Deatra Cohen is a for­mer ref­er­ence librar­i­an, is a clin­i­cal herbal­ist who trained with the Berke­ley (for­mer­ly Ohlone) Herbal Cen­ter, belongs to a West­ern Clin­i­cal Herbal col­lec­tive, and is a Mas­ter Gar­den­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia. In her research, Cohen became frus­trat­ed with the lack of prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion avail­able to Jews of Ashke­nazi descent, and relat­ed to East­ern Euro­pean tra­di­tions in gen­er­al. Ashke­nazi Herbal­ism was writ­ten to rec­on­cile this lack, and the first work in any lan­guage to doc­u­ment the herbal prac­tices of Ashke­nazi Jews.