People of the Body and the Book
From moral injury to sacred solidarity
Facilitated by Ayelet Marinovich, Noah Goldberg, & Stacey Prince
with special guests Wendy Elisheva Somerson, Resmaa Menakem, & Jo Kent Katz
“Just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away.”
- Omar El Akkad
“Collective pain demands collective hearts: spaces where we can come together to witness, hold, and metabolize the weight of what modernity has made unspeakable.”
- Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
What this Course is About
In the midst of a third year of mass displacement, starvation and genocide in Palestine, and amid the broader context of imperialism, fascism, expanding violence and war around the world, how can we…
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Come together
How can we come together as Jews to transmute our grief and trauma into healing, solidarity, safety, belonging, empowerment and action?
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Lean In
How can we lean into the Jewish values that underpin collective liberation rather than exceptionalism?
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Explore Possibilities
How can we explore what becomes possible when we engage in collective processing and co-regulation as core strategies to resist isolation, overwhelm, and gaslighting?
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Deepen Understanding
How can we understand the ways that our ancestral lineages have shaped our current collective identities and feel into what’s possible when we sort through the burdens and gifts of those lineages?
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Gain Momentum
How can we move from complicity and moral injury to sacred solidarity?
This matters now more than ever. The violence done in the name of Jewish safety continues to expand. Doing this work moves us toward collective liberation.
History Lives Within Our Bodies
We will gather together to respond to these guiding questions by engaging in a deep reading of Wendy Elisheva Somerson's An Anti-Zionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing -- a book that grapples with the way that history lives within our bodies (and will be reenacted until we heal) and explores an emergent Judaism beyond Zionism. We'll provide a space to
... co-metabolize our grief and moral injury
... be more attuned and responsive with ourselves and each other
... feel a sense of belonging that is created not by militarized nation states but by our shared care and collective healing
We call our group People of the Body and the Book because Jews are known as the people of the book - for our highly intellectual and intellectualized way of being in the world - sometimes to our own detriment.
Learning to be in our bodies and healing through the body is very much what Wes’s book is about, and what Wes believes is needed to bring about authentic Jewish healing from Zionism and in general.
As Naomi Klein said in her endorsement of the book, “this may well be the missing piece for breaking the pattern of violence undergirding Israeli apartheid and occupation.”
Details
When will this course begin and end?
This course is being offered on line. Beginning on June 14th, 2026, we will gather every second and fourth Sunday at 4pm PST / 7pm EST for 2 hours for a total of 12 sessions.
In addition to our 12 group sessions, participants will also be invited to meet 1:1 with one of our three facilitators. Additional details will be provided after the course begins.
What will this course entail?
Each group will begin with a grounding practice and check-ins, followed by a deep dive into the content of the current book chapter, supported by ritual, somatic and ancestral practices that encourage embodied metabolism of the material and co-regulation with the group.
Will we be using somatic and/or Jewish ritual practices?
While we will be using somatic and Jewish ritual practices inspired by the book to co-metabolize together, we will not be doing the practices that Wes describes in the book. If you are interested more specifically in those practices, we highly recommend that you check out Wes's group offering Ruach.
What will the learning style be?
We will be using a “depth education” approach for this course. You can learn more about it here and also in this short video. In this approach the course content is much more about your reactions to the material than the material itself.
Whereas mastery education is about “filling the cup” with knowledge, depth education is much more about “peeling an onion” and witnessing with compassion the layers underneath.
Depth education is more about confronting our denials and composting our grief rather than confronting ignorance. It requires different tools and toys than mastery education, and is more about collectively creating a depth of understanding and self-reflection rather than identifying solutions or next steps.
What will the group size be?
Up to 18 participants will be enrolled into this first cohort.
Who is this group for?
This is a Jewish affinity space for those who are on an anti-Zionist un/learning path. You are welcome whether you are just beginning or have been steeped in this work for a long time. While we think everyone, Jews and non Jews alike, has our work to do in this moment, there are many reasons why affinity spaces are helpful.
Who is facilitating this container?
Ayelet Marinovich is a pediatric speech-language therapist, parent educator, grief support facilitator, and a white, able-bodied, anti-zionist Ashkenazi Jewish woman based on Muwekma Ohlone land, colonially known as the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work is about holding space and building ritual into the every day. She is the founder of Learn With Less®, a parent education company helping educators and new families support early development and family connection by finding magic in the mundane, everyday objects and routines of life. As Ayelet has navigated her own anti-zionist identity, she has frequently turned to her own values as an individual, allowing them to guide how she shows up as a parent, business owner, ritualist, and community member. In order to move forward (or even stand still), she believes we must additionally connect to our collective humanity.
Noah Goldberg
Stacey Prince is a psychologist and somatics practitioner living on the stolen lands of the Duwamish and Coast Salish peoples in what is colonially known as Seattle, WA. She is a white, queer, currently able bodied, anti-zionist / anti-occupation Ashkenazi Jew and a visitor on these lands, with a lifelong commitment to examining and dismantling her complicitness with whiteness, settler-colonialism and modernity. She founded and stewards The Living Room, a collective of politicized healers. In addition to psychotherapy she offers supervision, consultation, group workshops and collective healing spaces, and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington.
Guest Speakers
We are honored to have the following guests joining us:
Book author Wendy Elisheva Somerson
Therapist, somatic healer and author of My Grandmother’s Hands Resmaa Menakem
Healer, educator and ritualist Jo Kent Katz
Resource Exchange
We are offering three tiers of payment for this course - $2,000, $1,500 and $1,000 - and will ask you to select which one is right for you based on this economic justice sliding scale framework. Payment plans of 3 installments every 2 months are available. We are also offering 2-3 pay what you can or pro bono spots.
Mutual Aid
A percentage of registration fees directed to (US Pal Mental Health Network or PCRF)
To Register
To apply, please complete this form.
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