Blog Archive: 2015
2015
Amy Powell
December 29, 2015
By Amy Sessler Powell
In the year since Laura Silver published "Knish: In Search of Jewish Soul Food," became known as the world's foremost authority on knishes, and occasionally strolled New York City dressed in a giant knish costume, Silver has been asked one question more than any other: "Where can I get a knish?"
December 21, 2015
By Tamar Biala
Spinoza got the better of me long ago. My Judaism is not based on faith in the Torah as the divinely revealed word of God. Rather, it's based chiefly on a national identification with the Jewish people, on the feeling of belonging and shared responsibility for its fate, on being drawn to Jewish culture, and the motivation to help shape it.
December 7, 2015
By Ellen Golub
You'd think I would have gotten over it sooner. I read a few stories by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem when I was 10 about a dysfunctional married couple and then, OMG: a lifetime of flashbacks! It didn't help that my parents were divorcing at the time. I asked them if I could see a psychiatrist. "What — and have it go on your permanent record?"
Janet Freedman
November 30, 2015
By Janet Freedman
The results of the vote on the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution put forth by the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) came over email this past Friday. Of those voting, 88.4% or 653 people approved the BDS resolution; 86 opposed. Thirty-five percent of the NWSA membership voted.
Cynthia Shamash
November 12, 2015
By Cynthia Kaplan Shamash
On Oct. 18, I spoke at the Iraqi Synagogue in Queens to celebrate the publication of my book, "The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile from One of Iraq's Last Jews." There were at least 70 people in attendance, and after reading a passage from the book in which I describe being interrogated by prison officers when I was 9 years old — looking for a recording device with which to accuse me of espionage, they tore apart a doll my father had given me — I pulled the broken doll out of a plastic bag and showed her to them.
Janet Freedman
November 9, 2015
By Janet Freedman
When I am determining how to work in solidarity with those who are seeking peace between Israelis and Palestinians, I start with a question. "Do you think that the state of Israel should continue to exist?"
Lisa Joffe
October 26, 2015
By Lisa Fishbayn Joffe
Canada got a new government last week. The Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau defeated Stephen Harper's Conservatives after Harper's campaign tried to increase turnout of Conservative voters by stressing anti-Islam controversies. This may have played a role in the Conservative loss, as many Canadians viewed this intolerant and mean-spirited attitude as, well, not very Canadian.
Susan Schneider
October 15, 2015
By Amy Sessler Powell
With 40 cubic feet of boxes containing 800 files ranging from AIDS to Zionism, the newly acquired Lilith Magazine Archives at the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections tells pathbreaking stories from the lives of Jewish women over the past four decades.
October 5, 2015
By Ornat Turin and Vardit Ringvald
Who teaches Hebrew to youngsters in the United States? Are they trained teachers with a passion for educating young students; How about Israeli women who are here for other reasons such as their husbands' graduate work?
September 24, 2015
By Phyllis Karas
How on earth did I — a journalist, a college professor, a doctor's wife, and a nice Jewish grandmother — become the sidekick of the real life criminal, Kevin Weeks, whose impressive resume includes five murders and who is being represented in the new movie, "Black Mass," by Jesse Plemons of "Friday Night Lights" and "Breaking Bad" fame? And, how do I reconcile all that with my Judaism?
Shulamit Reinharz
September 10, 2015
By Shulamit Reinharz
A year ago, I spent Simchat Torah in Vienna when I travelled there to participate in the Vienna Project, a multi-tiered program created by Karen Frostig, a Boston-based Jewish artist and daughter of a Viennese family who had to flee during World War II. The point of her project was to engage many current Viennese citizens in a remembrance of their past.
Marcia Falk
September 3, 2015
As we approach the High Holy days, here are two selections, one for Rosh Hashanah and one for Yom Kippur, excerpted from Marcia Falk's "The Days Between: Blessings, Poems and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season," published by the HBI Series on Jewish Women, Brandeis University Press.
August 26, 2015
By Suzanna Eibuszyc
My most vivid memory after the war in Poland is of my mother, always watching the door, always hopeful, never giving up that a loved one would enter, back from the dead. Later, when I grasped the magnitude of the crimes against Jews in Europe, I questioned why my parents thought it was essential to stay in "their homeland."
August 12, 2015
By Janice W. Fernheimer and JT Waldman
In the summer of 2013, JT Waldman and I made some curious observations taking in the sites on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. JT noticed a lot of Jewish-sounding names, like Shapira and Boehm, while touring the Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage Center and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.
Marcia Falk
August 5, 2015
By Amy Sessler Powell
Poet and scholar Marcia Falk, acclaimed author of the groundbreaking "Book of Blessings" last summer, published "The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season." Why did she choose to focus on the High Holidays? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That's where the Jews are.
July 23, 2015
By Keren R. McGinity
We can learn a lot from actor Michael Douglas about gender and intermarriage. "I am a Jew," he said with pride when he accepted the Genesis Prize last month in Jerusalem. He admitted it was "a long journey" to making this statement.
July 16, 2015
By Rachel Putterman
Why am I, a non-Orthodox female rabbinical student, brought to tears at the recent images of Modern Orthodox women being ordained as rabbis in both Israel and the U.S.? Why does this historic shift resonate so deeply with me, given that the liberal movements have been ordaining women for decades?
Deborah Greniman
July 9, 2015
By Deborah Greniman
How does one go about writing a feminist commentary on the Talmud — the literary-legal corpus, notorious for its exclusion of women, that has transfixed Jewish (and non-Jewish) scholars for millennia?
