Welcome to the Jewish Ancestral Healing
Season 3 first released as the Shavuot Siyum
We’re excited to gather with you for Season 3 of Jewish Ancestral Healing on this holiday of revelation to immerse in conversations featuring spiritual leaders, artists, activists and visionaries on their journeys of ancestral healing, embracing resilience, and ancestor reverence practices rooted in Jewish traditions and counter-oppressive devotion.
On Shavuot, many stay up all night in a learning ceremony of tikkun leyl / healing night. In the morning, ancestor-honoring prayers of remembrance / yizkor are offered, and it is a time of siyum, of celebrations of completions - usually of reading a sacred book. Here, we extend the custom of siyum to celebrate the completion of our Jewish Ancestral Healing podcast series.
May this offering be a portal of connection. May we may root in positive resource, remember ancient ways, and innovate toward collective liberation. May we be deeply nourished by the well of our loving and wise ancestors.
Listen in as Taya Mâ welcomes into the Jewish Ancestral Healing Shavuot Siyum and speaks on revelation, ancestor-honoring and siyum in connection with Shavuot and this offering.
Erev Shavuot Conversations / Thursday Night
Nomy Lamm
Nomy Lamm is a musician, illustrator, creative coach, a kohenet/Hebrew Priestess, and the Creative Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice based performance project. Nomy sings cosmic power ballads for the rise of the matriarchy in a band called The Beauty, and creates ritual tools for embodied Jewish feminist practice, including the Dreaming the World to Come planner and podcast, and the Omer Oracle deck. They live in Olympia, WA on occupied Squaxin / Nisqually / Chehalis land with their partner Lisa and their animal companions Dandelion, Momma, and Chanukah.
Imani Chapman
Dr. Imani Romney-Rosa Chapman, the founder and director of imani strategies, llc, is a powerful, dynamic, faith-filled, compassionate, change leader for equity. She has more than 30 years of experience organizing, educating and developing curriculum for social justice. Imani works for a world in which her children and the young people in your lives can live wholly and safely into their full humanity in an equitable world where race is not a major determinant in health, wealth, legal, and educational outcomes. She is an alumna of Hebrew Union College- Jewish Institute of Religion where she earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in Interfaith Clinical Education for Pastoral Care and was a UJA Graduate Fellow.
Susan Barocas
Susan Barocas finds the kitchen to be a place of unending creativity and connection. She is a writer, chef, cooking instructor and caterer with a passion for healthy, no-waste cooking and Jewish cuisines, especially the Sephardic food, history and culture of her ancestors.
She served as the guest chef for three of President Obama’s White House Seders where she brought Sephardic foods and flavors to the table. In addition to writing for such publications as the Washington Post, Lilith and Moment magazine, Susan has presented classes, talks and programs as well as cooked across the US and internationally and on broadcast media.
As founding director of the innovative Jewish Food Experience, Susan created a website and programming that reflects the diversity of the Jewish experience. Susan is in the process of launching a new project with the Ladino singer Sarah Aroeste, called Savor: A Sephardic Music & Food Experience , bringing together these touchpoints of Sephardic history and culture. For more information about the history of Sephardic food, check out Susan’s award-winning article in Lilith magazine.
Shavuot Day 1 / Friday
Izza Genini
Izza Genini, known as “The Godmother of Moroccan Film” is a director, founder of the production company Ohra, and active campaigner for the cinema of Morocco and North Africa. Izza was born in 1942 in Casablanca, grew up in France and returned to Morocco an adult. Her films — including Return to Oulad Moumen and Trances, and her film series Morocco Body and Soul and Musical Morocco — weave themes including Moroccan Jewish heritage, diasporic identities, women’s traditions and sacred sound. Izza’s films explore musical tradition and ceremony of Amazigh, al-Andalus, Cheikate, Gnawa, Sephardic Jews and more. Her films A Song for Shabbat, Nuba of Light and Gold and Embroidered Canticles and more speak to the intersections of Moroccan Jewish and Muslim experience and expression. Izza has inspired generations of artists and filmmakers and is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Pomegranate award from the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival for excellence and achievement.
