Rebecca Lubetkin's 60th Bat Mitz-versary
May 16th, 2012 by
Rebecca Lubetkin and her twin brother Hank celebrate their Bar and Bat Mitzvah in 1951. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Lubetkin
Rebecca Lubetkin chanting her halftorah on the 60th anniversary of her Bat Mitzvah. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Lubetkin
“It’s funny how practices that seem way out in one generation become so commonplace in another that people wonder what took so long. With the benefit of hindsight, the change looks like a no-brainer, like the natural order of things, making it hard to imagine the struggle that was required to make it happen.”
So begin the words Rebecca Lubetkin recently spoke to her congregation, Congregation Beth El in South Orange, NJ. Just weeks after attending her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah, Lubetkin did something unusual for a grandmother: She mounted the bimah to chant the same haftorah she’d chanted a full 60 years earlier … at her own bat mitzvah in 1951. And she shared this story with the family, friends and congregants seated before her.
“My Bat Mitzvah, on a Shabbat morning in 1951, is considered a very early one,” she continued. “Yet the first recorded Bat Mitzvah in the U.S. took place back in March, 1922, when Judith, the daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, became a Bat Mitzvah. It was still rare 30 years later when I became of age; and then it took yet another 25 years after my Bat Mitzvah before it became routine. Why did we not see a groundswell of interest just waiting to get in once the doors opened?”
After listing the many “seemingly insurmountable obstacles” that stood in the way of girls becoming a Bat Mitzvah, “what happened in 1951,” Lubetkin asked, “that allowed me to become a Bat Mitzvah on a Saturday morning?”
Her answer: “while I don’t know for sure what was responsible, I have a good idea of what was not.”
“It was definitely not a reflection of the rabbi’s personal conviction. The Congregation had never had a Bat Mitzvah of any kind before mine. The rabbi never allowed another Bat Mitzvah on a Shabbat morning. He retired in the early 1990s, 40 years later, still not having accepted what had become commonplace.”
Reflecting on what might have led to her Bat Mitzvah, Rebecca recalls “the fact that [her] mother, Jessica Levin, remembered feeling profound sadness having being denied this privilege. As a 12-year-old in 1924 in a Conservative synagogue, she longed to be allowed to express publicly her spiritual connections. She saw her five brothers acknowledged for their coming of age, a milestone for which they showed mostly disinterest; while she, with the same religious education and her enormous passion, was not recognized.”
But in the end she surmises that “what it really came down to was expediency and logistics: expediency because (the rabbi) was unwilling to stand up to my parents. Logistics due to the fact that I had a twin brother, Hank. My parents were unwilling to leave me out altogether or to have two separate services, one on Friday night and one on Saturday.”
Returning to the ceremony itself, Rebecca recalls that “we each delivered a speech. Our mother wrote mine. And here is the interesting thing: while insisting on an event traditional for only males, her speech reflected traditional female aspirations for me, valuing the occasion for inspiring me to create a Jewish home. After having me give thanks for this great honor, she had me add: ‘I will also pay particular attention to my special province—what makes a home truly Jewish, in order to fulfill the concept of Aishet Hayil, a woman of worth.”
Her mother also dressed her. “She wanted me to look feminine, despite my masculine role. And also to be dressed modestly. She decided that she would have to have a dress made. So off we went to a bridal shop, where she described what she wanted for her 12-year old: a full-length satin gown in light blue with matching elbow length gloves. I needed a head covering, but a kippah was for boys. So she designed a hat in matching satin decorated with tulle. On my feet would be matching light blue satin slippers.”
The congregation gave her brother a wine cup and she was presented with a diminutive white leather-bound “Bride’s Bible. ”It was very clear what was expected of me as I entered Jewish adulthood.”
Lubetkin who today considers herself, among other things, a Jewish feminist activist, has over the decades been an active force for the changes for women at her Conservative synagogue, Congregation Beth El. These include aliyot, being counted in minyan and calling both men and women by both their father’s and mother’s names; “paving the way,” she writes, “for a woman rabbi.”
