Julie Weitz’s performances invite us to inhabit ancestral memory with our bodies, not just our minds. Through characters like The Psychedelic Tzadik, she channels Yiddish folklore, Jewish mystical traditions, and diasporic histories, blending archival research with embodied practice.
On a sunny Friday in October 2025 in Berkeley, California, on the native land of the Ohlone people, she sat with The Zamlers—a Bay Area collective of artists and thinkers including Micah Wilson, Liv Kunins-Berkowitz, Kaya Wurtzel, Talia Isaacson, and Joanna Letz—over coffee and bagels. Two days earlier, Weitz had led The Psychedelic Tzadik’s Collective Liberation Workshop at UC Santa Cruz.
Weitz explores how imagination, play, and ritual can unlock ancestral knowledge. Her work confronts the legacies of assimilation, white supremacy, and inherited trauma while celebrating the messy, vibrant, and sometimes uncanny aspects of Yiddishkayt. From protective gestures rooted in shtetl folklore to the eroticism of the Tzadik’s striptease, Weitz shows how performance art creates space for imagination and history to converge in the body, in real time.
At the heart of her practice is a vital question: How do we broaden our collective capacity to face destruction, to withstand grief and violence, by looking to the past for guidance?
The first installment of this interview moves seamlessly between the cerebral and the somatic, the historical and the experimental. From Yiddish ethnographic expeditions to clowning and protective rituals, Weitz demonstrates that Jewish memory is not only archived in books or photographs—it lives in the body, in the imagination, and in the shared spaces of performance.
*A glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms appears at the end of this interview.*
Micah Wilson: Yiddish folklore is something I’ve been thinking about broadly…I’m really interested in how groups like ours are relating to the past. What are the imagined pasts we’re referring to? Are there imagined futures we’re gesturing toward? To what extent can we actually articulate those things—or are they moving through us in some way?
I was thinking about those questions during your performance last night.
Julie Weitz: Wow.
MW: And even as I’m saying this, I’m aware that there’s all this language, this leaning on the cerebral—
JW: Of course.
MW: —while so much of your performance felt like an invitation—one that people really welcomed—to try to think with the body. As “people of the book,” how do we also just be in the soma of it all?
I also feel kind of strange asking these questions—
JW: Oh, it’s great. It’s Talmudic. We have to ask.
MW: Maybe a big question to start with is: when you’re inviting us into our bodies, is there a particular relationship to the past—as Jews, as Yids—that you’re thinking about?
JW: Well, when you were speaking just now, I was thinking: right, because a relaxed body leads to an imaginative mind. The work isn’t just about being in the body—it’s also about guiding people into imagination.
I think what you’re pointing to is a question about ancestral knowledge—something we’re carrying within us that we haven’t quite placed. We don’t know how to direct it because we don’t know exactly what it is. We’re unclear, a bit lost, and that’s partly the result of assimilation, white supremacy, and inherited trauma.
Which is why it’s been really beautiful for me to witness how well received my workshop has been here in Northern California, and generally in the U.S. This question around reimagining—around diasporic Judaism, liberatory Judaism—we’re asking: what is that vision of Judaism? It feels like a really big question for all of us to carry right now: refusing violence and supremacy while still believing in Jewishness, grasping for the parts of it we want to keep.
I’m grasping for something behind me, trying to flip it forward like a trickster.
Have you ever seen the film Mir Kumen On? It’s this incredible Yiddish documentary about a children’s rehabilitation center outside Warsaw.
Liv Kunins-Berkowitz: The Bundist one?
JW: Exactly. It was a sanatorium for children recovering from tuberculosis, where they would live together for a month in this beautiful camp environment. The adults taught the kids how to run the camp themselves. The film was made in 1935 and used to fundraise support from American Jews.
LKB: Like Bundist propaganda. *said with an appreciation for propaganda*
JW: Yeah, lol.
There’s a sequence where the children are in the dining hall and they put on the most beautiful play. Watching it, I realized that that’s the performance spirit and collectivity I grew up with.
I went to Jewish overnight camp for ten summers. Yiddishkayt was part of my experience, but so too was zionism. The zionist aspect was very evident, but no one actually named the Yiddishkayt part. Yet why were my friends and I voluntarily out in the woods making up musicals about coming from the shtetl? We were eleven years old, writing full-on musicals with multiple songs and characters!
