Reclaiming Arab-Jewish Identity: A Spiritual Path To Peace

Join Hadar Cohen, a mystic and artist of Arab Jewish lineage, as she explores her multifaceted identity and the deep intersections between multi-religious spirituality, social issues, and community building. Hadar discusses her journey towards reclaiming her Arab Jewish heritage, the significance of Jerusalem, and her innovative work through Malchut, a spiritual skill-building school. This episode delves into the profound impact of Zionism, intergenerational trauma, and the healing power of relationships and spirituality in the quest for peace and justice.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
• 1:39 What Brings You Joy?
• 4:02 Hadar's Background and Identity
• 5:24 Body, Land, and Spiritual Connection
• 8:16 Jerusalem and Family History
• 12:59 Arab Jewish Identity and Zionism
• 23:06 Colonialism and Historical Context
• 31:22 Personal Journey and Cultural Shame
• 32:43 Reclaiming Arab Jewish Identity
• 33:19 Building Relationships with Palestinians
• 34:01 Unpacking Zionism and Jewish Unity
• 38:10 The Role of Spirituality in Activism
• 39:46 Founding Malchut: A School of Mysticism
• 44:20 Healing Through Community and Relationships
• 56:09 Jerusalem in Exile: A Spiritual and Political Journey
• 1:01:16 Concluding Reflections and Prayers

Transcript

Welcome to SuperHumanizer Podcast, where we promote empathy and understanding in polarizing viewpoints, through stories told by people living them.

Katie Bogen: Yay, hello everyone. Welcome back to Superhumanizer. I'm Katie Bogen. I will be your host today and I have the lovely, incredible Hadar Cohen with me. Hadar is an Arab Jewish scholar and a 10th Jerusalemite, with lineage roots in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Iran. She's currently pursuing her MFA at the Transart Institute for Creative Learning.

I am so excited to hear more about that. And as a mystic and artist, her work focuses on multi religious spirituality, politics, and religion. social issues and community building. She's the founder of Malchut, a spiritual skill building school teaching Jewish mysticism and the direct experience of God.

And Hadar holds healing circles and conversations around Judaism, Israel and Palestine and spirituality. And podcast Hadar's Web, which features community conversations on spirituality, healing, justice, and peace. And art Hadar. Thank you so much for being here. 

Hadar Cohen: Thank you so much, Katie, for having me. It's a pleasure.

Katie Bogen: I have truly been counting down the opportunity to chat with you. I've been following your videos for so long. Um and you have such a pristine wisdom to share. So I'm really glad that you are spending your time with us. Thank you. 

Hadar Cohen: Oh, thank you so much. Likewise. Yeah, it's funny when you become internet buddies and then you actually get to have a conversation.

Katie Bogen: I'm fangirling a little. I can feel my face getting red, but it's great. Okay. So before we get into our chat, I'd love to play a little game with you called What Brings You Joy? Will you play it with me? 

Hadar Cohen: Of course. 

Katie Bogen: Okay. So Hadar, my dear, what brings you joy? 

Hadar Cohen: Movement and dance and just being in the body.

Katie Bogen: We love embodiment. Joy through embodiment. Okay, Hadar, what brings you joy?

Hadar Cohen: Growing and learning and wisdom. Learning about spirituality and scripture and about humanity and finding new insights. 

Katie Bogen: And you do come through in all of your videos and conversations as such a spiritually and intellectually curious person that urgency or tendency to dig is very tangible in your content.

So thank you for sharing that with us. And finally, Hadar, my dear, what brings you joy? 

Hadar Cohen: well Not just because this is for this podcast, but truly because this is really alive in my heart. , but what brings me joy is being in a relationship with both Palestinian and Jewish people. I just deeply love both Jewish and Palestinian people , so much.

And even though it's so hard sometimes, there's also so much joy to be in these communities. 

Katie Bogen: Embodying that bridge and really tying those threads that people are told are polar and you clearly embody are not. 

Hadar Cohen: Yeah, 

Katie Bogen: absolutely Well , that was so wonderful. I really enjoyed hearing about your joys. Will you do the same for me?

Hadar Cohen: Yes, of course. So Katie, what brings you joy? 

Katie Bogen: I'm finally sharing space with you. I literally keep thinking about that Paul Rudd gif of like, look at us look at us

 I'm just so happy

Hadar Cohen: Oh, I love that. Thank you. What brings you joy? 

Katie Bogen: I would say what's been bringing me joy recently at a very superficial level is leaning into a soft femme cottagecore aesthetic when the world is this enormous rough angry pit of devastation and I look around and the things that I see, appear very hard, and so being able to look at myself and hold something sweet femme just is cozy to me.

So that's bringing me joy. 

Hadar Cohen: I love that. I got chills. Yeah, it's so often it's like we want to meet harshness with harshness and it's it does feel very revolutionary to respond with softness. 

Katie Bogen: Yes, I could not agree more. 

Hadar Cohen: Well , what brings you joy, Katie? 

Katie Bogen: Something I'm enjoying right now is fall, early fall in Nebraska.

There are all of these outdoor festivals and apple picking, and it's an invitation to reconnect to nature and to the earth. And I would say fall always feels really ritualistic to me, especially given Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and, diving into the high holidays. So that is bringing me joy.

Hadar Cohen: Lovely. Thank you for sharing that with me. 

Katie Bogen: And thank you so much for playing the game. now we get to know more about you, so start by just telling us about you, where you're from, and broadly your background. 

Hadar Cohen: I was born in Jerusalem. when I was 10, my family moved to the US to New Jersey.

 So my life has been back and forth a lot. I'm actually currently writing a book about that called Between East and West. A lot of my life has been around this in between identity, moving between my own culture and background, which is Arab Jewish, sometimes also known as Mizrahi, and then the U. S., the more Western world, and just navigating a lot of the loss and destruction that has happened in my personal lineage, around this whole Arab identity, the whole so called Middle Eastern region. I mean we just lost so so so so much. That was always very clear in my family background. 

my ancestry is pretty mixed from all -over the region. My dad's side is a mixture of Syrian Palestinian roots. So from Jerusalem and from Aleppo, and then my mom's side is Kurdish from Northern Iran and they moved to Jerusalem in the fifties.

Katie Bogen: Amazing. So you're holding these multiple geographies in terms of where you've actually lived. You're holding these multiple identities again that people often perceive as polar and you have this epigenetic link from your parents and everything your family has gone through over generations.

So what has it been like for you being both Jewish and Arab living across, Israel and Jerusalem and then in the United States? 

Hadar Cohen: The first thing , which has been in some ways so fundamental to my work for a long time is this Deep realization that the body and the land are not separate, that actually my relationship to the land is through the relationship of my body and my body carries what happens on the land.

 That has been just very clear for me in my entire life. Anytime, anything, something's happening in Jerusalem, there's a felt. Experience and sometimes, I'm not even reading the news, but all of a sudden, , I'll throw up and then I'll read the news and I'll be like, oh, you know so um yeah, I think the way that this body land connection is actually quite deep and part of what colonization has done is rupture that link both, personally and collectively, , and that to me is The most powerful link for connection to God is when the body and the land are connected, that's like a, that's how we channel, that's how we know, and when there's that rupture, there's also the rupture that we have with our souls, with our own spirit.

