OUR FACULTY

  • April Nichole Baskin (she/her) is an award-winning Black, Cherokee & Jewish liberation leader and the founding director of Joyous Justice, a social justice and spiritual transformation organization providing trauma-agile liberatory life & leadership coaching, education, and consulting through its Leadership for Liberation Laboratory and other joyously innovative services. Recognized as a Faith Leader to Watch by the Center for American Progress, for 20 years April has helped shift communities and institutions toward more equitable outcomes and, in her personal life, has been an international, counter-oppressive trauma peer counselor for 10 years. She serves on the boards of Rise Up: Nurturing the Soul of Jewish Justice and the Jewish Liberation Fund, where she is a founding steering committee member and currently on a leave of absence. Additionally, April was a national speaker and steering committee member of the 2019 Women’s March. She is a proud member of Tzedek Lab and the Selah Leadership Network. Previously, April served as the Racial Justice Director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, a Vice President of the Union for Reform Judaism, a Resources & Training Director for 18Doors (formerly InterfaithFamily), and as a President of the Jewish Multiracial Network. A dance-, dog- and food-loving multicultural Jewish priestess and mystic, April co-creates home, fosters belonging, and weaves shared power with kindred spirits globally and with her beloved partner Assane in Dakar, Senegal and on Turtle Island/USA.

  • Siona Benjamin is a painter from Mumbai, now living in the US.  Her work reflects her background of being brought up Jewish in a Hindu and Muslim India. She has a MFA in painting and a second MFA in Theater set design. She has exhibited her work in the US, Europe and Asia.  Siona does private and public art commissions, while also selling and exhibiting in galleries and museums.  She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011 to India and a second Fulbright in 2017 to Israel. 

    Her work has been featured in: The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Financial Times, The Jewish Week, The Boston Globe, Art New England, Art and Antiques, ArtNews, The Times of India, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and several others. A documentary was made on her work: Blue Like Me: The Art of Siona Benjamin. She has three children’s books recently published which she has illustrated and Growing Up Jewish in India where her work is featured and edited by Prof Ori Soltes.

    Artist website: www.artsiona.com

    Artistmerchandise: www.bluelikeme.com

  • Nathaniel Berman has been teaching kabbalah in a wide variety of settings for two decades -- from the university classroom to secret gatherings in the woods. Nathaniel finds the kabbalistic tradition endlessly fascinating: from the beauty of its magnificent visions to its grappling with the most difficult questions of "otherness," so urgent in today's world. Nathaniel is the author of Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: the 'Other Side' of Kabbalah (Brill 2018). He is currently finishing a new book,Anger, Evil, and Death: Existential Crisis and Kabbalistic Myth.

  • Kohenet Judith Breier’s path has been one of deep transformation, from a career as a massage therapist, reading and writing teacher, and social justice advocate, to becoming a wise elder devoted to the sacred work of conscious aging. Her journey began during her own experience of perimenopause and menopause, when she recognized the distinction between simply growing old and becoming a true elder. Determined to embody wisdom as she aged, she set out to explore what it meant to be a wise elder—a path that would shape her life’s work.

    In this pursuit, Judith connected with Rachael Freed, a pioneer in life legacy letter writing, who became both mentor and friend. Rachael’s mentorship and vision for legacy work inspired Judith to take on the responsibility of continuing this meaningful practice for future generations.

    As Judith retired from her roles in teaching and bodywork, she trained with Sage-ing International and became a Certified Sage-ing Leader, dedicated to guiding others through the aging process with intention and compassion. Her studies continued with Mythologist Sharon Blackie, whose Hagitude program illuminated the journey of aging for those with female biology, from perimenopause through the final stages of life. Furthering her commitment, Judith also became an end-of-life doula with INELDA and volunteers at a local hospice house, offering comfort and support to those nearing the end of life.