I think part of the work we’re doing is recognizing that this Yiddishkayt spirit is already in us, even if it hasn’t been identified as such. It was displaced—and that’s why looking at the archive feels so important.
LKB: Can you talk a bit about how you relate to Jewishness and/or Yiddishness? I noticed that while your character feels so deeply Yid, there’s also this reveal—when you take off the coat—where there are the pickles, where the Yid lives on, but also there is the Sefirot diagram, which is a symbology that predates the Yid and comes from Jewish mystical traditions more broadly. I’m curious how you hold your responsibility to each of those traditions, and also how it feels different performing in Europe versus here in the United States.
A big question that’s been on my mind is: what does it mean to be in multi-lineage Jewish communities, and how does that multiplicity show up in your work?
JW: It’s a beautiful question, and something I think about often. My performance style is very Yid, but there are also other layers of Jewishness that emerge. For me, that’s the liberatory aspect—it can be this, it can be that. I’m merging all of these traditions, or aspects, of being Jewish.
Recently, I performed the Psychedelic Tzadik’s striptease for friends from the Kosmic Kamels, a collective co-founded by Palestinians and Israelis. We’re artists and healing justice activists from the Jewish diaspora and the SWANA region who gather together at festivals.
In that context, I performed the Tzadik, and everyone loved it. But afterwards, when I was alone, I suddenly had this feeling like, “I don’t want to carry shame about being Jewish.” During our week together, many of the Israeli Jews were carrying so much shame, and after performing my Yid-ness as the Tzadik, I had this sharp awareness of being a Diaspora Jew.
That feeling also came after a conversation with a group of friends from the collective. A woman who is Dutch, and who partly grew up in Lebanon, asked me what my Star of David necklace meant to me. I spoke honestly about how it grounds me in my Jewish belief, and how—long before Zionism claimed the star as a symbol for the Israeli flag—it had been used by Jews for thousands of years as a protective amulet. I also shared that other Jews sometimes ask me if I’m afraid to wear it.
After sharing, I asked her what she thought. She told me that when she looks at the star, all she sees is blood. But then she looks at me and she sees love. So she goes back and forth in confusion. My Palestinian friend agreed, saying something like, “If it wasn’t you wearing it, I would not be cool with you.” There was a third person there—an Israeli Jew who identifies as antizionist, is mixed Mizrakhi and Ashkenazi, and speaks fluent Arabic—and he was silent.
I thought, “Wow, this is awkward.”
For me, the multiplicity that shows up in my performance work is not just about the layers of what it means to be Jewish. It’s also shaped by my encounters with Palestinians and Israelis, and by my awareness of what it means to be a Diaspora Jew. I can freely say I’m antizionist, but I don’t have close family in Israel and I didn’t grow up there, so my safety isn’t threatened—contrary to the argument that Jews need Israel for safety—and I am not carrying trauma from direct encounters with violence, either as a perpetrator or victim.
My Israeli friends are also trying to reclaim their Jewish lineages from different parts of the diaspora—Morroco, Yemen, Tunisia, Eastern Europe—and I think that process for them is also about reconnecting with the liberatory aspects of Jewishness. But it’s not easy. They are working against a vast nationalist system.
Being with the Kamels makes me aware of the relative ease and privilege with which we in the Diaspora can embody these parts of ourselves. Even during the workshop—inviting play, inviting joy, feeling safe in that.
So, to answer your question: I take this thing called Yiddishkayt as someone who was born and raised in the Jewish Diaspora and I’m like, “Hey, here’s what I’m bringing.”
LKB: What was so striking for me, coming from New York to the Bay, is that New York feels so imbued with Yiddishkayt—even in the physical embodiment of how people speak, and in how the older people I grew up around speak. It’s been interesting being around Ashkenazi Jews here, but also feeling how the forms of assimilation that happened in California can sometimes feel like a real moving away from that sensibility—from this feeling that there’s something a little gross or loud about Yiddishness. That’s been really striking to me.
I was in Crown Heights a couple of months ago over the summer, cat-sitting for a friend who lives down the street from the Lubavitch headquarters at 770. I had this really intense experience of both desire and repulsion—and I think there’s gender stuff there too. I would just be walking around, going into the shops, thinking, “Am I you? Am I not you?” Having these really intense moments of identification and distance.