When we don't know where we come from, when we don't have access to our lineages, , this is where we become fragmented in our psyche. , So a lot of my work has been around , recognizing that first within myself, these ruptures and fragmentations and this question of what it means to return, right?

Which we're in the time that we're recording this in the high holiday calendar in the Hebrew calendar. And that word return is so deep and so powerful around, you know of course, return being returned to God. Now, of course, also with Palestinian experience, that word return is also so deep around returning to land, returning to existence.

, and this question of , what does it mean to return? And what are we returning to has been something that's been. Really deep question for me. That's been guiding me. and part of that has been really reclaiming who I am through Arab Jewish identity. It's not, the final destination because I do believe that each of our identities is in some ways a portal for a larger communal connection, but, we can't really connect to other people.

We can't really understand other people unless we understand who we are. And that understanding of who I am, where I come from, what's been lost, what's actually true in my lineage, it's an ongoing journey that will never end. , but yeah, that's part of the power of claiming Arab Jewish identity.

Katie Bogen: You speak to these two really profound truths. One being that we view the world through the lens of our identities and who we were told that we are and who we are learning that we are. And the second being, we all come from the same stuff. Whether you understand it as God or the universe.

I just saw a meme the other day , we have to remember we're all born from the gut of a star. And so something, some stardust. A zillion years ago, built the capacity for us to exist and for each other to exist and for the land to be here and literally at an atomic level. We are the same, and that, , roots me over and over again to justice work and is a call to return and you speak so beautifully about the way that you've woven these identities into a fabric of the self that you understand. So from my understanding of you, you're a 10th generation Jerusalemite and I'm curious about that Epigenetic and sort of historic thread of your grandparents. What do you know about your grandparents life prior to 1948? And how did it change afterwards?

Hadar Cohen: I was very close with my grandma. , both my grandparents from my dad's side were born in the old city of Jerusalem in the thirties. , and yeah, my grandma's lineage has been there 10 generations and she was my mom. I would spend every summer with her. she had Palestinian friends till the day she died.

, so I feel blessed to have, grown up in a different way on that land being Jewish. Yeah. Yeah. , and growing up under Israeli society is that I did have this sense of Palestinian friendship from the home, which, in that society is quite foreign for a lot of Israelis. My grandma passed away a few years ago and that was such a big heartbreak for me in my life.

And that actually was the catalyst for me being more public around both Palestine and Arab Jewish identity, because part of the grief of losing her was also losing the world she knew. Before that, even though things were horrifying, I always found this comfort with her.

And then when she was gone, it was like, , what am I connected to? What's left of Jerusalem pre 48. And then as I was starting to realize that that's going to be farther and farther away, the more time passes the more responsibility I felt. Not just for speaking up politically, but also to, in some ways creating a Jerusalem that I want to live in.

And sometimes that means not necessarily on that land because that might not necessarily be possible right now, but in terms of creating or recreating or re remembering really the relationships between Jews and Muslims, the relationships of multi diversity, for me, Jerusalem was always a very strong place.

spiritual city. Part of what I love about being from Jerusalem, right? Because even in, in that land, it's , it's not just about being from that land. It's what city are you from? So I actually always, Resonated with being a Jerusalemite, I don't identify with a whole region.

I mean, I do in some ways, but it's also very particular, right? Of , where am I from? What city am I in? Jerusalem in particular, it's just, that's my landscape. What it means to also dedicate myself to a particular city. my grandma had a lot of stories about her connection with Palestinians, she had Muslim friends growing up.

They, would play after school together. , and yeah, the grief and trauma of all of a sudden being a child and. The way that she told me one story is that, she had one friend who was Palestinian Muslim, who they would just play after school all the time, they would, eat snacks and candies and stuff.

And then, , one day. She went over and her mom was like, you actually can't come here anymore. The situation's shifting. And just as a child being , Oh, I can't actually be friends with this person anymore. Which is something that does live in my bones because so often it's we're trying to dismantle apartheid.

We're trying to shift the political, , and these are , big things. And they also really Um , hinge on these personal relationships that we have and these moments of relational separation. Something I talk about a lot is that apartheid is, a physical reality that segregates Palestinians and dehumanizes them.

And it's also a relational reality in which, people are separated from one another mentally, spiritually, emotionally. We don't know each other's stories. We're not allowed to ask, and , for me, part of the work of dismantling the material apartheid is dismantling the relational apartheid.

 And that place of actually rebuilding connection and relationships and friendships and saying, actually, we can eat together and we can talk. And that's sometimes a tricky thing to say, and to do, for lots of reasons that we can get into if you want, but the relational dynamic feels pretty central for me in activism work.

Katie Bogen: You're doing this work of making , the theoretical tangible. And what keeps people distant from discussing Israel, Palestine, , or building these, , friendship ties and really embodying that role of a bridge is that the idea of peace and collaboration and whatever is so theoretical and rhetorical and it hasn't been made real for folks yet.

And so as you say, bringing down the apartheid wall is about more than physically addressing the wall, but of course that has to happen too. It's really the community connections that you're able to foster and a way as well of paying homage to your grandmother's legacy. You know, these friendships and relationships have existed before.

They will exist again. And the story that you told about your grandmother going over to a friend's house and trying to play mimics so precisely this story I heard from my great aunt Helen about in the context of the Holocaust, when she and her family were being moved themselves to a ghetto, her trying to call a friend to wish them

 a happy birthday and the friend basically saying, don't come to my house again, , and there has been this pattern of rifting, , throughout Jewish history in ways that have made us the marginalized and the oppressor, and I'm really curious your perspective about that. So to that end, there's this deep

shared history between Arabs and Jews. And you say Jews being embedded within Muslim communities, but that was either forgotten or actively erased when Israel was created. And when Zionism really came to the fore. And Zionism has virtually erased the rich heritage that belonged to Arab Jews. So can you talk to us about how Jews were embedded in Muslim communities? 

Hadar Cohen: Is it okay if I respond to something earlier you said because I just don't get often times to speak about this publicly because sometimes the nuances are are difficult. I think part of what's been challenging around both holding this value of relational solidarity and relationship building and community is that oftentimes, growing up in Jerusalem, I was very against a lot of coexistence movements around bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, right? Just to dine because part of that was part of the Oslo 20 years of Oslo kind of peace agreements. It's , Oh, what if Israelis and Palestinians play soccer together or do this together?

And that didn't work at all. It actually made things A lot worse for Palestinians, mostly because these relationships were not politicized. There wasn't an acknowledgement of power. There wasn't a conversation about the politics. There was just , let's just be friends and that's it. And that created a lot of very harmful situations and , there's a couple years ago. I wrote a piece that was called Israel's view of coexistence is colonization. Which I stand by still and that this is where there's , such a tricky dynamic, , around how to not have relationships mirror the colonialism that we're trying to dismantle.