    Today, Judith Breier facilitates conscious aging workshops throughout Western Massachusetts and leads trainings and workshops across the USA and Canada. Her work fosters community, encourages reflection, and celebrates the profound beauty of becoming a wise elder. Through her offerings, she continues to inspire others to embrace the sacred journey of aging with grace, resilience, and wisdom.

  • Sarah Chandler (she/her) aka Kohenet Shamirah is a Brooklyn-based Jewish educator, artist, activist, healer, and poet. She teaches, writes and consults on issues related to Judaism, earth-based spiritual practice, respectful workplaces, mindfulness, and farming. An ordained Kohenet with the Hebrew Priestess Institute and a trainer for “Taamod: Stand Up!”, she is also an advanced student of Kabbalistic dream work at The School of Images. Previously, Sarah served as the Director of Romemu Yeshiva, Chief Compassion Officer of Jewish Initiative for Animals, and Director of Earth Based Spiritual Practices at Adamah's Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. Currently, she is the CEO of Shamir Collective, as a coach and consultant to high profile artists and authors to launch new music and books.

  • Kohenet Annie (Annabel) Gottfried Cohen is a researcher, writer, translator and teacher, currently undertaking a PhD Modern Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She lives in France, where she is researching Jewish anti-fascist resistance before and during WW2. Annie teaches Yiddish at the Sorbonne University, and online with the Workers’ Circle. She has previously taught at YIVO, KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, and the London based radical language school Babel’s Blessing. She is a 2023-2024 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, for which she is translating the memoirs of Jewish Communist journalist and activist Gina Medem.

    Annie researches and translates materials relating to Jewish women’s religiosity in Eastern Europe, publishing her work on a blog: www.pullingatthreads.com. Her essays on this work have been published in Yiddish and English in the Forward, Vashti, and Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic (2021). She has taught on the subject at JTS, Yale, Wheaton College, Georgetown University, City College New York, Yiddish New York and Yiddish Summer Weimar.

  • Kohenet Serakh, also known as Stephanie "Steve" Guedalia, is a Queer, Sephardic Kohenet Hebrew priestess. She is an educator, storyteller, and a rabbinical student at Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. Serakh (she/they) spends much of their time guiding seekers in exploring Jewish curiosities and developing personal spiritual practices. A ritual theater crafter, Serakh officiates weddings, creates rites of passage, and holds sacred space for grounding, connection, and transformation.

    As a storyteller across many mediums—including performance, music, and the written word—Serakh invites others to engage with sacred mythology and explore the mysteries of the Hebrew language. With experience teaching at organizations like Lab/Shul and Romemu, their work bridges mystical wisdom and embodied practice. Serakh’s teaching helps learners forge personal connections to the Hebrew alphabet, treating it as a transformative journey of spirit and self.

    Their work has been featured at cultural events across New York City and in publications such as Efram Sicher’s Re-envisioning Jewish Identities: Re-envisioning Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Feminist Art. Serakh lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with their partner and their beloved bunny, Oneiro the Dream Spirit.

  • Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author, scholar, ritualist, poet, dreamworker and midrashist, is a co-founder of Beit Kohenet and of the Kohenet movement. She is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion (www.ajrsem.org). She is also the author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreaming, Return to the Place: The Magic, Meditation, and Mystery of Sefer Yetzirah, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (with Taya Shere), The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, and The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries. She is the translator of The Romemu Siddur and of Siddur haKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. She has written a children’s book, The Garden of Time. She lives in Manhattan with her family.

  • Or Har-Gil (she/they) is an Art Therapist, artist and ordained Kohenet. She facilitates workshops on creativity as a spiritual practice (including Intuition Card making, Altar Creation, and Vision Boards), supports people in individual sessions, and works in cancer care with patients and caregivers.

    Or is queer, of mixed Moroccan and Ashkenazi ancestry.

