Course Structure & Community Agreements
Yachatz: Jewish Ancestral Healing for Collective Liberation / March-April, 2025
Purpose and Structure of the Course
The purpose of this course is to provide a space for Jews who are socially classified as “white” to focus on their own healing, while building greater clarity, strength and power to challenge racism, anti-semitism and white supremacy and work toward collective liberation.
Yachatz: Jewish Ancestral Healing for Collective Liberation is being held as a caucus for anyone who has Jewish and European ancestry and benefits from white privilege, including: Jews who are Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, who come from multi-faith families, or were adopted into families with Jewish and European ancestry*. Our intention in holding this caucus is not to be exclusive, but to provide the best possible conditions for participants to be vulnerable with one another and break down social conditioning.
Racial caucusing is a well established practice in the field of anti-racism, designed to create greater capacity for cross-racial solidarity. The impetus for white people to caucus with one another often comes directly from people of color who have requested that white people take responsibility for educating ourselves about racism and engaging in the work of educating our communities.
Reasons for holding a white caucus include the fact that witnessing a group of white people’s learning process about race can be triggering or uncomfortable to people of color, and the presence of folks of color inside a white caucus can cause white folks to shut down, perform, and become overly self conscious and/or inauthentic. These conditions prevent more vulnerable, transformative work from occurring that would otherwise be possible. Additionally, it is also important for white folks to make time to resource and support one another in our anti-racist journey, which makes us better comrades and allies to folks of color in our lives and work for social change.
This course is both a Jewish and a white caucus, designed to promote healing, learning and liberation at the intersections of white supremacy, racism, anti-semitism and christian hegemony.
*BIJOCSM (Black, Indigenous, Jews of Color, Sephardi and Mizrachi) participants will have the opportunity to meet in breakout groups with other participants with shared identities. If you are unsure whether or not this caucus is a good fit for you, please reach out and we’ll help you determine if this class could meet your needs: jen@jenkiok.org
Community Agreements for Live Session Participation
Take Exquisite care of yourself while participating in this course. This includes being at choice about the level and depth of your participation and sharing.
Speak from your own personal experience, using I statements.
Practice deep listening & bring curiosity when others are speaking. Do your best to suspend judgement and listen for what you might learn.
Refrain from offering unsolicited advice or criticism. This is especially important in unmediated break out room discussions, and also applies to use of the chat during live sessions.
Confidentiality: Please be mindful when sharing your own reflections and learnings from the course not to share personal stories shared by other participants.
Respect time limitations when sharing and do your best to ensure that everyone who wants to speak has time to do so. This is especially important in break out rooms.
As a course participant, we ask you to thoughtfully and heartfully do the work of this course, and refrain from disrupting the experience of others. To this end, please follow the guidance of the facilitators. This includes staying on topic during break out room discussion.
We value this feedback; for the sake of everyone participating in this work, give feedback on content and facilitation outside of live sessions. Refrain from using whole group discussion time, the live chat feature or break out room discussion time to process or deliver criticism or feedback on how the course is being offered or facilitated. You’ll have the opportunity to offer feedback in the course survey, which will be sent to you right after our final session.
Direct feedback on this course is best shared with jen@jenkiok.org.
This course is offered to registered attendees only. Everyone who joins the course and/or attends a live session must be a registered participant in the course.
Please do not Share Zoom links or recordings for the course with someone who is not registered as a participant.
If you are acting in a way that violates these ground rules, the facilitators may take action to ensure that all participants who have shown up to do the work of the class are able to do this work unimpeded.
Taking action can include: redirecting the participant who has gone out of bounds; muting the participant; dropping the participant from the call and revoking their access to Zoom.
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Intellectual Property
While we hope that participants will share about what they’ve learned in informal settings, Jen Kiok maintains intellectual property rights over the name and the content of the curriculum.
Training participants agree not to use the exact name of our programming, and/or to recreate or offer any part of the curriculum as their own.
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Accessibility and Technical Requirements for Participation
We do our best to make online programming accessible to anyone who wishes to participate (including sliding scale registration fees with no-payment options), however, we recognize that we cannot guarantee that all materials or processes will be equally accessible to all people.
Participants in our online programming will need to be comfortable using email, navigate the website and Zoom platform in order to participate in the program and/or attend live sessions.
Full participation in live sessions will require a high speed internet connection and a digital device that is compatible with the latest version of Zoom (see this article for more information, and/or reach out to Zoom support directly to ensure you will be able to use the platform on your device, with your connection). Audio-only participation requires use of a cell phone.
Zoom’s live transcription feature will be enabled during all live sessions. You can read about that feature here. High-quality auto-generated captions and transcript for recordings will be available on all session recordings.
To correspond with our team about technical or logistical issues, please write to: info@jenkiok.org For content related questions, please write to jen@jenkiok.org
Thank you!