But how do we actually have these relationships to break them? Which means talking about politics and talking about these power dynamics , and also having shared values around anti Zionism and that without that, it's really hard to create, but with that, when there's a shared alignment, around our political values and our mission, then that's where I consent to these relationship building but I do not participate in things that are just about, people building peace outside of that political landscape because it does feel harmful.

Katie Bogen: Absolutely. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like what you're speaking to is this ethos of no to normalization of any social, event or sort of hosted event that has a veneer of peace but does not address the underlying power schisms and very active, violent, brutal oppression are in service of the veneer in a way that is inherently violent.

Hadar Cohen: Yeah, and this is where that word peace, the word peace is such a triggering word for a lot of activists these days, because what peace has meant, especially in the Palestine context is just , let's just not talk about it, right? Like just let's all try to be comfortable with how horrifying everything is. And that's not actually peace, right? Which I also get upset sometimes because the Hebrew and Arabic word for peace is actually so deep, right? Shalom, Salaam. It actually is about a whole depth of being with the wholeness of everything.

there's a lot of resistance to, peace work to even relationship work, right? There's so many people who are like, no, I'm not going to enter these spaces that are about relationships because people are so scared that's the dynamic that's gonna be created. I can't just be , Oh, I have a Palestinian friend and then that's it.

I did my activism work. Because as long as we're not actually dismantling the current paradigm and the current system that is creating hell on earth for Palestinians. That friendship is not politically meaningful.

Going back to the question about, Arab Jews being embedded in Muslim societies for so long, there's so much to say about it, and Yeah, part of the lineage of my family was being expelled from Spain in 1492 and then coming to Syria, which is the story of a lot of Jews, and there is so much in Islam in particular, and throughout the Ottoman Empire at that time, that almost had this mandate.

 There's so many beautiful stories about that, where Muslim leaders were like, it's our duty to protect Jews. Okay, cool. This rise of the Christian empire and Spain and Portugal is displacing Jews and putting pork everywhere. So Jews and Muslims can't be there and all that, but , we are gonna, we have this duty to protect Jews and we are going to open our lands and our communities and this whole culture of hospitality, that welcoming that bringing in and there's these, Right wing propaganda around Mizrahim and how horrible they had it in these places, they don't really reckon with the reality that Jews were actually there for thousands of years, which in a way that's unmatched in basically any region in the world that we were there and we were able to develop so much beauty and culture and spirituality and depth. I Was just talking to a friend yesterday about the musicians of the Arab world who, a lot of them were Jewish, especially North Africa and Iraq. It wasn't like they were just doing Jewish music on the side. No, they were getting , the main stage platform, some of the most famous Arab singers of the 20th century were Jewish Jewish people held very high prominent places. In the Arab world, and that was basically destroyed and, , colonialism always had such a deep interest of separating Jews and Muslims and using Jews as pawns for the larger Western Christian empire. And. So something I think about a lot, which will be a piece, hopefully I write one day, , is this project that is part of Zionism in some ways, but the project of the Christianization of the Jews, right?

, cause sometimes I look around and even in the U. S. and going to Jewish services and all these things, and I'm like, when did we become so Christian, right? There's also this thing that our religion , has just become so Christianized. And part of that was to cut off the connections and the ties we had with Islam, and obviously part of this larger empire interest of deep Islamophobia and Orientalism, , and trying to get Jews to align with that which meant that Jews who belonged there had to unbelong there.

, and that is the tragic story of Arab Jews, is that we were used as pawns, for the larger Zionist movement, for the larger colonial movement. And sadly, it worked. It really worked. Our community was ruptured from its context. , and Went through deep propaganda layers. I mean Especially in Israeli society or just completely assimilated into the Western world, into Christianity, or even sometimes into Ashkenazi world. 

 One easy way you can see that is in, any Jewish conference or any Jewish, anything, when they talk about Jewish languages. They don't mention Arabic, which Arabic was a very foundational Jewish language for so many years I mean Maimonides, who was one of the largest Jewish thinkers and philosophers and was writing in Arabic, so many Jews of the region were writing in Arabic and the ways in which Arabic is not seen as part of our tradition anymore.

Hadar Cohen: Because, quote unquote, now it is seen as the language of the enemy, or this terrorist language, or associated with something that's outside of us, when really it's been in us, and there's countless other examples to name the levels of just tragedy of the loss of, Jewishness itself, , but also the ways in which we were ripped out of our context, and how, so much of my work, especially about trauma healing has been around understanding my journey of how It's so difficult for me to understand myself in a Western world because the context is not mine.

And the context that of which I know how my mind thinks, how I feel emotions, how I respond, my ways of being is just completely ruptured. So how do I understand myself when I don't even have the context to be?

Katie Bogen: That kind of alienation from an existence that would feel wholly authentic, grounded as a result of these generations of political schism and I love and so appreciate that you bring up this christianization of judaism as This outpost work of zionism. 

I just went to this poetry reading last week by a jewish poet out in nebraska named ava winter who came out with a book of poems called transgenesis about Jewish queerness and Judaism and gender expansiveness and she reaches back into the legacy of the Torah and the Talmud and pulls these examples of queer inclusivity that were so intrinsic to the Jewish self and this spirituality that was vast and incredibly inclusive.

And as Judaism has become like Christianized and Zionized, it's become more queer phobic and exclusionary in a way that I find deeply alienating and despicable as a queer Jewish person. , so I just wanted to give a little shout out there as you spoke about this christianization that's coming out of the Jewish world.

Hadar Cohen: Still, and I know you do a lot of this work, , to reclaim an expansiveness that's been policed out of Judaism as a result of this Zionist project.  

 That is completely related to modernity and the rise of colonialism and all of this westernization of the world, which is to basically rigidify everything and every field and everyone, even if you look at these categories within Judaism around Orthodox, conservative, reform, and how those categories came to be. That just does not exist at all in Arab Jewish landscape. It only exists now through Zionism. But before, we had this word called "Masorti", which just means traditional, which is for people who value the tradition. But also, the classic kind of thing around Arab Jewish Shabbat, it's you do Shabbat dinner, and then you go out to a party after, and you go see a film, or you do something artistic, and it's that wasn't seen as untraditional.

Hadar Cohen: That was actually traditional, right? And , that this level of kind of religious rigidity Around what it means to be Jewish. And it's if you're Jewish, then you keep this law and that law. And, that was so foreign to a region that was so much about the intersection of fields, which is why you see, especially in the music lineages, Jewish musicians who are out in the public stage, .

Singing to Arabs of all faith, and then coming to the synagogue and bringing those same prayers. To the synagogue. And that's why Arab Jewish music is so beautiful. It's because there wasn't this , Oh, here's a secular and here's a spiritual. It was what happens in the synagogue is what happens in the public space.

And yeah, that kind of weaving of these dimensions. And, now it's I just find that especially the U S is structured through a lot of rigidity, a lot of rigid thinking, rigid ways of being, , that is also part for me of my work of , That's not actually what my culture teaches me.

That's not how I want to exist in this universe. 

Katie Bogen: Absolutely, and I love that you implicate the recency of this rigidification of Judaism has existed for thousands of years in so many diverse ways and ways that really do weave and provide nuance or allow for account for nuance. And so in the spirit of imbuing this conversation with more nuance, we always hear the statement that the Arabs kicked out the Jews, which in some ways has some truth but is removed entirely from critical historical context.