  • Shoshana Jedwab is an intuitive who feels gifted by uncanny experiences that have helped her to orient in this incarnation. Shoshana (Batshemesh) Jedwab served as founding faculty member and sacred drummer for the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute where she facilitated powerful primal prayer, vibrant Torah service ritual translations, and taught Jewish sacred foolery, contemporary mystical experience, Jewish spiritual practices, and Jewish history. Shoshana Jedwab lives in the world as a percussionist, singer-songwriter, worship leader, prize-winning Jewish educator and the Jewish Life Coordinator at the A.J. Heschel Middle School. Shoshana Jedwab’s original, hip-shaking, prayer music grounds body and spirit, and brings the ancestral past into joyous contemporary practice. The original songs of Shoshana’s 2016 debut album, “I Remember,” and her 2018 anthem, “Where You Go,” emerged from ceremonies Shoshana was leading, and are now being sung, and danced to, in churches, synagogues, weddings and protest marches around the world. Shoshana Jedwab released her popular prayer singles, “Openings” in 2020, “Torah Orah” in 2022 and “Life Is Born” in 2023. Shoshana Jedwab was included in Jewish Rock Radio’s Jewish Women Who Rock the Worship World. https://www.shoshanajedwab.com/

  • Joy Ladin is a prolific poet, and a central figure in transgender theology. She has written numerous articles and books of criticism, primarily on nineteenth-century American literature, as well as nine books of poetry. She has also published a book of transgender exegesis and theology, The Soul of the Stranger, a finalist for both a Lambda and a Triangle Award. In her readings of the Hebrew Bible, Ladin analyzes key texts, reinterpreting central Jewish theological concepts from a transfeminist perspective. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. It details her transition within an Orthodox institution and eloquently weaves together Jewish and transgender themes.

  • Kohenet Ketzirah haMa’agelet (The Circle Maker), is a maker and teacher of the sacred arts as well as an ordained Kohenet and Celebrant. Through Devotaj Sacred Arts, she explores Jewishly-rooted making, mussar, and magick to connect past, present, & possible future(s); cræfting artifacts for a forgotten future that is more equitable, just, and spiritually alive. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two pet rabbits, and a house filled with ensouled teddy bears, enchanted appliances, and magickal creatures. Learn more at devotaj.com and find her on Instagram @devotaj_arts, TikTok @devotaj, and BlueSky @devotaj.com

  • Dr. Jessica Litwak is a recognized leader in the field of socially engaged theatre. She is an award-winning playwright, an actor, educator, puppet builder, a creative coach accredited by the International Coaching Federation, and a registered drama therapist accredited by the North American Drama Therapy Association. She is a trained practitioner of Playback, Psychodrama, and Theatre of the Oppressed. She is the Artistic Director of the H.E.A.T. Collective, which she founded to bring together the practices of healing, education, and activism through theatre. Litwak has a BFA in acting from NYU, an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Theatre as Leadership and Change. Litwak is a core member of Theatre Without Borders and a Fulbright Scholar.  She has served as faculty at institutions such as San Francisco State University, Columbia, NYU, Lesley University, Whitman College, Hollins, Naropa, The Theatre Academy at Los Angeles City College, Marymount, Stella Adler Academy. Internationally, she has regularly taught at Masaryk University (Czech Republic) and the International Director’s Symposium at La Mama Umbria (Italy).

  • Step into the sacred dance with Kohenet Angelique (YA), a Jewyorican Teacher, Poet and Mystic in service to healing the past, stepping fully into the present, and igniting the boundless possibilities of our future.

  • Aliza Rivka is the visionary force behind Mariposa Movement - a movement modality & dance sanctuary to further our personal and collective awakening through dance. With over 15 years as a dance/movement therapist, DJ, ritual curator & embodiment guide, Aliza has helped thousands of people access liberation through movement. Her uniquely heart-centered & earth-based approach to dance inspires people all over the world to come home to the wisdom of their bodies. Aliza is a Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapist with the

    American Dance Therapy Association, an ordained Kohenet Hebrew Priestess & a certified DJ Witch (graduate of Tasha Blank’s PhDJ program). A valued leader of the dance community in Costa Rica, Aliza is the co-founder of the Imiloa Institute’s “Soul Sundays” – a weekly dance event that nourished the local community in 2020 during the pandemic. She is a sought after DJ for local events and ecstatic dances, and her Flight School Dance Leadership Program continues to transform women’s lives (enrollment is now open for the 2024 cohort).

