I am chanting a Yiddish incantation: “keynahora, keynahora, pooh, pooh, pooh!”

In the video, I wear a mask of an old woman. I am in a forest. A fir branch swishes through the air in my hand, keeping time with the rhythm of my voice. I shake it outward, toward the sky, toward unseen edges. Thousands of strangers watch this small ritual on their phones.

The gesture is familiar before I can place it. I remember my grandfather standing behind me, guiding my hands as we held the lulav1 together, teaching me to shake it in all directions, to mark the presence of something beyond what can be seen. Now, the branch moves the same way.

The words come just as easily. Keynahora, keynahora, pooh, pooh, pooh! I know them from almost every conversation with my mother, who repeats the phrase instinctively, warding off the evil eye without naming it, the soft pooh, pooh, pooh of symbolic spitting, a gesture passed down without explanation.

Only as an adult, did I learn what the words hold. Keynahora condenses keyn ayin hara, “no evil eye,” a phrase stitched together from Germanic and Hebrew roots.

Meaning persists, even as its origins blur.

In Yiddish, there is another word for this kind of speaking: a “speak-away-er,” a woman who could draw illness out of the body and guard against the evil eye. In the shtetls of Eastern Europe, ailments were often understood as the work of something unseen, and she was called upon to speak it away.

The Opshprekher does not arrive as a stable figure; she emerges instead as a set of fragments that refuse to fully cohere: a belief with roots in antiquity (the evil eye), an inherited prayer without translation (keynahora), a practice remembered without its instruction (opshprekhern). Over the past year, I have been tracing these fragments, and only recently found myself performing as her for a forthcoming exhibition premiering at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw this November.

The video I shared online was not intended as a finished work, but as a document of rehearsal—filmed in the forest as I began to inhabit the figure. Only later did I format it into an Instagram reel.

What began as rehearsal became something else in circulation. As it spread online, the responses surprised me. Alongside hundreds of new followers and thousands of views, it traveled into contexts I did not anticipate. The rapper Azealia Banks reshared it with the caption, “This is what the girls need to give okay honey.”

The ritual shifted registers in an instant. What I understood as improvisational performance was received as style, as attitude, as something to emulate.

What, then, was being recognized—or desired?

The Opshprekher appears in the ethnographic record, but never fully on her own terms. As folklorist Abraham Rechtman observed, “The female exorcists were dead set against teaching anyone… because there was a belief that as soon as one taught an incantation or gave a charm to someone who did not believe in its efficacy, it would immediately lose its power.”2

In some cases, the ethnographer resorted to deception, feigning illness in order to gain access to the Opshprekher’s practices. Rechtman’s account of the Yiddish Ethnographic Expedition across the Pale of Settlement, published decades later, remains one of the rare written traces of this work.

What is recorded is shaped as much by refusal as by preservation.

It is in this condition of partial survival that recognition becomes possible—not as knowledge, but as sensation: the feeling of having encountered something before without being able to locate where or when. A desire for what has gone missing, or for the fleeting sense that something severed might still be restored.

Through my art practice, I have retraced these gestures, phrases, and rituals, returning to the places where they once flourished in order to sense the presence of their absence. The archive offers support, a record of something we did not quite know was missing, but it cannot restore what was never meant to be fixed.

What returns instead is less stable, more immediate: a gesture, an intonation, a rhythm that can be taken up again. An inheritance not preserved but performed, spoken more than written, enacted more than explained.

I was still buzzing from our hike, not wearing my long-distance glasses, when something appeared ahead of us—a dark cluster of figures against the thick greenery of the forest. At first, I couldn’t quite make out what I was looking at: a squad of masked men in tactical gear, machine guns in hand, moving toward us through the late afternoon light.

Sap-oozing birch trees, decaying moss-covered logs, and enormous bracket mushrooms climbing up the trunks surrounded us. We had come to Białowieża Forest to revel in its biodiversity and to step closer to Belarus—a country too risky to enter now, but where some of our ancestors once lived.

The forest filled us with exuberance. Along the hike, we shared stories about our families and sang Yiddish songs and traditional khazones—Ashkenazi cantorial music—into the trees. We hesitated before raising our voices, then remembered how far we had hiked without seeing a single soul. We imagined our ancestors drawing near, crossing borders that meant nothing to ghosts, or to the trees and bison that roam these lands, but everything to the ever-shifting powers of men.

Only later did it occur to us that our songs, carrying through the forest, might have set off a sound sensor near the border—sending a squad of border police in our direction: three inspired Jews reforesting the borderlands with yiddishkayt.

I saw fear in their eyes as they approached us, the only part of their bodies not covered by protective gear. We pretended to walk past them casually, the way hikers do. In a flash, they grabbed one of us, and started yelling in Polish. We frantically searched for our passports, repeating “American, American” as if it were a magic word that would automatically release us. Our documents lessened their suspicion, and our friend, who they had grabbed, managed to pull out his British passport.

I was not afraid. That absence of fear was not neutral. It was shaped, in part, by the privilege of carrying passports issued by centers of global power—documents that afforded us protections denied to so many others. But it was also shaped by our encounter with the forest itself and the memories it held.

Something less tangible seemed to steady us, a feeling of being held. A sense of protection that carried its own responsibility.

Eighty years earlier, Jews had hidden in Białowieża Forest, fleeing the Nazis. Today, the forest has once again become a site of violence, where refugees are tracked and intercepted as they attempt to cross the EU–Belarus border, seeking asylum after fleeing wars, persecution, and instability in places including Somalia, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Returning to these lands made us accountable—not only to the memory of Jewish life, but also to the injustices unfolding here now. To the dehumanization of others carried out in the name of “safety” and “protection.” This language, echoed by leaders across the globe, is one we refuse to accept—because we know too well where it leads.

