Push The Water

Order at Thread Makes Blanket Press

About

Push the Water is a politically astute memoir built around the moving image. In it, filmmaker and artist, Irit Reinheimer, weaves together descriptions of archival footage, home movies and memories that prompt new recognitions of her Jewish family’s participation in settler-colonialism and the occupation of Palestine. At the center of this investigation is a painful divide between Reinheimer and her mother, who appears in the foreground as the subject. Through this analysis of their relationship, the author seeks to understand her own connection to tradition, culture and inheritance. These dreamy and vulnerable meditations deny a reader the simple unspooling of the films themselves, asking us to consider what’s been hidden from view, as much as what’s been centered.

This is a story about what it means to be claimed by violent forces and what it looks like to refuse that claim, to choose a queer, liberatory belonging instead. Here you’ll find politics rendered as image, image refracted through memory, and memory bisected by love and rage.

“This memoir at its best. Reinheimer writes with both radical vulnerability and the sharp, analytical mind of an ethnographer, connecting the personal and the political as she highlights the erasure of violence in her own family’s record to reveal larger historical truths. With political wit and queer sensibility, Push the Water, deconstructs a simple us/them divide to engage painful and powerful questions of what it means to adopt a position that puts us at odds with those we love and who love us.” — Wazhmah Osman

"Wrestling with our own complicity with the state is essential as Jews committed to Palestinian liberation, and I’m profoundly grateful for this astute, thoughtful exploration of the painful tangles of family and politics." — Dori Midnight

“Irit Reinheimer's beautiful meditation on the question and drama of the category of the family, especially the maternal, elucidates how this category is entangled with Israeli occupation and colonization. Push the Water is as indispensable as it is affecting. Reinheimer's text unfolds like a current -- a gentle and measured but urgent push. There's also an undertow, one that shows how the emotional ties that suture together family are also subject to friction and tension, weathering. In a resolute and commanding way -- like a wave that erodes what was once firm foundational beliefs -- Reinheimer grapples with political ties, and how they saturate the most intimate of social connections. Reinheimer's text however isn't only about impasse, but ultimately about openings, breakthroughs and political transformation.“ — Che Gossett, Associate Director, Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

“Irit Reinheimer has given us a beautiful meditation on family, violence, and the places we (never) call home. Elegant and sophisticated, Push the Water is a bold exploration of Jewish identity and queer kinship in search of a better world.” — Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family's Journey