Guest Profile

Rabbi Tirzah Firestone Ph.D.

Tirzah Firestone, Ph.D., is also a psychotherapist, and founding rabbi of Congregation Nevei Kodesh in Boulder, Colorado. Having studied and counseled hundreds of Jewish families and individuals for over thirty years, Tirzah Firestone brings to life her case studies and interviews with real people who have surmounted their tragedies. Trauma legacies, Firestone posits, transfer from generation to generation, and Wounds Into Wisdom offers encouragement and solutions to stop the negative effects of our historical traumas from continuing on to future generations.

Central to the book is Firestone's own upbringing in a large Orthodox Jewish family and as the younger sister of the late radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (author of The Dialectic of Sex). She describes her family’s Holocaust trauma legacy: emotional abuse, parental rejection, mental illness, and suicide. From her own and others' extraordinary stories, Firestone distills seven principles, rich in Jewish wisdom, that mark a path to new freedom for people who are suffering from trauma.

Importantly, the book focuses on the impact of collective trauma in the world today, as populations are dislocated by war, poverty, government policy, and climate change—and provides a template for people everywhere to emerge from tragedy and reshape their destinies. Relevant not only to the catastrophic past, but also to our current world of turmoil and displacement, Wounds into Wisdom is an essential book for our times.