Introduction to Everyday Ashkenazi Magic – The Demons of Summer

Wednesday afternoons: July, 15th, 22nd, and 29th at 2pm EST. ($125). All sessions are recorded and available to watch afterwards.

To sign up, send an email to cjcrokhl@gmail.com

Summer school is in session

You are warmly invited to join me for the newest edition of “Introduction to Everyday Ashkenazi Magic," summer session.

What is Everyday Ashkenazi Magic? We often associate Jewish magic with kabbalists and wonder working rabbis, men who study the Zohar and who use their mastery of sacred names and mystical techniques to write amulets and perform miracles. But what about everyone else? What about that 50% of the population (at minimum) who did not, and could not, study those sacred texts? Everyday Ashkenazi Magic is our frame for finding the magic wielded by everyone else, especially women. Our primary source texts are mostly in Yiddish, the language of everyday life, rather than Hebrew-Aramaic. Our archive is rich and diverse: Yiddish-prayer books, newspapers, memoir, poetry, song, and ethnography.

Our first class will be devoted to the magic and folklore of the season, including cemetery visits and the demons of summer. In our other two sessions, we will go into some of the conceptual foundations of what I call “Everyday Ashkenazi Magic” as well as key beliefs and rituals. We’ll also talk about how figures like Satan, angels, and the spirits of the dead were very much present to Eastern European Jews, and why they are so absent from much of American Judaism.

I hope you'll join me for this thought-provoking and fun look at a very different side of Jewish life!

New July Class - Exorcists, Embodied Magic, and the Evil Eye

Rooster in the Cradle (Part Two): A Brief History of the Evil Eye and Yiddish Anti-Demonic Technologies

You are warmly invited to join us for Rooster in the Cradle (Part Two) on Tuesday evenings, July 14, 21 and 28 at 7pm EST. ($100) To register, send an email to cjcrokhl@gmail.com

Everyone is invited to this class, even if you haven’t taken Part 1.

If you’ve ever put a red ribbon around a crib, or uttered a kinehore (keyn ayin-hore, Yiddish for “no evil eye”), you have drawn on a rich tradition of embodied, apotropaic (anti-demonic) magic going back thousands of years.

In many Eastern European towns, you could find Jewish men and women who specialized in exorcising the Evil Eye: the (op)shprekher(ke)s. Where a specialist wasn’t available, ordinary mothers and fathers had their own techniques for lifting bewitchments. When I say this was an embodied magic, I mean it quite literally. Even the simple act of “poo poo poo-ing” drew on the power of human saliva to neutralize and drive away the evil forces which plagued Yiddish-speaking Jews.

The danger of the Evil Eye is hardly a thing of the past. More than any other time in history, we are now vulnerable to an infinite number of eyes, seeing us from every angle. Technology has become a force multiplier for the malevolent human gaze, as well as the greed and envy that travel with it. If you've ever posted your new car/vacation/graduation pics for all to see, you might want to learn more about the ancient dangers awaiting us online!

Topics in Part 2 include:

Elijah the Prophet's role in healing and anti-demonic incantations
More tales of (op)shprekher(ke)s - the shtetl exorcists
The surprising story of how the Yiddish Evil Eye made its mark on American pop culture