Rebecca Lubetkin’s Bat Mitzvah story is included in “Bat Mitzvah Comes of Age,” a traveling exhibit organized by Moving Traditions and the National Museum of American Jewish History. To learn more about the exhibit, visit batmitzvahcomesofage.com.
The Real Housewives of the Lower East Side
May 15th, 2012 by
One hundred and ten years ago today, something surprising happened. Jewish immigrant housewives in New York City—concerned and angry about a sharp rise in the price of kosher meat from 12 cents to 18 cents per pound—launched a kosher meat boycott that lasted nearly a month, spread to several other boroughs of New York, sparked violent riots and arrests, and attracted much media attention before ending with the successful lowering of meat prices.
Unlike most other immigrant activists of the period, these boycotters were not young workers—they were housewives with children. Their average age was 39, and most had four or more children at home. Though women had historically been involved in popular protests around issues like food prices, the kosher meat boycott of 1902 stands out as a pioneering example of women’s strategic political organizing and effective use of local networks.
In early May of 1902, small butchers had responded to the skyrocketing price of kosher meat by boycotting the wholesalers (known as the Meat Trust) in an attempt to lower prices. But when the butchers settled with the Meat Trust without achieving a price reduction, housewives of the Lower East Side decided to take matters into their own hands.
Armed with the knowledge of their own consumer power and with the organizing tactics of the labor movement, they canvassed their neighborhood and succeeded in bringing thousands of women into the streets on May 15 to declare a boycott. The protesters broke into butcher shops, confiscated meat from customers, and engaged in violent clashes with police. Approximately 70 women and 15 men were arrested.
But these women were not simply angry, spontaneous rioters—they were political actors making strategic, planned calculations. Following the riot, the committee of women leading the boycott held a mass meeting to gather support and to strategize. On May 16, they went from house to house to organize their fellow housewives and to collect funds to pay arrest fines and reimburse customers whose meat had been taken in the riot. They set up pickets in front of each butcher shop. Rioting continued that day, and more than 100 people were arrested. The boycott spread to the Bronx and to Harlem, where local women took up the organizing of their own neighborhoods.
The Sabbath brought no rest to the boycott leaders. Not only did they use communal surveillance to enforce the boycott—checking the cholent pots of their neighbors for the banned meat—but they also went from synagogue to synagogue to plead their cause. Drawing on the custom that allowed interruption of the Torah service for a matter of social justice (a tactic that, IMHO, should be revived), the women came down from the women’s section, calling for support of the boycott.
By the following day, most of the kosher butcher shops had succumbed to the boycott and closed. The boycott had also spread to Brooklyn. That night, more than 500 women met to organize and strategize further, now under the name of the Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association. The Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association organized house-to-house patrols and surveillance of butcher shops. They assigned committees to visit labor union meetings and mutual aid societies and to plan cooperative kosher meat stores.
At this point, male communal leaders decided it was time to assert their own direction over the boycott. They gathered men representing synagogues, mutual aid societies, unions, and other organizations, and formed the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat, telling women to leave the fighting to them. Undeterred, women continued their tireless neighborhood organizing.
Overall, the boycott met widespread support throughout the community. Rabbis addressed it from their pulpits; crowds came to the courthouse to support the arrested women. The boycott received near-daily coverage in the New York Times and the New York Herald (though not all of it positive) and Jewish newspapers—both the socialist Forward and the Orthodox Yiddishes Tageblat—covered the boycott sympathetically. Labor unions lent their support, too.
The strike officially ended on June 5, 1902, and retail meat prices returned to 14 cents per pound. The Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association disbanded, but the kosher meat cooperatives that had been established during the boycott continued to operate. The boycott had been a success, though its impact was not permanent—meat prices eventually began to rise again.
