LINKE FLIGL WAS A QUEER JEWISH CHICKEN FARM & CULTURAL ORGANIZING PROJECT THAT WORKED TOWARD BUILDING A RADICAL DIASPORIC JEWISH FUTURE ROOTED IN LAND, TRADITION, HEALING AND JUSTICE.
Through growing nourishing food, cultivating land-based community and organizing for reparations, we co-created Jewish cultural practice for collective healing, resilience and liberation.
After 7 years of vibrant life and community building from 2016 - 2022, Linke Fligl decided to sunset our project, in rhythm with the shmita (release) year of 5782/2022. Read more about our decision to close during shmita, listen to a podcast on how we brought love and intention to our final year, and visit our archive at YIVO!
Although Linke Fligl is now closed, our website lives on for at least the duration of this current shmita cycle (until 2029)! Echoing our beloved LF queer ancestor Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz z”l, “For the young brave diasporists, heading into this new century’s heart seeking each other,”… we hope our story and resources inspire you on your diasporic journey, and remind you of your inherent belonging to Judaism, land, community and queerness.
To support our ongoing archival process as well as our core staff in this year of transition, please consider making a gift to the Linke Fligl Legacy. You can also find our past merch (including stickers, shirts and zines) at Pushcart Judaica!
our Beginnings
Linke Fligl was born from a longing for vibrant rural queer Jewish life at the intersection of Jewish tradition and liberatory politics. In 2015, LF’s co-founder, Margot Seigle, gave a reparations gift of 181 acres to WILDSEED Community Farm & Healing Village, a Black and Brown-led healing sanctuary and political & creative home. WILDSEED generously offered the use of 10 acres to build toward our dreams of radical land-based Jewish community. Inspired by the history of socialist Jewish chicken farmers across the US in the 1920s and 30s, Margot Seigle and Adin Zuckerman co-founded LF in the spring of 2016 as a queer Jewish chicken farm. In the years that followed, we grew into a thriving local farm project and a hub of Jewish cultural organizing.
our work
At LF, we saw land-based cultural work as critical practice to build a more just world. We created space to reclaim our inherent connection to land, tradition and each other while confronting legacies of colonialism, antisemitism and assimilation. We practiced an embodied and land-based Judaism centered in our traditions and sacred texts, woven with queer ritual and guided by Jewish time. We hosted queer and trans Jews for immersive land-based celebrations of Jewish festivals and life on the farm, taught at various gatherings nationally and participated in regional and national organizing of liberatory Jewish ritual and community.
Some of our offerings over the years included our annual Sukkot retreats, virtual Hallel, Shavuot for Black Lives Text Study, our Cultural Organizing Team 2-year leadership cohort, and a collective zine project about land, justice and home(coming) in Jewish diaspora. In addition, we had a small farm business through which we sold eggs, chicken and apparel.
“I’m having a hard time finding the right words to describe what celebrating Sukkot at Linke Fligl with 40 radical queer Jews of varying identities has brought up for me. Never in my very secular and assimilated life would I have thought I’d find a home for myself in Judaism”
the land
Linke Fligl was located in Millerton, NY on occupied Schaghticoke and Mohican territory, currently stewarded by WILDSEED. LF tended 10 acres of expansive, marshy, fully off-grid farmland nestled among the Taghkanic Mountains. We paid a 5 to 10% land tax to Schaghticoke First Nations on all sales, program contributions and donations to honor that we were settlers on this land, with a hope to contribute to its healing.
We are grateful for our neighbors WILDSEED, the Watershed Center and Rock Steady Farm, all radical land-based community projects alongside whom we learned and grew for 7 years.
OUR CHICKENS
Our birds were free range, organically fed and heritage breed - which means that unlike most chickens, hybridized to eat less and grow faster, they were bred over generations to live a long and productive life outdoors free of chronic pain and sickness. We are grateful for Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA) for helping us acquire our first and second round of chicks from Good Shepard Poultry Ranch in Lindsborg, Kansas. LF sold eggs by the dozen and half dozen at Random Harvest Market in Craryville, NY and through Rock Steady Farm CSA.
From matzo ball soup to schmaltz, chickens have always been a big part of Ashkenazi Jewish food culture. We are grateful to have fed our community this nourishing ancestral food. Over the years, we also had the privilege of hosting multiple community shechita events, where folks witnessed and participated in queer-led kosher slaughter and meat processing. At the time of closing, our flock had been rehomed with Roberto, our friend and neighbor across the street, and Xena, a fellow queer Jew in Hamilton, NY.
“Y’all have provided a framework for what it can look like to strive toward being in right relationship with land and community and I’m one of the many, many folks that is deeply grateful for your work.”
Thank you!
Deep, humble gratitude to everyone near and far who wove Linke Fligl into their lives and hearts over the years! From our local friends who were in it with us day in and day out to our far flung community who may have never touched the land and everyone in between - this project wouldn’t exist without you. Special shout out to our staff, Cultural Organizing Team and advisors, as well as everyone who offered their guidance and leadership to this project. And thank you to our donors and multi-year funders - including Rise Up, Jewish Liberation Fund and Resist, and our fiscal sponsor Allied Media Project - we are so grateful for the trust and support.