A rabbi living in a small town near these forests, Aaron Shmuel Tamares, was already writing in the early twentieth century about the dangers of nationalism, zionism included. Having witnessed the devastation of war and the suffering it inflicted on ordinary people, he grew wary of ideology in all its forms. Even after a brief involvement in the early zionist movement, he turned away from it.

What concerned him most was the way war, and the rhetoric surrounding it, could hypnotize entire populations. Against this, he emphasized a different kind of work: liberation, both personal and collective.

In a 1926 autobiographical reflection, written in the third person in Yiddish, he described how the forest shaped his thinking:

It was in the forest (where he spent most of his time during the summers)—in the company of his most intimate friends, the beautiful evergreen trees, and under the open skies—that he perfected his own training in the theory of morality and freedom: he penned most of his work in the forest. And the small town in which he lived left him free to conduct his life according to his principles.1

This town, Milejczyce, near the Belarusian border in eastern Poland, is where I have spent the past three summers developing the collaborative, place-based project Hereland, bringing together artists, activists, and local community members to engage Jewish memory as a living practice of care, responsibility, and relation.

We gather in the restored former synagogue, share meals, study texts, sing and listen—to one another, and to those living and organizing in the region. We learn from border activists supporting refugees in the surrounding forests, and from neighbors whose lives are shaped by the border itself, and by the loss of more than half their community—the Jews who once lived there alongside their ancestors.

In these encounters, memory becomes something we carry forward, understood as relational, accountable, and multidirectional.

This is not easy work. At a time when the language of safety and protection is mobilized in ways that justify exclusion and violence, we are trying to hold open another possibility—one rooted in nonviolence, mutual care, and a refusal to let memory be used to harm others.

This July, we will gather again at the former synagogue of Tamares for a Shabbat weekend of communal learning. Participants are joining us from across the world, including a small group of activists from Jerusalem who study and teach the writings of Tamares, alongside other pacifist and anarchist texts, in their beit midrash (house of study).

From there, the Hereland collective will return to Białowieża Forest for a self-organized art residency. And in November, we will bring this work to POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews for an exhibition, to share our process while continuing to build relationships between diasporic Jewish artists, local communities, and those engaged in refugee justice at the Poland–Belarus border.

This work is still unfolding. I’m sharing a short video to offer a glimpse into our process—our time in the forest, in the synagogue, and in collaboration with those working along the Poland–Belarus border.

If our work resonates with you, I invite you to support Hereland. Your contribution helps sustain these gatherings, deepen our collaborations, and carry this work forward.

Contribute to Hereland

Thank you for your consideration. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment, share this essay on Substack, or email me if you'd like to learn more about Hereland—hereland@proton.me.

In 2009, I asked the poet and songwriter David Berman to record himself saying a single sentence over and over: “I don’t know, Adonai.” My plan was to use it as a track for a video artwork.

Adonai is the spoken substitute for the four-letter name of god, considered too holy to pronounce.

He sent the file a few weeks later. The recording was simple, but I found it impossible to use. In David’s voice, the words carried more weight than I knew what to do with.

Ten years later, David took his own life. The night before I learned of his death, I dreamt I was trapped in an old station wagon plunging into the ocean’s depths. The water rose around me as I fumbled with the door. I woke up just before the car submerged.

When I heard the news of his suicide the next day, I thought of the dream as a message that had already arrived, waiting to be read. As I struggled to escape the sinking car, he seemed to disappear into the ocean’s darkness.

Recently, I made a pilgrimage to the grave of the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin in Portbou, Spain. Exiled in Paris in 1933 and later stripped of his German citizenship, he fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940 along a steep mountain route over the Pyrenees.

On a warm day in late spring, I retraced his path. Climbing through vineyards before crossing onto the mountain’s shadowed side, where deeper ridges rose to the north, I stopped at a small spring marked by a sign explaining that Benjamin had also rested there, alongside Lisa Fittko, the anti-fascist Jewish woman who guided hundreds of refugees along this route into Spain.

During the hike, David’s voice—repeating “I don’t know, Adonai”—returned to me. I had chosen this difficult climb, pausing to turn back toward the sunlight sparkling across the cerulean Mediterranean. But with each step up the rugged path, I imagined the weight of this crossing for Benjamin.

How far can a person go when there appears to be no way forward?

Benjamin, exhausted by years of displacement, carried with him a heavy suitcase said to contain a manuscript that would later disappear into legend. Behind him, the threat of the Nazis; ahead, the uncertainty of the border. Not knowing when, or if, this journey would end.

I thought of those making similar journeys today, across forests and deserts, over mountains, in overcrowded boats crossing dangerous waters, in search of safety and the possibility of a future.

The final ridge into Spain is called the “Hill of Freedom”: cascading peaks dotted with yellow Spanish broom, sage, and juniper, opening onto a wide horizon where the blue of the sea blurs into the sky. Standing there, I understood why Benjamin carried morphine tablets on this journey—not simply as a means of death, but as a final measure of agency should every other path be closed.

How long did that sense of freedom last, I wondered, before he was stopped by Spanish border police?

After authorities threatened to return him to France the next morning, Benjamin spent his final night in a hotel room in Portbou. He wrote: “In a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it. It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will come to a close.”

I don’t know how I would have faced such a moment—the threat of return, the collapse of all remaining paths.

To say “I don’t know, Adonai” is to stand before the unknowable and remain there, not as surrender, but as a refusal to mistake certainty for truth.

David never sought fame, and he was a generous artist. Our correspondence began with a question I couldn’t shake. In 2009, I wrote to him asking why, in the 2007 documentary Silver Jew about his band’s tour in Israel, he never mentioned the violence of the occupation or apartheid, the experiences of Palestinians, or the 2006 Israeli attack on southern Lebanon. That question sparked a correspondence that lasted until his death.

