Summary: “There is something peculiar about this book: the fact is the cover gives it away right from the start.” That was the first line of Walter Benjamin’s review of The Fairy Tale and the Present written by Alois Jalkotzy in...
Read More
Published in: Studies in Interreligious Dialogue Abstract In the tradition of hakawatis (Arab storytellers) and the maggid (Jewish storytellers), I intend to ignite social-justice dialogue, ecological consciousness, and collective action. How can we transform habitual behaviors of entitlement and…
December 4, 2023 Hosted by the Jewish Climate Action Network Program in Massachusetts, I presented with Thea Iberall, Mirele Goldsmith, Rabbi Katy Z. Allen, and Judith Black as the emcee.
Oberlin College’s Environmental Studies Department at Oberlin presents my in-person workshops Thursday, September 28th 12:15-1:15pm Lunchtime Objects as Storytellers Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies 201 4:30-6:30pm Embodied Practice Workshop Oberlin Center for Convergence (StudiOC) I will be dedicating…
When we live in a practice of gratitude, when we do not take things or people for granted, we truly embody hospitality. This practice unravels the interdependent relationships between waste/disposability and ethnocentrism/xenophobia–between ecological collapse and humanitarian abuses. Storytelling is a vehicle we can use…
Unveiling Progress as Parasite: We Must Replace “Renewable” Energies with Ecological Ethics • From The Paris Institute for Critical Thinking dePICTions volume 3 (2023): Critical Ecologies. Summary: My essay examines the insidious manifestations of greenwashing and environmental racism in the context of humanitarian imperialism—the…
Is there nothing you can do about the environment? Also, see my many contributions to Green Sabbath Project Gatherings:
Transmutations, Transgressions Promiscuous Crossings: Transforming Climate Chaos through the Sephardic Jewish Body Organizer: The International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture Video Lecture:
A central theme is how to integrate the personal with the political, the private with the public. As I discuss with the audience embodied energy and supply chains, Fibershed* consciousness (individual, community, corporation, infrastructure, policy paradigm changes as a collective practice of...
Read More
For this month, I offer Micaela Amateau Amato’s recent presentation at Pennsylvania State University’s Cancer and the Environment Symposium. Amato is not only my mother, but my primary collaborator focusing on fossil-fuel addicted culture and counter-hegemonic, living-art practices. Amato’s presentation on Cancerous Collusions, is the…
I conclude my essay series for Mother Pelican 2022 with a confession. I have reached an impasse, a seemingly untraversable territory bordered by child-rearing landmines—a misstep may suck me into parental-failure quicksand. I thought I “did the right thing:”… READ MORE…
Howard Zinn distinguishes between a totalitarian state and democracy: “To go along with whatever your government does is not a characteristic of democracy.” The colossal scale of industrial technologies (Big Data, Big Telecom), fifth generation of wireless networks (5G), digital…
Cultural Biomimicry: An Evolutionary Guide to the Ecozoic through Epigenetics In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson shares: “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.” These cycles are not about eventually doing more through increased efficiency, but about equilibrium and relationship. This sense…
Monthly Essay Series Mother Pelican ~ A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability Love & Waste: Igniting A Permaculture Paradigm Shift~ A Personal Story, Part I Love & Waste: Igniting A Permaculture Paradigm Shift~ A Personal Story, Part II Love…
April 28 and 29, 2018 From Article in Boulder Daily Camera/ Denver Post > Even though everybody poops, it’s still gross — generally speaking. Not for dung beetles, though. Those bugs are sustained by poop. They ball-up animal…
Building our biocentric eco-art home has inspired the perfect homeschool opportunity for Zazu. It spurred an amazing hands-on opportunity to teach him about co-responsibility and living wisdom. We called the learning opportunity “Adventures in Ideas; Adventures in Action.” The word…
Published in: Philosophy as Practice in the Ecological Emergency: An Exploration of Urgent Matters, Ed. Lucy Weir, Palgrave Macmiilan, 2023 Summary: “I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to…
Published in: Communities Magazine, Winter 2021 issue, Children in Community Summary: Ecoliteracy begins at home; it begins with parenting; in every room of the house; in the classroom, in the media. An ecoliterate mindset inspires us to draw connections as...