Jared Jackson
Jared Jackson, MAJNM, is the Founder and Executive Director of Jews in ALL Hues, an education and advocacy organization that builds a world where intersectional diversity and dignity are normative. A Philadelphia-born multi-heritage Jew, Jared is an internationally renowned Jewish diversity leader, consultant, facilitator, speaker, writer, musician, and entrepreneur. He is an alum of the Selah leadership program through Bend The Arc: A Jewish Partnership for justice. Jared holds a certificate of nonprofit management from LaSalle University and was named one of the “Jews That Will Change the World” by periodical, Ma’ariv. Along with everything else, In May of 2021, Jared graduated from Hebrew Union College with a Master of Arts in Jewish Nonprofit Management.
Margot S. Neuhaus
Margot S Neuhaus is a mixed-media artist whose work centers the transformation of intergenerational trauma. Her parents fled Poland in 1943, having lost most of their family in the Holocaust. They landed in Mexico, where Margot was born and spent her formative years.
While working as a psychiatric social worker, delving into art became a way for Margot to understand and heal from her family’s difficult history. After creating a series of abstract paintings related to the Holocaust, Margot realized that she was depicting the unspoken feelings of her parents, who had been silent about their past. She exhibited those paintings at a gallery in Esslingen, Germany, from where her husband’s family fled, and was also able to honor her family in their ancestral land by showing them at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland.
Her most recent exhibition, "Of Darkness and Light" was shown at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC, and her works are in several collections, including the Art Museum of the Americas and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Eva Clara
Eva Clara is a midwife of dreams and a champion of wildness. Her work centers the question of what enables individuals and communities to thrive. Her grandparents fled Poland and Germany for Mexico and Brazil before and during the Second World War, having lost most of their families. Eva felt haunted by her family’s history, and sought a relationship to the legacy of the Holocaust that was life-giving.
She grew up dancing, and turned to movement and ritual as catalysts for healing. This process led her into a study of modalities that encompass healing as well as thriving, including a master’s in somatic psychotherapy, and training in life coaching, tai chi and energy work.
In her work as a life coach and intuitive healer, she uses an integrative approach to support people in turning pain into purpose, and living in ways that light them up every day. She offers virtual sessions to clients all over the world–life coaching, and intuitive healing.
Shavuot Day 2 / Shabbat
This conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a collaboration with the The Sarah & Hajar Series: Sacred Practice and Possibility at the Intersections of Judaism and Islam and Hadar’s Web.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, curator of anti-colonial archives, film essayist, and theorist of photography. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is of Algerian and Palestinian descent and identifies as a Muslim Jew, which she powerfully unpacks in her article Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues.
Azoulay recently completed a children story, Gold Threads, based on an early 20th century strike led by jewelers and gold spinners, acting also as guardians of the Muslim and Jewish world in Fes, Morocco. Ariella Aïsha’s newest book project is Algerian Letters - The Jewelers of the Ummah (Verso 2024), and its companion film, the world like a jewel in the hand.
Penny Rosenwasser
Penny Rosenwasser, Ph.D, is lifelong heartfelt white-Ashkenazi-Jewish queer/lesbian rabble-rouser for justice. She loves learning new things, having adventures, and being a Jew. Her most recent book, Hope into Practice: Jewish women choosing justice despite our fears, focuses on working through internalized anti-semitism so toward being more effective world-changers. She currently helps lead initiatives in her Oakland synagogue around challenging white supremacy and decentering whiteness.
Penny is founding board member of Jewish Voice for Peace, chaired the Jewish Caucus of the National Women’s Studies Association, and co-taught an Antisemitism/Anti-Arabism class with a Palestinian colleague at the City College of San Francisco. She leads workshops and classes and speaks publicly about internalized and outward anti-Semitism, white nationalism & white supremacy, activism and empowering leadership. Find Penny blockading streets or leading songs around climate justice with 1000 Grandmothers for Future Generations.