The film offered a rare aperture into this reclusive musician’s life. In it, he speaks casually about Jewish mysticism, shares stories about his evolution as an artist, and asks a pet-store owner for a Jewish gift for his dog. But what stayed with me most was watching him break down in tears while praying at the Kotel. In that moment, I felt the weight of what he carried: addiction, earlier suicide attempts, and a fragile rediscovery of Judaism in sobriety. I also felt my own estrangement from Judaism stirring, shaped by the violence I had personally encountered in Israel/Palestine and the zionist myths I had been raised on.

Not knowing is not an obstacle but a condition. Sometimes it leads to discovery; sometimes it leads to a dead end.

Benjamin’s grave rests in a Catholic cemetery overlooking the sea. Nearby stands the memorial Passagen by the artist Dani Karavan. I guided a group of diasporic Jews up the hill to the site, inviting them to walk backwards. We faced the valley through which Benjamin had entered Spain, the sea behind us, our arms lifted like the Angelus Novus from Paul Klee’s drawing, made famous by Benjamin’s description of it in his Theses on the Philosophy of History.

One by one, we entered the memorial: a staircase flanked by steel walls, descending toward a point suspended over the ocean, sealed by a thick glass barrier. Benjamin’s words are engraved on the glass in five languages: “It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous.”

Stories of escape do not elude us. They linger, like the slow movement of a mountain’s shadow across a valley. On this pilgrimage, I was among Jewish activists, poets, philosophers and ritualists, many of whom carry multiple passports—documents born of generations of forced migration, now conferring a mobility our ancestors did not have.

We gathered to grieve the ongoing violence of the present, to honor Benjamin’s memory, and to study together during Shavuot, the holiday marking the receiving of the Torah. Following tradition, we studied through the night, choosing to read and discuss Benjamin’s theses. After hours of conversation—about marxism, mysticism, memory, and redemption—bleary-eyed and nearly voiceless, we stepped outside to greet the sun rising over the sea.

What does it mean to face the past while suspended in the present, our backs turned to the unknown future?

I don’t know. And it is in this unknowing that I choose to remain.

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P.S. It was only after David’s death that I was able to use his recording. It appears in this video artwork featuring an early version of my Tzadik character in ecstatic dance.

You can hear more about my friendship with David in a radio interview with Sam Hatchwell and Jeremy Lev Steinberger on World Refugee Radio in Berlin. And check out Sam’s remixing of David’s track in his new release, Shalom Aleichem feat David Berman.

Julie Weitz’s performances invite us to inhabit ancestral memory with our bodies, not just our minds. Through characters like The Psychedelic Tzadik, she channels Yiddish folklore, Jewish mystical traditions, and diasporic histories, blending archival research with embodied practice.

On a sunny Friday in October 2025 in Berkeley, California, on the native land of the Ohlone people, she sat with The Zamlers—a Bay Area collective of artists and thinkers including Micah Wilson, Liv Kunins-Berkowitz, Kaya Wurtzel, Talia Isaacson, and Joanna Letz—over coffee and bagels. Two days earlier, Weitz had led The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop at UC Santa Cruz.

Weitz explores how imagination, play, and ritual can unlock ancestral knowledge. Her work confronts the legacies of assimilation, white supremacy, and inherited trauma while celebrating the messy, vibrant, and sometimes uncanny aspects of Yiddishkayt. From protective gestures rooted in shtetl folklore to the eroticism of the Tzadik’s striptease, Weitz shows how performance art creates space for imagination and history to converge in the body, in real time.

At the heart of her practice is a vital question: How do we broaden our collective capacity to face destruction, to withstand grief and violence, by looking to the past for guidance?

The first installment of this interview moves seamlessly between the cerebral and the somatic, the historical and the experimental. From Yiddish ethnographic expeditions to clowning and protective rituals, Weitz demonstrates that Jewish memory is not only archived in books or photographs—it lives in the body, in the imagination, and in the shared spaces of performance.

*A glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms appears at the end of this interview.*

Micah Wilson: Yiddish folklore is something I’ve been thinking about broadly…I’m really interested in how groups like ours are relating to the past. What are the imagined pasts we’re referring to? Are there imagined futures we’re gesturing toward? To what extent can we actually articulate those things—or are they moving through us in some way?

I was thinking about those questions during your performance last night.

Julie Weitz: Wow.

MW: And even as I’m saying this, I’m aware that there’s all this language, this leaning on the cerebral—

JW: Of course.

MW: —while so much of your performance felt like an invitation—one that people really welcomed—to try to think with the body. As “people of the book,” how do we also just be in the soma of it all?

I also feel kind of strange asking these questions—

JW: Oh, it’s great. It’s Talmudic. We have to ask.

MW: Maybe a big question to start with is: when you’re inviting us into our bodies, is there a particular relationship to the past—as Jews, as Yids—that you’re thinking about?

JW: Well, when you were speaking just now, I was thinking: right, because a relaxed body leads to an imaginative mind. The work isn’t just about being in the body—it’s also about guiding people into imagination.

I think what you’re pointing to is a question about ancestral knowledge—something we’re carrying within us that we haven’t quite placed. We don’t know how to direct it because we don’t know exactly what it is. We’re unclear, a bit lost, and that’s partly the result of assimilation, white supremacy, and inherited trauma.

Which is why it’s been really beautiful for me to witness how well received my workshop has been here in Northern California, and generally in the U.S. This question around reimagining—around diasporic Judaism, liberatory Judaism—we’re asking: what is that vision of Judaism? It feels like a really big question for all of us to carry right now: refusing violence and supremacy while still believing in Jewishness, grasping for the parts of it we want to keep.

