Blog Archive: 2015

2015

Amy Powell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.