Ginna Green
Ginna Green, co-host of A Bintl Brief, is a strategist-consultant-movement-builder helping Jewish, progressive, and progressive Jewish organizations change through her firm, Uprise. She is on the boards of Bend the Arc: Jewish action, where she was Chief Strategy Officer until June 2020, the Jews of Color Initiative, the Women’s March and Political Research Associates. Ginna is a frequent speaker and writer on democracy, race, racism in the Jewish community, Jewish community diversity, and leadership, and has been published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Salon, and more. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina and loves cooking, bourbon and playing word games on Shabbat.
Lynn Harris
Lynn Harris, co-host of A Bintel Brief, is a writer-activist-multihyphenate who uses the power of comedy to drive change. She is founder of GOLD Comedy, co-creator of Breakup Girl, and a former advice columnist for Glamour and other print magazines of blessed memory. She enjoys hot sauce and embarrassing her teen children just by existing and dedicates her work on A Bintl Brief to her late mother, who gave the best advice in the world.
Jewish Ancestral Healing is convened by Taya Mâ Shere. Shavuot Siyum guest interviewers include Hadar Cohen, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Rae Abileah and Yoshi Silverstein.
Hadar Cohen
Hadar Cohen is an Arab Jewish scholar, mystic and artist. She teaches direct experience of God and Jewish mysticism at her spiritual skill building school Malchut. She is a 10th-generation Jerusalemite with lineage roots also in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Hadar weaves the spiritual with the political through performance art, writing, music and ritual. She was the first fellow at Abrahamic House, a multifaith social change incubator, was recently featured on Season 3 of “Ramy: One Cup of Tea” (Hulu) and has her own column at The New Arab. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Rae Abileah
Rae Abileah is a social change strategist, author, editor, ritual facilitator, an advocate for collective liberation and economic justice, and an ordained Kohenet. Rae is a trainer and contributing editor at Beautiful Trouble and she is the co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon storytelling art ritual project. Rae was the co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace for nearly a decade and was the recipient of the Rising Peacemakers Award from the Agape Foundation. Rae founded CreateWell consultancy to support people to create impactful events, publish books, coordinate strategic campaigns, mark life transitions with moving rituals, and achieve their wildest dreams. She is a contributing author to numerous books including Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution; Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists; Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry and Sacred Stories By Women; and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook.
Yoshi Silverstein
Yoshi Silverstein is Founder and Executive Director of Mitsui Collective, which builds resilient community through embodied Jewish practice and racial equity. He is also Cleveland community organizer for Edot: The Midwest Regional Jewish Diversity Collaborative, and served as director of the JOFEE Jewish Outdoor Food, Farming and Environmental Educators Fellowship @ Hazon. As a Chinese-Ashkenazi-American Jew, Yoshi is an advocate and educator in the Jews of Color community and speaks regularly on diversity, equity, and inclusion. He sits on the Board of Directors for Repair the World, is a member of the Grants Advisory Group for the Jews of Color Initiative, and has been a cast member of Kaleidoscope Project's "What Does Jewish Look Like to You" monologue series and an ELI Talks speaker. Yoshi holds certificates in Spiritual Entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, permaculture design, ecovillage design, and environmental education. Also a 2nd degree blackbelt and aficionado of Chinese Roast Duck, Yoshi lives in the Cleveland area with his wife, daughter, and pup.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the first women to become a rabbi in Jewish history, is a pioneer Jewish feminist, human rights activist, writer, visual artist, ceremonialist, community educator and master storyteller. Lynn has been a congregational rabbi since the fall of 1973, and founded the Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, NM, in 1980. Lynn engages in multifaith, intergenerational and multicultural organizing in solidarity with racial, indigenous, gender justice and Palestinian liberation struggles. Currently, Lynn serves as Director of Youth and Family Programming at Chochmat Halev and sits on the Rabbinic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is board chair of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity and a member of the organizing team of The Grassroots Reparations Campaign, a black led organization dedicated to reparations as a healing pathway. Rabbi Lynn is the author of several books, including Peace Primer II, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of Renewed Judaism, World Beyond Borders Passover Haggadah and Trail Guide to the Torah of Nonviolence.