Literature and Poetry

Ayin Press is an independent publishing house and production studio rooted in Jewish culture and emanating outward. Both online and in print, they celebrate artists and thinkers at the margins and explore the growing edges of collective consciousness through a diverse range of mediums and genres. This includes—but is not limited to—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, art books, children’s books, interviews, translations, multimedia projects, conceptual projects, digital art, immersive events, and online programming.

Ayin was founded on a deep belief in the power of culture and creativity to heal, transform, and uplift the world we share and build together. Ayin is a letter in Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Phoenician, and many other languages. In Hebrew, Ayin means Eye, and also refers to a fountain or spring of water. Ayin signifies emergence and receptivity; letting light in, stimulating perception. Albi will partner with Ayin to develop a vertical of works in translation from Israeli and Palestinian authors, some of which will be published already in 2024.

In 2017 Novak stepped down from leading Breaking the Silence. Burnt out, exhausted, lonely and confused by the turbulent political struggle she had led, she packed her bag and bought a one-way ticket away from Israel, facing one last battle – with herself. Over the course of the next year, Novak traveled to the moon-like landscape of Iceland, where loneliness and rage threatened to engulf her; to the beaches of Portugal, where a psilocybin trip with a group of strangers quickly turned into a nightmare, exposing the unspoken personal costs that her political struggle demanded; to the hills of Ireland, where she fell in love with Ruth, and the two ventured out into the mountains to hike, hashing out their political and ideological differences before getting lost, hoping to be rescued;

and finally to the heart of South Africa, where Novak met and bonded with anti-apartheid activists and former soldiers of the apartheid regime, discovering unsettling and illuminating resonances between their stories and her own, and between the history and present of their country, and that of her own. It was there that Novak finally began to chart a course, complicated and fraught as it might have been, to begin to make her way home.

Albi is linking arms with our co-conspirators at Ayin Press to partner on the publishing of Yuli Novak’s bestselling “Who Do You Think You Are?” This will be the first English language publication of this world-crossing, world-making, and ground-breaking book.

With reality rapidly metamorphosing and the increasing inequality between the river and the sea that is so prevalent, we believe that there is a unique opportunity to reflect on the past and what brought us to where we are now, how we currently understand and read the present as well as how we anticipate and imagine (or re-imagine) the future.
Past / Present / Future (working title) is an entirely trilingual literary project that consists of original texts written by various contributors living in the Palestinian and Israeli spaces and reflecting their thoughts and reflections at this point in time.
This project is curated and produced by Amit Ben-Haim, Ben Ronen and Albi flagship artist Addam Yekutieli (aka Know Hope),

with the participation of a group of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, a broad range of individuals from different backgrounds, walks of life and tones of voice. This collage – of activists and artists, lawyers and community leaders, doctors and directors, and more – will grow from a shared intention of understanding and imagining our shared social and political realities. We root this project in the belief that the intersection between culture and resistance is necessary while working together towards a just future. Past / Present / Future is supported and funded through the Albi Lab and flows from Albi’s shared commitment to creating cultural change in and about Palestine-Israel.

The Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah was first written in 1971, at the beginning of their movement. It was written in a dark tin shack in Jerusalem on a stolen typewriter. In the introduction to this 50th Anniversary Edition, Reuven Abergel, one of the founders of the movement, writes that the Haggadah talks "about the pain, discrimination, and oppression that we were subjected to as part of Israel's policy of separation between Jews from Muslim countries and Jews from Eastern Europe." A year later, a fire destroyed most of the Israeli Black Panthers' archives, including the Haggadah. It was thought lost for some 40 years until a rabbi who collected Haggadot reached out to Abergel with a copy. In 2019, a second edition of the Haggadah was published in Hebrew as a pamphlet, an effort initiated through The Civil Archive of Social Struggles in Israel, led by Sapir Sluzker Amran.

After that, groups came together with the purpose of making the Israeli Black Panthers struggle and the Haggadah story accessible in both Hebrew and English as a way of promoting dialogue about the potential of Mizrahi struggle in Israel/Palestine. Translator Itamar Haritan worked closely with Abergel to translate the Haggadah into English starting in 2017 and has updated parts of it since then with his help. The Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah is a completely bilingual (Hebrew-English) book and in addition to the new translation from Haritan and introduction from Abergel, there are other new essays that reflect on the Israeli Black Panthers and the Haggadah text. It also includes powerful archival images of the Panthers and their activism.