This is the first installment in a series examining influential Jewish figures in the modern health movement. It aims to shed light on how their creative visions shaped wellness practices and the ways their Jewish heritage influenced their work.
While the titular headstand is far from Moshe Feldenkrais ’greatest achievement, its resonance is undeniable. Many postwar Jews in America and Israel found security in nationalism, the foundation of the Israeli state, and the continuity of Jewish practices in the modern world. Still others embraced the uncertain liminality of a Judaism once again fractured and remade (the “upside-down,” if you will)— recognized by pioneers like Moshe Feldenkrais, who would eventually become a forefather of wellness culture. Both Feldenkrais and Ben-Gurion’s Jewish backgrounds contributed uniquely to their places in the history of ideas, albeit in non-religious and opposing ways.
Feldenkrais’s impact is most keenly felt in wellness practices broadly labeled as psychosomatics. The thrust of this perspective is that our bodies hold memories of early life experiences, both trials and traumas, which reinforce patterns of tension and nervous activation that are re-enacted throughout our lives, influencing how we act and think. If the body’s configuration is shaped by such memories, Feldenkrais argued, then uncovering and re-developing dysfunctional areas can help individuals gain control over compulsions and become better versions of themselves.
In the early 1950s, as reports circulated widely about Ben-Gurion’s chronic back pain, he received a bold letter from Moshe Feldenkrais, a man with no medical credentials to speak of, claiming he could heal the Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion’s doctors quickly dismissed the inquiry. After all, doctors heal bodies, and psychologists heal minds—Feldenkrais was neither. But when the back spasms returned with a vengeance on the eve of the Sinai Campaign in 1956, it became clear to Ben-Gurion’s doctors that the problem wasn’t so easily classified. Ben-Gurion consulted one of Israel’s top scientists, Dr. Aharon Katzir, who knew just the man to help. This time, Ben-Gurion did not refuse.
Today, the mind-body connection is taken for granted, bolstered by popular books like When the Body Says No and The Body Keeps the Score. Physical therapy now includes numerous practical avenues to access the emotional self (e.g., Hakomi, Yoga Therapy, Somatic Coaching, even EMDR). However, in the mid-1950s, the prevailing understanding was vastly different.
Psychologists of that generation generally held a Freudian view, believing that the mind transcended the body and that talk therapy alone could effect lasting change. However, cracks in this view were emerging, particularly through the (infamous) work of Wilhelm Reich, who, in works such as Character Analysis, among others, identified how psychological defenses are entangled with the body in specific areas, visible to practitioners through patterns in musculature and posture. Though his innovations are now measured against the unscientific nature of his claims, his sexual obsessions and volatile character.
When Feldenkrais introduced his ideas at San Francisco seminars in the 1970s, thousands of health practitioners, dissatisfied with existing systems, flocked to his lectures, eager to learn from his approach. It was an era when people were drawn to radical ideas of self-transformation, seeking to raise their consciousness and cast off the old world. This ethos, with its mix of idealism and naivety, is captured and aptly critiqued in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Cyra McFadden’s The Serial, and most scathingly in Tom Wolfe’s The “Me” Decade. Cynically, it could be said that the wealthiest generation America had ever produced sought to spend it climbing as far as they could into their own navels. But unlike many new-age gurus who garnered acclaim at the time, Feldenkrais was no charlatan; his method was the result of decades of diligent study, blending diverse influences with a vision to liberate human potential.
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Where did this healer who captivated the San-Fran-70’s come from? Moshe Feldenkrais was born in 1904 in Slavuta, now in Ukraine. During World War I, his family moved to Belarus, where Moshe completed two years of high school and his bar mitzvah. In 1918, at age 14, he left his family to emigrate to British Mandate Palestine—a journey that took him six months.
During this time, European Jewry was experiencing seismic shifts. Driven by antisemitism and secularization, many young Jews sought a remade world and a renewed Judaism through Zionism. Though Feldenkrais made it to the Holy Land, the realities of the new state did not halt his searching. After working as a laborer for three years, completing high school, and working as a cartographer, he moved to France to study engineering.
In British Mandate Palestine, Feldenkrais has also become part of a renaissance in self-defense and martial arts among young Zionists. He excelled in the newly disseminated Japanese martial art of Jiu Jitsu, an encounter which would have been unimaginable in the cloysters of Eastern Europe. In these few short years, he developed his own synthesis of the art, publishing a book on the subject, the very first in the Hebrew language.
