I am a community care practitioner*, ritual leader, writer, and deep listener oriented towards healing and liberation.
For over 20 years, I have practiced intuitive healing and woven rituals in reverent collaboration with plants, the seen and unseen, and in service to personal and collective healing. My work is rooted in and guided by Jewish ancestral traditions, feminist, decolonial and abolitionist scholarship, queer liberation, and disability and healing justice work.
I am interested in remembering ancestral healing ways and stories that have been lost, hidden, and co-opted in the maw of assimilation, trauma, capitalism, and re-enlivening them to cultivate more embodied presence and deeper connection to ourselves, each other, the earth. I believe that rooting into ancient Jewish wisdom from a radical, decolonial and abolitionist position can be a source of support as we work towards the world we dream of, built in interdependence, co-liberation, and love.
I offer classes on reconnecting with Jewish ancestral traditions, Jewish plant and protection magic, and remedies and rituals for unraveling times.
I write liberatory liturgy inspired by ancient Jewish text and weave collaborative, radical, joyous Jewish community ritual spaces.
I have been involved in organizing work supporting Palestinian liberation, prison abolition, and queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for over two decades.
I make my home on the occupied lands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc**, by the Quinnehtukqut River, where I tend a garden full of garlic and flowers.
For more about my lineage and teachers, see below.
*though I have been in practice for 20 years, I have yet to find the right word for my work. Healer has never resonated for me, though many people call me that. Some people who work with me also call me “my main witch” or “bubbe.” My prayer is that my work flows in the river of tradition of my Jewish ancestors who called themselves: sanadoras, prekantadoras, mechashefa, buenas madres, and tzadikim – people who carried ancestral wisdom, listened deeply and tended to their communities with love and care.
**please see my reparations and land tax practices for more info
LINEAGE/TEACHERS
I am deeply grateful to the networks of kin I am woven of and into, of human and more than human, the seen and unseen.
My first spiritual teacher was my great-grandmother, Frances Tzipora Dimond, who taught me about talking to plants and G-d, the power of prayer and vodka, and whose fuschia Jordache sneakered feet I had the honor of sitting at for much of my childhood.
My beloved older brother, Matthew, taught me to read, took me to my first ACT UP protest, and introduced me to feminism, art, and queer theory.
My ancestors guide my life and work and sing in my bones and blood. Most of my ancestors are Jews from the Pale of Settlement (Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania), the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Like many of us, my family stories are full of gifts, beauty, loss, secrets, and lies, and I continue to follow threads and learn more to honor, detangle and heal, and to be in integrity and reverence.
I honor my queer, trans, and femme ancestors, crip/disabled ancestors, and am especially dedicated to honoring the legacies of Leslie Feinberg, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, Asnat Barsani, and Miriam haNeviah.
My first mentor in healing work was Cybele (aka Suzette Rochat) who I began working with in a Breath and Bodywork Group for Survivors when I was 22. I apprenticed with her in intuitive healing and stone work for over a decade and also studied with her teacher, Jackie Dennis. I am also grateful to have learned from the politicized witch elders in the Reclaiming Collective and leatherdyke communities in the Bay Area in the 90s.
My main plant teachers are the plants themselves, and I have been hanging out with them since I was a child. My mom taught me about calling plants by their names and was the first person to give me herbal remedies. I have studied with: Shayne Case, Karyn Sanders, Atava Garcia Święcicki, at the Berkeley Herbal Center, and studied flower essences with Jane Bell and the Flower Essence Society, and have learned so much from my wide radical herbal community and friends.
I am grateful to all my teachers in my ongoing work of undoing white supremacy and to the brilliant legacies of Black feminist, abolitionist, and Indiginous scholarship. As someone who benefits from historical and current settler colonization, I am committed to practicing teshuvah, tzedakah, reparations, and accountability. Please see my about my fees page to learn about my reparations practices.
I am honored to call Aurora Levins Morales, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, and Rabbi Jill Hammer mentors in my writing, liturgy, and ritual practices.
I am who I am because of my chosen family and friends, too many to name, from whom I have learned more than I have words for.
I was ordained as a Kohenet (Jewish priestexx) and given the title Kohenet Mechashefa Meholelet Segula M’Ein Dor (Witch who Conjures Treasured Remedies from the Well of Generations) in 2018.
I was ordained as an Interfaith Minister in 2006 from The New Seminary in NYC, where I also trained as a spiritual counselor.
I hold a BA in American Studies from Smith College, 1998
Dori is a witch, and her vision and manner of the meaning of spirituality and mysticism to struggles for social justice has offered me concepts through which to liberate myself from these internal conflicts about spirituality and activism. She has astute and sharp race and gender politics, and uses her magical skills as part of a broad arsenal of interventions focused on healing the world of the effects of capitalism and imperialism.
— D.S.
