Woven Roots: Recovering the Healing Plant Traditions of Jews and Their Neighbors in Eastern Europe, with Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel

Please register for this free in-person program. The Library is located at 1835 Ellis Street in San Francisco, with free garage parking at 1227 Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy.  

Woven Roots, a companion guide to Ashkenazi Herbalism, explores the rich history of plant-based medicine and folk healing traditions of Eastern Europe from 1600 through the present. It is the first in-depth guide to the communal care, medicinal plants, and folk healers of Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, and maps the ancestral folkways, herbal traditions, and shared legacies of Ashkenazi Jews and their neighbors across the region.

Authors Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel will discuss the research in the book, including a special focus on the medicinal use of carrots (which happens to be one of the simanim—symbolic foods—for Rosh Hashanah).

Deatra Cohen, co-author of Ashkenazi Herbalism, is a former reference librarian, trained as a clinical herbalist at the Berkeley Herbal Center, co-founded a Western Clinical Herbal collective, and is currently part of a community herbal project. In her research, Cohen is dedicated to recovering the lost or forgotten shared plant healing cultures of Jews and their neighbors in the historic Pale of Settlement.

Adam Siegel, co-author of Ashkenazi Herbalism, is a former research librarian, trained linguist, and award-winning translator. In his research, Siegel explores the symbiosis of plants and peoples in both the Old World and the New.