In France, Feldenkrais contributed to the new science of atomic fission. There, he also met Kano Jigoro, the founder of Judo, with whom he resumed martial training, earning a black belt in 1936, and publishing two more works on Japanese Martial Arts.. He was already exploring the possibilities of lateral thinking, applying principles of dynamics learned from his training as an engineer to explore the workings of the human frame.
When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Moshe and his wife Yana fled to England, where he developed cutting-edge radar technology to detect German submarines. During his escape, he aggravated a childhood knee injury, motivating him to experiment with new means of self-rehabilitation. This exploration led to his study of psychology, body mechanics, and mysticism, which he reflected in his 1949 book, Body and Mature Behavior.
The method he developed at this time, now known as Feldenkrais or Awareness Through Movement (ATM), involves slow, typically supine movements that isolate specific muscles while targeting others. Practitioners develop an intimate, felt sense of their body’s construction and movement. This awareness helps uncover inefficiencies or misalignments that impact daily life. Feldenkrais argued that such misalignments were tied to developmental disorders, and correcting them could positively influence psychological well-being. For instance, people who puff out their chests may inadvertently misalign their spines, while those who fear occupying space may slouch, compressing their lungs. Everyone, he suggested, walks with a distorted idea of their body, shaped by emotionally charged early experiences under parental expectations.
In the early 1950s, Feldenkrais moved to Tel Aviv to direct the army’s electronics department, yet soon found success teaching his method. During this period, his renown and experience as an unorthodox therapist grew, at last eliciting the request of the prime minister.
While working together, Feldenkrais noticed that, despite the bold strength Ben-Gurion projected outwardly, he privately had what Feldenkrais called the “body image of a nebech” (a weak person in Yiddish). Part of the effectiveness of Feldenkrais’ method lay in his recognition that each of us carries an idea of our own body, shaped by societal and personal expectations, which we in turn express in how we use and misuse our bodies in our daily lives. With this understanding, Feldenkrais structured a regimen not only to strengthen and realign the Prime Minister’s physical body but also to instill a renewed internal image.
They trained together for a year. In 1967, they traveled to Herzliya Beach, where they captured the iconic photograph. For a man like Ben-Gurion—then in his 70s and struggling with chronic back pain—a headstand was more than just an act of strength and mobility; it represented a profound transformation in self-image and self-understanding.
In 1975, Fendenkrais began leading annual training sessions in San Francisco, solidifying his legacy in North America.
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In many ways, Feldenkrais’s story shares much with other Jewish health innovators of his generation. He endured displacement and upheaval from Ukraine in the interwar years, but was nonetheless propelled by a restless creativity that drove him to push the boundaries of every system he encountered. Throughout his life, regardless of institutional or national boundaries, he engaged in a dogged pursuit of a method to break people free from the habits of thought that had caused so much suffering for his generation.
Ultimately, Feldenkrais saw his work as a path to individual freedom. As Andrew R. Heinze points out in his excellent essay Jews And American Popular Psychology, many Jewish health figures of his era rebelled against a science that was veering toward a deterministic view of “human nature” and genetic inheritance. They saw how psychological tools like intelligence testing and diagnoses were often used to justify discrimination against minorities deemed inferior, and worse, could convince a person their dysfunctional patterns were an unalterable part of their essence.
While critics often write off the American 1970s spiritual movement as being fundamentally driven by self-indulgence, one could argue that Jewish contributors like Feldenkrais were animated by different drives. The Jewish immigrants of his generation found in their own experiences of discrimination and displacement the need and possibility for personal and societal improvement. Contrary to the wider spiritual movement, their approach to higher awareness placed strong emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to change—a value rooted in Jewish tradition.
Furthermore, we should remember the renewals that occurred within post-Holocaust Jewry alongside the national revival. Outward political achievements can only take a person so far; true renewal requires internal change, at the level of self-image—a realm more subtle and challenging to define. Through Feldenkrais, a generation learned to free themselves from damaging self-images, rooted in an old-world conception of self. Jews walking the streets of Poland had learned to lower their heads, to make themselves small. In a twist on an old aphorism, we might say that Ben-Gurion’s political mission took the Jew out of the ghetto, while Feldenkrais’ liberating psychosomatics helped to take the ghetto out of the Jew’s self-image.
