In January, 2024, ITP launched an experiment: a lab for us to explore how we ‘read’ together. We were invited to create a salon series in Harlem with Black and/or Jewish artists and clergy, and began what is now a multi-year, multi-borough series of regular gatherings. 

Rather than beginning with participants’ identities, positions, or experiences, we begin with a shared text and allow stories, histories, and perspectives to emerge through encounter. We gather around difficult texts, not difficult people. We’re not on the table; the text is.

As scholar Kevin Quashie writes, we often assume that certain texts belong only to certain audiences. Building on Quashie’s notion of textual belonging, our salons ask: How do we belong to a text together? A shared text becomes common ground where multiple histories, interpretations, and lived experiences can meet.