Farming on the Front Lines

Abstract

The Jewish community farming movement began in 2004 with the founding of Adamah and it now comprises over twenty farming organizations bound together by a shared sense that the best way to face the climate crisis is by drawing on the well of Jewish tradition. These Jewish farmers put environmental ethics into practice as they face the realities of our time. The multispecies theorist Donna Haraway refers to this era as the Chthulucene, which she describes as “a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.” In this article, I draw on Haraway’s work and on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Jewish community farming organizations all over North America to describe the ways in which Jewish farmers are “staying with the trouble” in this era.