Politics and the Jewish Body

In the latest issue of Jewish Currents, we published a piece called “Does the Jewish Body Keep the Score?” by Jon Danforth-Appell, which looks at three recent left-wing books about the relationship between Jewish trauma and Zionism, and challenges the view that Zionism in Jewish communities constitutes a trauma response that will need to be healed in order to be fought. On this episode of On the Nose, Arielle Angel speaks with the author of one of those books, Wendy Elisheva Somerson, known as Wes, a somatic healer who helped found the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and published An Anti-Zionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing last year. Angel and Somerson discuss the risk of essentializing about “Jewish bodies,” whether implanted or prosthetic trauma still needs to be “healed,” and what it means to claim Jewish ritual as somatic practice.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Media Mentioned and Further Reading

An Anti-Zionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing by Wendy Elisheva Somerson

Ruach healing groups

“Western Philosophy as White Supremacism,” Crispin Sartwell, The Philosophical Salon

Power-Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change by Steven Wineman

“Prosthetic Trauma at the Nova Exhibition: Holocaust Memory, Reenactment, and the Affective Reproduction of Genocidal Nightmares,” Ben Ratskoff, Journal of Genocide Research

“Picturing Power,” Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents

Wounds Into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma by Tirzah Firestone

Taking the State Out of the Body: A Guide to Embodied Resistance to Zionism by Eliana Rubin

Transcript forthcoming.