“Everything I do is journalism,” Arielle Lana Lejarde tells me on a Friday afternoon Zoom call. It’s a methodology as much as a philosophical outlook.
When she’s not at her day job managing a newsletter, she’s a culture writer with bylines in places like Rolling Stone and Brooklyn Magazine. When she’s not profiling artists, she’s a DJ who educates partygoers by injecting genre pioneers into her setlists. When she’s not behind a DJ booth, she’s organizing music journalist get-togethers with her friend Andre Gee. She, Gee, and fellow veteran writers Timmhotep Aku and Alphonse Pierre are fusing those worlds with Freedom Writers: a Fundraiser for Journalists in Palestine, a party set to take place at Brooklyn’s Mood Ring this Thursday (July 3). As its title says, it’s a linkup designed to raise funds for journalists reporting on wartime atrocities in the region. Part-function, part-fundraiser, all journalism, the get-together is a call to action. And the action itself.
The plan began to take shape a week after the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) announced that they had counted up to 178 journalists who were killed in Palestine since the conflict exploded again on Oct. 23, 2023. After spending nearly two years reposting information about purported acts of genocide, Lejarde sent Gee a text suggesting that they take action following the CPJ’s report.
“Sometimes it feels like we could be doing more and there's nothing better than to actually do something by getting our community together and showing that there are contributions to be made,” says Lejarde. “And we can do it in our own way.” According to Gee, who operates as Rolling Stone’s hip-hop staff writer, that path was a surprisingly natural one.
“I appreciate that our community is made up of people who we're aligned with value wise,” says Gee, who is hosting the party along with Lejarde and Aku. “When we were sending invites, it's not like there were people we had to omit because we don't know where they stand. These are all the same peers we would invite to anything else.”
Together, Lejarde and Gee pulled from the same network of friends to make sure the party is crowded. They extracted DJ talent from the same pool. In addition to herself, Pitchfork Senior Staff Writer Pierre, Finals Blog co-founder Andrew Matson, and Politics of Dancing’s Annabel Ross will also take the time to deliver DJ sets. 100% of the proceeds from the event will go to International Media Support, “a non-profit organisation working to strengthen the capacity of media to reduce conflict, strengthen democracy and facilitate dialogue.”
When the function unfolds, it will look much like any other writer linkup — fun spaces where local creatives are able to find peace in a land of decreasing pay rates and a fundamental dearth of full-time jobs for even the most skilled writers. Events like this one can feel like a slice of refuge. By design, Lejarde and Gee’s events are for journalists and by journalists. This one is the same — except it’s for journalists abroad. And the stakes are obviously weightier.
While there have been casualties on both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict, the distribution of tragedies is microcosmically stark; of the 178 journalists killed, 176 have been Palestinian. Two have been Israeli. In an era of sanitized media and targeted reporter killings, the stakes are life and death, and the stakeholders face the same disproportionate violence as the victims they’re writing about. For Freedom Writers organizers, it’s even weightier because of a shared profession. If not the same immediate gravity.
“Because we are journalists we have solidarity with other journalists who were reporting and recording for the archive, that it's kind of our duty to help out how we can get in where we fit in,” says Aku, a veteran journalist-organizer with stints at Pitchfork and NPR. “And this is a great way to do it.” In a world of extremes and all-or-nothing fatalism, feelings of hopelessness can drive you to search for average ways of doing nothing. Events like Freedom Writers can spur passive tragedy observers into activity.
“There's a lot of pessimism around organizing and a lot of like, oh, ‘What you're doing doesn't actually matter.’ And that's why I feel like what Andre and Arielle have organized is cool,” says Pierre. “It’s just getting people to gather and think about something while also just having a night in their own community. I feel like that's something that could happen more.”
“Any meaningful action that’s happened in history has involved a collective of people who were aligned with each other,” adds Gee. “So don't even think about [causes] in terms of just ’you’ as if the weight is going to be just on you. Be collective minded.”
That collectivism is the spiritual spine of the Freedom Writers party. It’s bookended by an institutional belief in action over apathy. “I think I can speak for everyone where you may feel a sense of helplessness,” says Aku. “But I think the rule of organizing is to do what you can where you are from your position whenever possible.”
This Thursday, inside of a dimly lit bar on Myrtle Ave, it will be possible. Following her own personal journalistic tradition, Lejarde plans to include Palestinian acts in her set. “I like to think that everything I do makes an impact,” she says. “And I hope so.”
Freedom Writers: a Fundraiser for Journalists in Palestine will take place at Mood Ring on Thurs., July 3 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. EST