building earth-based, radical, diasporist jewish community in the UK & organising for land justice for all
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About Us
Miknaf Ha’aretz (pronounced phonetically Mik-naf Ha-a-retz) literally means end, edge or wing of the earth. There is no doubt we are at an edge, a frightening edge. But an edge with a wing. An edge of emergence.
Miknaf Ha’aretz was founded in 2020 to create a space for radically reimagining Jewish belonging to land beyond zionism, to build community and a movement rooted in principles of earth-based radical-diasporism. Our work aims to re-connect the Jewish community in the UK to regenerative food and farming practices, organise around food and land justice issues, articulate a ‘Jewish land justice’, and collaborate with other diasporic communities to pursue an agro-ecological approach to farming which truly affirms and celebrates the diversity of land-workers across the UK.
Our work aims to heal, repair and transform Jewish belonging to land.
Our Story
Our work emerged through a conviction that there must be other responses to the violence of the Jewish past than the violence of settler-colonialism, which we had witnessed first hand after spending time in Palestine, seeing the impacts of occupation and the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people. We became determined to offer liberated alternatives for Jewish connection and healing on land. We have been deeply inspired by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s articulation of ‘Radical-Diasporism’ as a positive alternative of co-liberation beyond nationalism, that seeks healing, belonging and justice alongside all marginalised peoples. This is rooted in the revolutionary idea of Doikeyt from the Jewish Labour Bund (Yiddish, meaning: Hereness), a commitment to the lands you live in and to be in solidarity and fight for justice wherever you are. We were also deeply inspired by partners in the US after exploring the rich and radical Jewish food and farming movement there.
We seek to re-connect the Jewish community back to land and to tend the traumas that have resulted from multiple displacements, genocide and centuries of discriminatory laws preventing Jewish people from accessing land. We insist on uplifting Jewish safety, belonging and re-connection to land, not through the nationalism of zionism but through a politics of solidarity and co-liberation.
Jewish histories of displacement have meant, like for many diasporic communities, that without being around others who share the racialised experience of being Jewish, many in the Jewish community feel fear of living and being in rural spaces. Many of us have felt isolated in rural spaces, land based communities and the food and land justice movement where a Jewish positionality wasn’t being considered or articulated. We wanted to explore our unique set of circumstances within the British Jewish community, and the broader diaspora communities of the UK, whose access to land has been affected by empire, persecution, racism and the diasporic experience.
Our work to build diasporist jewish community is being increasingly recognised as a tangible antidote to the violence of zionism that we are seeing play out right now in its most extreme form. As we fight for justice in Palestine and as many in our community become more and more disillusioned with zionism, our work feels part of a significant shift in the jewish imagination towards collective liberation and belonging to land through solidarity and justice.
“Landlessness had been a central feature of Jewish oppression.”
Who We Are
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Sara Moon
Co-founder & director
Sara Moon is a nature-connection facilitator, Jewish educator and Kohenet//Hebrew-Priestess. Sara has trained in the One Year Program at Pardes & Paideia Institute for Jewish Studies, the Adamah Jewish Food & Farming Fellowship, Forest School (Level 3) & Wildwise’s flagship programme Call of the Wild and its alumni program, Tending the Green Fire. Sara has taught and held ritual in Synagogues, fields, farms & retreat centres across the diaspora and runs an earth-based, experiential, radical B-Mitzvah programme for teens. Sara understands the principles of ‘doykeit’, of ecological belonging & justice-seeking as a sacred, diasporist practice and is very moved to share this Jewish wisdom with the next generation in service to ancestral healing and creating transformed, liberated, just futures for us all. Sara currently lives in Dartington, South Devon.
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Samson Hart
Co-founder & director
Samson Hart is a food grower, facilitator, nature-based educator and co-founder of Miknaf Ha’aretz. He has been tending land and market-gardening for over 8 years, and currently tends a kitchen garden on the edge of Dartmoor. His work explores the intersections of land, ecology, justice, culture & spirituality. Samson holds an MA in Regenerative Economics from Schumacher College, has completed the Adamah Jewish Farming Fellowship, the Aleph Kesher Fellowship in Jewish Spiritual Leadership, collaborated with St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation & Peace and has worked as a collaborative associate at gentle/radical.. He loves cooking, baking bread, wild swimming and reading/writing poetry.