  • Jewish music innovator Basya Schechter is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, musical director and cantor.  She is the lead singer and founder of the pan-Mediterranean psychedelic band Pharaoh’s Daughter.  With them, she has released five albums on Knitting Factory, Tzadik and Magenta labels, as well as two solo albums, an oud/Persian santur percussion project called Queen’s Dominion,” a cycle of songs set to the Yiddish poet and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, called “Songs of Wonder,” a rap-and-Kabbalat-Shabbat collaboration with Eden Pearlstein called “Raza,” as well as many side projects including an Appalachian Kabbalat Shabbat collaboration with Shaul Magid called Kabbalachia–all these musical sparks bubbling up as she returns to a freelance lifestyle.  Her music blends concepts from Jewish music with a variety of indigenous styles and sounds from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, among others.

  • Noam Sienna is a historian and artist whose work focuses on medieval and early modern Jewish culture, especially in the Islamic world. He holds a PhD in Jewish history from the University of Minnesota, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. He is also the author of the award-winning collection A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts (Print-O-Craft Press, 2019).

  • Kohenet Bekah Starr (she/her) is a multimedia Sacred Artist exploring ancient & weaving new connections between Jewish Mysticism and the Divine Feminine.

    Bekah is the illustrator of Hamsas for the Divine Feminine, Illuminating the Moon, Wonderful Whimsical Winter, & Divining Pleasure: an oracle for SephErotic liberation with Rav Kohenet Taya Mâ Shere. Her artwork has been featured by the Jewish Arts Salon, the Every Woman Biennial, WomansWork. Art, Haggadot.com, the Parliament of World Religions, LabShul, and is held in private collections.

    Bekah also contributes to the vibrant religious and spiritual life at Ursinus College where she is the Jewish Life and Interfaith Relations Coordinator. She offers Jewish students and allies opportunities to explore embodied ritual, engage in inspiring interfaith experiences and participate in a supportive community. Bekah has facilitated classes and workshops in Jewish arts and theology for over 2 decades, including at Romemu NYC, The Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, and the Parliament of World Religions, among others.

    She lives with her amazingly supportive husband and their two inspiring children on the lands of the Lenapehoking First Nation people, also known as Phoenixville, PA.

    @bekahstarrart ~ BekahStarrArt.com

  • Rabbi Jericho Vincent (they/them) is the founder and spiritual leader of Temple of the Stranger, a mystical community rooted in Jewish ancestral wisdom and open to all. They are a leading teacher of queer mystical Torah on Instagram (@thealef) and as a guest of communities around the country. The author of the acclaimed memoir Cut Me Loose (Doubleday 2014), Jericho's writing has been published in The New York Times, Hey Alma, The Rumpus, The Cut, and elsewhere. Jericho has been named to the Jewish Week's 36 Under 36 and the Forward 50 for their work. They live on Lenape land in Brooklyn with their family.

  • Kohenet Sho'eret Liviah Oreget Shirim (she/her), Priestess, Guardian, and Song Weaver, has regularly held ritual space for the Kohenet community, as well as leading, co-leading, and acting as Cyber-Gabbai. She writes and arranges liturgical music for chanting and choral settings. K’Liviah has led or co-led for Yelala, Kesher Pittsburgh, the Nechama Minyon, and numerous rituals, including weddings, funerals, and shiva services. She has catered events and taught cooking classes through her company MamaBakes, teaches college theatre, English, and humanities, and is a theatre director, producer, designer, and dramaturg. Liviah is the mother of three adults, a painter and poet, an opera singer, and an engineer, plus two cats--Cary Grant and Grace Kelly—residing in Silver Spring, Maryland.