Amy Powell
July 2, 2015
By Amy Sessler Powell
On July 4, our nation once again celebrates its birthday, but most Americans would have to stop and do the math to figure out how many candles to put on the cake. This birthday has no fancy name, no bicentennial or semiquincentennial, but birthday number 239 comes after a few weeks that may be worth noting for the ages.
June 26, 2015
By Ranana Dine
Before I arrived here, I was warned that I might be disappointed by the state of Jewish Orthodox feminism in England. Sure, there's JOFA UK and a small partnership minyan in London, but the great strides that have been taken recently in the U.S. just haven't made it across the pond, I was told.
June 19, 2015
By Shulamit S. Magnus
Bonna Haberman created and ran Women of the Wall (WOW) for years and remained active in our core mission literally, to the day she died. The idea for a religiously diverse group of Jewish women to pray together in a group service with Torah reading, came from Rivka Haut, z'l, an Orthodox Talmud scholar from Brooklyn.
June 9, 2015
By Yarden Fanta-Vagenshtein
I am proud to be an Ethiopian-Israeli black woman, yet I am angry and disappointed at what is going on with Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Israel is my home and I owe my life to Israel and the Jews around the world who enabled me to be airlifted, in 1985, from the Sudan desert by the Israeli Air Force.
Shulamit Reinharz
June 1, 2015
By Shulamit Reinharz
Several years ago, I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with the Dalai Lama. At one point, he asked me, "Shula, the Jewish people were exiled from their homeland 2,000 years ago, yet they never have forgotten where they came from. My people were exiled from Tibet in 1950 and I fear most of them have already forgotten their origins. How were the Jews able to remember?"
May 21, 2015
By Rachel Putterman
For those who follow the cycle of the Jewish year, we're about to wrap up the interim period between the Israelites' redemption from slavery in Egypt that we commemorated at the Passover seder, and the paradigmatic moment of revelation at Mount Sinai that we will soon celebrate at Shavuot.
Susan Weiss
May 15, 2015
By Susan Weiss
It's time to talk about Israel’s blacklist. This state-sanctioned registry of "untouchables" — the last public accounting of it in 2004 lists 5,305 Israelis — is a motley crew who fall under three general categorizations.
April 23, 2015
What does ice cream have to do with feminism? A lot, according to Yael Mazor-Garfinkle, an HBI internship alumna and the creator of a petition to create "Ruth Bader Ginger" ice cream. The petition — which has gained attention from sources such as TIME, Fox News, Bustle and The Daily Mail — has reached over 4,000 signatures.
April 14, 2015
By Laura Morowitz
The new film, "Woman in Gold," is playing in many theaters around the country this week. The movie tells the victorious story of how Maria Altmann won back the Gustav Klimt painting stolen from her family by the Nazis.
March 31, 2015
By Rabba Ayala Miron-Shashua
At the height of the pre-Passover cleaning chaos, I remember my young son asking me, "Mother, what are you doing?" Without a pause, I answered, "I'm making seder" (Hebrew for "order")! When he didn't respond, I looked up and saw the confusion on his face: nothing around us looked in any way like what he associated with a Seder.
Shulamit Reinharz
March 23, 2015
By Shulamit Reinharz
The country of Yemen is regularly in the news as radical Islamists overwhelm the existing government. Although this has been the fate of various countries lately, Yemen provides an instructive case for those of us interested in Jewish survival.
Lisa Joffe
March 12, 2015
By Lisa Fishbayn Joffe
The day before Purim is marked by many Jews around the world as Agunah Day; a day to remember and speak out on behalf of women trapped in dead marriages unless and until their husband decides to let them go. Recently, I had the privilege of speaking to a group of women gathered at Mayyim Hayyim about the agunah problem in the 21st century.
Amy Powell
February 27, 2015
By Amy Sessler Powell
In a Boston Daily Globe story dated April 17, 1904, via the sensational headline, "Crippled Wife Scalds Brutal Husband," we learn that Mrs. Jacob Deutsch boiled a large pot of water, added fat, scalded her sleeping husband from head to toe and disappeared.
February 17, 2015
By Bethany Wolfe Barnett
Two years after Israel passed a Photoshop law designed to ensure models maintain healthy weights and to promote editorial transparency in fashion advertising, the law is gaining notice again.
Dalia Wassner
February 5, 2015
By Dalia Wassner
On Jan. 19, as the United States honored Martin Luther King and his message, Argentines awoke to a situation in stark contrast: the tragic news that Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment.
Shulamit Reinharz
January 29, 2015
By Shulamit Reinharz
Amid the tragic, anti-Semitic events in Paris and all over Europe and Israel, I also see examples of something else, for which I have coined the term, "anti-anti-Semitism." A recent example was the declaration by the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, that "if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure."
January 22, 2015
By Michelle Cove
That's a question I've been thinking about ever since the Pew Research Study "A Portrait of Jewish Americans," came out in 2013 showing that two-thirds of Jews polled said it is not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish. I remember being shocked at the statistic when I first read it, although I'm not sure why exactly.
January 6, 2015
By Nelly Las
My approach is to observe what happens when today's feminist activism and Jewish dilemmas meet and intersect against a comparative background of France and the United States. The feminist debate is thus placed in a setting which does not address women's "voices" only but also more generally historical and contemporary aspects in Jewish identity and dilemmas.