Jewish Currents Podcast On the Nose: The Hill, Arielle Angel in conversation with Harriet Clark, May 7, 2026, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-hill.
This episode of the On the Nose/Jewish Currents podcast grapples existentially with the question of what remains to be done when one is at the mercy of the prison system. The ever-insightful Arielle Angel speaks with Harriet Clark about her recently published book “The Hill”: an autobiographical novel about a child who can only be with her mother during weekly prison visits. The child simply wants to see her mother and devotes her entire life to this—for 38 years. It wasn’t until 2019 that the mother was released. Harriet Clark’s mother is Judith Clark, a former member of Weather Underground and the communist organization May 19th in the U.S., sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981 for her participation in a robbery in which three people died. The grandparents who care for the child were also communists; within the family, revolutionary activism for a just world was passed down from generation to generation, with great harshness toward themselves and others.
Harriet Clark recounts with incredible poignancy her insights into a prison system where the separation of children from their parents is systematic and the destruction of families is intentional. Family reunification, if it happens at all, can only take place within the prison itself. She brings into sharp relief things we already know—such as how drastically this system has evolved and become dehumanizing since 2001. She connects the supposedly exceptional fate of imprisonment with the big questions of life and literature—for example, with death (her grandparents die); when a loved one dies, a part of oneself goes with them, just as in prison. What helped me particularly was the thought that people always looked out for her—even strangers, even prison staff—and that her mother, too, looked out for others while in prison; so they weren’t alone, even though they were, of course, completely alone, and that this child held the family together in the face of the repressive system, even though that was, of course, an overwhelming burden and actually impossible. So this comforting yet inconsolable sense of being held within the human and the solidarity that children experience in resistant social contexts, but which is missing in non-resistant social contexts. I also found it particularly interesting how Arielle Angel compares the child’s persistence in returning to prison with the persistence of the Palestinian demand for return, and how the two discuss the radicalism and “derangedness” of such a desire to return home. And there is much more to be learned from this conversation.