And this was also my first time being there since I’d started studying Yiddish with my mom this past year. Suddenly I could read the signs, follow the songs. I’d been learning this language on Zoom with my mom, but I never actually get to encounter it in daily life. Then suddenly, in Crown Heights, it’s like Yiddishland.
So there was something really cathartic for me in your embodiment—and honestly, even in the pickle juice on the beard. It was a little repulsive, and I felt relieved by that. It made me feel like the relationship to ancestors isn’t supposed to be clean or polished, So my two questions along those lines are: first, whether you’ve experienced people having really strong reactions to that kind of deep embodiment of Yiddish physicality. I think about it in relation to zionism as a kind of erasure—the idea that we had to clean ourselves of the “Yid,” the so-called ghetto Jew, in order to become this more muscular zionist figure. I’m curious what kinds of feedback or responses you’ve encountered when people see you inhabit that Yiddish physicality so fully.
And then my second question is about the character itself—whether taking on that embodiment felt natural to you in your own body and spirit, or whether it was something you had to grow into. Was it connected to how you were raised, or did it feel like more of a transition over time?
JW: Well, I actually started by performing as a Golem in 2018. I developed techniques for getting into character by channeling my grandparents in particular—how they spoke, gestured, their facial expressions. I also started watching silent and Yiddish-speaking films. I was asking myself: what is specifically Yid about different ways of expressing?
Then in 2022 I did a residency at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles where I focused on three characters at once: the Golem, the Dybbuk, and the Tzadik. That was the first time I embodied the Tzadik character, and it felt incredibly freeing.
As a culmination of the residency, I gave a performative lecture in character about my artwork and process, and suddenly this voice just started coming through. I was cracking jokes, exposing things, and playing with caricatures. Later on, at the Fowler Museum of Art in Los Angeles I did a public interview in character with Benjamin Kersten. Meanwhile I’d been taking clowning classes in L.A., and I started realizing how much that training was shaping the work.
When I arrived in Poland on my Fulbright in 2023, I felt like I needed to push the character further so I could really understand his purpose.
The Tzadik was the first character I created who could really speak—and once I allowed that, the voice became very fluid. Part of that comes from my upbringing. My grandfather was a huge influence on me—he was a pious and spiritual man, and I admired him deeply. I grew up going to a religious overnight camp and also spent time in Chabad spaces. I was always struck by the theatricality of religious Jewish men—the way they performed their authority, how they occupied space, and how effortlessly they drew and held attention.
There was this one Hasid in Kraków who left his ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn and set up a life in Poland. He calls himself the “Rebbe of Kazimierz,” wears these beautiful embroidered bekishes, and even makes rap-infused Hasidic music on YouTube. He hosted regular shabbat dinners and what struck me, sitting at his table, were his hand gestures—they were so simple and so performative. Watching him, I thought: okay, what does it mean to fall into that kind of embodiment?
At the same time, I’d also had painful experiences in orthodox spaces where I was told not to sing. I grew up traditional and egalitarian, so the first time someone told me not to sing Birkat HaMazon in a Hasidic setting it felt deeply humiliating. That was over twenty years ago now, but I think that experience was still percolating somewhere inside me.
So when I finally put on the beard, there was this moment of thinking: okay—this is me, Rebbe.
And now I’m asking another question: does he actually have wisdom? What is clown wisdom? I’m still playing with that. Because the character is also intersecting with my role as an educator—I’ve been teaching my whole adult life, and studying aspects of Hasidism and Kabbalah—so somehow these threads meet inside the Tzadik.
Your other question was about reactions. The strangest reactions I’ve had are two:
One was in Berlin. I went out in character carrying this bouquet of watermelon balloons and was just encountering people in the street. Most people were really sweet to him, but then this white German guy started yelling at me in German. I answered back in Yiddish. He was basically saying, “You’re antisemitic. This is such an ugly costume. What are you wearing?”
And I kept saying, “Ikh bin a Yid!” — “I am a Jew!”
Eventually he walked away, but I suddenly realized I was standing in the middle of a park in Germany yelling Ikh bin a Yid! and thinking, what just happened?
