Episode 021: Reclaiming Arab Judaism with Hadar Cohen

This week on the Palestine Pod, we sit down with Hadar Cohen, a Mizrahi feminist multi-media artist, healer and educator originally from Jerusalem with lineage from all over the Middle East including Iran, Iraq, Syria and and Palestine. Hadar is a Jewish mystic with Sephardic roots who works to build decolonial frameworks for worshiping God. Her artistic mediums include performance, movement, writing, weaving, sound and ritual. During the global intifada of unity, Hadar came out as a strong anti-Zionist Jewish voice from on the ground. She speaks to us about her family's presence in Palestine harkening to a time long before Zionism, the power of memory as a liberation tool, and the meaning and importance of decolonizing the mind. Lara quotes Hadar's fierce rebuke of Zionism while imagining a life in Palestine post Zionism. Hadar insists on reclaiming the Arab Jewish identity as something separate and unique from European notions of Judaism in response to Arab Jewish trauma that resulted from the Zionist movement. Michael and Hadar dive deeper into the Zionist weaponization of anti-semitism and Michael reminds us that "nobody does anti-semitism like Zionists do."

To consult the sources used in the preparation of this episode, please see:

Background/Contextualizing Sources

• IV Geneva Convention (UN)

• Rome-Statute.pdf

• Convention on the Rights of the Child (OHCHR)

• Fact Sheet_UN Conv Rights of the Child

• Defense for Children Palestine (dci-palestine.org)

• A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid (B'Tselem)

• Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: crime against humanity (Amnesty International)

• A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution (HRW)

Videos/Social Media References

• Hadar Cohen (@hadarcohen32 on Instagram)

Articles/References

• Official Website_Hadar Cohen

• When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family's Forgotten History a book by Massoud Hayoun (bookshop.org)

• When We Were Arabs: 'I am not an Oriental' (Middle East Eye)

• Ashkenazi Jews in Israel - Wikipedia

• The Disappeared Children of Israel (NYT)

• Israel Admits Targeting Ethiopian Jews for Compulsory Contraception (Center for Genetics and Society)

• Israel Admits Ethiopian Women Were Given Birth Control Shots (Haaretz)

• Ben & Jerry’s Will End Sales of Our Ice Cream in the Occupied Palestinian Territory(Ben & Jerry’s)