I’m grasping for something behind me, trying to flip it forward like a trickster.

Have you ever seen the film Mir Kumen On? It’s this incredible Yiddish documentary about a children’s rehabilitation center outside Warsaw.

Liv Kunins-Berkowitz: The Bundist one?

JW: Exactly. It was a sanatorium for children recovering from tuberculosis, where they would live together for a month in this beautiful camp environment. The adults taught the kids how to run the camp themselves. The film was made in 1935 and used to fundraise support from American Jews.

LKB: Like Bundist propaganda. *said with an appreciation for propaganda*

JW: Yeah, lol.

There’s a sequence where the children are in the dining hall and they put on the most beautiful play. Watching it, I realized that that’s the performance spirit and collectivity I grew up with.

I went to Jewish overnight camp for ten summers. Yiddishkayt was part of my experience, but so too was zionism. The zionist aspect was very evident, but no one actually named the Yiddishkayt part. Yet why were my friends and I voluntarily out in the woods making up musicals about coming from the shtetl? We were eleven years old, writing full-on musicals with multiple songs and characters!

I think part of the work we’re doing is recognizing that this Yiddishkayt spirit is already in us, even if it hasn’t been identified as such. It was displaced—and that’s why looking at the archive feels so important.

LKB: Can you talk a bit about how you relate to Jewishness and/or Yiddishness? I noticed that while your character feels so deeply Yid, there’s also this reveal—when you take off the coat—where there are the pickles, where the Yid lives on, but also there is the Sefirot diagram, which is a symbology that predates the Yid and comes from Jewish mystical traditions more broadly. I’m curious how you hold your responsibility to each of those traditions, and also how it feels different performing in Europe versus here in the United States.

A big question that’s been on my mind is: what does it mean to be in multi-lineage Jewish communities, and how does that multiplicity show up in your work?

JW: It’s a beautiful question, and something I think about often. My performance style is very Yid, but there are also other layers of Jewishness that emerge. For me, that’s the liberatory aspect—it can be this, it can be that. I’m merging all of these traditions, or aspects, of being Jewish.

Recently, I performed the Psychedelic Tzadik’s striptease for friends from the Kosmic Kamels, a collective co-founded by Palestinians and Israelis. We’re artists and healing justice activists from the Jewish diaspora and the SWANA region who gather together at festivals.

In that context, I performed the Tzadik, and everyone loved it. But afterwards, when I was alone, I suddenly had this feeling like, “I don’t want to carry shame about being Jewish.” During our week together, many of the Israeli Jews were carrying so much shame, and after performing my Yid-ness as the Tzadik, I had this sharp awareness of being a Diaspora Jew.

That feeling also came after a conversation with a group of friends from the collective. A woman who is Dutch, and who partly grew up in Lebanon, asked me what my Star of David necklace meant to me. I spoke honestly about how it grounds me in my Jewish belief, and how—long before Zionism claimed the star as a symbol for the Israeli flag—it had been used by Jews for thousands of years as a protective amulet. I also shared that other Jews sometimes ask me if I’m afraid to wear it.

After sharing, I asked her what she thought. She told me that when she looks at the star, all she sees is blood. But then she looks at me and she sees love. So she goes back and forth in confusion. My Palestinian friend agreed, saying something like, “If it wasn’t you wearing it, I would not be cool with you.” There was a third person there—an Israeli Jew who identifies as antizionist, is mixed Mizrakhi and Ashkenazi, and speaks fluent Arabic—and he was silent.

I thought, “Wow, this is awkward.”

For me, the multiplicity that shows up in my performance work is not just about the layers of what it means to be Jewish. It’s also shaped by my encounters with Palestinians and Israelis, and by my awareness of what it means to be a Diaspora Jew. I can freely say I’m antizionist, but I don’t have close family in Israel and I didn’t grow up there, so my safety isn’t threatened—contrary to the argument that Jews need Israel for safety—and I am not carrying trauma from direct encounters with violence, either as a perpetrator or victim.

My Israeli friends are also trying to reclaim their Jewish lineages from different parts of the diaspora—Morroco, Yemen, Tunisia, Eastern Europe—and I think that process for them is also about reconnecting with the liberatory aspects of Jewishness. But it’s not easy. They are working against a vast nationalist system.

Being with the Kamels makes me aware of the relative ease and privilege with which we in the Diaspora can embody these parts of ourselves. Even during the workshop—inviting play, inviting joy, feeling safe in that.

So, to answer your question: I take this thing called Yiddishkayt as someone who was born and raised in the Jewish Diaspora and I’m like, “Hey, here’s what I’m bringing.”

LKB: What was so striking for me, coming from New York to the Bay, is that New York feels so imbued with Yiddishkayt—even in the physical embodiment of how people speak, and in how the older people I grew up around speak. It’s been interesting being around Ashkenazi Jews here, but also feeling how the forms of assimilation that happened in California can sometimes feel like a real moving away from that sensibility—from this feeling that there’s something a little gross or loud about Yiddishness. That’s been really striking to me.

I was in Crown Heights a couple of months ago over the summer, cat-sitting for a friend who lives down the street from the Lubavitch headquarters at 770. I had this really intense experience of both desire and repulsion—and I think there’s gender stuff there too. I would just be walking around, going into the shops, thinking, “Am I you? Am I not you?” Having these really intense moments of identification and distance.

And this was also my first time being there since I’d started studying Yiddish with my mom this past year. Suddenly I could read the signs, follow the songs. I’d been learning this language on Zoom with my mom, but I never actually get to encounter it in daily life. Then suddenly, in Crown Heights, it’s like Yiddishland.

