Wendy Elisheva Somerson (Wes) w/ Stefanie Fox

About the Conversation

In a time when antisemitism is being weaponized and used to justify the Israeli genocide against Palestinians, presents a liberatory model for Jewish healing firmly rooted in Jewish spiritual values.

Wes and Stefanie will discuss the intersection of healing and activism that can make our organizing movements more healing and our healing more political to strengthen our collective work for a free Palestine and a Jewishness beyond Zionism.

Over the last year and a half, many of us activists and organizers have felt hopeless, despairing, and angry that we have not been able to stop this genocidal violence being carried out in our names. Sometimes we take these feelings out on each other by being overly critical and unkind, which leads to fractures inside our movements.

At this time of rising fascism when the Trump administration is exploiting the fractures on the Left to create division, we can incorporate body-based healing to strengthen our collective power that moves us closer to a liberated world and a free Palestine.

About the Book

Dr. Wendy (Wes) Elisheva Somerson, PhD, shows how Jewish history lives in Jewish bodies—and how antisemitism and oppression disrupt our access to safety, dignity, and belonging. This unmetabolized trauma can lock us into a survival state that brings historical grief into the present moment…and keep us from exploring critical questions that help us tend our legacies and live into a better world.

How does ancestral grief live on in our bodies and keep us from feeling safe—and how is that fear enacted on other peoples? How do we reconcile a history of persecution with the state power of Israel today?

Each chapter invites us back into the body, exploring healing as a spiritual and political reclamation. With skills-based wisdom for trauma, safety, spiritually grounded intentions, and resourcing ourselves for difficult conversations, this book also helps readers understand:

• Trauma and healing through our bodies
• Jewish longing, belonging, legacies of assimilation
• Healing shame—of not being Jewish enough, of being too much, and of being complicit
• Embodied experiences of Jewish resilience, ritual, and grief

Rooted in justice, care, and spiritual depth, this book asks us to live into a Judaism beyond Zionism. It invites us to heal toward liberation—to reclaim Jewish faith and release Jewish identity from the colonial project of Israel in power, skill, and community.

About the Author

Wendy Elisheva Somerson (Wes) is a non-binary Jewish somatic healer, writer, visual artist, and activist who helped found the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. They facilitate Ruach, body-based Jewish healing groups held in an anti-Zionist, anti-racist, and feminist framework. As part of a movement of anti-Zionist Jews, they support Jewish healing from historical trauma and promote a liberatory future for Judaism and Jewishness beyond Zionism that includes a free Palestine.

About the Interlocutor

Stefanie Fox, MPH (she/her) is the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a grassroots membership organization that organizes and mobilizes hundreds of thousands of Jews and allies into solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle and a vision of Judaism beyond Zionism. Stefanie joined JVP in 2009 as the organization’s first National Organizer (when the organization had six chapters and a few hundred members) and played multiple roles as part of the team that grew the organization into the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. She has written extensively including for The Nation, Time, and Boston Review, and her media appearances include MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, CNN, and more.

Pre-order your copy of An Anti-Zionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing here.

Also check out other Arts events in Seattle, Literary Art events in Seattle.