Ancestral Recovery and Radical Diasporism: Beyond Dispersion to Solidarity

When I first traveled to Poland, I learned about the very intentional effort to transform the ‘weak ghetto Jew’ into the muscular, armed Israeli — pressuring our people to abandon 1000 years of Jewish life in Europe, including their language, for modern Hebrew. Yiddish and Yiddishkayt were suppressed and stigmatized in early Israel — theater groups were prohibited from producing shows in Yiddish, newspapers were banned. And the story of the Jewish Labor Bund — the solidarity movement that fought back, physically and politically, against both Zionism and fascism, was buried.

When I learned this, I was overcome with anger first, and then grief. I saw that my culture, already ravaged by the Holocaust, had been further stolen from me by Zionism — and that as it proclaimed Israel as the Jewish homeland, it demoted hundreds of Jewish Diasporic cultures to a peripheral, second class status at best.

As if this weren’t enough — many of the cultural elements that did survive to this point slipped through my great-grandparents’ fingers as they assimilated into dominant US society. They made a difficult bargain when they gained the opportunity to pass as white. I have much compassion for them — their choices must have been very difficult, perhaps not feeling like a choice at all. But in the end, it’s another layer of loss.

I wanted my culture back. Personally and politically. So since that first journey, I’ve begun to de-assimilate myself, rooting into Radical Diasporism as a framework that can hold this process.

What is Radical Diasporism?

While there are ongoing conversations about the meaning of diasporism, my attempt builds on the movement envisioned by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (z”l) in her book the Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, published 20 years ago.

She defines Radical Diasporism as an “intentional political, feminist, and anti-racist stance,” built on the Yiddish principle of ‘doikayt’ — hereness — the experience of rooting down in the places we live — not as an act of claiming, but as an act of commitment.

“Hereness demands that we learn our local histories and resurrect hidden ones of our own. Hereness means we refuse to disappear into the interiority of our liturgy, and equally refuse to stop being Jews in public. Hereness forces us to consider critically our relationship with class and its ordering of our world. Hereness is weird and materialist and queer and fun and angry, and best of all it’s already happening.”

Radical Diasporism calls us to both the gift and the responsibility of a place: to fight for justice alongside our neighbors and to live in right relationship with the Indigenous peoples whose land we now inhabit. It emphasizes embracing our Jewish cultures and Jewish cultural diversity, resisting both assimilation and nationalism, and challenging the notion of Israel as the Jewish homeland and only possible place of Jewish safety.

But Radical Diasporism goes beyond a diverse Judaism to a reclaiming of culture for all. It’s about collective liberation — for all diasporic peoples, for all marginalized peoples, for all beings.

As Kantrowitz states, “Diasporism joins those who see borders as lines to cross… [and] offers a place where we might join with others who value this history of dispersion; others who stand in opposition to nationalism and the nation state.”

A pathway through collapse

Radical Diasporism has the potential to be a pathway through collapse and into the *better and more beautiful world** we wish to inhabit… One where we hear a cacophony of our and others’ ancestral songs and languages in the streets and community gardens, where we feel connection, solidarity, and a sense of generosity with our neighbors, and where we live in commitment and connection to the people, traditions, plants, and animals of the place — however challenging, messy and uncomfortable that may sometimes be.

It’s a project dedicated to cultivating a sense of home wherever we are, recovering our lost lineages, embracing the reality of human migration over millenia, and reframing diaspora itself: from the dispersion of seeds into the wind, to the act of rooting wherever we land. From here we can constellate with other communities, crossing borders to create bioregional resilience, and moving from our inherent interdependence to bring more peace, healing, justice and liberation for all.

Ancestral recovery is one part of living as a Radical Diasporist

Ultimately, belonging is an inside game. And, when we lack a sense of belonging, it becomes difficult to root into anything. But paradoxically, that is exactly what we must do to break the cycle of disconnection. I believe this is what Radical Diasporism is both asking of us and offering us — to cultivate inner belonging through a process of outward commitment to place, culture, and beings — because our modern crisis is rooted in the rampant separation from land and one another.

Land shapes culture. It provides food and plant medicines, informs language and daily rhythms, inspires mythologies, magic, architecture, and holy days.

In turn, culture shapes humans. Any place your people have lived, over generations and eons, has shaped who you are.

When a culture is destroyed, or when we leave a place, by choice or by force, we can become severed from what roots us, and we risk feeling adrift. This is why so many refugees and migrants find and live in community with people of their culture in their new lands. And that helps. But what if that’s not enough? What if we still feel gaps in our belonging?

When I first visited my ancestral places, a gap I didn’t even know existed was filled. I felt more whole, more grounded in myself, and as though something in my soul shifted or opened up. A new era of my life began. And I’ve since heard similar testimonies from many who have traveled with us.

So on our pilgrimages, we immerse ourselves in culture and tradition, history and politics, death and life. We learn and practice nearly-lost Yiddish rituals, sing Bundist anthems in the streets of Warsaw, dance to live Klezmer music, roll neshomalicht (soul candles) in stunning restored synagogues, celebrate and learn from our ancestors’ inspiring resistance movements. We visit Holocaust sites and witness the tragic histories of our people in the places they happened, and we metabolize grief and trauma through ritual, song, prayer, and movement.

