ABOUT WOVEN ROOTS

FORTHCOMING FROM NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS, JUNE 2025

Woven Roots, a companion guide to Ashkenazi Herbalism, explores the rich history of plant-based medicine and folk healing traditions of Eastern Europe from 1600 through the present. Woven Roots is the first in-depth guide to the communal care, medicinal plants, and folk healers of Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, and maps the ancestral folkways, herbal traditions, and shared legacies of Ashkenazi Jews and their neighbors across the region.

Woven Roots features illuminating—and surprising—original research on:

• The pivotal but historically overlooked contributions of women folk healers

• Deep, ancestrally rooted traditions of care for land and nature among Ashkenazi Jews

• The rich cultural exchanges among Jews, Muslims, and Christians that allowed life in the Pale to flourish

• Newly discovered recipes

• Enduring legacies of mutual aid and community interdependence

• How long-lost links between Eastern and Western folk knowledge can shed new light on your heritage and ancestral connections

• Traditional magical practices of the Ashkenazim

ABOUT ASHKENAZI HERBALISM

NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS, 2021

The definitive guide to medicinal plant knowledge of Ashkenazi herbal healers, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Until now, the herbal traditions of the Ashkenazi people have remained unexplored and shrouded in mystery. Ashkenazi Herbalism rediscovers the forgotten legacy of the Jewish medicinal plant healers who thrived in eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement, from their beginnings in the Middle Ages through the modern era. Including the first materia medica of 26 plants and herbs essential to Ashkenazi folk medicine, this essential guide sheds light on the preparations, medicinal profiles, and applications of a rich but previously unknown herbal tradition--one hidden by language barriers, obscured by cultural misunderstandings, and nearly lost to history. Written for new and established practitioners, the book offers illustrations, provides information on comparative medicinal practices, and illuminates the important historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to eastern European Jewish herbalism.

from The Forward