Read More
9-11am at the Denver Convention Center Comparative Studies in Religion Unit Theme: Querying Eco-Aesthetics Monday, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM Convention Center-304 (Street Level) Roberta Sabbath, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Presiding Especially for those who are invested in contemporary issues…
Petroleum parenting, what I identify as the decisions parents make that overwhelmingly contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices, reifies the status-quo and our myopic capacity to engage beyond our shame-based, accumulationist individualism. In our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-world, our…
By entering one’s consciousness through the mediated vehicle of storytelling, Alhadeff aims to surprise her audience—evoking a reconsideration of how the consequences of one’s daily choices impacts global human rights. Her story’s characters explore unfamiliar geographical and metaphysical terrain…
Summary: Cara Judea Alhadeff is really difficult and easy to put in a box..Free is the best word. Cara came into my consciousness while studying nude yoga.
Summary: In this two-part conversation, Zuzman talks with Cara Judea Alhadeff—author, most recently, of Zazu Dreams—about the Ecozoic Era, biocentrism, communion with all beings, social permaculture, friction as a source of fertility, the unnatural aspects of natural building, reimagining waste,…
Summary: Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory with an emphasis on the ecological failures of our current economic system relating to its foundation in colonialism.
American-Ladino author, photographer, and performance artist Cara Judea Alhadeff speaks about her startlingly original book, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle – A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene, an environmental tale which also takes up themes…
Kaylan Buteyn interviews panel at Elsewhere Studios Artist Residency with Laura Deutch, Cara Judea Alhadeff & Carolina Porras on Artist Mothers, Art as Life, Not a Job.
Priscilla Atropine interviews Cara Judea Alhadeff: Changing the Climate
Kate Redmond interviews Paonia author Cara Judea Alhadeff about her book “Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle.” LISTEN NOW:
In preparation for the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado, Boulder multi-media, musical and cultural performance, Zazu Dreams: A Declaration of Interdependence, A Love Story. LISTEN NOW:
Earthaven Ecovillage and Get Off The Grid Festival: http://www.zazudreams.com/community-events/ Watch the Video Lecture
Summary: During the triple pandemic of climate crisis, racism / ethnic cleansing, and covid-19 we have become increasingly aware of the world that does not work for the majority of the planet. We long for inspiration and grounded strategies which…
Summary: The purpose of this environmental-justice performance is to generate cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, interfaith dialogue and Jewish-themed action. Reclaiming ancient Judaic spiritual-pharmacopeias, agricultural and architectural environmental engineering practices can be one resolution for systemic oppressions in our triple pandemic of racism,…
Summary: Presented for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), Nearly Carbon Neutral Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency, UC Santa Barbara, 2020 Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era asks: How can…
Summary: We must practice caution during our transition from our global petroculture, not based on the motivation, but on the underlying false assumptions and strategies that perceived sustainability agendas offer. At this juncture of geopolitical, ecological, social, and corporeal catastrophes,…
Summary: Presented at Peace Education: Security, Stability, Sustainability at Assam Don Bosco University, India, 2022 Watch the Video Lecture
Summary: Through historical Sephardic storytelling, Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff presents contemporary interconnections between MLK Jr. and the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat, “the new year for trees.” Presented as a Power Through Partnership Program. In partnership with The Big…
Summary: “Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewable Energy Revolution” is a video lecture from my chapter in the book Shifting Climates-Shifting Peoples, Dr. Miguel De La Torre, editor. The video-lecture that is shot outside our repurposed school-bus tiny home…
Summary: Presented at Peace Education: Security, Stability, Sustainability at Assam Don Bosco University, India, 2022 Watch the Video Lecture
Summary: This video was made for Harvard Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality international conference: Ecological Spiritualities, April, 2022. It was the Racial Justice Invocation for Ammud Jews of Color Torah Academy’s 3rd Anniversary Gala February, 2022. Watch…