So can you speak to how that rupture happened? 

Hadar Cohen: One thing that's really important, this is where I oftentimes get very upset. First of all, that's also another thing that I want to rebel against the West for is, removing the emotional landscape from these historical political conversations where it's , Oh, if you're angry, then you need to go quiet your anger and then enter the conversation.

But it's these ways that the narratives have been created are incredibly deceiving 

Katie Bogen: and emotionally violent 

Hadar Cohen: for sure. This is an example in which Jews being uprooted from the whole Islamic society.

 This is where we see the product of that because when people bring up that narrative, they're just talking about Jewish history. They don't care to know about what happened to the other communities in that region during that time. They don't care to know about what was happening in the Arab world, what was happening to them, right?

They don't want to look at Jewish history in relationship to the history of other people. it's just taking Jewish history, Finding the parts that appeal to empire and just putting them in and then saying we don't have to learn the rest of the history of this region, and that's actually also violent to my people because I belong to the region and to the people, not to the narrative of empire. So part of also my work has been no, you don't get to use my story in that way. But there's a lot of things to say to that question. One being, there's just been so much Western colonial intervention into the region.

 Even if you're not looking at Zionism, you're just looking at The British and the French and what they did in North Africa and what they did in Syria that's already so intense. And, in Algeria in particular, this is where you see these examples so clearly and

, the way that the French really tried to break up the dynamics between Jews and Muslims and not even in relationship to Zionism, just to serve the own French empire, which was, when, basically friend the French colonized Algeria and the Jews and the Muslims who were living there were in a shared society.

And overnight the French gave the Jews French citizenship and they didn't give the Muslims citizenship. And that all of a sudden created this dynamic where the Algerian Jews were French and the Algerian Muslims were Algerian, so the way that Jews all of a sudden had an out to become French, to become Westerner.

 And that of course created a lot of animosity between the communities of why do you all of a sudden have these privileges and I don't. Yesterday, we were sitting at the same cafe. and you could see a similar dynamic that happened in all of these. This is again where it's hard to answer that question without looking at particularities of what happened in Egypt, what happened in Iraq, because they're a bit different, but that overall way in which Zionism was really Used as a tool to divide between these communities.

 I don't think you can look at the history in an honest way without really seeing that. When Zionism started, part of what happened is that there weren't enough Jews coming from Europe to settle Palestine and Zionism will not have been successful without getting the Arab Jewish community on board. And, there was so many Zionist agents who went all over to basically try to convince the communities to join their project. And the immediate answer was actually, no, they said, no, we don't want to. A lot of the reason why these communities said no, was for religious reasons.

They looked at the Ashkenazi Jews and they're like, we're not on the same religion, and especially because Zionism was so secular. Arab Jews have such a deep devotion to God and spirituality and tradition, and, being part of this project that's not religious, it's political, there was no interest in it.

And Things only started shifting when two things started happening. One, Zionism was painted as a religious thing and that's when the narrative shift started to happen, that instead of it being about this project of Jewish unity, it became this project of , don't you want to see Jerusalem?

Don't you want to see what you've been praying for thousands of years? And when it started being in the religious context, that's when you started to see more arab Jews come along, which also led to the deep heartbreak, right? Because of course we know what happened to Arab Jews when they got there to the newly created state.

They didn't get Jerusalem. They actually didn't get anything really, and they weren't even allowed to, own lands in the same way that Ashkenazim were, , they were put in ma'abarot, it's called, which is basically these encampments. there was nothing available for them in their own languages.

They were discriminated against. They had to go through a intense cultural assimilation that's still ongoing till this day, but this level of using religion as a trick is a , deep wound, , for a lot of us. the second thing, Which I'm not personally a historian, but Professor Avi Shleim has done incredible work.

And recently I had the privilege of leading a retreat with him for Arab Jewish scholars all over the world. And he speaks about this so brilliantly you cannot really, avoid the historical evidence in which Zionist agents actually purposefully try to create situations of chaos and confusion and blame it on Muslims as a way of sowing again that division and making Jews feel unsafe.

And this is where around the 1940s was such a, just chaotic time in the world following post world war two. And we also have to understand that at that time we didn't have social media. We weren't seeing a live stream genocide. We weren't seeing all these things in the ways that we can see them as clearly now.

 The Jewish community in Iraq, for example, they were only finding out about, the Holocaust later on, they weren't finding out about it in real time and they were finding out about it as Zionist agents were coming and telling them hey listen, this is what just happened in Europe to all the Jews This is what's gonna happen to you here now If you don't move now and there was a sense of urgency.

There was a sense of a lot of political shifts And of course the bombs that were implanted there and then of course the Farhud , you know We don't have to go into all these Deep histories, but, a lot of destabilization for the community that didn't know what to do. And eventually Iraq and Israel did a deal of basically uprooting the community.

 For a lot of these Jews there was this choice of , either you go to Israel and revoke your citizenship and never come back. or you stay in this unknown world where you just don't know what's going to happen. Nazi propaganda was also particularly coming into Iraq. A lot of Arabs were trying to resist colonization, right?

So they were resisting the French, they were resisting the British and they didn't necessarily know everything that was happening in Germany to the Jews at that time, but they were anti colonial, , and, it's not that they were pro German or pro Nazi Germany, but they were anti British and they were anti French and those sentiments were so deep in the Arab world that it did actually open a doorway for Germans to come in and bring in more of the Nazi propaganda.

 All of these dynamics are are complex it's not as simple as just saying the Jews were kicked out because the whole world was shifting, actually, in that time, there was a lot of dynamics that were going on. , but these are all 20th century issues.

These are not deeply, institutional, , anti Semitism was never institutionalized in this systemic way that as it was in Europe in the Arab region. It just wasn't sure. Of course, there were things that happened against the Jewish community I don't think we need to overly romanticize and say that it was perfect.

But when there was attack around Jews, it wasn't about Jews being this evil, satanic. Antichrist. They were minorities and they suffered like other minorities suffered in that region. 

Katie Bogen: I knew that interviewing you was going to be a spiritual, political, historical, rendition of being taken to school and I'm really enjoying it.

Thank you so much. , and then something you said really resonated with me too, about this centrality or primacy that's given to Ashkenazi culture and even Ashkenazi non religiosity or Ashkenazi secularism. And I noticed myself in these conversations, I'm a religious Jew, I believe in God, I pray, I have a relationship with God that feels very strong.

And I feel this sense of urgency knowing that some of the listeners will be Ashkenazi Jewish to talk about , the power of the universe or to really de religionize my own language to cater to this secularism that has taken over a lot of cultural understanding of Judaism. So I just wanted to name that earlier.

I was like, Oh God or universe or whatever. And even internally for me, I'm like, no God, but I rarely say that out loud, because at least in Ashkenazi culture, it's Devalued or seen somehow as anti scientific, anti 21st century, whatever. , and I rebuke that. So thank you for the history lesson and the reminder that religiosity is a core part of Judaism as well. I'm curious from your perspective, we've talked about these rifts, this erasure, the nuance of what was happening in the world at that time that created the split between Arab and Jewish identity, at least in a superficial way. How have you reclaimed and nurtured your combined Arab Jewish heritage?

