My relatives were part of the socialist colony movement, but they experienced such extreme oppression during the McCarthy era, that I only fully understood what the colony movement was and how it was destroyed when I became an adult, and became interested in utopic communities, socialism, and radical Jewish history.

My grandparents were part of this movement, and I grew up charmed and alarmed by the half-told stories of the foibles of the Colony. I identified with the desire to create a personal and political utopia, an alternative to the patriarchal family and capitalist social structure. There is something so hilarious and tragic about the idea that banal, bourgeois suburban Westchester (or Successchester, as a friend of mine terms it) used to be scattered with radical socialist Jewish collectives! At the height of the labor movement in the '30s, there were several dozen of these colonies in Westchester, New Jersey, and Long Island. They were founded as summer retreats for factory workers, created to provide a respite from the city and promote solidarity between workers; they evolved into utopic communities that aimed to promote solidarity and an alternative social and economic structure--somewhat like a kibbutz--to working class Jewish people. Then, in the '50s, the twin demons of McCarthyism and assimilation more or less eradicated them.

As I grew older, and participated in my own versions of such communities, I became aware of the difficulties of sustaining such an enterprise--of how sexual politics and territorialism make collectivity impossible, and about how dialectics of power often play out in political communities. The profound misogyny that structured every aspect of such communities also struck me as resonant with my experiences with the political left (including its contemporary incarnation as the queer left) in this country, and the charisma and complexity of the women operating with this system also intrigued me. I was struck by the absurdity and nobility of the Colonist's enterprise; these dirt-poor immigrant Jews had such chutzpah, creating a socialist utopia in America! They were such small-time, powerless working class folks, most with little education or capital, and yet their ideals and dreams were so enormous. And even though they were just a bunch of hippies, essentially, the US government saw fit to silence them. I always wanted to write about them, somehow; once Sylvia appeared on the page, I began to find a voice and a path through this complex history.

Today, this history seems all too relevant. The Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney triumvirate's Patriot Act has given the green light to a McCarthyistic shadow world of illegal surveillance, interrogation, torture, and murder. Once again, racial 'others,' undocumented workers, and non-Christians are targeted. Meanwhile, forces of resistance are demonized, and the left is left to eat itself. In the Rumsfeld era of surveillance, illegal seizure of persons and property, and racial profiling, we see the same dynamics at work as in Sylvie's day: the retreat of the liberal middle class into bourgeois denial, the paranoia of the left in the face of very real persecution.