"I Am What Was Taken From Me": Unlearning Colonization and Embodying Resistance with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

This episode was recorded on March 23, 2023 and is in collaboration with Jewish Ancestral Healing and the Sarah & Hajar Series.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, curator of anti-colonial archives, film essayist, and theorist of photography. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is of Algerian and Palestinian descent and identifies as a Muslim Jew, which she powerfully unpacks in her article Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues. Azoulay recently completed a children story, Gold Threads, based on an early 20th century strike led by jewelers and gold spinners, acting also as guardians of the Muslim and Jewish world in Fes, Morocco. Ariella Aïsha’s newest book project is Algerian Letters - The Jewelers of the Ummah (Verso 2024), and its companion film is the world like a jewel in the hand.

Taya Mâ Shere is a ritual artist embracing embodied, earth-honoring devotion as liberatory spiritual practice. She serves as a professor of Organic Multi-Religious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry and co-weaves Makam Shekhina, a Jewish and Sufi Muslim multi-religious community committed to counter-oppressive spiritual practice. Taya Mâ hosts the acclaimed podcast, Jewish Ancestral Healing and The Sarah & Hajar Series: Sacred Practice and Possibility at the Intersections of Judaism and Islam. She co-founded the Kohenet movement, is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women's Spiritual Leadership and her five albums of sacred chant have been heralded as "cutting-edge mystic medicine music."  Learn more at www.taya.ma

Hadar Cohen is an Arab Jewish scholar, mystic and artist. She teaches spirituality and Jewish mysticism at Malchut, a spiritual skill building school teaching direct experience of God. Hadar is a Jewish mystic who builds decolonial frameworks to worship God. Hadar is an artist weaving the spiritual with the political through the artistic mediums of performance, movement, writing, weaving, sound, and ritual.

To learn more about Hadar, visit hadarcohen.me // @hadarcohen32
To study at her mystical school, check out malchut.one.

Subscribe to her Substack to stay tuned to latest episodes and offerings hadarcohen.substack.com