Hadar Cohen: This is where the personal political, these mirror realities of what's happening internally resembles what's happening societally and we can't look at ourselves without looking at the context. And for me, a lot of the work to do this political work came through my own personal self journey.

 I just grew up with so much shame around my identity. It was so deep the levels of shame I felt about who I am and where I come from in Israeli society, which, it was not unique to me. It was so embarrassing to listen to Arabic music at home.

It was something that you lied about in school. When I was 10 and we moved to the U S I pretended I was Ashkenazi and of course it strained my hair and all these classic things of trying to appear whiter or blonder or whatever.

 At a certain point, I just felt tired of carrying that shame that also impacted a lot of my dynamics with my parents and the way that I saw them and, that kind of classic narrative I grew up with in Israeli society was we're this barbaric uneducated ones that are darker and grosser or whatever.

And the Ashkenazi elite, , look, they have their universities. They listen to Beethoven and my mom, even she kept being like, I really want you to go into a Western education. That's the highest thing and this way that I just devalued my own culture.

Of course, later on, I learned that the first university in the world was actually in Morocco, which is like just such a joke around thinking about intellectualism and where it actually comes from. But yeah, that way of learning to actually say , where does this shame actually come from because it didn't come from me.

It actually didn't even come from my parents or my family, even though they also had to work through some of their own. and then starting to see, what was politically occurring and the ways in which certain ways of being were just completely demonized. For me, the journey of reclaiming Arab Jewish identity also came it's not separate from the question of Palestine. there's no way to just do your Arab Jewish healing work outside of Palestine. I don't think it's possible because it's so embedded in it. I spent a good portion of my early life, trying so hard to fit into the Ashkenazi world. And then at a certain point I was like, I'm never going to fit in here.

And as that thing was crashing, that's when I started to meet more and more Palestinians and all of a sudden, just in my body, I felt so much more emotionally understood. I didn't have to try to pretend to be someone I'm not. I actually built friendships with Palestinians from Jerusalem who supported me so deeply in my own Arab, like they were so excited to meet an Arab Jew and wanted to just know more about who I am and what traditions they do.

 And it was so strange for me because it was the first time in my life, really. Someone knew about my identity and was showing interest in it instead of just seeing it as this weird thing that needs to be eliminated in this new world of Zionism. so my relationship with Palestinians has just been super influential and moving around that.

 And also just feeling loved for my identity, and acceptance. And here I was In my 20s, where, I was taught so much in Zionism about this Jewish unity of , it's us against the world of , everyone hates us and we have to unify and, of course, feeling all these dynamics between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim all this conflict between us and actually not feeling a lot of belonging at all within Jewish spaces.

And then here I am building relationships with Palestinians who, I was taught where my enemies and people that we must destroy because they hate us and all this stuff and I actually feel family. I actually feel deep family. I feel loved. I feel love for them and that's, also where

so much of Zionism was unpacked for me. And since then I've just been trying to strengthen that love relationally, but also internally within myself of being actually proud of my lineage and where I come from. Again, also facing the responsibility of that, which is not a simple thing in our time. cause it's quite extreme, it's extreme to be from Jerusalem. It's extreme. It's extreme to just be alive these days and witnessing everything that's happening. 

Katie Bogen: Everything that you've said resonates so strongly, particularly this idea of, , being raised with the threat mythology of, , everyone hates you and you're gonna be alone forever and so you need to be part of this Jewish unity project so that you have any community to speak of because the rest of the world wants you dead.

 That's a very bizarre kind of psychopathology story to be raised on, and traumatizing story to be raised on and the most impactful work that I have done in unlearning that myth of the jews are widely detested Has been finding community in this palestinian liberation anti zionist movement that's been deeply healing for me and then you speak to this tension between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim so beautifully and I was raised feeling not Jewish enough because I'm very white.

My, my mother is Irish. My dad is a Polish Jew. And, I had the reverse experience after I came out as pro Palestine in my early twenties of being , I need to somehow look more Jewish because people are looking at me and seeing this little white girl. And I was trying to figure out how to curl my hair.

I was trying to learn how to speak Hebrew because I never went to Hebrew school and trying to find being Jewish enough that not even the Zionists who learned my political stance could say, Oh, she's not a real Jew, fake Jew, Irish mother, whatever it is. and so the fact that we had these bi directional paths toward an imagined Judaism that someone else projected as a necessity onto us, I find deeply paralleling.

Of course, I'm aware of the privilege of being Ashkenazi and white passing and all of the doors that has opened for me in the Western world and that I'm buffered in many ways against not only racism, but anti Semitism because of the way that I look, but still I feel that crisis of not Jewish enough.

, and it's similar to queer identity of chronically feeling not queer enough. Not whatever marginalized identity enough to legitimize. so thank you for bringing that to the conversation and also allowing me space to parallel. 

Hadar Cohen: Yeah, definitely. those identity wounds are exactly Where the political systems take advantage of right?

And especially when we're younger, we don't know that we just struggle with on belonging and fitting in and not feeling enough and feeling too much and all of these feelings, that are actually quite politically purposeful, and as we become adults, it's our responsibility to look at that to look at the ways in which, , we're trying to readjust everything we are to, , to fit in and it's because there's a lineage wound, right?

Because there's a rupture around our connection to ourselves and to belonging. And if we lived in a world where we just innately felt belonging, we would not be doing this shit of domination and extraction, right? Because a lot of that is trying to fill a wound. That is obviously not going to get filled through those tactics, but we think it might sometimes.

So we get addicted to these systems of oppression and yeah, I just think that , this psychology work is just so foundational to dismantling of political systems. 

Katie Bogen: Yeah. That, that mythos of empire and like the buying into empire, the way that you will be Jewish enough is if you support this brutal occupation and ethno nationalist political project. That is , the check mark of your Judaism. I find so despicable and devaluing and an isolation from what Judaism is slash can be. So I want to learn so much more from you about Malchut and this school of mysticism that you founded and mysticism as your spirituality and your way of life.

Hadar Cohen: My school Malchut is named after my grandma, whose name was Malka. Which means queen in Hebrew also Arabic, similar, etymology roots. malchut is a Kabbalistic sefirah, it's a divine aspect of God. So in Kabbalah, part of the cosmology is that there's these sefirot, which are divine aspects of God.

That God created the universe through these Different energies, you could say different channels. there's a whole kind of orientation of how they relate to one another. There's that's where the tree of life comes from. Very deep stuff. But Malchut is one of the 10 and it's the last one and it's oriented with the feminine.

Principle of God. , and oftentimes the way that I like to translate it as the manifestation of God in the world. The womb that is taking all the energies and actually creating life. and for me, I was an activist space for a long time and different struggles.

