Taking the State Out of the Body: Embodied Resistance to Zionism
With Eliana Rubin
September 19 - 21, 2025
The fight for Palestine is a fight for all of our aliveness. We cannot afford to be numb. The ongoing colonization of Palestine and current genocide we are witnessing can feel unbearably devastating. And yet, we must keep feeling so that we can keep fighting. As Jews, our trauma has been weaponized as a moral cover for genocide. And as people in the belly of the imperialist beast of the U.S., the government counts on our numbness as we implicitly consent to billions of dollars being sent to the Israeli apartheid state every year. We must keep feeling. We must keep resisting. We must keep transforming. In this workshop we will: Disentangle from Zionist propaganda, Root into anti-Zionist and anti-fascist histories of resistance, Workshop difficult conversations, Debrief organizing experiences, Create space for our collective grief, Co-create a transformative environment through popular education and applied practice.
Goals of the retreat:
- Increase participants curiosity about the body and its implications for social movements
- Introduce concept of connections between trauma (particularly intergenerational trauma) with histories of fascism, genocide, and Zionism
- Build embodied resilience to face Zionist repression through political education on what antisemitism is and is not and more broadly disentangling from Zionist propaganda
- Introduce tools for navigating activation internally, in relationship, and in political struggle
- Equip participants to face difficult convos around Zionism and move people
- Co-create a transformative environment through popular education and applied practice
- Offer participants a visceral and embodied experience of the book
Leader
Eliana Rubin builds transgressive relationships with bodies, land, and lineage through their work as a somatic practitioner, politicized facilitator, anti-Zionist organizer, and full-spectrum doula. Their practice centers queer and trans organizers in developing embodied leadership as well as Jewish organizers in healing intergenerational trauma for the sake of collective liberation. They were born and raised by the dramatic landscapes and freaks of the San Francisco Bay Area, and are now rooted in the red clay of Durham, North Carolina.
Learn more about Eliana Rubin