Winter 2019-2020

happening

“Curiosity Over Assumptions” “Relationships Before Politics” “Plurality Over Parity” “Local Over International” “Respect for Self-Definition” “Safe Open Space” “Nimble and Responsive” These are the stated values of NewGround, a community-building organization that creates, connects and empowers Jewish and Muslim change-makers in America. NewGround works through a professional fellowship, high school leadership council and public programming.... Read more »

A Change, Inked: Dani Shapiro Reckons With a DNA Discovery

feature

“Last spring I found out that my father was not my biological father,” I told him, keeping the story as brief as possible.

A White-Passing Black Jew in NYC, via YA Fiction

reviews

As a Black Jewish woman, it feels inevitable that whenever a book comes out about being Black and Jewish, someone’s going to tell me to read it. So when someone asked me to review Color Me In by Natasha Diaz, I was skeptical. Usually these books are not actually written for me—they are written to... Read more »

Relative Relations

happening

Curator Laura Kruger chose works by 70 artists highlighting “the connections that provide for the amazing melding of the human race, an ever-widening network of interests, talents, commitment, and broadening diversity.” At the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at through June 2020. http://huc.edu/research/museums/dr-bernard-heller-museum-in-new-york/current-exhibitions.

Action on #MeToo Violations

voices

In the ongoing painful saga of #MeToo reports in the Jewish world, there’s heartening news. The Association for Jewish Studies president Christine Hayes announced in November the creation of a formal Committee on Sexual Misconduct, following two years of work by a Sexual Misconduct Task Force, chaired by Laura Levitt, Temple University Professor of Religion,... Read more »

Speaking Truth to Trump

voices

Frequently, it is women who have come forward, in droves, to speak truth to [Trump’s] power, or to nonsense, or, perhaps most accurately, to the nonsense that feeds his power. From Sally Yates to E. Jean Carroll to April Ryan to Greta Thunberg... Read more »

Life and Art

voices

All strong women don’t have to be saintly. Some go about corralling the money they need to survive or to gain importance in brutal or deceitful ways, just as men do, in real life and in theater. AILEEN JACOBSON, “Maiden, Sorceress and Stepmother on Stage, Yiddish-Style,” on the Lilith Blog.

After Auschwitz, They Never Forgot Each Other

voices

The reunion lasted about two hours. He finally had to ask: Did she have something to do with the fact that he’d managed to survive in Auschwitz all that time? She held up her hand to display five fingers. Her voice was loud, her Slovakian accent deep. “I saved you five times from bad shipment,”... Read more »

For Jews of Color, by Jews of Color

voices

I remember a time not long ago in which I could read Hebrew, chant it, recognize words, but not understand the text before me. I remember visiting Orthodox cousins and watching them davening, a flurry of words on their tongues. In contrast, my immediate family could not speak a... Read more »

I Knew I Was a Girl

feature

“LOOK WHO IS HERE!” Zeide Stein exclaimed as I walked into the sukkah one afternoon. “It’s the upshern yingel!” It’s the boy who is about to get a haircut. In the Hasidic community, boys get their first haircut on the day they turn three. Until then, their hair is left to grow, and from a... Read more »

Newly Formerly Orthodox

happening

Freidom (freedom, in Yiddish) supports formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews who are attempting to leave an insular religious environment to experience a more open world. These brave individuals are often shunned and ostracized by their former communities, friends and even families. losing the only life they’ve ever known, and face the challenge of navigating a foreign world.... Read more »

The Vagina Museum

happening

Driven by social justice and public health initiatives, a new crowd-funded museum— in a temporary location in London and hoping to expand—is dedicated to under- standing and appreciating gynecological anatomy. “It’s less about titillation and more about education,”says founder and director Florence Schechter. vaginamuseum.co.uk

Anna O.

happening

The first documented psychoanalytic patient was Anna O., a patient of Josef Breuer made famous in the writing of Sigmund Freud. The pseudonymous Anna O was later outed as the real-life Viennese Jewish feminist social worker and activist Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), who became a source of fascination and inspiration to the late Ann Jackowitz, a community... Read more »

Political Hospitality

voices

Patti Kenner’s political hospitality

Trauma and Transition in Sephardic History

reviews

Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century ($28.00), a remarkable new book by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, introduces the lives and legacies of Salonica’s Jews during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Abrevaya Stein takes readers on an intimate multi-generational journey via the lives of Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi (later Levy), a prominent publisher in... Read more »

voices

Hunger is not and has never been a meaningful incentive to find employment when employment is not there to be had. MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger responds to federal cuts to food stamps.

She Rescues and Recycles Trash

voices

Why sort through the drugstore trash

Size Discrimination

happening

A body-positive documentary film intent on inspiring change, “Fattitude,” created by Lindsey Averill and Viridiana Lieberman, focuses on real-life solutions for changing the national conversation about body image. Informed by “postmodern, post-colonial, feminist perspectives,”the film also examines how fat-shaming crosses lines of race, class, sexuality and gender. Diverse voices include academic scholars, activists, filmmakers, actors and psychologists, such... Read more »

A Prayer Book for Everyone, Regardless of Gender.

voices

Without the willingness to cautiously and responsibly, shape and reshape the practice of Jewish prayer, it will cease to be a source of life, joy, and meaning and become a burdensome rote observance. Our centuries-old tradition is not fragile enough to be damaged by this approach — on the contrary, diversity of practice has always... Read more »

voices

“The integration of feminist political commentary and investigative reporting with other stuff, whether it’s fashion or beauty or sports, is part of a necessary expansion of the mainstream media to include women as full human beings.” Rebecca Traister in “A Farewell to Feministing and the Heyday of Feminist Blogging” by EMMA GOLDBERG, New York... Read more »