And I kept confronting this thing that I didn't have answers to, which was What to do with human pain, right? Because so many activists struggles ultimately are relating to pain and they're trying to fix pain, heal pain, create conditions where pain is not as extreme as it is. but this question of pain . What holds pain or what transforms pain? Okay, sure. We're fighting for a different world. But. How do we be with pain? And I just didn't find any answers other than spirituality or God. That's where I found the depth of answers for that. And that's, Where my own, , personal spiritual journey, you can say, began. 

I tried to create a different school in which most of our modern education is really built around teaching content. This is what happened then, or this is how you do math, or this is this story and things that if you Google, you can learn, but spiritual schools are really oriented differently, which is not about teaching content, but it's about cultivating ways of being, which are things that even if you Google for the rest of your life.

Hadar Cohen: You might never learn, right? Because the only way you can attain them is through practice and experience really, right? Patience or courage or humility or love or, , all these attributes, which for so long in humanity, this is what school was. School was a place where you practice how to be. in the modern age, we have become so dissociated. Both from who we are and from what's happening around us, that our educational models are just about how to store more and more information. And we see that's not working. we see that's where not working around Palestine, right?

As much as there's so much beautiful educational initiatives out there that are shifting narrative. Some of this work is just such deep trauma work where you can be presenting people with the same information over and over again. It's not shifting because there's something else that needs to shift.

 That is that work of a spiritual school is around , this teaching of these practical skills, , which is how do we cultivate our minds? How do we cultivate our hearts? How do we cultivate our body? And part of what I love about that is that no matter who you are, no one can do that work for you, right?

 There's no cheating. Okay. In God's school, , there's just none, right? It's , your mind is your mind. How you are with your thoughts is your world, right? And no one can do that work for you. So it's also this deeply empowering thing, which especially coming from Jerusalem, growing up on such a deep spiritual land that You know, it has a prophetic lineage where so many prophets all over, and so many different traditions, they would see institutionalized religion and they would see all these ways that humans set up systems and they would pull the people from the back and say , Hey, who actually wants to do the deep serious work?

Which is let's go to the desert and confront our fears and ourselves , because no institution can do that for us. This is my contribution to the world is this teaching of spirituality because fundamentally I do believe that's what heals us and that's what shifts suffering in this world. I don't think that we can shift the world outside of us. I believe it has to be through us. It has to be in the felt sense. It has to be through this investigation of the internal landscape that's woven in. My dream eventually, we'll see if it will ever be possible, but it is to have this spiritual center in Jerusalem as a space of a portal of connection to God that is healing, that is justice, that is beauty, that is, all of these things.

But for now, it's , okay, let's create that virtually and in different spaces, , doing different retreats. we did one in Andalusia last year, Jewish, mystical retreat. And hopefully next year we'll do a Jewish Muslim retreat in Andalusia. And part of also rebuilding and reviving Andalusia, which also feels like a big spiritual project for me.

, also part of the school is also teaching Jewish mysticism, which just to say briefly about it. My grandfather was a prayer leader. I grew up in a synagogue space. I was taught that Judaism is about love of humanity, because Judaism is about love of God. And if you love God, you love humanity.

The creation of God, which is humans. , it's other things as well, but it's also humans. And so often we have spiritual leadership that is disconnected from the deep love for humanity. And I'm not saying that it's easy. It's one of the hardest thing ever to return to that love of humanity. But to me, that is the spiritual work.

And. , growing up in Israeli society, and the proper word for what's happening with Zionism and with this apartheid regime is just idolatry. It's complete idolatry. It's worship of false idols of illusion of the worst things that you could be doing , and for me, I feel such a deep dissonance between My Jewish lineage and the teachings of that spiritual lineage and what is known as this Jewish state that is making a mockery of my religion.

, so part of my school is also to actually be rooted in my lineage that is Jewish. And that is about love of humanity and the deepest way possible, which absolutely includes Palestinians. Too often we create Spaces in the justice world and the spiritual world that are just , we love everyone except for Palestinians because Palestine is too challenging for us to look at.

And that just cannot be part of any spiritual framework. It has to be through that land in particular, right? That land is the Holy land for a reason. So it's , how are we going to be spiritual without actually looking at the insane amount of suffering that Palestinians are enduring for so many years? 

Katie Bogen: Judaism is very anchored in community and this idea of shared knowledge. it's a deeply intellectual, curious, investigative practice, and I know that the healing circles that you hold are to heal some of these wounds within Jewish identity through this sharing of spiritual awareness and practice.

So can you tell us about that? A few of the people or the stories that have stood out to you in those circles that you think brings home this idea , of sharing or coming down the mountain. 

Hadar Cohen: If I don't believe that I can change that reality can change, then I might as well just go home and do nothing. When I am allowing, and this is also a deep practice. In the mind is to like, am I really permissioning this world to change or am I imposing the views I had even a minute ago on to it, right?

Because when we really get down to the spiritual root of it, life is changing moment by moment and part of being in relationship to it is to allow for it to change. And so often because of our patterning and our wounds, we actually do not allow change. We don't allow ourselves to be different. We don't allow other people to be different because now I see them through this lens and we hold on to stories that reinforce our wounding.

And of course, you could see that very easily with Zionism. one of the things that I oftentimes I'm so shocked by is just even this narrative, even if you were to buy into this, the whole world hates us. And , we just are destined to suffer. that's actually a self hating position to take as a Jewish person to say that you are here on earth for a life of suffering and there's nothing that can shift about it just because it it's just it's just filled with self hatred to me versus even if you want to say that the whole world hates us okay great how do we create a different world in which we are loved right is that a possibility and if it's not then we know that we're dealing with the highly traumatized mind. Gosh, these healing circles. so I will say that one thing also about Jewishness that feels really important and of course, in some ways, Norman Finkelstein did a lot of work around this. There's a lot of people do a lot of work around it, but there's a Jewish trauma, which is real.

And for me. I do not, I'm not interested in being in the business at all of belittling any parts of Jewish trauma and the pain that Jewish people carry, because it is quite deep. So there's that level of it. And then on top of it, there is the weaponization of it. There's the creation of, , what Norman Fickelstein called the Holocaust industry, the way the Holocaust is used.

The way that narratives and education and history, , those are all actually separate things than the actual pain that Jewish people are carrying. And for me, part of what I've been trying to do in my work is to position them as different things. Because so long as our pain is actually embedded in these war machines, And these military industrial complexes that tell us that , the only way for us to not feel this pain is if we kill a bunch of Palestinians, , but that's extreme.

That's an extreme thing to say. So we have to separate. Our wounding and our pain from the industrialization of it. , and cause it is a whole industry of using Jewish pain, using Jewish trauma. , and to -me, part of how we dismantle it is through actually learning how to be with the actual pain that is there without needing to now have it be a whole industry that's used against Palestinians and Arabs and Muslim people.

Now that's all sometimes can get challenging, right? , where's that moment of, but this is where the body. Landscape is quite, , important and also something that I bring a lot of the time when I do these healing spaces and circles is this invitation to allow ourselves to surprise ourself right?

Because so often we're like, I know who I am. I know what my wounding is. Maybe we actually don't. . And we actually don't know until we participate. in some healing ritual and see what comes up. So this invitation to also be surprised by what's there. But I will say that in terms of healing Jewish, , I just don't believe Jews can heal alone.

