A riveting family portrait of four generations of Jewish women from Calcutta.

Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames offers a personal and social history of the author’s foremothers, Baghdadi Jews who lived most of their lives in the Jewish community in Calcutta. These rich family portraits convey a sense of the singular roles women played in sustaining the diaspora in “Jewish Asia” over the past 150 years and depict the dramatic political shifts in India reflected in their personal histories.
Silliman’s sketches bring to life a fading community and culture, the unexpected and subtle complexities of the colonial encounter as experienced by Jewish women, and the author’s attempts to escape that dynamic and forge her own identity.

Jael Silliman was educated at a Catholic school in Calcutta. A scholarship took her to Wellesley College. She continued her studies at Harvard University, University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University, where she received her doctoral degree. She was associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Iowa and is currently program officer of the human rights unit at the Ford Foundation in New York.

“Silliman’s book makes a unique contribution to the ongoing conversations on identity, diasporas, and the meaning of ‘home.’…I found it impossible to put down. A must read.”
–Rita Arditti, author of Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and The Disappeared Children of Argentina