Ashkenazi Herbalism: Land, Body, and Diasporic Memory

This workshop will facilitate collective remembering and reimagining of ancestral herbal medicines through Ashkenazi root systems as ways of dialoguing with ancestors through plants. 

This heritage refers to the multiplicity of plant medicine traditions practiced by Jews in the Yiddishland region of Eastern Europe, shaped in its encounters with neighboring communities. Revitalizing these ancestral plant knowledges in today’s Berlin opens towards a practice of herbalism as a cross-cultural connector that interweaves diasporas and defies ethnonationalist drives.

Together, we will create a remedy that embodies our personal, collective, and ancestral plant-relations to the nervous system, empowering us to mediate senses of safety collectively.

Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator, gardener, and herbalist. Her work engages with relations between bodies and lands through the plant world and intersections of place-based, (multi)local, migratory, and ancestral knowledges. Integrating embodiment practices and herbal medicine-making through community-based socially-engaged processes, she asks questions about land…