So there was something really cathartic for me in your embodiment—and honestly, even in the pickle juice on the beard. It was a little repulsive, and I felt relieved by that. It made me feel like the relationship to ancestors isn’t supposed to be clean or polished, So my two questions along those lines are: first, whether you’ve experienced people having really strong reactions to that kind of deep embodiment of Yiddish physicality. I think about it in relation to zionism as a kind of erasure—the idea that we had to clean ourselves of the “Yid,” the so-called ghetto Jew, in order to become this more muscular zionist figure. I’m curious what kinds of feedback or responses you’ve encountered when people see you inhabit that Yiddish physicality so fully.

And then my second question is about the character itself—whether taking on that embodiment felt natural to you in your own body and spirit, or whether it was something you had to grow into. Was it connected to how you were raised, or did it feel like more of a transition over time?

JW: Well, I actually started by performing as a Golem in 2018. I developed techniques for getting into character by channeling my grandparents in particular—how they spoke, gestured, their facial expressions. I also started watching silent and Yiddish-speaking films. I was asking myself: what is specifically Yid about different ways of expressing?

Then in 2022 I did a residency at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles where I focused on three characters at once: the Golem, the Dybbuk, and the Tzadik. That was the first time I embodied the Tzadik character, and it felt incredibly freeing.

As a culmination of the residency, I gave a performative lecture in character about my artwork and process, and suddenly this voice just started coming through. I was cracking jokes, exposing things, and playing with caricatures. Later on, at the Fowler Museum of Art in Los Angeles I did a public interview in character with Benjamin Kersten. Meanwhile I’d been taking clowning classes in L.A., and I started realizing how much that training was shaping the work.

When I arrived in Poland on my Fulbright in 2023, I felt like I needed to push the character further so I could really understand his purpose.

The Tzadik was the first character I created who could really speak—and once I allowed that, the voice became very fluid. Part of that comes from my upbringing. My grandfather was a huge influence on me—he was a pious and spiritual man, and I admired him deeply. I grew up going to a religious overnight camp and also spent time in Chabad spaces. I was always struck by the theatricality of religious Jewish men—the way they performed their authority, how they occupied space, and how effortlessly they drew and held attention.

There was this one Hasid in Kraków who left his ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn and set up a life in Poland. He calls himself the “Rebbe of Kazimierz,” wears these beautiful embroidered bekishes, and even makes rap-infused Hasidic music on YouTube. He hosted regular shabbat dinners and what struck me, sitting at his table, were his hand gestures—they were so simple and so performative. Watching him, I thought: okay, what does it mean to fall into that kind of embodiment?

At the same time, I’d also had painful experiences in orthodox spaces where I was told not to sing. I grew up traditional and egalitarian, so the first time someone told me not to sing Birkat HaMazon in a Hasidic setting it felt deeply humiliating. That was over twenty years ago now, but I think that experience was still percolating somewhere inside me.

So when I finally put on the beard, there was this moment of thinking: okay—this is me, Rebbe.

And now I’m asking another question: does he actually have wisdom? What is clown wisdom? I’m still playing with that. Because the character is also intersecting with my role as an educator—I’ve been teaching my whole adult life, and studying aspects of Hasidism and Kabbalah—so somehow these threads meet inside the Tzadik.

Your other question was about reactions. The strangest reactions I’ve had are two:

One was in Berlin. I went out in character carrying this bouquet of watermelon balloons and was just encountering people in the street. Most people were really sweet to him, but then this white German guy started yelling at me in German. I answered back in Yiddish. He was basically saying, “You’re antisemitic. This is such an ugly costume. What are you wearing?”

And I kept saying, “Ikh bin a Yid!” — “I am a Jew!”

Eventually he walked away, but I suddenly realized I was standing in the middle of a park in Germany yelling Ikh bin a Yid! and thinking, what just happened?

My Palestinian friend was with me—I had asked him to come along as a kind of guard, which I know is a strange reversal of roles. And then there was a queer Israeli artist who I hired to photograph the whole thing. I had intentionally brought this little triangulation together and we were all vibing, but when we encountered this German guy it just turned into this bizarre confrontation. Later my Palestinian friend who understands German better than me explained what he was saying. He also relayed to me how surreal the encounter was for him to witness.

JW: The other strange experience I had was at a Yiddish open mic in Berlin. Afterwards an Israeli man came up to me and told me he wanted to kick my head in.

I said, “You mean you want to kick his head in?”—like, please refer to the Tzadik in the third person. He is not me.

Then we actually started talking about where his anger was coming from—essentially I was holding emotional space for him. The piece I performed had political undertones, not super overt, but he said something like, “You American Jews have no skin in the game. You come with your leftist politics and have no understanding.”

My immediate response was “No.” I pushed back by sharing stories from the activist communities I’m part of, talked about being raised a zionist, and reminded him that “my country” sends billions each year to support Israel’s violence.

Experiences like that make me realize that I’m actually interested in encountering audiences who aren’t automatically sympathetic. I loved the joy and warmth of the reception in Santa Cruz, but I’m also curious about friction—about what happens when the character unsettles people.

Because the Tzadik isn’t just there to be loved. He’s there to expose something. And sometimes that means people react.

Kaya Wurtzel: I’m curious about the interplay between the different kinds of research you do. It sounds like there’s archival research, and then there’s embodied research with these characters. Which comes first, or how do they interact?

JW: I wish I had a formula. I was actually thinking about this this morning. For me the research is really interconnected—I build each layer on top of the others.

Right now I’m researching a new project about the Opshprekherins—literally “the speak-away-ers,” or the women who cast things out. They were Yiddish healers in the shtetlekh who specialized in removing the evil eye. Apparently something like eighty percent of ailments were believed to be related to curses. These women worked with incantations and plant medicines.

