Ancestral Performance Art
by Alissa Schwartz
How can we work effectively to dismantle racism and other social inequities if we do not first examine and rework our origin stories? A remembered and reimagined ancestry is integral to social transformation.
The practice of Ancestral Performance Art utilizes familial and ancestral history for the purpose of communal thriving and liberation. It is the examination of family stories told and retold, and the surfacing of ones never recounted.
“Schwartz’s characterization of the language, relationships, and overt and covert forms of racism within Ashkenazic communities—whether large or small—is stirring and, of course, deeply troubling.”
—Barbara Simon, Professor Emerita, Columbia University
Alissa Schwartz’s previous book, Organizational Performance Art, laid out a framework for offering productive possibilities and space for joy in the workplace. In Ancestral Performance Art, Schwartz shares the intimate work of witnessing and holding space with a dying parent; uncovering and re-interpreting racist and separatist practices within her white Jewish family; and the twinning and untwinning and twinning again she experiences with her mother, all in the service of equitable culture-building. The Workbook section at the end of the book offers tools and prompts to help you make your own Ancestral Performance Art.
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Alissa Schwartz, MSW, PhD, Principal of Solid Fire Consulting, is a master facilitator and organizational culture builder with over 25 years of experience working with groups. She is also a performance artist; her latest dabblings have been in developing a new body of work she calls Ancestral Burlesque. Alissa is inspired by and part of a diasporic and ancestral Jewish tradition of fighting for social justice, warmly hosting (and feeding!) people, and developing innovative, useful scholarship and creative work. Alissa wrote these essays as a gift to her family, to renarrativize their history, and to impact, as well, the larger narrative of the white Jewish experience in the United States.
Alissa is based out of Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, where she parents, grandparents, bikes, and practices yoga. Learn more about her work and writing at www.solidfireconsulting.com.
US$20
128pp / 5x6” / perfect-bound paperback
Printed and bound in the US by Versa Press
Distributed to the trade by Asterism Books
Impeller Press Books B-009
ISBN 9781967136995
Published June 17, 2025