But the success of the boycott should not be assessed only in terms of kosher meat prices. The housewife boycotters modeled an approach to community organizing that set an important precedent, emerging to effective use again in the rent strikes of 1904 and 1907, and in the kosher meat boycotts of 1917 and 1935. They also helped broaden the conversation about labor activism to include housewives, women’s roles as consumers and domestic managers, and the power of informal neighborhood networks. The boycotters used explicitly political language in their fight: they referred to themselves as strikers, called those who broke the boycott scabs, and referred to freedom of speech when protesting police disruption of their gatherings. Despite difficult conditions, they sustained their activism and grew their organization over the course of several weeks. The important lessons the boycott taught about women’s political potential also likely shaped the political consciousness of their daughters, many of whom were working in the garment industry during the “Uprising of the 20,000” in 1909-1910.
I’ve had the pleasure of re-immersing myself in this story of the kosher meat boycott recently as I’ve been developing the newest part of the Living the Legacy social justice education project on Jews and the Labor Movement (stay tuned for its launch in the fall!). More than 100 years later, we still need to be reminded that “workers” should include those in the domestic sphere, that housewives can be political, that there are fewer things stronger than neighborhood networks, and that sometimes, it’s even ok to interrupt the Torah service.
Embarrassed and Embarrassing Mothers
May 11th, 2012 byIn a video clip posted on the new website for MAKERS: Women Who Make America, writer Judy Blume remembers about embarrassing her mother when she discussed female masturbation on Dr. Ruth’s talk show. “My mother was horrified,” Blume recalls many years later.
Perhaps because I was never a guest on national TV, I had few opportunities to embarrass my mother. In any case, it would have taken quite a lot. Like Judy Blume’s mother, mine was my “greatest fan.” Of course that did not deter her from embarrassing me on a regular basis, especially when I was a teenager.
On the eve of Mother’s Day weekend, a Hallmark bonanza long ago downgraded to a Verizon holiday in our family, I think of all the wisdom my unconventional, often embarrassing mother passed on to me and the other young people related to her by blood or friendship.
When my friends’ adoring, cuddly kids began to roll their eyes at everything their mothers said (fathers usually got a pass; mine certainly did), my wise and wacky mother gave them one piece of sterling advice: “Do not take it personally” and one profound insight: “Your mother is never more embarrassing than when you are 13.”
I count often think how lucky I am that my mother has lived long enough for me to recognize how fortunate I was that she did what she thought was right, even if it embarrassed me.
You can view more of Judy Blume’s reminiscences here. They are part of a growing collection of video interviews, developed by AOL, that will tell the story of the women's movement through the firsthand accounts of the leaders, opponents, and trailblazers who created a new America in the last half-century. This digital platform is the basis for a comprehensive and innovative three-hour documentary scheduled to air on PBS in early 2013. “The film will feature the stories of those who led the fight, those who opposed it, and the unintentional trailblazers--famous and unknown--who carried change to every corner of American society.”
My mother, the storyteller
May 11th, 2012 by
Emily Kadar with her mother, Miriam Kadar, and sister Dorothy. Image courtesy of Emily Kadar.
Judaism is rooted in our people’s ability to tell a good story. From the Talmud to Yiddish folklore to Holocaust memoirs, the Jewish tradition and culture has survived because we do not hide our history. We share it and strive to learn from it and keep it alive through the generations.
My mother was a writer. But I also like to think of my mother as a storyteller in this Jewish tradition. She was not the gregarious center of attention, a joke teller or the life of the party. But people were drawn to her in a very special way, and would tell her things that I don’t think they would ordinarily share. She observed everything, picked up on minutia. As a kid riding the train into the city with my mom, we would look at our fellow passengers and try to figure out where they were headed, creating elaborate life stories for them. At my request, she would often tell me tales from her own life, stories from the “olden times.” I loved to lie in bed next to my mother as she told me about her adventures with her brother as a kid growing up in Yonkers or her long walks in the snow to her job at a diner in an Upstate New York farm town. I learned the names of her childhood friends, ex-boyfriends, old teachers, former colleagues, as if they were characters in a favorite book.
I have piles of my mother’s old journals and notebooks from creative writing classes, filled with those memories and fiction and poetry and a lot in between. Stories about her parents, my father, my sister and me, everyone given aliases, the details tweaked, personalities blended and shifted and turned into something entirely new. My mother had the slightly morbid habit of reading the obituaries section of the local paper every day, on the look-out for interesting journeys and funny names that she could use in her writing. Occasionally I’ll come across a character name in her notebooks and recognize it as one of those obit finds.