 We're too traumatized. We're too bound up in this intensity of being warped through Zionism and all of it. And I actually think we're in deep. Need of community and relationships with others. And over the years I've been hosting and different places in the world, whether in London or LA or Berlin, these spaces of Jewish Palestinian belonging, and sometimes it's just Shabbats or iftars or, this just community space to celebrate whatever holiday we're subway celebrating and sometimes it's woven with prayer and relational exercises and all of this.

but I just find that it's impossible for Jews to heal without being in a relationship. And this is where it gets a bit tricky, , for me, at least. I also believe that it's necessary to heal in relationship with Palestinians. I'm at this point where I actually don't even feel comfortable doing Shabbat or doing high holidays or doing any of this without having Palestinians present because our, Histories and futures are so bound up together.

 My Jewishness has to be in relationship with Palestinian liberation all the time, , , it cannot be disconnected from it. And to me, that is where the true spiritual wisdom is and also maybe unexpected, right? Because people perhaps are used to thinking of Jewish prayer or Jewish ritual and being in particular ways and a synagogue looking this way and looking that way.

but when we get down to , spirituality has to, in some ways, meet the moment as it is, we cannot impose on it something different. We have to meet it for where it is and where it , is a lot of , deep pain and separation. , and the healing that is available for us if we choose to do that is just , so deep and , so high that for me, I'm like, .

 Going back to the Purim story where, , Queen Esther is, , has this opportunity to basically save the Jewish people and Mordecai, her uncle, is , who knows? Maybe you were positioned in this exact identity to do this work. And if you don't, it's okay. Other people will do it. You don't have to, but maybe there's a way in which God positioned you in this way to do this work.

So I, about that and I come back to, okay. What is it about my identity that allows for a greater level of healing? And that's a question that all of us can ask ourselves is , how am I positioned in a way to create more healing and liberation for our people, which hopefully is all people.

Katie Bogen: It is not on you to complete the work, nor are you free to abandon it as you're speaking. And you were speaking earlier about, hearing someone use all of the right words. And assessing how it feels in the body and as you were talking about the impossibility Of jews healing in isolation or the impossibility of jews healing alone.

That feels absolutely true to me It's , you know The traumatized person who decides never to leave their home or never to leave their apartment Because they believe that they're safe on their own as long as they're inside or the allegory of the cave or whatever and then eventually You do have to leave.

And the only reality that can prove your safety is experiencing other people and knowing or learning or having it proven to you that they do not wish you harm. And that, , is what's been so revolutionary for me about being in these, anti Zionist critical Palestinian liberation spaces, is being in community with the folks who I was told my entire life would wish ill on me.

and having the tangible proof in person that is untrue and the way that has lit a fire and motivated my justice work in a way that felt much more shallow prior to that proving, has been incredible. So , you're speaking , to the healing of a wound, , to approach rather than avoidance, to these very , emotional, spiritual, cognitive, mechanistic orientations of we must do X and Y in order to experience Z.

, so thank you for bringing that to the conversation. One of the things I would love to hear you Parse and speak about is the intergenerational reality of exactly what you're talking about now, of, , healing this trauma wound and recognizing that as the younger generation we have the privilege of an additional generational buffer from some of this pain.

Hadar Cohen: Not all of it, but some of it. , and so what does intergenerational reality look for you in this conversation of healing not only for Jewish people, but for Palestinian folks as well? 

Yeah. , this is part of my spiritual belief is that life will always be creating more life, , and however intense the suffering and violence is life is always going to be more powerful and life is always invested in creating more life.

Hadar Cohen: So that's a belief I have. , and that when we look at intergenerational trauma, and certainly I felt this with my. My parents and my grandparents, there are certain things that they could do, and there are certain things that they couldn't do. There are certain things that they could see, and there are certain things that they couldn't see.

And , for me, especially in the earlier days of my life, there's things that I would get upset at. It's , how can you not see this? How are you still, but also I wasn't in their shoes. I don't, I didn't experience the things that they experienced. And that intergenerational work requires a lot of humility.

Because so often we get so wrapped up in our experience and narrative and how we see things, but time is such a, who knows who I would have been if I was born a hundred years ago, I probably would have been, , certain things about my essence might be similar, but my worldview, my ways of being might be totally different depending on my experiences, because ultimately, all of us are so shaped by our experiences and our conditioning.

but this is where it becomes so critical. , you're talking about the isolation that happens in Jewish community and , it sometimes feels also similar to a child who. it's sitting at the dinner table and is upset and is running, screaming to their room because they want to be left alone.

, yeah, they want to be left alone. And that's what they're saying. But also there's probably a part inside that's Hey, can someone please come get me? A more vulnerable side that is scared to even say that. And that's similar for the Jewish people, right? We're running away and being , no, don't touch me or don't look at me.

And it's , there's a part of us , please see me, and that's kind of part of this energetic somatic work is learning to see the things that are unspoken , which is very deep work. But ultimately it's about also understanding, which is a really harsh thing. Especially sometimes in the activist world, right?

Because we get very, we get into our perspectives really deeply around what's true and what's right and what's wrong and what's not, which, , there's a lot of beauty and justice in that and sometimes it can lead to a certain rigidification in which we do not see someone else's perspective.

And part of what I love about Andalusia in particular is the reason why it was a thriving golden age. Is because they were so diverse, , because there was this healthy way of , sometimes reading these letter exchanges between different scholars and their conceptions of God and they disagreed with each other, but they would write each other

 even Maimonides and Ibn Arabi and all of these different ways of thinking about God they were in relationship and in conversation with one another. And I long to create some of that world and intergenerationally one of the things that was so beautiful about hosting an Arab Jewish retreat with Avi Shleim was that it was a very intergenerational group of people from all over the world.

all ages. And the power of that is just so palpable. It's so different than being around just people of your same age group, because you were all conditioned in a similar time, and when you start to see things in different time lineages, the picture starts to become more full. , it's difficult work to do because it requires seeing something from another time period, but the beauty that's there and the connection , when I was doing this Arab Jewish work, at first, I started just organizing with people of my age, and then I realized, We're actually too traumatized to do this.

We don't have enough resource to do this. We're eating each other alive in this activist world, because we don't have elders and we don't have mentors the second I looked , a few years older than me, I was like, Oh, wow. They went through the same dynamics that we're going through.

Katie Bogen: And then bringing them into the conversation is , so much more powerful. . building connections with scholars who are 20, 30, 40 years older than me, , they help orient me and they also help teach me about how to not make the same mistakes. 

 I've

Katie Bogen: observed online these very justice fears is the tendency of the left and justice movements to eat themselves for a period of just, this internal pain and perfectionism that is . stark that folks can't sit in discomfort. And this idea of elders who have been in justice oriented spaces and in Jewish spaces and pro Palestine spaces for decades and generations, having to go through arcs of that or cycles of that, of watching a community form rifts and figure out how to heal and see each other's humanity and do it again and again.

