Lectures, Classes, and Tutoring with Rokhl Kafrissen

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-A...

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...