My Palestinian friend was with me—I had asked him to come along as a kind of guard, which I know is a strange reversal of roles. And then there was a queer Israeli artist who I hired to photograph the whole thing. I had intentionally brought this little triangulation together and we were all vibing, but when we encountered this German guy it just turned into this bizarre confrontation. Later my Palestinian friend who understands German better than me explained what he was saying. He also relayed to me how surreal the encounter was for him to witness.
JW: The other strange experience I had was at a Yiddish open mic in Berlin. Afterwards an Israeli man came up to me and told me he wanted to kick my head in.
I said, “You mean you want to kick his head in?”—like, please refer to the Tzadik in the third person. He is not me.
Then we actually started talking about where his anger was coming from—essentially I was holding emotional space for him. The piece I performed had political undertones, not super overt, but he said something like, “You American Jews have no skin in the game. You come with your leftist politics and have no understanding.”
My immediate response was “No.” I pushed back by sharing stories from the activist communities I’m part of, talked about being raised a zionist, and reminded him that “my country” sends billions each year to support Israel’s violence.
Experiences like that make me realize that I’m actually interested in encountering audiences who aren’t automatically sympathetic. I loved the joy and warmth of the reception in Santa Cruz, but I’m also curious about friction—about what happens when the character unsettles people.
Because the Tzadik isn’t just there to be loved. He’s there to expose something. And sometimes that means people react.
Kaya Wurtzel: I’m curious about the interplay between the different kinds of research you do. It sounds like there’s archival research, and then there’s embodied research with these characters. Which comes first, or how do they interact?
JW: I wish I had a formula. I was actually thinking about this this morning. For me the research is really interconnected—I build each layer on top of the others.
Right now I’m researching a new project about the Opshprekherins—literally “the speak-away-ers,” or the women who cast things out. They were Yiddish healers in the shtetlekh who specialized in removing the evil eye. Apparently something like eighty percent of ailments were believed to be related to curses. These women worked with incantations and plant medicines.
A lot of the material comes from An-sky’s Yiddish ethnographic expedition, which gathered extraordinary documentation of folk healing practices. I’m studying those sources and then beginning to test things out in an embodied way.
For example, there’s this gesture they used for protection. If you put your right thumb in your left palm and press it, you can feel a kind of nerve or centering point. Then you mirror it with the other hand. It’s slightly awkward at first, but it creates a kind of energetic enclosure. The healers would combine the gesture with an Aramaic phrase invoking protection through Joseph, who in Jewish folklore is considered immune to the evil eye.
Last September I was doing protective presence work in the West Bank, and the whole time I kept thinking: we’re literally practicing protection here. These settlers have the evil eye—they’re casting it on the Palestinian shepherds and their families, on us, and on the land. What kinds of ritual practices could ground activists psychically in environments like that?
I showed the gesture to some of the activists and we tried it together. People really responded to it. That’s when I started thinking that my next project might involve collectively developing new incantations for casting out the evil eye.
The traditional Yiddish ones are incredible. They’ll say things like: “I send you out of the neck, out of the elbow, out of the knees.” And then they interrogate the curse—Where do you come from? Are you British? Are you Russian? Are you something else? It’s like they’re forcing the evil eye to reveal itself before casting it out.
So now I’m thinking: how do we collectively name the curses we feel—those placed on us, and those we place on others—and transform them into something that can be expelled?
Joanna Letz: I don’t even know where you find An-sky’s materials. How did you find them?
JW: I didn’t know either. My collaborator Danya Voyskoboynik shared a book with me last summer by Abraham Rechtman, who had been a young participant in An-sky’s expedition. He later published a memoir about it in the 1950s after immigrating to New York. The English title is something like The Lost World of Russia’s Jews, but the original Yiddish title was closer to The Yiddish Ethnographic Expedition.
He describes all the folklore, rituals, and healing practices they documented. It’s an amazing resource.
LKB: Do you know Nathaniel Deutsch’s book?
JW: The Jewish Dark Continent? I know of it but I don’t have it yet.
LKB: It includes An-sky’s questionnaire from the expedition. The questions are incredible.
JW: I’ve heard about those.
LKB: The questions trace the entire trajectory of the Jewish soul—from conception to after death. Some are mundane, some are wild. For example: If a horse is carrying a dead body, do you whisper in its ear to tell it what it’s carrying?