A lot of the material comes from An-sky’s Yiddish ethnographic expedition, which gathered extraordinary documentation of folk healing practices. I’m studying those sources and then beginning to test things out in an embodied way.

For example, there’s this gesture they used for protection. If you put your right thumb in your left palm and press it, you can feel a kind of nerve or centering point. Then you mirror it with the other hand. It’s slightly awkward at first, but it creates a kind of energetic enclosure. The healers would combine the gesture with an Aramaic phrase invoking protection through Joseph, who in Jewish folklore is considered immune to the evil eye.

Last September I was doing protective presence work in the West Bank, and the whole time I kept thinking: we’re literally practicing protection here. These settlers have the evil eye—they’re casting it on the Palestinian shepherds and their families, on us, and on the land. What kinds of ritual practices could ground activists psychically in environments like that?

I showed the gesture to some of the activists and we tried it together. People really responded to it. That’s when I started thinking that my next project might involve collectively developing new incantations for casting out the evil eye.

The traditional Yiddish ones are incredible. They’ll say things like: “I send you out of the neck, out of the elbow, out of the knees.” And then they interrogate the curse—Where do you come from? Are you British? Are you Russian? Are you something else? It’s like they’re forcing the evil eye to reveal itself before casting it out.

So now I’m thinking: how do we collectively name the curses we feel—those placed on us, and those we place on others—and transform them into something that can be expelled?

Joanna Letz: I don’t even know where you find An-sky’s materials. How did you find them?

JW: I didn’t know either. My collaborator Danya Voyskoboynik shared a book with me last summer by Abraham Rechtman, who had been a young participant in An-sky’s expedition. He later published a memoir about it in the 1950s after immigrating to New York. The English title is something like The Lost World of Russia’s Jews, but the original Yiddish title was closer to The Yiddish Ethnographic Expedition.

He describes all the folklore, rituals, and healing practices they documented. It’s an amazing resource.

LKB: Do you know Nathaniel Deutsch’s book?

JW: The Jewish Dark Continent? I know of it but I don’t have it yet.

LKB: It includes An-sky’s questionnaire from the expedition. The questions are incredible.

JW: I’ve heard about those.

LKB: The questions trace the entire trajectory of the Jewish soul—from conception to after death. Some are mundane, some are wild. For example: If a horse is carrying a dead body, do you whisper in its ear to tell it what it’s carrying?

MW: Really kind of cunty questions, like they very much have an answer embedded within them.

LKB: Exactly. They’re based on things people actually reported happening. Like: When a midwife dies, do all the babies she delivered come in procession to her funeral?

JW: Yes, I’ve seen a photograph from the expedition with the midwife and all the children she delivered. The thing that’s heartbreaking is how much of the archive has been lost. Apparently they collected thousands of recordings and documents, but no one knows where most of it ended up.

TI: Throughout this conversation, I’ve been thinking about the way you relate to silence. Some of your characters, like the Golem, don’t speak. I have my own relationship to silence through a speech impediment — a glottal block stutter that inserts silences into my voice — and I feel the friction of how that interacts with the hyperverbal nature of Yidness. Sometimes we feel stuck in the verbal. How do you relate to silence as a mode of embodied research? [Spaces reflect moments of stuttering.]

JW: That’s a beautiful question. Early on, silence was a way for me to turn language off and move more deeply into the body. I was also very inspired by silent film and by clowning, which is so much about gesture and expression. Instead of words, you play with sounds, movement, presence—things that can hold emotion without needing to explain it.

But interestingly, the more Yiddish I’ve studied, the more I’ve felt able to speak through the characters. Maybe I was holding back until I felt I had a relationship to the language.

I’ll also say something that might sound unusual: I did work with plant medicine at certain points with the intention of opening myself to ancestral knowledge. That experience really affected my somatic awareness—what my body could feel and access.

And as a visual artist, I think visually first. Images guide me.

Now something new is happening. With the Tzadik, and now with the Opshprekherin project, I’m changing the masks I use. I took the mold of the Dybbuk mask and created a new one that exposes the mouth. I realized I don’t want to be completely hidden behind the mask anymore. The mask is still important, but now the voice can come through.

And instead of the Dybbuk possessing me, it’s more like we can collectively step into the role—anyone could become the Opshprekher.

Looking back, I think part of my early silence was also a conscious reaction to all the talking men in Jewish spaces. I was like, okay—I’m just going to be quiet.

But silence is also something I learn from meditation. There’s a lot of wisdom in quietness.

LKB: Going back to Talia’s question about silence. Something that’s come up in several of our conversations with grandparents about ancestors is this thread of people not speaking. And that’s interesting alongside the conversation about hyper-verbality. On the one hand, there’s this sense of so many words, so much storytelling. But on the other hand, there’s this deep thread of silence—we don’t talk about it.

People who literally didn’t speak. I’m thinking about our friend Kaya’s story of an ancestor who barely spoke. And I was talking to my Torah mentor recently, and he described his grandmother as someone who forgot Yiddish and never learned English. So she didn’t speak.

And what you just said about not being able to speak until you learn Yiddish—it raises this question of return. Of going forward by going backward, or backward by going forward. It feels like you’re describing a reversal of the process that so many of our ancestors experienced. They were ripped from Yiddishland—fled, left, escaped. There are so many verbs we could use for that. And they ended up between languages.

Whereas you, and your characters, are moving back into that space. I’m really moved by that different directionality.