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Lucy Michaels
Steering Group
Lucy (she/her) is a scholar–activist, food grower, and mother. She has spent her adult life working at the intersection of environmental and social justice, community organising, and Jewish life.
Lucy became active in radical environmental activism with the Earth First! network, and was a director of the Corporate Watch research co-operative for five years, researching and campaigning on corporate power in the food system. She also lived in Israel–Palestine for seven years, where she was involved in joint struggle and environmental peacebuilding initiatives.
Lucy is rooted in her local Leicester Jewish community and is active in several British Jewish environmental organisations, including XR Jews and EcoJudaism. She is also involved in local interfaith work on ecological and social justice issues.
She holds a doctorate in Desert Studies and is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Her research and practice explore soil–human relations, ecological belonging, diaspora identity, sustainable diets, and dietary inequalities. She enjoys tending her garden, community cooking, nature rambles and Shabbat.
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Rachel Solnick
Steering Group
Rachel has spent sixteen years working on food and justice in the UK. She is a campaigner, market gardener, activist and academic. Her focus on just and agroecological food production emerged after she founded the food-waste campaigning organisation ‘This is Rubbish’ in 2009. Rachel then completed a MSc in Sustainable Horticulture and Food Production, and spent four years working in market and community gardens and as a Director of Edible Mach Maethlon in Machynlleth, where she helped to establish a growers cooperative veg-box scheme. She then returned to academia and is currently writing up her PhD investigating diaspora identity and Black agrarianism as an abolitionist praxis. Her research focuses in particular on how discourses of racial justice and Diasporism provide a means for a radical politics of co-liberation and anti-racist, decolonial land practices. Rachel has spent the last 8 years establishing the land-based co-housing project Bodfrigan, which manages 4 acres of mixed land, where she lives in community with 7 adults and 5 children.
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Sima Cutting
Steering Group
Having spent 3 years travelling & working in SE Asia, Australia & NZ, Sima settled in Totnes, Devon in 2010. After getting involved in Transition Town Totnes, co-ordinating the food group & setting up a cafe in a Transition-run supermarket in Exeter, she set up The Kitchen Table in 2011 with a like-minded friend. Together they established a thriving sustainable eco business, catering weddings, family gatherings, community events & retreats for 11 years. In 2015, Sima went solo, took on a unit & employed an amazing staff team. After navigating covid she decided to close the unit in 2022, though she continues to cater occasionally.
At Pesach in 2023, Sima, Sara & Samson met (finally! Having heard of each other for a couple years!). Sima had an opportunity to explore her Jewish roots & meet some incredible dynamic & politically aligned Jews! Since then, she has catered several of our retreats & events & is now on our steering group.
Sima is interested in food from a political point of view; from land & social justice, to the environmental & community impact of growing well to building wellbeing connection & community. She’s also interested in what makes Jewish food Jewish, the anthropological roots of Jewish food to how it links to various Jewish identities & histories. One day, she says, she’ll write a Kitchen Table cook book!
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Gabrielle Lobb
Steering Group
Read & Listen
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KINDRED SPIRITS
Kinfolk Magazine
Words Tal Janner-Klausner, Photos Christian Cassiel
“Sara Moon and Samson Hart founded Miknaf Ha’aretz in rural Britain to, as Moon says, “reconcile this split between my Judaism and my love for the wild. Much of Jewish practice is deeply grounded in the cycles of agriculture and the rhythm of the seasons.””
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How Miknaf Ha’aretz Is Building a Decolonial Movement Through Land Justice
Atmos
Talia Woodin
“The Jewish-led organisation is focused on dismantling the nationalist form of Judaism many of us were raised with, writes Talia Woodin. Here, they speak with cofounder Sara Moon about Jewish land justice, solidarity with Palestine, and working towards the liberation of all peoples.”