MW: Really kind of cunty questions, like they very much have an answer embedded within them.
LKB: Exactly. They’re based on things people actually reported happening. Like: When a midwife dies, do all the babies she delivered come in procession to her funeral?
JW: Yes, I’ve seen a photograph from the expedition with the midwife and all the children she delivered. The thing that’s heartbreaking is how much of the archive has been lost. Apparently they collected thousands of recordings and documents, but no one knows where most of it ended up.
TI: Throughout this conversation, I’ve been thinking about the way you relate to silence. Some of your characters, like the Golem, don’t speak. I have my own relationship to silence through a speech impediment — a glottal block stutter that inserts silences into my voice — and I feel the friction of how that interacts with the hyperverbal nature of Yidness. Sometimes we feel stuck in the verbal. How do you relate to silence as a mode of embodied research? [Spaces reflect moments of stuttering.]
JW: That’s a beautiful question. Early on, silence was a way for me to turn language off and move more deeply into the body. I was also very inspired by silent film and by clowning, which is so much about gesture and expression. Instead of words, you play with sounds, movement, presence—things that can hold emotion without needing to explain it.
But interestingly, the more Yiddish I’ve studied, the more I’ve felt able to speak through the characters. Maybe I was holding back until I felt I had a relationship to the language.
I’ll also say something that might sound unusual: I did work with plant medicine at certain points with the intention of opening myself to ancestral knowledge. That experience really affected my somatic awareness—what my body could feel and access.
And as a visual artist, I think visually first. Images guide me.
Now something new is happening. With the Tzadik, and now with the Opshprekherin project, I’m changing the masks I use. I took the mold of the Dybbuk mask and created a new one that exposes the mouth. I realized I don’t want to be completely hidden behind the mask anymore. The mask is still important, but now the voice can come through.
And instead of the Dybbuk possessing me, it’s more like we can collectively step into the role—anyone could become the Opshprekher.
Looking back, I think part of my early silence was also a conscious reaction to all the talking men in Jewish spaces. I was like, okay—I’m just going to be quiet.
But silence is also something I learn from meditation. There’s a lot of wisdom in quietness.
LKB: Going back to Talia’s question about silence. Something that’s come up in several of our conversations with grandparents about ancestors is this thread of people not speaking. And that’s interesting alongside the conversation about hyper-verbality. On the one hand, there’s this sense of so many words, so much storytelling. But on the other hand, there’s this deep thread of silence—we don’t talk about it.
People who literally didn’t speak. I’m thinking about our friend Kaya’s story of an ancestor who barely spoke. And I was talking to my Torah mentor recently, and he described his grandmother as someone who forgot Yiddish and never learned English. So she didn’t speak.
And what you just said about not being able to speak until you learn Yiddish—it raises this question of return. Of going forward by going backward, or backward by going forward. It feels like you’re describing a reversal of the process that so many of our ancestors experienced. They were ripped from Yiddishland—fled, left, escaped. There are so many verbs we could use for that. And they ended up between languages.
Whereas you, and your characters, are moving back into that space. I’m really moved by that different directionality.
Glossary
Zamler: Yiddish term for someone who collects, gathers, and compiles items
Yiddishkayt: Yiddish term that refers to the secular culture, language, art, and worldviews of Eastern European Jews
Tzadik: Hebrew term for a spiritual leader who acts as a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.
Birkat HaMazon: Hebrew blessings recited after the meal
Bekishe: Yiddish term for the long coat worn by religious Jewish men
Opshprekherins: Yiddish term for traditional Ashkenazi folk healers who specialized in treating illnesses believed to be caused by the “evil eye”
Shtetlekh: Yiddish term for “shtetls” the small towns of predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations that existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Julie, this conversation makes the body feel like an archive that has been waiting for permission to speak. I was especially struck by the movement between Yiddish research, clowning, silence, protective gestures, pickle juice, the Tzadik’s voice, and the Opshprekherins, because the work refuses to treat memory as something safely contained in documents alone. It lives in gesture, shame, laughter, repulsion, play, ritual, language, and the strange courage of inhabiting what assimilation taught people to smooth away. “A relaxed body leads to an imaginative mind” feels like one of the keys to the whole exchange, because it suggests that imagination is not escape from history; it is one way the body begins carrying inherited knowledge forward.