jewish women

Make Me A Woman

brittany — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

It’s no stretch to say that mainstream media gives us a limited range of what women can be, so much so that when we find a book that actually reflects the complexity of womanhood, we’re ecstatic. Make Me A Woman is just that book. Readers will be able to readily relate to Vanessa Davis and the daily events of her life, while also encountering just enough difference to sink into some pure escapism.

Make Me A Woman is a collection of Davis’s diary comics and drawings from 2004 to 2010. In watercolor, pen and ink, and pencil drawings torn from the pages of her sketchbook, Davis unveils the events of her childhood in South Florida, her life in New York in her early twenties, and finally her move to California, where she currently lives with her boyfriend. Davis tackles those seemingly indescribable everyday events—such as developing a crush on a stranger in her daily commute and dealing with awkward sexual encounters or unrequited love—with biting wit and aplomb.

Aspiring artists out there will find this collection inspirational. Davis details her series of low-paying jobs with an eye trained firmly on her career—a paid cartoonist. She also pens a few panels about facing the artist’s worst demon: procrastination. In addition to creating strips about her Jewish identity and hanging out with friends, this autobiographical cartoonist creates some of her funniest panels about her relationship with her mother and sister. Although Davis’s mother is the űber cool founder of the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, she makes her daughters cringe by her mere choice of words, as mothers are wont to do.

I found Davis’s collection of strips enjoyable. I loved the tiny details she adds to her comics, and the hilarious asides that she slips in. But what I love the most is the range of feelings that the cartoonist expresses in her art, such as anger, annoyance, disappointment, anxiety, physical pain, pining, self-pity, embarrassment, and bliss. What’s more, it’s refreshing to see a cartoonist who is not afraid to draw herself with some weight on her and does not obsess about her size in the book, except for the fat farm she went to in her teens, which she “enjoyed.”

I’ve read through the collection three times, and each time that I get to the end, I want more. Although her critique of artist Robert Crumb alone was worth the price of the book, I still wish that Davis had delved more into her life as a cartoonist.

Written by: Heather Leighton, November 21st 2010

Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Miryam Kabakov

North Atlantic Books

Approximately 900 years ago, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote a book, called the Mishneh Torah, that acknowledged the presence of women “who rub against each other.” His advice to the tract’s male readers was clear: Keep your wives away from them. Sadly, it is one of the only Hebraic texts in which the existence of lesbians is acknowledged.

Kabakov’s collection of fourteen personal and scholarly essays not only acknowledges Jewish dykes, it argues that as long as Orthodox Judaism exists, there will be Orthodox LGBTQ people. The anthology includes the voices of diverse women, all of them bound by a desire to maintain a connection to traditional Jewish life—reciting daily prayers, keeping kosher, going to a monthly mikveh after menstruating,observing the Sabbath—but with a female partner. Some wonder—obsess,even—about whether this will doom them to an afterlife in hell, or whether living authentically trumps all else. Others question whether lesbianism is completely prohibited, or just discouraged by Jewish law. How about passing as a man, or having a sex change?

Mara H. Benjamin’s “Learning to Be a Lesbian” describes the process of choosing a same-sex partner. “I fantasized about women: Not just about having sex with them, but about the whole package, of what living as a lesbian seemed to offer: Companionship. Understanding. Good food cooked by someone other than me. A presumption that household chores were a shared responsibility. All told, life with a woman seemed a better arrangement than living with a man, even with the one obvious downside, homophobia.”

Benjamin joined a group, called Orthodykes, which helped her to not only come out, but to interpret traditional texts in ways that affirmed her queer, feminist persona. The camaraderie she found also enabled her to push back against heterosexist assumptions.

Sasha T. Goldberg’s “The Road to Yehupetz” chronicles her move from the US to Israel where she lived as a male. A self-described “bulldagger,” she writes that what initially started as “passing,” over time “turned into being... Being a man in Israel was one of the most comforting experiences in my life... I say my prayers, I like to eat, I love and respect women as I love and respect my mother, and I am faithful, hard-working, and neurotic. I was the nice Jewish boy that they wanted me to be.” While Goldberg eventually returned to California and resumed living as a butch female, she owns the power of adopting a false identity. It’s an exhilarating read.

But what of those who don’t want to pass, but instead desire a more radical identity change? Joy Ladin’s “In The Image” is a heartfelt overview of her transition from male to female—all while teaching at Stern College for Women, an Orthodox institution in New York City. Her pre-surgical certainty that she was doing the right thing left her both breathless and terrified. “When, in a few months, I achieve the sin qua non of transsexual transition—living full-time in my new gender role—I will simultaneously complete the mid-life crisis trifecta of losing my career, my home, and my family,” she writes. An Afterword reveals that her worries were at least partially for naught:Stern College did not fire Ladin after she transitioned, but used her example to open dialogue about transgender issues inside and outside the Orthodox world.