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83: a Jewish grassroots collective, mentoring and native wild plants
Farmerama
“This month we meet two people who are building a community group to celebrate an earth-based connection between their religion and the land.”
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Cultivating Rootedness w/ Miknaf Ha'aretz
The Jewish Diasporist Podcast
“What does it mean to have a diasporist relationship to the land we live on? Coming to you from Miknaf Ha'aretz's Radical Farm Camp, organised last month Ben spoke to the organisers Sara Moon and Samson Hart! With Zach unavailable, he was joined by a special guest host... Join us to find out who, and stay for a conversation about cultivating a sense of belonging through grounded community.”
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Building a Jewish Land and Food Justice Movement in the UK
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2023
Samson Hart & Sara Moon
“How to cultivate Jewish identity and community rooted in ‘radical diasporism’? How to mobilise the Jewish community to act on food and land justice issues? How to link in to the wider land justice movement whilst articulating a specific Jewish experience in relationship with land? This session will share the work of Miknaf Ha’aretz in building a radical, diasporist, Jewish food and land justice movement in the UK, offering Jewish identifying folks more access points to be on land as a source of joy, healing, connection and belonging, beyond assimilation and nationalism.”
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Cultivating Belonging: Exploring diasporic relationship to land
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2023
Claire Ratinon, Rachel Solnick, Jo Kamal
“In this session, Claire Ratinon and Rachel Solnick will discuss their two very different experiences of identity, diaspora and displacement in relation to land work. Chaired by Jo Kamal, this conversation will see where Claire’s Mauritian Kreyol heritage and Rachel’s Jewish Diasporist identity converge in order to explore what it means to work the land when our ancestral relationship to the earth has been disrupted and how diasporic peoples might - in reclaiming the role of land steward - cultivate rootedness and belonging wherever they find themselves.”
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Shmita: a Session on Jewish Farming and Land Justice
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2022
Sara Moon, Samson Hart & Rachel Solncik
In this session, three members of the diasporist Jewish collective Miknaf Ha;’aretz share stories, questions and feedback from a Jewish Land Justice retreat that took place in November 2021, exploring the role of Jewish peoples in the diaspora in imagining a justice-rooted land system for all. Amongst other things, it explores the ancient Jewish farming practice of Shmita (meaning: release), a once-every-seven-year cycle of release for the land, in which debts are forgiven and the land is left uncultivated as a means for regeneration. How might Shmita offer wisdom in these times of ecological breakdown and profound land injustices? How does diasporism offer an alternative idea of belonging to land in opposition to notions constructed within the colonial nation-state?
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Land for Abundance?
Untelevised: The Podcast
Rachel Solnick, Mona Bani, Fisayo Fadahunsi
“By pushing the boundaries of what our current society offers us, we’re investigating what our world would look like if everyone in it had access to enough. By rejecting notions like exclusivity, division, conflict and suffering, we’re proposing that Earth is an abundant land that can, and should, be shared. To do this, we reimagine ownership, challenge capitalism (as always) and even get a bit spiritual! With help from Guests Rachel Solnick from Miknaf Ha'aretz and Beth Stratford from London Renters Union, who together strike a beautiful balance between the ideological, the creative and the practical solutions we need.
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Reimagining the Jewish experience of land
Wicked Leeks
Jack Thompson
““We wanted to build a sense of Judaism, Jewish culture and identity beyond Zionism,” says Hart.
Through courses and camps on food growing, shepherding and ecology here in the UK, they believe that Judaism takes on new relevance and can deepen the relationship to their religion while opening wider conversations about climate change, land justice and stewardship.”
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Less And Better? (Ep. 5 & 7)
Farmerama
Samson Hart & Sara Moon
“It feels like one of the biggest questions of our time: what do we do about meat? Rather than choosing either extreme – business as usual, or ruling out meat altogether – some people suggest the best approach is one of ‘less and better meat’. But how much less is ‘less’? And which meat is ‘better’? How do we even begin to answer these questions?”
