Red Yenta Is the Dating Site With a Revolutionary Twist
If you're a rebel in search of a rebel, look no further
Mikhailova
Online dating can be hellish (and may very well be on its way out, at least as far as the younger generation is concerned). Much has already been written about how apps like Tinder are rotting our brains, putting our personal data at risk, and generally eroding our faith in humanity—and the creepy, abusive Tinder messages that many deal with on a regular basis is just the tip of an extremely toxic iceberg. For some people, there is yet another hurdle outside of staying safe and choosing the perfect profile photo or pithy bio quote—namely, literally mixing the personal with the political. What happens when a radical leftist dips their toe into the online dating pool? What does it look like to search for love—and revolution—in 2019?
“You can say on Tinder what your gender preferences are, but you can’t set a filter for politics, so if that’s something you actually care about you’re just kind of swiping,” Marissa Brostoff tells Playboy, describing her past experiences on the dating app and the endless filtering she must to do to find politically compatible people. Her hunt for other communists eventually proved fruitful, but left her wondering if there was a better way to bring people together in the name of radical love.
Brostoff is a 33-year-old freelance writer and grad student at City University of New York (CUNY); her counterpart, 28-year-old Mindy Isser, is a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. Together, the two of them have created one of the most wholesome corners of the often volatile online political milieu colloquially known as Left Twitter: an upstart socialist dating site called Red Yenta, which marries a charming spin on old-school personals ads with a revolutionary twist.
Isser says that the idea for the site was, rather fittingly, born on Twitter. After she tweeted complaining about how so many of the socialist men she knew did not date socialist women, she was met with responses from a number of people who explained that they didn’t want to seem like “creepers” by asking someone to a date while at an organizing meeting or in an explicitly political space, but were unsure how to meet other socialists outside of that context. For her, the conversation emphasized the need for a specifically romantic space, where everyone was there for the same reason, and—unlike on any other dating site—shared similar leftist politics. Thus, Red Yenta was born.
Brostoff is a 33-year-old freelance writer and grad student at City University of New York (CUNY); her counterpart, 28-year-old Mindy Isser, is a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. Together, the two of them have created one of the most wholesome corners of the often volatile online political milieu colloquially known as Left Twitter: an upstart socialist dating site called Red Yenta, which marries a charming spin on old-school personals ads with a revolutionary twist.
Isser says that the idea for the site was, rather fittingly, born on Twitter. After she tweeted complaining about how so many of the socialist men she knew did not date socialist women, she was met with responses from a number of people who explained that they didn’t want to seem like “creepers” by asking someone to a date while at an organizing meeting or in an explicitly political space, but were unsure how to meet other socialists outside of that context. For her, the conversation emphasized the need for a specifically romantic space, where everyone was there for the same reason, and—unlike on any other dating site—shared similar leftist politics. Thus, Red Yenta was born.
If we want to resist the state and all the normative hierarchical patriarchal modes of power, we have to unlearn the flawed ideas we have about love, and investigate what radical acts of love look like.
The way it works is easy: prospective lovers send in a short bio including their "socialist sect" (which spans the left-curious and earnest DSA types to full-fledged communists and militant anarchists) and their location, and Red Yenta takes care of the rest. Some of the founders’ favorite ads have come from a 26-year-old “cornbread commie; trans + queer gentlethem” in search of a hiking buddy; a 25-year-old gay man whose personal brand is “Lenin in the streets ‘ Dostoyevsky in the sheets” who’s looking for “Comrade Charming;” a 31-year-old Buddhist social worker looking for a monogamous relationship with “a red of any gender;” and a 22-year-old Marxist-Leninist whose heart is simply “too big for [her[ goddamn chest.”
They post a new batch of bios every week on Twitter and Instagram, and take a very hands-off editorial approach; as Isser says, “We’ve gotten complaints or messages about certain people or certain ways people described themselves, but so far, we’ve decided that unless there’s something that’s very obviously racist or otherwise fucked up we’re just going to post, and if people want to respond to them, they can.”
Diversity is an issue that Red Yenta has kept at the forefront of their minds since the project’s inception. “Because it was called Red Yenta and because both of us are loud Jews online, we thought from the very first wave of profiles that we got that we had just accidentally started a Jewish dating site,” Brostoff says with a laugh, before noting that the demographics of the site’s users seem to shift intermittently; at first, Jewish leftists made up the bulk of the submissions, but then came an upswing of bios from trans and gender-nonconforming people. Right now, Red Yenta’s current postings showcase a wide mix of identities, genders, and sexualities, though as Isser says, there is no denying that the bios still skew heavily towards white people, which is in and of itself a reflection of the broader organized socialist left in this country.
They post a new batch of bios every week on Twitter and Instagram, and take a very hands-off editorial approach; as Isser says, “We’ve gotten complaints or messages about certain people or certain ways people described themselves, but so far, we’ve decided that unless there’s something that’s very obviously racist or otherwise fucked up we’re just going to post, and if people want to respond to them, they can.”
Diversity is an issue that Red Yenta has kept at the forefront of their minds since the project’s inception. “Because it was called Red Yenta and because both of us are loud Jews online, we thought from the very first wave of profiles that we got that we had just accidentally started a Jewish dating site,” Brostoff says with a laugh, before noting that the demographics of the site’s users seem to shift intermittently; at first, Jewish leftists made up the bulk of the submissions, but then came an upswing of bios from trans and gender-nonconforming people. Right now, Red Yenta’s current postings showcase a wide mix of identities, genders, and sexualities, though as Isser says, there is no denying that the bios still skew heavily towards white people, which is in and of itself a reflection of the broader organized socialist left in this country.