She wrote less in the last six years of her life. Cancer and chemo zapped her energy, and she had to ration what little she had left for spending time with those she loved or just doing the nitty gritty life stuff that doesn’t stop when you’re sick. About one year after she was diagnosed, she wrote a pretty great essay about her weekly treatments at the oncology office, and a friend from temple with some connections tried to get it into The New York Times Magazine. They rejected it: not funny enough. Cancer’s hard to take without a few jokes thrown in.
I miss my mom. I often feel like I’m stumbling through my twenties, trying to figure out my career and love and life without the guidance of the person who knew me best. So I find myself thinking about her stories often. They’re guideposts to me, bits of posthumous advice. That was probably not her intention 20 years ago, racking her brain for another story to tell her endlessly curious little girl. But I am so glad that she did. Like so many before her, she shared her history with me. And I will learn from it, and try to grow from it, and hopefully share it someday, too.
My two moms: Jewesses with a different kind of attitude
May 11th, 2012 by
I am a lucky girl. I have two women who I call mom. Well, one I call mommie and the other emma (Hebrew for mother), but that’s just semantics. I have two maternal figures and role models who inspire me to be a better woman now, and to be a better mom when my time comes.
My mommie gave birth to me and physically brought me into this world. She raised me to be a kind, caring, confident, empowered woman, just as her mom raised her to be. My emma gave birth to my religious identity. She helped me to grow into the outspoken, educated, empowered Jewish woman she knew I could be. Without knowing each other, they shaped the most critical years of my life with their love and guidance.
While these two women are so very different, they share some of the most important qualities I can imagine. They are warm, nurturing, and open. They listen to those around them, and really hear what they have to say. They will do anything in their power to help a friend in need, and when the friend doesn’t know what can be done, they’ll make cookies and just be a positive presence. The doors to their homes are always open and there is always a seat at their table. Their children, and their children’s friends, love them unconditionally - and they love them right back.
If I can embody just one thing from each of my maternal inspirations, it would be their welcoming spirit. Just as our foremother Sarah is remembered for the open sides of her tent and her desire to always make everyone comfortable so to do these women embody gemilut chasadim (deeds of loving kindness) in their homes and their communities. They are Jewesses with a different kind of attitude, one that is eternally warm and hopeful.
I am honored to have them as a part of my life, my heart, and my future. Happy Mother’s Day!
"Dear Blu Greenberg": JWA blogger Talia Weisberg's award-winning letter
May 10th, 2012 byWe are proud to announce that JWA blogger Talia Weisberg, a junior at the Manhattan High School for Girls, New York, won runner-up in the 2012 Letters About Literature contest in New York state. The program has student readers write to an author, living or dead, describing how that author’s work somehow changed the reader’s view of the world or himself/herself. The competition had 14,000 entries this year. State winners comepte at the national level, sponsored by the Library of Congress’ National Center for the Book.
Weisberg wrote her letter to Blu Greenberg, the mother of Orthodox feminism and founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA). We are delighted to share Talia's award-winning letter with you on Jewesses with Attitude:
Dear Blu Greenberg,
Like you, I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, keeping Shabbos (the Sabbath) on Saturdays and only eating strictly kosher food. It was a way of life I was born into, something that always made sense to me.
Also like you, I discovered the feminist movement. It was the summer before ninth grade, when I was researching Second Wave Feminism for a paper I was writing. While I had read a lot about First Wave Feminism in middle school, my interest in it only went so far. The main goal of the early women’s movement, suffrage, had been met several generations before my birth, so I never had that strong of a connection to the First Wave. But the more I read about the Second Wave, the stronger tie I felt to women’s rights.
When I fell in love with feminism, my subconscious told me that it clashed with Orthodox Judaism. I couldn’t bring myself to leave either part of my identity behind, though. My faith in God was too ingrained into my heart to suddenly forget, and feminism rang too true to simply abandon. As a result, I compartmentalized my beliefs. In synagogue, I would drop my feminist ideals and pray with full intensity; at home and in school, I would advocate on behalf of women’s rights with no religious qualms. My two selves never met, never overlapped, and certainly never made peace with each other.
