The Future We Are Beckoning
Jewish joy, creative practice, and ritual innovation flourish with vitality. Diasporic Jewish artists and activists carry forward a legacy of peacemaking and ecological care, serving as healers, teachers, and cultural doulas guiding our communities toward liberation and collective renewal.
The Challenge We Are Facing
Now more than ever, we need alternative Jewish futures and transformative ways of communicating. As governments and oligarchs weaponize trauma and manipulate public consent through technology, we are building a team to create a strategic plan rooted in Jewish resistance and radical imagination.
The rise of ethnonationalism and supremacist culture is dismantling networks of care, dragging us back into the darkest legacies of the 20th century, and obstructing our ability to confront global crises. Fascism thrives by erasing memory and futures of possibility—distorting Jewish history, fueling antisemitism, forcing false binaries of power, undermining traditions of critical thought and cultural reinvention, isolating Jews from broader justice movements, erasing reparative histories, and using Jewish identity to justify violence. We are committed to countering these forces with imagination, strategy, and collective action.
What We Are Doing About It
We are developing a creative, earth-based roadmap for diasporic Jewish healing, grounded in an expansive vision of technology and a commitment to ending genocide for all people. By gathering in ancestral forests marked by Jewish genocide, partisan resistance, and current border violence—the Bialowieza Forest in Poland—we explore the healing potential of land-based rituals, collaborative art, and collective grief practices.
Drawing from the creative legacy of Yiddishland and inspired by figures like Rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamares, during weeklong gatherings we reclaim embodied play, reimagine sacred ceremonies, and weave together scholarship, memory, and storytelling. This immersive process guides us in crafting a vision for a liberated Jewish future, culminating in a shared roadmap to strengthen our diasporic community through digital tools and collective offerings.
Who We Are
Hereland is a collective of diasporic Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish artists, clowns, technologists, ritualists, ecologists, and scholars—including descendants of Holocaust survivors—dedicated to shaping liberatory futures for all people. We reimagine ancestral wisdom to confront and heal the deep-rooted traumas of genocide, forced migration, and assimilation within the diaspora, paving the way for collective resilience and transformation.
The project is co-founded by artist, educator, and Fulbright Scholar Julie Weitz, and Jewish educator and scholar Daniel Voskoboynik. We are fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts, a non-profit arts service organization, and tax-deductible donations can be made through them.
What Your Support Makes Possible
We launched the inaugural Hereland cohort in eastern Poland in July 2025 and are now building new programming informed by that experience. Tax-deductible contributions will help cover:
Transforming the wisdom of our first gathering into cultural tools and public resources that can be shared widely.
Creating digital platforms for learning, storytelling, and resource-sharing that extend beyond our in-person events.
Hosting our second in-person retreat in the Bialowieza Forest (Summer 2026), blending ritual, grief work, and movement-building on land marked by Jewish resistance and genocide.
For more information or a detailed budget contact julie.weitz@gmail.com.
Thank you for supporting Hereland’s mission and helping us build a more vibrant, connected future.