23.09.26 Ronnie Gross: What Does Freedom Ask of Us? Artist Talk

werkraum bild und sinn: Artist Talk im Rahmen unseres Formats „Jüdische Realitäten“
Ronnie Gross
What Does Freedom Ask of Us?
Reflections on Living in a Ceasefireless World (engl.)

September 23, 2026, 7:30 pm
@bajszel ProgrammSchänke, Berlin

October 7, 2023, permanently changed how Israeli writer and grief facilitator Ronnie Gross experiences life, love, and loss. The murder of her friend Carmel Gat z”l in Hamas captivity was followed by an avalanche of other losses—of home, relationships, belonging, and certainty—and gave rise to her ongoing newsletter, Grief and Travel Journal, excerpts of which were published in the yearbook „Jewish Realities After October 7“ by werkraum bild und sinn e.V.

Written from Israel during war and from periods spent elsewhere in Europe, the journal asks what it means to remain human in a “Ceasefireless World”: a world in which conflict has become an ongoing condition, externally and internally. Increasingly, another question has emerged from the writing: What does freedom ask of those who still possess it?

Drawing on writings from the past two years, the talk moves through war, displacement, mourning, migration, psychotherapy, community, and the stubborn continuation of ordinary life. It asks what remains possible when so much has been lost, and what it means to stay attentive—to suffering, but also to beauty; to responsibility, but also to freedom; to the realities of others without abandoning one’s own.

At the heart of the evening is the possibility of holding realities in the plural: love and anger, fear and safety, beauty and devastation, the longing to leave and the longing to remain. Rather than resolving these contradictions, Gross’s writing asks what might become possible when we allow them to coexist—and whether attention, listening, and the preservation of our capacity to be affected can themselves become forms of resistance to dehumanization.

Combining readings from Grief and Travel Journal with personal reflection, the evening is an invitation to consider what freedom, responsibility, and humanity might ask of us in a world that offers no simple ceasefire.