The topic that I’m drawn to for creating this piece is gigantic, huge, overwhelming and too much to put in a single papercut. I can’t call out racism and injustice in policing, arrests, bail, judges, sentencing, prison, post-prison and everything in between all in one papercut. I am trying to focus down. Maybe just big-picture on Injustice In the Justice System. Maybe just on ending mass incarceration. Maybe just on racism in the justice system in general.

But I also want to keep in mind the message I want to convey. I’m not making a papercut simply calling attention to these problems; I want to make a statement about Jewish responsibility for reforming the system. Like cutting the letters of Black Lives Matter out of a tallit.

Do I use prison bars? Tie them to a court building, maybe. Have a Jewish symbol – a tallit again, or a book – prying open the bars. Maybe I can use doves for the incarcerated, or doves as the Jewish symbol, or doves for both. I don’t want to try to represent the incarcerated by using human figures; that’s generally not my style, and it would be problematic if I then try to imply the race of the figures in their shape.

The Yiddish prayer mentions shackles. I like this idea because not only does it give me more artistic flexibility than prison bars, but shackles also evoke slavery, which in many ways the American justice system is an extension of our never-fully-eradicated slavery system.

Noam suggested I could have a torah in shackles, referencing something Heschel said about how if a Jew doesn’t work actively to live torah and improve the world, they can’t fully access torah in shul; torah is locked away from you if you aren’t doing justice in the world.

And I want this papercut to challenge the viewer. That’s difficult to fit in.