And perhaps most importantly — we slow down to connect with the land itself, to attempt to repair what’s been severed. We plant our feet on the earth, smell the flowers, make medicines from the herbs, wander the forests, perform ceremonies in overgrown cemeteries, and seek out our ancestors’ physical places — visiting their hometowns and doing mikvahs in the lakes they swam in.

The solidarity effect

Ancestral recovery also supports us to become better solidarity partners in our fights for justice — this is another reason it weaves so naturally into the praxis of Radical Diasporism, especially for white-passing Ashkenazi Jews. This work breaks our hearts open into deeper compassion for communities who have been systemically excluded and/or displaced from their lands. It’s humbling and healing work that can right-size our sense of self and make us more aware of how all of these dispossessions are connected, as well as the ingrained patterns of trauma and white supremacy culture that we carry within us. In fact, ancestral recovery can be seen as one intervention aimed at dismantling whiteness itself.

Penny Rosenwasser teaches that when a white/white-passing person feels grounded and validated in their own cultural identity, they are less likely to unconsciously lean on potential solidarity partners viewed as having a more intact culture for validation. From that grounded place, we can show up as more conscious, less needy collaborators.

But ancestral recovery is only part of the story.

Indigenous solidarity: Ethically rooting in the places we live now

When Bundists created the concept of doikayt, Jews were being systemically marginalized, tortured and murdered simply for being Jews, in lands that Jews had lived on for nearly a thousand years. Their call was for the right to live in these lands, as Jews, with safety, equality, and freedom.

Today, American Ashkenazi Jews live on lands stolen from Indigenous people. And while antisemitism continues, we have gained enormous safety and power relative to just a few generations ago.

How do we reconcile this? What are the principles for living doikayt now? Solidarity with our neighbors is a big part of it — but more specifically, it requires intentional inquiry — and then action — into the history and current realities of the Indigenous people whose lands we landed on.

How did our ancestors, who likely arrived here as refugees of political violence, then commit violence (knowingly or unknowingly) on the Indigenous people of the lands they settled on? What did our people gain by building their new lives on Indigenous land? What can we do now to repair on behalf of our ancestors?

And if we live somewhere different from where our ancestors first arrived, what about the lands we live on now? How do we live in right relationship with the Indigenous people of this place? What actions will we take to right these wrongs beyond our land acknowledgments?**

Ecological Diasporism: Rooting into the Earth Itself

Our relationship with the earth itself weaves through both the ancestral recovery work and the work of rooting into our current homes.

Deepening connection with the plants, animals, rivers, and lakes of the lands we reside on feels core to a true Radical Diasporism — whether by sitting quietly in a city park, wandering a forest, planting a garden, or harvesting some wild plants for dinner.

The synchronicities and magic that arise when we connect to place (whether ancestral or local) are powerful. Something as simple as a birdsong or flower can relieve our worries or carry a message from an ancestor. It’s moments like these that help foster a sense of connectedness and belonging.

Finally, connecting to land in one place, connects us to the land in the other places too — maybe our ancestral lands and our current homes are more interconnected than we think. My ancestors in Europe used many of the same plants and herbal medicines — garlic, plantain, yarrow, raspberry leaf — that people have used on Turtle Island for eons, and that I work with today.

The earth gives us so much, including the opportunity to grow sustainable, liberatory communities. How do we give back to her too?

Digging in

The invitation of Radical Diasporism is to hold both truths at once — to heal ourselves from the ways we have been oppressed, and to repair for the ways we have been, and are, oppressors. It asks a lot of us. But it also offers a lot.

Note that word: radical. It means roots. This is not a framework of escape, erasure, or bypass — it is one of digging in, of going deeper, of finding what was buried and bringing it back to life.

Ancestral recovery is never only for ourselves. It is always, also, for those who come after us. When we recover a lost song, grieve an ungrieved loss, repair a broken relationship with land or neighbor, put our bodies on the line for another being — we are changing what our descendants inherit. We are interrupting cycles that have run for generations.

The better and more beautiful world we long for is not somewhere else. It is here, in the places we live, in the communities we build, in the ground beneath our feet.

A couple notes:

I want to acknowledge two things here — one is that it is possible to do ancestral recovery work without visiting the place itself. There are so many ways to immerse ourselves in the boundaryless Yiddish culture that lives in our souls, and even to connect with our ancestors’ lands, without physically being there. (In fact, we hope to offer some classes in that vein later this/next year).

And two, many of us come from multiple lineages, which can make the ancestral work feel immense or overwhelming. The beautiful thing about ancestral work though, is that when you turn toward it in any way… learning a song, preparing a traditional dish, asking an elder relative to tell you family stories, the next step on the journey often seems to present itself. We cannot do it all — this work encompasses lifetimes, going backwards and forwards. It is more often done incrementally and synchronistically, and without urgency.

PS — You can buy a really cool Radical Diasporist t-shirt or hoodie HERE.

*A phrase used by the Jewish Labor Bund.

**Jews on Ohlone Land (JOOL) is a beautiful example of Jewish solidarity with Indigenous people, but there are many ways we can take action to come into right relationship with our Indigenous neighbors.