In the degradation of Passover tradition that happens when parents get older and children move away; at times when there is no one young enough to sing the Four Questions without embarrassment; when the eating of the Hillel Sandwich is skipped because everyone at the table gets acid reflux; when the traditional four cups of sock-rotting Manischewitz dwindles to a single glass of Hagafen Chardonnay that is raised four times and demurely sipped by the host alone, one Passover tradition lives on: Matzoh balls, or knaidlach. Or, as my neighbor calls them, “those cool things you Jewish people put in soup on Passover.”
Artists began to try to create a new Hebrew dance in the 1920s. Israeli Expressionist Dance flourished first, followed by American modern dance. Israeli dance became professionalized and centralized, and over the past few decades, efforts to promote local creativity accelerated, ethnic dance companies have flourished, and choreographers have taken increasingly political stances.
Rina Schenfeld is an Israeli dancer and choreographer who uses objects of daily life to build a world of poetry and dance. She was a principal dancer in Batsheva Dance Company in the 1960s and 1970s and later established the Rina Schenfeld Dance Theater.
Joyce Kozloff is an internationally recognized painter, public muralist, and feminist whose long-term passions have been history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. One of the founders of the pattern and decoration movement, Kozloff is dedicated to creating her own work and giving the folk art of women of color a voice. Kozloff is known as one of America’s more original and engaging artists.
As a widowed immigrant and young mother, Hayuta Busel fought to expand options for women in Palestine throughout her work on kibbutzim and in the women’s labor movement. Busel believed profoundly in the liberation of Jews, especially women, in the Hebrew language, and in the creation of a new model of family which would facilitate women’s liberation.
Suzanne Brøgger is a Danish journalist, cultural critic, author, and essayist. With more than twenty books to her name, Brøgger has received widespread acclaim for her novels, essays, anthologies, poems, and plays.
Tamar Sella is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Music at Harvard University, from where she also earned a PhD in ethnomusicology in 2020. Her research focuses on ancestral memory in contemporary Mizrahi performance in Palestine/Israel, probing questions of race and colonialism in the region, interrogating persisting resonances of occluded social histories in the present day, and exploring articulations of alternative futures. Tamar has also written on jazz and creative improvised music in the United States and is a founding member of We Have Voice, a collective of performers and scholars working toward equity and safe(r) spaces in the performing arts.
Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France Emerita and Professor of Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University. Her books include The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France (2016), Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996). Among collective volumes she has edited are Exile and Creativity (1998) and French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (with Christie McDonald, 2010).
Hard-boiled egg—check. Greens—check. Charoset, maror, shank bone—check. These are the traditional seder plate items that represent the themes of Passover. Many people have also adopted the feminist tradition of including an orange... but what does it symbolize, and how come so many people have the story wrong? In this episode of Can We Talk?, host Nahanni Rous talks with Susannah Heschel, who created the ritual in the 1980s, about the real meaning behind the orange. She also talks with her aunt and cousin, who introduced the orange to the Rous family seder.
Joan Rivers and Treva Silverman were friends and partners in comedy for decades. In this delightful conversation from JWA’s archive, Joan and Treva talk about what it was like to be women in comedy in the 1960s and 1970s, how they got their start driving to gigs in the Catskills in Joan’s beat up old car, and the origins of some of their favorite jokes.
One of the major Jewish sources dealing with contraception is Tosefta Niddah. As with the issue of abortion, the more public the debate about contraception became over time, the more some rabbinic authorities attempted to usurp women’s control over their bodies.
Jewish women activists were among the first in the United States to highlight the need for reproductive health care. Women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds found common political cause promoting access, advocacy, and education in the American birth control movement, achieving successes and confronting challenges throughout the twentieth century.
Renée Levine Melammed is a professor of Jewish History at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem whose fields of research include the lives of conversos and Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish women. Her current project deals with women’s lives as reflected in the Cairo Genizah, in particular, through letters. She has published numerous articles in four languages, as well as the books Heretics or Daughters of Israel: The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (Oxford, 1999); A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2004); and An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty (Indiana University Press, 2013). She is also the academic editor of Nashim.
Consider Rachel and Leah’s intertwined story and complicated relationship as sisters, and reflect on both the positive and challenging aspects of sisterhood.
The Mexican Ashkenazi poet Gloria Gervitz (1943–2022) is known for her award-winning, book-length poem Migrations (Migraciones). This poem, an epic journey through the individual and collective memories of Ashkenazi women emigrants to Mexico, which she began writing in 1976, took her 44 years to complete. In 2018, Gervitz won the prestigious Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award for Migraciones.
Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community (AWP) was founded by Shifra Bronznick in 2001 as an intervention “to advance Jewish women into leadership, stimulate new models of shared leadership, and promote policies for healthy, effective workplaces.” Over fifteen years, AWP conducted groundbreaking research and adapted strategies from other sectors that engaged women and men in decisive, systems-based change.
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