Glossary

Zamler: Yiddish term for someone who collects, gathers, and compiles items

Yiddishkayt: Yiddish term that refers to the secular culture, language, art, and worldviews of Eastern European Jews

Tzadik: Hebrew term for a spiritual leader who acts as a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Birkat HaMazon: Hebrew blessings recited after the meal

Bekishe: Yiddish term for the long coat worn by religious Jewish men

Opshprekherins: Yiddish term for traditional Ashkenazi folk healers who specialized in treating illnesses believed to be caused by the “evil eye”

Shtetlekh: Yiddish term for “shtetls” the small towns of predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations that existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

I would argue yes. Purim’s blurring of “good” and “evil” invites us to question those binaries altogether. Through collective storytelling and costume, we rehearse the possibility that domination is not destiny, and that even in the shadow of violence, imagination remains a tool for survival and transformation.

I’m sharing here a photograph I found in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute: children dressed as kings, queens, clowns, soldiers, a Torah scroll, Moses—and even a gravestone (the ghostly figure in the front row, right). The image comes from the archives of the former Central Committee of the Jewish socialist Bund and was taken in 1924 in Vilnius. Can you imagine the Purim shpiel they might have performed? What hopes and subversions were stitched into those costumes?

In that spirit, I’m excited to share updates about an upcoming tour of performative workshops led by my drag king persona, The Psychedelic Tzadik, with events in Detroit, Northampton, Boston, and Philadelphia. These gatherings invite embodied play as a way of confronting grief, memory, and collective struggle.

Please share with anyone who might want to join us.

Best,

Jules

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The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop

Queer clowning meets radical Jewish politics in this 90-minute participatory workshop devoted to joy, justice, and cultural resistance. Through movement, improvisation, and embodied play, participants explore how humor and heresy can unsettle despair and open pathways toward solidarity. All are welcome. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Free Gaza Circus.

March 9, 2026, Planet Ant, Detroit, MI RSVP

March 15, 2026, Hidden Temple, Florence, MA RSVP

March 18, 2026, MIT, Cambridge, MA RSVP

March 19, 2026, Deep End Studios, Philadelphia, PA RSVP

This boy, who appears hardly fourteen, is an Israeli settler. He lives without parents or family in an isolated structure set into the dry, rocky hillside above Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja, a small Palestinian shepherd community in the occupied West Bank. Each morning he emerges with the same purpose: to provoke fear and assert domination over his neighbors.

Neighbors is misleading; it suggests mutual relation, which does not exist here. About 135 families, descendants of Bedouin communities expelled from the Negev during the 1948 Nakba, have lived in Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja for over fifty years. The arrival of a small outpost of teenage Israeli settlers two years ago marked the beginning of a campaign to forcibly displace them.

Last September, leveraging my status as an American Jew, I served in what is called “protective presence.” I placed my body between Israeli settlers and Palestinian families in Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja as a nonviolent attempt to deter settler violence. What unfolded before me was a microcosm of ethnic cleansing in real time.

Shortly after arriving in the village from Jerusalem with a group of young Israeli Jews from Bnei Avraham—the activist wing of Smol Emuni, a movement of observant Jews advocating for justice and equality for Palestinians—we received a phone call: a teenage Israeli settler had entered a home and was harassing Palestinian children.

The activists moved quickly and calmly, deciding who would respond. Two ran to the home to de-escalate the encounter, while the rest of us unloaded our bags in our temporary base in the village. Later, we watched a video: the settler, no more than seventeen, pressed aggressively against my friend, who spoke firmly in Hebrew but did not retaliate. Watching the footage, it struck me viscerally: this was not random bullying, but intimidation sanctioned and enabled by the state, driven in particular by far-right Israeli politicians.

Any reasonable adult would recognize whose behavior required intervention and whose safety required protection. But here, in a landscape shaped by systematic territorial dispossession, that moral logic is not merely confused, it is deliberately inverted.

The settler, unkempt, his knotted hair dangling from under his black hoodie, taunted and provoked at will. His behavior recalled Lord of the Flies: boys left to govern themselves, cruelty unchecked and quietly rewarded. That’s because his bullying is backed by settler religious organizations that recruit and exploit vulnerable Jewish youth, positioning them as instruments of land seizure under the guise of religious entitlement.

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As I write this essay in January 2026, the Palestinian families of Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja are being driven from their homes. Settler violence has escalated, effectively destroying the village. The forced displacement of this Palestinian shepherd community in the southern Jordan Valley is not a singular act, but a coordinated effort to permanently remove Palestinians from Area C, which remains under full Israeli control.

None of this is news, either literally or figuratively. The daily realities of Israeli apartheid rarely appear in mainstream media, whether in Israel, Europe, or in the United States—which funds it extensively. And the American Jewish communities in which I was raised have largely doubled down on denial. They refuse accountability in the face of the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.

I know all too well that words like ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation, and apartheid can trigger contraction and defensiveness among Jews who still hold tightly to Zionist narratives—including much of my family and the friends I grew up with. I understand this reaction intimately; it took me decades to unlearn the ideological forces and to acknowledge the inherited trauma that shaped my own psychological and somatic responses.

But there are no other words available. These terms exist because they name specific crimes against humanity, and to refuse them would be to deny what I witnessed with my own eyes.

Yet there is another challenge, one less often addressed, because acknowledging it would collapse the moral compass on which so much of Judaism claims to rest: the Jewish ethic, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), a principle in stark contradiction with Israeli expansionism.

It is so glaringly obvious that naming it almost feels stupid. Yet this is precisely the work these teenage settlers are trained to do: act in the opposite direction, treating their Palestinian neighbors with total contempt and violence. This, of course, mirrors the functioning of the Israeli government and military. But what becomes clear when witnessing this behavior on the ground, especially when it is carried out by children, is that these settler youth have themselves been harmed: neglected, poorly educated, subjected to violence within their families, and exploited by state structures. That harm manifests in the ways they abuse those around them, and likely one another.

