This is an intimate 6-week healing process group for people exploring Levantine, Mizrahi, and Arab Jewish identity through embodiment, memory, and lived experience.

The group explores themes of identity and belonging, Judaism, Zionism and homeland, Islam, Orientalism, connection to Middle East and North Africa, and ancestral and generational healing. 

This is a political and healing-oriented space that holds complexity without forcing resolution. We will talk on what it means to live between worlds—emotionally, culturally, and historically—and on what has been fragmented, inherited, or silenced with presence and care.

This is a small, contained group designed for depth, reflection, and relational process. Together, we aim to create space for remembering, processing, and reclaiming identity within a shared Levantine experience between East and West.

Who is it for?

If you are Jewish with roots in the Middle East and North Africa and your identity was informed

We welcome you if you identify as Mizrahi, Sephardi, Arab Jews, Kurdish, Persian, Amizgh, we know this identity is complex and multilayered. We invite expansive understandings of what it means to be a MENA Jew.

Shelly and Hadar born and raised in Israel/Palestine, currently living in the United States. They both identify as Arab Jews and are committed to Palestine liberation. 

Session 1: Identity & Belonging
Who we are beyond fixed labels and inherited categories. This week explores fragmentation, multiplicity, and the experience of holding more than one cultural, religious, or national identity at once. We look at how we name ourselves, how others name us, and where we feel seen or unseen. This is a space to begin locating ourselves without needing to resolve contradictions.

Session 2: Family, Trauma & Ancestry
The emotional and relational patterns we inherit through family lines—spoken and unspoken. We explore silence, rupture, survival strategies, displacement, and the ways our histories live in the body and nervous system. This includes grief for what was lost or never fully known, and curiosity about what has been carried forward unconsciously across generations.

Session 3: Zionism, Palestine & Homeland
Where do we fit in politically? We have been squashed into narratives of Holocaust and Nakba and while these atrocities are related to us, they are not fully our political story. What does it mean to understand our political reality in these times? What is our homeland and what stories have been told to us about our homelands? How do we understand our homelands outside of Zionism? Ashkenazi narratives have been imposed on our histories. Belonging, statehood, memory, inheritance, contradiction, and personal relationship to homeland narratives. The lies of Zionism that have been fed to us - a European dream that has uprooted us from our homes. 

Session 4: Orientalism
An exploration of how Arabness, “the East,” and Middle Eastern identity have been imagined, framed, or distorted through external cultural and historical narratives. We examine how these representations shape internal identity, belonging, and self-perception. This includes the experience of being seen through a gaze that simplifies, exoticizes, or dislocates, and how that becomes internalized or resisted.

Session 5: Jewishness & Ashkenazi Assimilation
Home, ritual, spirituality, distance, intimacy, and inherited Jewish life.
 

Session 6: Islam
Islam as part of cultural environment, shared Middle Eastern life, family history, proximity, and associations—not theology or debate.

Shelly Elia-Shalev

Shelly Elia-Shalev (she/her) is a Mizrahi Arab-Jew, born and raised in Israel/Palestine, who has lived in the United States since 2018. She is a psychotherapist specializing in complex trauma, attachment wounds, and the psychological impact of multicultural and migration experiences in both individuals and couples. Shelly's goal is to help people reconnect with their inner truth, intuition, and capacity for authentic self-expression.

Before moving to the United States, Shelly was active in the Mizrahi left, where she explored the multilayered and often contradictory narratives that shaped her own identity and the history of her Iraqi Jewish family. This commitment to examining silenced and marginalized histories also informed her ethnographic research, which focused on the stories, memories, and lived experiences of Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa to Israel/Palestine.

Shelly's lifelong project as a researcher, activist, and therapist has been to explore narratives, intuitions, and knowledge that fall outside dominant frameworks of legitimacy. Drawing from oral history, somatic approaches, and non-Western traditions of knowing, she is interested in how embodied experience, ancestral memory, and personal narrative can reveal truths that are frequently overlooked, dismissed, or difficult to measure through conventional research methods. Across her work, she seeks to create space for silenced stories and ways of knowing to be recognized, validated, and integrated.

Hadar Cohen

Hadar Cohen is an Arab Jewish scholar, mystic, and artist devoted to spiritual liberation through self-knowledge, relational weaving, and direct experience of God. She is a 10th-generation Jerusalemite with lineage roots also in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Iran, currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

She teaches through Malchut, her global multi-religious mystical school, offering Jewish mysticism, embodiment, psychology, healing, and contemplative practice. Her core offering is God Fellowship, a twelve-week journey into cultivating a direct relationship with Spirit. Malchut is also home to her Jewish Mystical School, which includes a library of recorded classes and a weekly Hebrew Bible study. 

She is dedicated to the theological, political, and cultural revival of the Andalusian tradition through writing, research, and annual retreats in Andalusia, Spain. She was the inaugural fellow at Abrahamic House, a multifaith social change incubator. 

 She teaches internationally through workshops, retreats, universities, and organizations, and works with individuals both one-on-one and in groups. She also consults for media, television, and publishing projects.

Her podcast, Hadar's Web, features conversations with community members on spirituality, healing, justice, and art. She offers free meditations at Insight Timer. Subscribe to her Substack for ongoing writing, teachings, and offerings.

hadarcohen.me or malchut.one. // @hadarcohen32