I lived that schizophrenic lifestyle until I read your book. To be honest, I don’t remember how I stumbled onto it. There’s no way that I would’ve specifically looked into Jewish feminism, since I had no idea that it existed. I guess it shows that God’s hand is in everything that I found On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition.
As I read it, all of the questions I was too afraid to ask were answered. I learned that Orthodox Judaism is not the opposite of feminism; in fact, feminism is at Judaism’s core. Your book taught me that the Torah is one of the biggest sponsors for equality, despite what it may seem on the surface, and it’s imperative that we as Jews take that message and tell it to the world. While On Women and Judaism is far from an exhaustive analysis of Judaism’s philosophy towards women’s rights, as you acknowledge, it still gave me the basic knowledge I needed in order to understand that I can be both a Jew and a feminist at the same time.
Your book not only gave me peace of mind that I could balance Judaism and feminism, but turned me into a Jewish feminist. It made me realize that women’s status in Judaism needs to progress, and inspired me to get involved in women’s advancement within the religious sphere. To broaden my knowledge of this topic, I started looking for other Jewish feminist outlets. I found dozens, both online and in print. After a while, I decided to make my own voice heard and created my own Jewish feminist blog.
Ms. Greenberg, I cannot thank you enough for enabling the transformation I have gone through. Had I never read On Women and Judaism, I don’t know if I would have ever found Jewish feminism. If I had eventually discovered it, I may have already dropped Judaism or feminism rather than have the balance I possess now. I know it’s trite and overused and a little melodramatic, but your work has truly changed my life.
In solidarity,
Talia Weisberg
To learn more about Blu Greenberg, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution or Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.
Mazel tov, Talia!
Toward an inclusive celebration of Jewish motherhood
May 9th, 2012 byWhat does it mean to be a Jewish mother? It’s Mother’s Day, and the way this secular holiday is celebrated in the Jewish media reveals a range of beliefs and attitudes towards Jewish motherhood and the role of women in the Jewish world.
On one end of the spectrum, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognize Jewish mothers as unsung heroes of the domestic sphere—as the cherished, revered, spiritual, and moral compass of their nuclear families. This is exemplified in a new commercial for Wissotsky Tea called “Tribute to the Jewish Mother,” shared with us via Twitter.
Obviously, this video by Shmuel Hoffman was intended for an Orthodox audience. It was commissioned by the Ptex Group, Wissotzky’s ad agency in Brooklyn, New York. While it recognizes the dedication and hard work of religious Jewish homemakers, which should be recognized and valued, it is limited by its reductive definition of Jewish motherhood. The whole story of Jewish motherhood is so much broader than that.
Jewish mothers are both religious and secular, traditional and non-traditional, and the diversity of their experiences should be both acknowledged and honored. This was our goal in contributing to Uriel Heilman’s “Salute to 12 Jewish moms for Mother’s Day 2012” at JTA.
For example, this list recognized Bella Abzug, mother of two who was the first woman elected to Congress and a staunch women’s rights supporter, Bessie Hillman, another mother of two and Chicago union organizer who became known as the “Mother of American Labor,” and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who did not let the label of “mother” stop her from becoming a well-known sex therapist.
We could also add to the list women like Betty Friedan, who many consider the “mother” of American feminism—a distinction she earned after her groundbreaking book, The Feminist Mystique shook up the status quo—who was a mother of three who went on to co-found the National Organization for Women (NOW) and fight for equal rights.
We could also add Blu Greenberg, who raised five children and founded the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), becoming the “mother” of Orthodox feminism. Beverly Sills is another Jewish mother worthy of recognition. Credited with bringing opera into the lives of a new generation of Americans who couldn’t distinguish an aria from a coloratura, she also faced her challenges as a mother, with a daughter who is deaf and a son with cognitive disabilities. And how could we omit Joan Rivers, the acid-tongued comedian currently starring on the mother-daughter reality show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?
