Ashkenazi Herbalism ~ Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews

This is a Free In-Person Event at Banyen Books in Vancouver.

Join Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel for a special in-store conversation about their book Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews.

Until now, the herbal traditions of the Ashkenazi people have remained unexplored and shrouded in mystery. Ashkenazi Herbalism rediscovers the forgotten legacy of Jewish medicinal plant healers who thrived in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, from the Middle Ages through the modern era. Presenting the first materia medica of 26 essential plants, it reveals the preparations, applications, and cultural context of this healing tradition while illuminating the practices of ba'alei shem, feldshers, opshprekherins, midwives, and brewers. This groundbreaking work restores a vital, nearly lost tradition and opens a window into the history, culture, and folk wisdom that shaped generations of Ashkenazi healing.

“A brilliant work that captures an important but long-ignored facet of traditional herbal healing practices.”—Rosemary Gladstar

"Cohen and Siegel have successfully resolved the mystery of Ashkenazi herbal traditions.”—Marek Tuszewicki

DEATRA COHEN is a former reference librarian and a clinical herbalist who trained with the Berkeley (formerly Ohlone) Herbal Center, belongs to a Western Clinical Herbal collective, and is a Master Gardener at the University of California. In her research, Cohen became frustrated with the lack of practical information available to Jews of Ashkenazi descent, and related to Eastern European traditions in general. Ashkenazi Herbalism was written to reconcile this lack, and is the first work in any language to document the herbal practices of Ashkenazi Jews.

ADAM SIEGEL is a research librarian at the University of California, Davis, and a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, studying issues around cultural contact and plant knowledge in the region. Siegel is also a literary translator who has translated works from Russian, Czech, German, Croatian, Serbian, French, Italian, Swedish, and Norwegian, and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship in 2014. He conducted the non-English research for this work, reviewing literature and scholarship in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Polish, and Hebrew.

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