I can imagine finding very inspirational despite even the lack of exposure. , I'm still in the brace , of watching our communities eat themselves right now. and so speaking to that as well, , we've heard you talk about Jerusalem itself being in exile , this city land or space in exile, and that in order , to honor the spirituality of the land.

She would not exclude anyone. So I would love for you to talk about, why is Jerusalem itself in exile and what would you imagine her or their message to be in this moment to Palestinians, Israelis and the world? 

Hadar Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Jerusalem is just such a holy special city. There's been so many prophets who've walked.

In that city so many people all over the world who've prayed to her, One of the things that's also interesting being from Jerusalem is that almost every day. There's like a new Trip from somewhere else in the world that's coming with their own belief systems about Jerusalem and I forgot who says this But there's someone who says that everyone has their own Jerusalem.

So the way that Jerusalem is just such a deep portal physically, but also in the psychosomatic spiritual right the conceptions of Jerusalem are quite deep and the gap between the Jerusalem that I know from the spiritual books of being a multi religious city of God and the reality of apartheid and division between East and West, segregation, discrimination, extreme brutality it's inconsistent.

It's that's not the city of God. That's. The hell realms, and that goes back to the beginning of our conversation in which we talked about the land body connection, because oftentimes when we think of exile, we think about people being in exile, right?

People are displaced from their land. And from my work around somatic relationships and, you know relating to land, I was also feeling the land itself is actually in exile, right? The land is not actually satisfied. It was what's happening. The land also has prayers. The land also has, experiences of suffering.

And I just believe in the deep power of land as well. So Jerusalem in exile, that was this piece that I started after my grandma died, because that's how I felt in my body. It was , this land is an exile. It's not able to be herself. and that became a few year long project that is in some ways still ongoing.

Hopefully one day will be a book about the notions of exile from. Psychology from spirituality and how that relates to political exile and looking specifically at also this trauma transference that happens. when I remember moving to the US when I was 10, and I went to a Jewish high school.

And in the school, the way that they talked about Jerusalem was like, oh, this is our homeland, this is our, and I remember being like, that's not your homeland, that's my homeland. I actually just came from there. And just this way in which, in the Jewish narrative sometimes, there's a sense of oh, now we're back in Jerusalem, so our exile and suffering is over.

And how shallow of a narrative that is, because, of course, it doesn't look at the impact and consequence that had on, had and has on Palestinians. But also, it's not really fully honoring of Jewish narrative and story as well. Return isn't just about, okay, I was displaced from this land, and now I'm back in this land, and now everything's good.

You actually have to go through a soul journey to Look at all the parts of yourself that were fragmented through that. And the inability of the Jewish community sometimes to look within around what has happened to us creates a space for us to transfer that trauma onto Palestinians. If you look at what's been happening to Palestinians and Palestinian trauma, and of course, Edward Said was already writing about this years ago, and many Palestinian scholars have been writing about this, but the way that Palestinian trauma is Jewish trauma, just dumped on them, Edward Said has a really beautiful line on the reflections on exile the book of essays where he's like, Palestinians feel that they have been turned into exiles by the proverbial people of the exile, the Jews, right? This way that exile is , Something that's also been passed on Palestinian exile is in some ways is suffering that comes from Jewish exile and the way that Jewish exile and Palestinian exile are woven and the trauma transference and all of that.

So that was also part of looking at Jerusalem and exile and yeah, became also this prayer that I have in my heart around. What does it look like to liberate Jerusalem? What is the liberation of Jerusalem? Which to me has to mean practical material dismantling of apartheid on that land of full and equal rights for Palestinian people and reparations and all of that.

And also the psychosomatic spiritual. Work of trauma of the Jewish exile, Palestinian exile, which of course are, again, they're not just physical things. exile in essence is just such a deep layer because it's like, we're not just exiled from a place on earth. We're exiled from our souls.

We're exiled from God. We're exiled from lineages, right? These are not things that you can just fly on a plane and get to. This is a journey that is required of each and every one of us. 

Katie Bogen: And you speak so, so stunningly to this idea of the heritability or contagion of the symptoms of trauma, if they are unhealed and the way that we, project and act and place those upon other bodies.

And this idea of a return from exile being. Demanding a spiritual journey so that we do not do those things, so that we do not become the perpetrators of our history. And that this idea of calling ourselves returned just because of an arrival at a certain geographic space is such a farce.

It is such an abandonment of Jewish history and philosophy. Our last question. So would you share with us a notable post poem or piece of writing that's helped you navigate this conversation or stress management practice that's been helpful to you?

Hadar Cohen: Yeah. So this is part of this question that you asked me about Jerusalem and exile, and it comes from The Talmud tractate to unneath 5a, I always like to cite my scripture. But in general, scripture has always been such a deep portal for me of connection because of it's time travel abilities, being in this time, but also being beyond time.

But also just finding the language and the ways of getting at the human experience in such a deep way to be quite meaningful. But okay, I'll just read it. And Rav Nachman said to Rabbi Yitzchak, What is the meaning of that which is written? It is sacred in your midst, and I will not enter the city.

This verse is puzzling because it is sacred in your midst. Will God not enter the city? Rabbi Yitzchak that Rabbi Yohanan said the verse should be understood as follows. The Holy One, blessed be God, said, I shall not enter Jerusalem above until I enter Jerusalem below. And is there such a place as Jerusalem above?

Yes, as it is written, Jerusalem built up a city unified together. The term unified indicates that there are two cities of Jerusalem, the above one and the below one, which are bound together. So this is part of a deeper Qabbalistic teaching that many people are familiar with, right? That as above, so below this understanding of parallel worlds that for whatever there exists in the material world, there's a parallel spiritual world that corresponds to it.

And when we shift things in the spiritual world, they impact the material world and vice versa. But I particularly like this about Jerusalem of thinking of Jerusalem below and Jerusalem above. And part of what I love about this. Passage is that it shares that God is actually unwilling to dwell in Jerusalem above and spiritual Jerusalem until God is welcome in Jerusalem below.

And that to me feels like that's a responsibility of us as human beings is to make Jerusalem a hospitable place for God, for the divine. And that actually requires us to dismantle systems of oppression that actually requires us to fight for Palestinian liberation. Thank you Because otherwise God's not going to enter not Jerusalem below and not Jerusalem above and this is where I also believe that Jerusalem in particular is a collective mirror for all of us, Oftentimes people look at what's happening there and they're too complicated.

I don't want to see I don't want to talk I don't want to look and people do not really Understand the ways in which what's happening there has global significance Not just politically, but spiritually as well. And we all have actually responsibilities to Jerusalem. And this work for me has served as a compass around, okay, if I can't change it all today, what are the ways that I can.

Still build a certain level of Jerusalem, both spiritually and politically, that can create, that can be part of the process of creation, an invitation for the divine to come and return to us. 

Katie Bogen: I mean

Moving from the space of change making just all of the time, having change making be an embodied And I want to take this reading that you've applied, the scripture that you've applied to Jerusalem and expand it in our closing prayer, which is, may all beings everywhere thrive in peace and dignity and share in all our joys and freedoms, and may we see true peace in the Middle East for all in our lifetime.

Amen. 

Hadar Cohen: Amen.