This year, Mother’s Day hits us in the midst of important conversations about what it means to be a woman without children. Katie Rophie’s latest piece in Slate asked if childlessness is still taboo, sparking heated discussion about the the right to be “childfree” and the stigma women who are childless by choice—or otherwise—still face. For example, read Chanel Dubofsky’s response on the Sisterhood and Adaya Adler’s response on Role/Reboot.
This discussion challenges us to expand our definitions of motherhood to include women who do not have children. Women like Henrietta Szold, who rescued thousands of children from German and other Nazi-infested European lands, sending them under the banner of Youth Aliyah to a new life in Palestine and earning the gratitude and love of an entire generation. How about Debbie Friedman, who for the last quarter century has been the “mother” of contemporary Jewish music? JWA’s own Ellen K. Rothman does not have children but is easily the mother of our office, always sure to ask about our lives outside of work (and each winter reminding me to get my flu shot already!). As we can see, one does not need to have children of their own to be the mother of an organization, a community, a movement, or a people.
So, this Mother’s Day, let us move towards a more inclusive celebration of Jewish motherhood—honoring Jewish women with or without children for their work and dedication balancing various modes of caregiving with a broad range of commitments and achievements that take place both inside and outside the home.
Deborah Fineblum Raub, consulting communications manager at the Jewish Women's Archive, contributed to this post.
Sara Bock: A Jewish mother with attitude
May 8th, 2012 by
My mom is not famous, like her sister, Lea Nikel, who is included in JWA's online encyclopedia of Jewish women. However, she is certainly a "Jewess with Attitude." She had a very tough life, born in British-Mandate Palestine in 1929. She lost her father when she was 12 years old, leaving her, her sister, and her mom (who had TB), without a means of support. My mom took care of her mother, which allowed her sister (who was 7 years older) to study art and begin her career. After her mother died a few years later, she lived with family for a short while and then at a youth village, for orphans and disadvantaged youth. Eventually, she was introduced by relatives to my dad, Philip, who was an American Volunteer in Israel's War of Independence (1948).
After the war, they married. My older brother Yehuda was born shortly afterwards, and I was born 3 years later. When I was 10 months old, my dad moved the family back to the U.S. Times were very difficult in Israel, and he had trouble making a living as a taxi driver. Our first abode in the U.S. was a one bedroom apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Yehuda, I, and our new younger brother, Steven, shared the one bedroom. My parents slept on Castro-convertible sofas in the living room. My father worked in his father's rag business, but they didn't see eye to eye, and so he left and was unemployed for a period of time. He finally got hired as a clerk in the Post Office in Kennedy Airport. So, when I was 7 years old, we moved into a newly built housing project in Edgmere (Rockaway), Queens, NY. Things were nicer there, in many ways, because we had a 3-bedroom apartment!
My mom (and dad) sacrificed their own needs to send us to a Yeshiva, so that we could have a good education. It was very hard to live on a postal clerk's salary, and, so we lived there in near poverty, and continued to live there after the apartment complex became a slum. We could not afford to move and we feared for our lives. Eventually, we moved to nearby coop, which was a little (but not much) better. After I married, I moved to an apartment in Rockaway Park. Shortly after, my parents were able to get a beautiful 2-bedroom apartment in an adjacent building in the same apartment complex. In the years following, my mom survived five hip operations and thyroid cancer.
My mom was a women's libber, before there was such a phrase. As her only daughter, she pushed me to have a career of my own so that I would not have to depend on a man. She also pushed my brothers, her two sons, to succeed as well, telling us all that we needed to be doctors of something. We all met her expectations (becoming 2 PhDs and one medical doctor) and this is her proudest accomplishment.
After my father died (in 1996), I had tried to get her to move closer to my home in New Jersey. She refused to leave her beautiful apartment in Rockaway Park, NY, with a view of the ocean. Finally, a few months ago, she finally agreed to move to a wonderful assisted living community, a few miles from my home. This would normally be a difficult move for someone her age. However, when she finally made up her mind, she didn't look back, and just jumped into her new home, and adjusted very quickly.