Everyone dates; the poorest people in the world experience heartbreak; that is one thing that unifies us all.
“We want Red Yenta to be more racially diverse, [and] want it to be a place for all leftists, but also I think it speaks to a larger issue, which is that most of the people in socialist organizations in this country, primarily DSA, are white,” she explains. “I think a lot of the bios we’ve gotten have been from DSA members—though again, we’re open to all—so that’s a reflection of the socialist world that we’re in, but it doesn’t feel good, and is something I want to fix.”
Red Yenta’s users are also predominantly queer or polyamorous (or both), which Isser finds unsurprising. As she says, her experience growing up queer led her to her current political identity as a communist (“I think we [on the left] are gayer than everyone else, which is good!”), and Brostoff agrees.
“I think there’s a way that thinking about one’s romantic life in political terms that comes very easily for queer people, because we’ve always been doing that,” she explains. "The whole idea of sexual revolution comes from early 20th century Marxist thinkers, and the liberationist side of the left has thought very hard about where sexuality fits into the matrix of revolutionary action. I think there are good reasons that we’re not all Wilhelm Reichians anymore [but] there is a lot that is very useful to revive from that, and more generally, we’re not the first people ever to be thinking about this. [laughs] We’re just the first ones to be doing it on Twitter.”
No good deed goes unpunished, especially on Twitter, and Red Yenta have already gotten their fair share of pushback—though not from the end of the political spectrum one might expect. Rather, the site has drawn scorn from some fellow leftists.
“We’ve gotten a lot of pushback from what some people would call ‘tankies’ calling us cops, the FBI, and honeypots, but another thing that they’ve been saying is that communists should not be focused on things like romance,” Isser says. “I’ve been a union organizer for half a decade now, and I think there’s this thing that people who spend a lot of time on the internet—and not a lot of time actually organizing with people—do, which is have these very strange ideas about workers and the working class, as if we are all not workers, and are not full humans who experience joy, and pain, and pleasure, and have interests that are not just about working or reading or studying or building our vanguard party. Everyone dates; the poorest people in the world experience heartbreak; that is one thing that unifies us all. It’s so silly to pretend that communists are too good for romance and feelings.”
Red Yenta’s users are also predominantly queer or polyamorous (or both), which Isser finds unsurprising. As she says, her experience growing up queer led her to her current political identity as a communist (“I think we [on the left] are gayer than everyone else, which is good!”), and Brostoff agrees.
“I think there’s a way that thinking about one’s romantic life in political terms that comes very easily for queer people, because we’ve always been doing that,” she explains. "The whole idea of sexual revolution comes from early 20th century Marxist thinkers, and the liberationist side of the left has thought very hard about where sexuality fits into the matrix of revolutionary action. I think there are good reasons that we’re not all Wilhelm Reichians anymore [but] there is a lot that is very useful to revive from that, and more generally, we’re not the first people ever to be thinking about this. [laughs] We’re just the first ones to be doing it on Twitter.”
No good deed goes unpunished, especially on Twitter, and Red Yenta have already gotten their fair share of pushback—though not from the end of the political spectrum one might expect. Rather, the site has drawn scorn from some fellow leftists.
“We’ve gotten a lot of pushback from what some people would call ‘tankies’ calling us cops, the FBI, and honeypots, but another thing that they’ve been saying is that communists should not be focused on things like romance,” Isser says. “I’ve been a union organizer for half a decade now, and I think there’s this thing that people who spend a lot of time on the internet—and not a lot of time actually organizing with people—do, which is have these very strange ideas about workers and the working class, as if we are all not workers, and are not full humans who experience joy, and pain, and pleasure, and have interests that are not just about working or reading or studying or building our vanguard party. Everyone dates; the poorest people in the world experience heartbreak; that is one thing that unifies us all. It’s so silly to pretend that communists are too good for romance and feelings.”
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Red Yenta recently had its live debut at Verso Books’ anti-Valentines Day “Red Party,” where they staged a gender-blind, irreverent version of the Dating Game. The lucky “suitor” was a leader in the Brooklyn chapter of Socialist Alternative (who, according to Brostoff, “already has two boyfriends”), and the “bachelorette” was a socialist feminist organizer from Pittsburgh named Arielle Cohen. “In romance and revolution, it's about praxis,” Cohen tellsPlayboy. “Love is an active thing, [and] it's incredibly revolutionary to care for one another and realize we can't do this on our own. If we want to resist the state and all the normative hierarchical patriarchal modes of power, we have to unlearn the flawed ideas we have about love, and investigate what radical acts of love look like. We need love, we need each other.”
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“As much as I could tell, the people who could hear us in the front were very into it, and the people in the back were like,’What the fuck are they doing?’ Isser says of the Red Party experiment, inadvertently summoning a neat metaphor for Red Yenta itself. Brostoff and Isser have already gotten messages from several people who have found new friends (and potentially more) through the site, and are looking into planning more live events to keep the love flowing.
“We are kind of running a small community organization now, whether we meant to do that or not, so there is a certain kind of pressure built into that—we want to make sure nobody gets hurt,” Brostoff says. “We only deserve to have this be a cool fun thing if we’re also making it a place that’s good and not damaging for people. The world sucks ass, we could at least be as kind as possible to each other.”
During these dire times of great political division, it’s important to remember that revolutionaries need love, too. As long as lovelorn anti-fascists and lusty Leninists keep writing, Red Yenta will continue their mission of connecting people—both in the streets, and in the sheets.