Summary: For Ecological Spiritualities Inaugural International Conference 2022, Harvard Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality Published in: The excerpts come from my interviews with National Public Radio: KPFA, Pacifica Radio KGNU KVNF Local Fauna AshevilleFM Podcast interviews:…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: ”The future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” — Rainer Maria Rilke For my Mother Pelican…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: Dedicated to Greg Jacobs aka SHKG Humpty Hump “April is the cruellest month, / breeding lilacs out of the dead land, / mixing memory and desire, /…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: “Realizing the potential of women is the single most important pathway to planetary regeneration.”—Paul Hawken Yes, but how? Many environmental activists claim that empowering women through education is key…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: “Electricity is an element that is more intimate to us than the air we breathe.”—Abbé Nollet, 1746 “The relative divergence of my bodily senses….indicates that this body…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users:’ illegal drugs and software.” — Edward Tufte We can no longer ignore the intricate interconnections between manufactured consent…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: “Our house is on fire…I want you to panic.”—Greta Thunberg’s speech at the 2019 World Economic Forum The fires, dear Reader, have caught up with us. As…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2022 Summary: As activist-educators, we must scrutinize extractive-capitalist interrelationships among slowwashing (including stress reduction technology that actually increases cortisol production), greenwashing (including fraudulent “corporate social responsibility” – CSR) and whitewashing “a coordinated attempt to…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: “We fear that when we stop, even for a moment, the sheer enormity of our lives will overwhelm us. Our outspoken and unspoken fears, they speed up…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: The terrestrial has been exiled from the earth.—Sajay Samuel’s review of Zazu Dreams We woke in the Safeway parking lot, ash falling from the sky. The gated…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: “You cannot regulate an abomination. You have got to stop it.”— Wendell Berry Driving across the United States in our over-heating converted eco-art school bus tiny home—painted…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: The mold had not only seeped into the fibers of our clothes, sheets, pillows, it infiltrated the hinges of my eyeglass frames, the space between the bed…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: Following a determined, iridescent dung beetle, my previous four-part Mother Pelican series ended with: “And then we, too, shift our path…” I hadn’t realized how dramatically our lives…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: Creative-Waste Living as Biophilia Rob (Wild Menagerie), Zazu, and I integrate the utilitarian with the sacred. This is our tikkun—our particular task of repair. Our actions model…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: Practicing Non-Violence through Creative-Waste Living I had met Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, at Peaceweavers while Zazu and I were living at EcoVillage Ithaca. His book, Be…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: I have always attempted to live my ethics to the utmost. During my book launch for Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, author Jill Nagle, introduced me…
Published in: Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2021 Summary: Migration In search of a home that could support my ardent values for my son’s education, Zazu and I had been living in off-grid intentional communities from…
Published in all of the following: –a collaborative series sponsored by– VIEW NOW VIEW MEDIUM Mother Pelican: The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability VIEW NOW The Esperanza Project...
Read More
Published in: Communities Magazine, Summer 2021 issue, Ecological Culture Summary: A devotion to repurposing objects, to constructing co-beneficial, regenerative infrastructural support systems, is an antidote to industrialized convenience culture…
Published in: Shifting Climate – Shifting People, Ed. Miguel De LaTorre, Pilgrim Press, 2022 Summary: Alhadeff’s chapter examines the insidious manifestations of greenwashing and environmental racism in the context of humanitarian imperialism—the ways in which our taken-for-granted standard of…
Published in: Socioscapes: International Journal of Societies, Politics, and Cultures; Gender and Sexualities Studies in Difficult Times: Uncertain Presents, Coalitional Futures, 2022 Summary: We have confused the apocalypse with Armageddon. Unlike Armageddon, a decisive battle between good (humankind) and…
Published in: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, issue 41.3, The University of Nebraska Press, 2021 Summary: My color photography is a theater of psychological and physical transformations that reveal a luminescent excess. This excess combines both the civilized…
Published in: Tikkun, Journal of Radical Empathy, 2022 Summary: Each fall, I send out the following appeal to my communities: Dear friends, While buying Halloween candy this year please consider the links between many of the popular brands...
Read More
Published in: Deep Green Resistance News Service, 2021 Summary: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” —Audre Lorde As with our shift from our systemically racist culture to one rooted in mutual respect for multiplicity and difference, we must...
Read More
Published in: Tikkun, Journal of Radical Empathy, 2022 Summary: In the framework of our current Shmita Year, “Sacred Attunement: Shmita as Cultural Biomimicry” explores the Hebrew concepts of selah (pause, including a practice of decolonizing our relationship to homogenizing…
Mother Pelican ~ A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, January-April 2021
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, “The Meat Issue,” Tate Gallery, London, pp. 27-40
Intimate Citizenship and Competing Sexual Rights Claims and Justice in the 21st Century, Special Issue: Journal of the International Network for Sexual Ethics & Politics (INSEP), “Embodied Theory as Intimate Citizenship,” University of Ghent, Belgium Sex-Positive Parenting in the 21st Century…