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Hidden in Plain Sight: Zohare Jacobi on Jewish Magic Beyond Nationalism
On August 7th at 2pm Eastern, Rabbi Andy Kahn sits down with Zohare for a conversation about diaspora, magic, comparative religion, and what it means to teach Judaism rooted in scholarship and love when so many mainstream institutions have collapsed it into ahistorical nationalism.
Her shop, jewitches.com, carries ethically sourced ritual goods, herbs, books, and Judaica drawn from across the diaspora. Worth a browse before or after the conversation.
Zohare Jacobi built Jewitches out of a deep love of Jewish magic, folk practice, and mysticism, and now over one hundred thousand people follow her work on TikTok and Instagram. She has taught a generation of young Jews about kesem, besamim and baytele, and the herbs their great-grandmothers kept that weren’t recorded in the Talmud. Now, her brick and mortar store in LA, Diaspora Magic, is a community home for Jews and others looking for new depths in Judaism.
She has also been a clear, steady voice against the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, as well as against the antisemitism that treats Jews as a monolith to be defended or attacked rather than a wide variety of diasporic people.
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- Brooklyn, NY
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish Tradition Book Release Event
Join us for the book release event, in partnership with Jewish Currents, McNally-Jackson, and Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser, in conversation with activist and writer Jasper Nathaniel. The two will discuss the history of Jewish Anti-Zionism, its current iterations, and what it means to actively involve yourself in this tradition today.
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Tashlich Guide 5787
The ritual of Tashlich—casting bread into water while reflecting on the wrongdoings of the previous year—is a potent, tangible way to reset and recommit for the year ahead.
This Tashlich guide uses the four worlds of Kabbalah, the layers of reality our ancient mystics saw as integral to human existence, to engage with different forms of wrongdoing. Each page of this guide invites you to reflect on one world of wrongdoing, providing a Kavanah (intention), an excerpt from the high holiday liturgy, a responsive reading (to be split between individuals or groups), and an invitation to cast off our wrongdoings in the past year.
This ritual can be done alone, with family, in a havurah, or with a large group any time during the 10 days of Teshuvah between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
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A Multi-Rooted Movement — Devin Naar on Sephardic Memory and Jewish Futures
What gets lost when Jewish history is told from a single root?
Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington, has spent two decades recovering the Ladino-speaking Jewish world that American institutional memory mostly left out. His scholarship draws on multi-rootedness, a concept describing communities that come from more than one lineage at once, rather than the familiar frame of a single homeland and a single dispersal. That idea offers a different starting point than the usual diaspora and homeland narrative, one shaped by Mediterranean Jewish socialism, Sephardic illegibility within American racial categories, and a long tradition of solidarity built sideways rather than upward.
Join Andy Kahn and Devin Naar for a conversation about Sephardic memory, Ashkenormativity in Jewish left spaces, and what new Jewish institutions can look like when they draw on more than one root.
This is a recorded, virtual conversation. Registrants will receive the Zoom link ahead of the event.
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