Keep Your Wives Away from Them is a bold plea for tolerance. What’s more, the depth of faith that keeps Orthodox lesbians within the fold affirms the need for LGBTQ visibility in both religious communities and their secular counterparts.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, July 1st 2010

Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn

New York University Press

Why is it that so many scholars—people well-versed in captivating ideas and history—are dry writers? Being a feminist with Jewish roots, I was really excited to review Women and Judaism. Divided into four sub-categories: classical tradition, history, contemporary life, and literature—the volume did present some very interesting thoughts on women's role within the Jewish religion. Unfortunately, like many textbooks I remember from college, Women and Judaism was written in a scholarly, rather than engaging, format. While there were a few authors who were exceptions, this dry style dampened my enthusiasm for what could have been a fascinating read.

That said, if you can wade through the style, the meat of the book is definitely worth checking out. For starters, there is some interesting discussion about the relationship between Judaism and feminism—the authors don't believe them to be mutually exclusive. Rather than justify the sexism written into historical Judaic documents, several of the authors make the point that it is the sexism of the time that led to the inequity in religious texts—and they think that modern Judaism can, and should, move past it. This is probably the book's key theme: the authors challenge the idea that Judaism is a fundamentally sexist religion, arguing that changing times call for changing practices.

Some of the bare historical facts (the first female rabbi was not ordained until 1972!) were shocking in terms of how late women were accepted into leadership roles, and how long it took for them to be included in traditionally male roles and ceremonies. The essays of Pamela S. Nadell (“Women and American Judaism”) and Sylvia Barack Fishman (“Women's Transformation of Contemporary Jewish Life”) are both eye-opening and highlight the importance of Jewish feminists in the second wave of the women's movement in the United States.

As a writer, the section on literature was of particular interest to me. “Text, Nation and Gender in Israeli Women's Fiction,” by Nehama Aschkenasy, is a very interesting piece; she analyzes the still-evolving feminist literary response to the historically male-dominated Israeli culture. But as Sara R. Horowitz notes in “Women in Jewish American Literature,” sexism has curtailed the celebration and acknowledgment of Jewish women writers in the United States until the last quarter century, which she describes as a “sea change.”

If you can plod through some of the narratives, the ideas contained in this volume make it worth reading each of the essays.

Written by: M.L. Madison, February 3rd 2010

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Ayala Fader

Princeton University Press

A “mitzvah” is colloquially translated as “a good deed,” but this Hebrew word actually means “commandment,” and observant Jews believe in 613 “mitzvot.” The commandments structure daily life and religious rituals, such as prayer, dietary habits, and romantic and sexual relationships. When a young woman becomes a Bat Mitzvah she is responsible for practicing and adhering to commandments outlined in the Torah.

Mitzvah Girls is Ayala Fader’s ethnographic study of young Hasidic girls becoming adults in a deeply structured religious community in Brooklyn, New York. There’s been almost no scholarship on this particular demographic, although as an anthropologist Fader understands that women are often responsible for bearing and reproducing culture. By studying children and young adults becoming women, Fader in effect presses the pause button and allows the reader to observe the moment girls become Jewish women.

Fader’s rich ethnographic research takes her into the homes, synagogues, and schools of Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. She is especially interested in the history, structure, and use of Yiddish, and in how linguistics shape and reflect everyday Jewish life. Fader explores words themselves to illustrate how meaning shifts in relationship to religion and gender.

Hasidic Jews are stereotypically right wing, one of the guaranteed Republican voting blocs in New York City, and gender roles are rigidly defined in Hasidic communities. Women are expected to raise large families, keep kosher households, and visit the Mivkah—or ritual bath—after menstruation. Looking into the Hasidic world from the outside, I confess that it’s quite easy to judge, to assume that these women are victims. Mitzvah Girls challenges that assumption, and Fader’s in-depth study foregrounds Hasidic women’s agency. She demonstrates how young women and girls negotiate the secular world, its modern temptations, and even feminism. Mitzvah Girls is an extraordinarily fascinating read.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, December 31st 2009

The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Edited by Danya Ruttenberg

New York University Press

This new collection of essays, solicited from among the world’s most brilliant scholars of rabbinic literature, interpreters of the Torah, and professors of gender studies, is the first book I would recommend for those preparing to teach advanced courses in Jewish Studies. The essays range in tone from playfulness to fairly turgid exegesis, but the pieces are—without exception—bold, honest, and unabashed. They starkly confront the challenge of reconciling sexuality and spirituality from the perspective of those who study, worship, and identify with the Torah and the Talmudic tradition of critical analysis, while also maintaining active feminist belief and commitments to social justice that often seem to conflict with Jewish law, at least as it has been traditionally construed.

Each of the essays deserves more than the cursory notice possible here and would serve as ideal prompts for further (and badly needed) engagement on the nexus between religious law and the realities of living. A representative piece is Haviva Ner-David’s poignant essay “Reclaiming Nidah and Mikveh Through Ideological and Practical Reinterpretation.” The author confronts the subject of menstruation and its “impurity” as it arises first in Leviticus 15:19-33. The priestly and later rabbinical interpretation of this significant part of each month as a time of impurity for women, when they were denied access to worship in the temple, “reinforced the patriarchal power structure that gives these men their power.”

