Icons of Chutzpah
There have been Jewish women for far, far longer than there have been books about them, but several biographical anthologies now feature bright, courageous, and talented Jewish women who made a profound impact on the course of Jewish history and world history more generally.
This past year alone has witnessed the publication of two new collections by women living in Israel and writing about Jewish women around the globe. Chutzpah Girls by Julie Esther Silverstein and Tami Schlossberg Pruwer (Toby Press, $34.95) is subtitled “one hundred tales of daring Jewish women”—each tale, confined to a single page and focused on a single moment in each woman’s life, is accompanied by a boldly colorful visual image painted by a Jewish illustrator from around the world and
commissioned for this book.
The other collection, Iconic Jewish Women by Aliza Lavie (Gefen Publishing, $27), features “fifty-nine inspiring, courageous, revolutionary role models for young girls,” with each two to three page profile accompanied by guiding activities. Whereas Chutzpah Girls is visually striking, Iconic Jewish Women is more text-based, consisting of lengthier profiles geared toward engaging young women and offering them recommendations for how to “see something new,” “give back” and “get out of your comfort zone.” The reader who is inspired by the profile of Emma Lazarus, for instance, is encouraged to help out a new immigrant or write her own poem in the spirit of “The New Colossus.”
There is a considerable degree of overlap in the women featured in each volume. Nearly half the women profiled in Lavie’s book are included in Chutzpah Girls, from Sarah the matriarch to Sarah Schenirer, founder of the Beis Yaakov schools; Deborah the prophetess to Deborah Lipstadt the Holocaust historian; and from the matriarch Rachel to Rachel “Ruchie” Freier, the Hasidic judge. Indeed, the number of women featured in these books who share the same name though they live generations apart attests to the ways that these women continue to inspire.
The sheer diversity of the women profiled in both these volumes is remarkable: There are women who achieved prominence in nearly every discipline, from politics to art to entertainment to sports to religious life. Chutzpah Girls includes more contemporary women, several of them observant Jews—including Batya Sperling-Milner, the first young woman to read from the Torah in braille at her bat mitzvah, and Beatie Deutsch, the “marathon mother,” an Israeli national running champion. Lavie’s book, in contrast, features many women involved in Holocaust and Zionist history, from Hannah Semer, a Holocaust survivor and the first female editor of an Israeli paper, to Yehudit Nisayho, a Mossad agent involved in airlifting Moroccan Jews and in the capture of Adolf Eichmann.
It is notable that the authors of both these volumes live in Israel, where Jews hail from all over the world and live in close proximity in spite of tremendous ethnic diversity. Chutzpah Girls, which features Mizrahi, Ashkenzai, Persian, Ethiopian, Indian and Bukharan Jews, is authored by American-born and Italian-born Israeli immigrants. The author of Iconic Jewish Women is an Israeli-born former member of Knesset, and her book, which is explicitly geared toward bat mitzvah girls, includes a history of the bat mitzvah celebrations around the world, starting 150 years ago in Verona. Both books, in addition to inspiring young Jewish girls, also showcase the remarkable diversity of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, and the limitless potential of Jewish women to leave their mark.
Ilana Kurshan is the author of the forthcoming memoir Children of the Book.
