In getting ready to welcome Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish New Year, I am also excited to celebrate a personal anniversary of a very meaningful professional milestone: twenty years since the completion of my BFA degree at UAF. Shortly after the onset of the current millennium, I felt like the luckiest person on Earth to be a Painting and Printmaking student at the UAF Art Department, living in Alaska as a newly confirmed US citizen – then a recent asylum-granted refugee, having experienced firsthand the mandatory service in the Soviet Army and the collapse of the country that enforced that mandate.

I stepped onto the bridge beside the tall patch of fireweed blossoms, careful not to step in the reindeer scat lying in the brush, as the swirling river shimmered ahead beneath the hot July sun.

On Wednesday, April 9, University of Alaska Fairbanks and wider Fairbanks community members came together for a teach-in and rally in support of Palestinian liberation and the constitutional right to free speech and assembly. The chant “Money for jobs and education, not for bombs and occupation” was one of many chants that could be heard across UAF’s lower Troth Yeddha’ campus.