I’m a second-generation Holocaust survivor, born to refugees from Russia and Poland.

As a queer individual committed to Palestinian rights, you can imagine that my upbringing in an Orthodox Jewish home with a Rabbi as a father was not what one would call easy.

But I was exposed to so much art and beauty through cultural and religious traditions.

Even as a child, I wondered:

  • Could aesthetics have a role beyond religion?
  • Could beauty interrupt social suffering?
  • Could it be a force for healing and justice?

This became personal in a whole new way for me in 1995, when an arson fire destroyed my home. Everything was gone, just twisted metal and ash where my life used to be. I felt completely powerless.

Then one night before the six-month anniversary of the fire I had a dream of my Russian grandmother’s hands, reddened from peeling beets as she prepared borscht for Passover.

As a performance artist, I woke up compelled to re-create that image.

I returned to the ashes of my home, barefoot in a white dress, and peeled beets; 80 lbs of beets! The juice stained my hands red.

In the moment, I didn’t fully understand how this creative gesture was helping me process the trauma, but I was deeply curious about the connection between beauty and displacement. That curiosity became the driving force for my PhD research-creation about beauty in the built environment for the forcibly displaced.

Beauty, Displacement, and Healing

During one of my research events, a participant named Alexis, a refugee and immigration lawyer, spoke the words I hadn’t yet articulated for myself:

“As refugees, we lose our sense of beauty. And when that happens, we lose our sense of everything. Of life itself.”

That’s when it hit me.

I had lost my sense of beauty, and with it, my sense of life during that fire.

But the creative gesture of peeling those beets, barefoot, on the sidewalk in front of the gaping hole that was my home, helped restore it.

Passing on Beauty, Breaking the Cycle

I began working with first, second, and third-generation refugees from all over the world.

And I noticed something extraordinary: when families beautified their homes, it changed how their children understood their displacement stories. It had the ability to stop trauma from being passed down.

I had found my answer to those early questions:

  • Yes, beauty can interrupt social suffering.
  • Yes, it can be a tool for healing.
  • Yes, it can carry justice, not only through protest, but through presence.