Why the push now for Jewish women to be fruitful and multiply. Israeli women lose their rights. A new prayer book where God is female.
Table of contents Get the issueA funny thing happened to the young Jewish heroine of I Never Promised You A Rose Garden on the road to Hollywood. The current film of this classic novel about a schizophrenic teenager completely eliminated 16-year-old Deborah Blau’s Jewish identity. Somewhere en route to the silver screen, Jewish Deborah Blau became ethnically-neutered Deborah Blake. In... Read more »
In a revealing interview, poet and novelist Esther Broner talks about rediscovering our mothers...the Jewish-Black rupture...how patriarchal Judaism excluded—-but did not demean--women...how women writers were told they "couldn’t handle men"... feeling more and more sensual under the Israeli sun... the growth of anti-Semitism... and much more.
Jewish women, many of them Orthodox, are studying this martial art because "the Torah wants us to lead healthy and disciplined lives...and emphasizes hard work as the route to understanding."
Woman and man may both have been created in God’s image, but the God of the traditional prayerbooks is strictly male. In the new Sabbath prayerbook written by two members of the Brown University Women’s Minyan, the God language is female and is inspired by women’s experience.
A nation-wide (U.S.) study of professionals in Jewish community service documents what women have long sensed—-that in social work, fund-raising and administration, the men lead and the women follow—-far behind.
The newly-elected Likud Government has no commitment to women’s equality, and its own leader, Menahem Begin, groups women together with children as beings who must be protected—-by men.
Jewish children have learned to expect their mothers to demonstrate their Jewishness primarily by being selfless, altruistic and preoccupied with their family’s well-being.
The current panic by communal leaders over more Jews having fewer children is more than coincidental, since the discovery of the demographic "crisis" follows close on the heels of the emergence of Jewish feminism.