But rather than rejecting the law and rabbinic tradition, the author reinvents it. When she is in nidah (having her period), she finds herself naturally more “closed and self-absorbed,” so that the ritual immersion becomes a powerful transition to a state of greater openness. Further, she and her husband have negotiated the “distancing laws,” whereby intercourse during a woman’s period and the seven “white days” afterwards is prohibited, so that they make sense practically and spiritually in terms of their own relationship. Most profoundly, I thought, she has invited her husband to join her in the mikveh immersion, so that the ritual is a reinvigorating element in their relationship.

One of the shortest pieces in the book is similarly moving and frank, Rebecca T. Alpert’s “Reconsidering Solitary Sex from a Jewish Perspective.” She references Talmudic argument about whether the “punishment, to cut off a man’s hand, is a law or merely a curse.” For better or worse, the possibility that women masturbate seems not to have occurred to the Rabbis, and the author concludes simply and joyfully, “Self care is an important Jewish value.”

Equally provocative is Naomi Seidman’s semi-autobiographical essay “The Erotics of Sexual Segregation,” illustrating the point that the breakdown in traditional cultural segregation between men and women has “entailed a certain erotic loss.” The editor’s own essay “Toward a New Tzniut” is related in advocating a connection between subjectivity and eroticism, the self-love that grows out of claiming one’s own sexuality through a connection with the divine.

The book takes on the “queering of Jewish theology,” what the Torah and its interpreters say about having “good sex,” prostitution, divorce, and intermarriage. Wendy Love Anderson dares to explore “the Goy of Sex”—groan!—a brief history of Jewish-Gentile “boundary-crossing” sex. Sarra Kev interprets the Mishnah Sotah as rabbinical pornography: the Sotah is a woman accused of adultery and forced to endure humiliation and a sort of public rape before the gaze of the powerful men punishing her—and the literary gaze of the male students re-imagining this ghastly scene as part of their religious training.

This is a brilliant book, as well as an entertaining and moving one, with implications that extend well beyond the immediate project of Jewish-feminist exegesis.

Written by: Rick Taylor, August 21st 2009

The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh

admin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:46:00 +0000

By Varda Polak-Sahm

Beacon Press

I felt very divided when reading The House of Secrets. On one end of my ever-teetering religious spectrum, I find joy in the empowerment a woman gains while embracing her belief system. On the other end, even though I am a non-Jewish woman, I found the commonalities in my childhood religion and the mikveh to be somewhat disheartening. There is much beauty in the reasons for immersion in the mikveh, such as, the closeness a woman feels to her god, her husband, and the continued spiritual transformation she receives from it. However, what was difficult to digest was the mindset of some of the women in the praxis and the praxis itself. Even still, none of my opinions discount the informative and fascinating job Varda Polak-Sahm does in detailing a world many of us have no clue exists.

A mikveh is an obligatory cleansing from head to foot that is firmly entrenched in Jewish law, from the knowledge needed to enter the mikveh to the items used to cleanse the menstrual impurities that preclude entrance. The women who perform the immersion have the power to turn away those they feel have not obeyed the rules associated with cleanliness and those who are non-Jewish. It is believed that the flesh of a non-Jew will contaminate that of a Jewish bride who must immerse in the mikveh on the eve of her wedding.

Polak-Sahm tells of the relationship between the Jewish woman and the mikveh through her own personal experience and the experiences of the Balaniyot (the woman performing the immersion), as well as the many women who habit the mikveh. For Jewish women who choose to make the mikveh a part of their lives, it provides a spiritual connection that goes beyond religious doctrine.

There are many aspects concerning the mikveh that both trouble and fascinate me. The same menstrual blood that is considered a manifestation of and justification for Eve’s mental promiscuity and corruption of Adam is the same blood that is considered to be a blessing of sorts. This blessing is what allows the Jewish woman to propagate the Jewish population, thus fulfilling her obligation to God, and distinguishes true femininity from the stigma of barrenness. The rules of the mikveh fall under Jewish law—law that was and is set by men.

Of course, it is easy for me to be opinionated about a religion I was neither born into nor chose to adopt. I realize how easy it also is for me to rain down spiritual condescension with claims of backward, patriarchal, and misogynistic belief systems placed on women who choose to remain complacently ignorant. What stands out, however, is the conviction with which these traditions are upheld and Polak-Sahm’s ability to capture the innocence and dedication that these women give in upholding this aspect of Jewish tradition. No matter what we may think of this aspect of Judaism and those who implement it, Polak-Sahm seems to invoke the question of how firmly we are convicted to our own spiritual advancement. Perhaps the balancing act we undergo on a daily basis, to solidify our own connection to the Creator, should leave us with less time to judge those who remain solidly grounded in theirs.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, August 14th 2009