Jews Are Magic: Occult Practices from Palmistry to Professional Psychics
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Exhibition Opening
In Person:Admission: Free Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free |
From palm and face reading to phrenology; from reading tea leaves and coffee grounds to lead and wax pouring practices; through to mind-reading, hypnosis, and mentalism, the Jewish experience with the occult is a rich field for exploration that continues into the present.
The opening of YIVO’s latest exhibit, Jews Are Magic: Occult Practices from Palmistry to Professional Psychics, will include a panel discussion featuring specialists on the Jewish occult, Samuel Glauber and Rokhl Kafrissen, moderated by YIVO Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions, Eddy Portnoy. The discussion will consider the history and nature of Jewish occult practices, as well as their modernization and professionalization.
About the Speakers
Samuel Glauber is a scholar of modern Judaism specializing in East European Jewry and its diaspora communities. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is writing a dissertation exploring Jewish engagement with modern occult currents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Eastern Europe. His work has appeared in, among other journals, Nashim, Jewish Historical Studies, In geveb, Tradition, and Kabbalah, and he is co-editor of Hillel Zeitlin, In the Secret Place of the Soul: Three Essays (Jerusalem–Berlin: Blima Books, 2021). In 2021–2022, he held the Fellowship in American Jewish Studies at YIVO, where he worked on the archive of Yiddish writer and occultist B. Rivkin.
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, teacher, and playwright and the winner of the prestigious 2022 Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish prize. Between 2017 and the end of 2024, her “Rokhl’s Golden City” column appeared 150 times in Tablet magazine, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. In the fall of 2023 and 2024, she designed and taught courses for the Yiddish Book Center focusing on Ashkenazi women's folk magic. Her ongoing series of “Everyday Ashkenazi Magic” classes have developed a cult following online, covering topics such as the evil eye, Yiddish incantations, spirit intercession work, and recovering embodied spiritual practices of the shtetl.
Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He has written numerous articles on topics relating to Jewish popular culture and is also the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).