As the sun set that Friday evening in Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja, the activists and I gathered for Shabbat in a three-walled structure rented from a local Palestinian. A simple kitchen had been set up; mattresses were spread across the cement floor. Facing the village, and beyond it a mountain range dotted with tiny lights in Jordan, we lit the candles, sang familiar melodies, recited the blessings over challah and wine, and shared a pre-prepared dinner together. Practicing Judaism here was not about claiming land, but about grounding ourselves in spiritual practice and ethical relation.

I didn’t sleep much that night; it’s hard to rest when you feel chaos could erupt at any moment. A barking dog or flash of headlights might signal the approach of an Israeli settler. That is their purpose: to unsettle.

The next morning, we were called to place ourselves between a young Israeli settler and a Palestinian family, as he encroached on their land with his flock of goats, a subtle method often used to intimidate. Four of us, all Jewish women, spaced about ten feet apart to form a boundary, keeping roughly thirty feet from the teenager and his herd. For several hours under the hot desert sun, we moved alongside him and the goats. We filmed him, and he filmed us in return, a deliberate tactic settlers use to portray activists as unruly anarchists, despite our visibly calm behavior.

Simply being present often deters settlers from acting violently.

Midday, when the sun was at its highest, even the settlers took a break. In these moments of rest, we spent time with the local families—playing soccer and other games with the children, and sharing tea, food, and stories with the adults. Most of the Israeli activists spoke Arabic, and everyone knew each other by first name. For the past year, the group had been coming to Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja every Shabbat, perversely, the time when settlers are most active in their intimidation, despite Shabbat being a day of rest for observant Jews.

I first met this group of activists in April 2025, in the Alpujarra Mountains of Andalucía, at a Passover retreat devoted to decolonizing Judaism. Organized by a mutual friend, the retreat explored the shared worlds of Jews and Muslims in the region before the Christian conquest and the Inquisition, which forced both groups to convert, flee, or face death. We explored the legacy of Jewish and Muslim mysticism, poetry, and ecological knowledge, engaged with the local Sufi community, and traced how the roots of colonial violence in Spain continue to echo through the present.

Over a week of learning, eating, and praying together, I came to see that these Israeli activists were doing the hardest work of decolonial resistance from within a Jewish framework: directly confronting their society’s routine disregard for Palestinian life, so often justified in the name of Israeli “security.” It became clear to me that speaking out from afar, or making art rooted in Doikayt, the anti-nationalist Yiddish concept of “hereness,” was no longer sufficient.

The work demanded more than words or representation. It required placing my own body on the line—not as a savior, but as an ethical refusal, to stand against Jewish supremacy as a Jew myself.

It may come as a surprise that many of these activists grew up on Israeli settlements themselves. Raised as religious Zionists, and still living within a society that actively supports ethnic cleansing, they are unlearning the fear-based narratives they inherited and studying the Torah of nonviolence. They take reparative action in solidarity with their Palestinian friends, opposing the occupation and ongoing Nakba through sustained, embodied presence on the ground. For them, being in Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja is an act of care, one that is integral to their Judaism. Yet taking this stand means confronting not only the immediacy of violence, but also the long histories that have produced it, and recognizing that ethical commitment demands both awareness and action.

I too was raised a Zionist, though of a particular American liberal brand, one that romanticized the brighter aspects of Zionist history, such as the formation of socialist kibbutzim, while deliberately ignoring its violent realities, including the Nakba and the occupation.

More than twenty-four years had passed since my last trip to Israel/Palestine. I chose to return during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a spiritually heightened period when Jews engage in teshuvah—repentance for the sins of ourselves and our communities.

Now, from the comfort of my home, I watch daily Instagram videos of the settlers I once encountered, with growing distress: ploughing fields to establish new outposts, cutting off their neighbors’ electricity and water, raiding the village, and directing police and army units to abduct Palestinian residents. Activists and NGOs are calling urgently for more international observers to arrive in Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja.

Last week, my activist friend sent me a voice note. Half the families have already fled. Many more are packing to leave. He says quietly, “This seems like the end of the story of Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja.”

Scanning the news, I see the same boy we observed herding goats, now riding a donkey, his face wrapped in a kufiya, his hand raised in a V sign. He believes this is a game. He believes he has won.

Faced with a growing urgency to write about my experience there, I ask friends to read drafts of this essay. They ask in turn whom I am writing for—Jews who already agree with me, family members who may not, or non-Jewish friends who care but sometimes reveal how little they know. “Is this a call to action?” asks one friend, a veteran activist and writer. I don’t have a simple answer, only the sense that speaking is itself a form of teshuvah, a refusal to normalize what I have seen.

And this much I know, from the embodied memory of Ras ‘Ein al-’Auja and from the Torah with which I was raised: the real terror is not an external enemy, endlessly invoked to justify violence. It is what we—the abstract, diverse, complicated Jewish collective—have become capable of. It is the figure of the settler youth, shaped and unleashed by a system that has abandoned ethical restraint, if it ever possessed it. And our teshuvah, as Jews in the Diaspora and on the Land, is to turn toward that danger within—to confront our collective moral disorientation and refuse it.

To learn more about what’s happening on the ground or to get involved, follow these accounts: Achvat Amim, Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine, Looking The Occupation In The Eye, All That’s Left , Rabbis for Human Rights, Sam Stein, and Andrey X.

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The subjects that have shaped my life’s work are surfacing in the collective consciousness with new urgency. I’m starting this Substack to share personal stories that journey through the complicated terrain of Jewishness, ancestral memory, nationalism, solidarity, and healing.

My hope is that these reflections—on the entanglements and disentanglements I’ve encountered across forty-six years in this body—offer meaning, resonance, or even spark your own insights as we navigate these questions together.

Julie Weitz, Wherever We Live That’s Our Homeland (Dybbuk in Jewish Cemetery, Tarnow, Poland), archival print, 2024 (photo credit Magda Chudzik).