Treating Pregnant Women Like Criminals

voices

Pregnancy and criminality

Incentivizing Congregations to Hire Women in Clergy Roles

voices

A new program at JOFA intends to increase paid spiritual leadership positions for Orthodox women in Orthodox synagogues with funds of up to $10,000 per year if the synagogue commits twice the sum from its own funds to hire a Devorah Scholar. Jeremy Pava, who funded the incentive with Ann Pava, commented, “Think about the... Read more »

Prayer, Illuminated

reviews

I’ve never been a morning person, but not long after moving into an apartment with large windows facing the rising sun, my life changed. I would instinctively wake up to watch the colors gradually brightening from midnight blue to the dawn’s splashes of pinks and purples across the horizon. As the metallic magenta ball rose... Read more »

A Novel Amplifies the Lens of History

reviews

A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum (Grand Central Publishing, $28) is the escapist fiction we need for the terrible times in which we find ourselves. I mean “escapist” in the best sense of the term—without intending to, I read it in one sitting, catapulted from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, as all the terrifying headlines of... Read more »

Toni Morrison Gave Me Permission

voices

On one of my visits back to campus in my late twenties, I spoke to my former advisor, Toni Morrison about my fears about combining writing with (then-still-theoretical) motherhood. I’d grown up watching my own mother break gender barriers in her field of immunopathology; I... Read more »

Mildred at 100

feature

Meet a woman whose visionary philanthropy and signature humor have helped bring you social-change films, iconoclastic art, and Lilith magazine.

“I Threw Out”

feature

Your toothbrush, dental floss, soap, glasses, socks, stained T-shirts, 12 lipsticks, 3 rouges, 5 tubes of foundation, sunscreen, unopened deodorant. I kept the eye cream. I threw out a piece of paper on which you wrote phone numbers and mathematical equations, a photocopy of your Continuing Ed classes where you circled “Drawing Class: Jan.... Read more »

Compliance

feature

She knows the neighbors call on her because she is childless—an anomaly, a two-headed turtle in this enclave, where every woman’s accessory is a baby carriage. It is always Chana’s door they ring if they need her to watch their children, so they can run to the store for a forgotten ingredient for Shabbas dinner,... Read more »

Making America Smart Again

feature

I LIVE PART-TIME IN RURAL MICHIGAN. While helping me pull weeds in the summer before the 2016 presidential election, a friend of mine, a non-college- educated white woman, told me that the increase in her health insurance premium under the Affordable Care Act would make her more likely to vote for the Republican candidate. (This... Read more »

Across the Barrier

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WHAT I LEARNED FROM PALESTINIAN BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS ABOUT HOW TO SURVIVE “SURVIVING”

Mythic Under the Radiation’s Red Eye

feature

If I'm Andromeda bound on the cliff and Perseus is coming to stop the monster, I wish he'd get a move on.

The Era of Family Secrets Is Over

feature

An interview with Libby Copeland suggests that this means the end of family secrets.

A Legacy of Lox

feature

NYC’s First Lady of Fish grew up in the legendary “appetizing” store. Then, she and a cousin took it over.

Beauty Parlor Seder

feature

A swirl of aromas fills my nose the minute I start climbing the rickety spiral staircase: oniony chicken paprikash, dill-infused matzo ball soup, and vinegary cucumber salad propel me up to the second-floor landing of the Brooklyn tenement, where I also detect... Read more »

We All Stand Here Ironing

feature

Tillie Olsen wrote her important stories and essays in a tradition of Jewish radicalism that insists on the struggle for economic, gender and racial justice as a burden and privilege of Jews—rooted in a history of oppression and survival, in the conviction that such experience demands... Read more »

Rosine Cahen’s Drawings from the Great War

happening

Rosine Cahen (1857–1933) was an unlikely chronicler of the First World War. She arrived in Paris in 1871 from Delme, a small town in Lorraine, France and studied art at the Julian Academy, the only institution accepting women at the time. Between 1916 and 1919, while in her sixties, she regularly visited those seriously wounded... Read more »

Winnipeg Jews & the Garment Industry

happening

A STITCH IN TIME! Winnipeg, Manitoba in the 20th century was a hub of the garment industry, and Jews were involved in its manufacturing, retail and union organizing, as the sector moved from a cottage industry sewing farmers’ work clothes to factories of high fashion. Historians of this prairie city note that the shift was... Read more »

Creating Safe, Respectful Jewish Workplaces

happening

Ta’amod: Stand Up seeks to help Jewish communal institutions and the people who work, learn, or worship at them to develop cultures of safety, respect, and equity. They offer workplace training using Jewish values and ethics and an understanding of the unique dynamics and needs of Jewish organizations and a resource bank at taamod.org.

Adoption & Jewish Identity

happening

Despite the fact that American Jews adopt at about twice the rate of the general population, very little has been known about the real-life experiences of Jewish adoptees and their families. Many Jewish adoptees grapple with unique identity issues rooted in common assumptions about what a Jew looks like, “Jewish” abilities, and what makes someone authentically... Read more »

Story Aperture

happening

With a new story-collecting mobile app, Story Aperture, you can record your own Jewish women’s stories, preserve the memo- ries of family and friends, document a com- munity’s collective history, or record cultural moments as they happen. Start your record- ing with an introduction: “Today is (date). My name is …, and I am interviewing... Read more »

What Quotidian Objects Say About Women’s Lives

happening

“The stuff of women’s daily lives, the relics of their political campaigns, the remains of their suffering, the products of their invention. Quilts, banners, looms, tele- scopes,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “are among the things that for a long time were never collected or cataloged” They are now featured,in a richly illustrated volume. Smithsonian American... Read more »

Winter 2019-2020

DNA Secrets, Hidden Identities

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