On this coming Mother's Day, I would like to recognize my mom, Sara Bock, as a "Jewess with Attitude," and wish her a Happy Mother's Day!
Rereading Eishet Chayil for Mother's Day with Sinai Live's "More Precious Than Pearls"
May 8th, 2012 by
Published by Sinai Live, More Precious Than Pearls is a collection of 10 essays reflecting on Eishet Chayil (A Woman of Valor), the chapter from the Book of Proverbs traditionally sung to the woman of the house before the Friday night Shabbat meal.
Mother's Day always makes me wonder: How do we convey the love, respect and gratitude we feel for the women in our lives – and for the fortitude and accomplishments of women everywhere?
Jewish tradition offers one option in "Eishet Chayil," an ancient poem from the Book of Proverbs. Sung before the Sabbath meal on Friday nights, the song opens with a question and a declaration: “A Woman of Valor, who can find? She is more precious than pearls.” It then praises women for a range of attributes and behaviors.
Just in time for Mother’s Day, Mark Pearlman of Sinai Live is releasing More Precious Than Pearls: A Prayer for the Women of Valor in Our Lives, a collection of reflections and essays on "Eishet Chayil." The contributors are rabbis, scholars and laypeople, spanning denominations and generations.
JWA’s Executive Director Gail T. Reimer contributed a chapter to the collection titled “Rereading Eishet Chayil.” Acknowleding the prayer’s seeming emphasis on old-fashioned ideas of women’s domestic roles as wife, mother, and homemaker, Reimer shares a subversive interpretation by Lillian Wald, a public health pioneer who was neither a wife nor a mother. Wald’s interpretation encourages us to read the poem metaphorically, opening the door to recognize women as producers, patrons, athletes, advocates, experts, rebels, and entrepreneurs. “With each recitation of 'Eishet Chayil,'” Reimer writes, “we have the opportunity to see ourselves as links in a long chain of powerful women.”
The final chapter, an "Eishet Chayil" Study Guide from JWA and Hillel’s Joseph Myerhoff Center for Jewish Learning, is a post-modern Talmudic dialogue between Biblical and modern “Women of Valor” from JWA's online exhibit of the same name.
More Precious Than Pearls is free to download in a number of digital formats, and available for minimal cost in print. “Our goal is not to make a profit but to put wisdom out there in a short, engaging way.” Pearlman told the Jewish Week. Needless to say, this collection makes a great Mother’s Day gift.
Get your copy at Sinai Live, or click here to send More Precious Than Pearls as a Mother's Day gift.
Who would Cynthia Ozick’s Edelshtein envy now?
May 7th, 2012 by![Ozick, Cynthia - still image [media]](http://jwa.org/system/files/imagecache/bio_mainimage_medium/mediaobjects/Ozick-Cynthia.jpg)
"I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be—not to have a 'career,' but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer," Cynthia Ozick once said. She has certainly achieved her goal. The winner of numerous literary awards, Cynthia Ozick is a writer par excellence, author of essays, plays, short stories and novels.
Institution: The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH, www.americanjewisharchives.org and Gerard Murrell.
Reading Adam Kirsch’s excellent piece in Tablet on Isaac Bashevis Singer reminded me of my all-time favorite short story, Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” wherein the hilariously bitter Edelshtein is obsessed with Yankel Ostrover (a Singer-like figure), consumed by the fact that Ostrover has obtained mainstream adulation through having his Yiddish writing translated into English.
Having immersed myself almost exclusively in creative nonfiction for the past few years, I decided to look at the contemporary Jewish women writers whose work is part of the evolving Jewish American canon. Whose literary success would Edelshtein envy now? Specifically, which women would he would envy? And how would they differ from the women writers who were Singer’s peers, like Ozick, whose characters mourn the death of Yiddish and whose Rosa wraps her baby Magda in a shawl to hide her in the camps. Or Grace Paley, whose immigrant characters weave in and out of assimilation and whose iron-strong renderings of immigrant speech often made the language itself a character.
I took a walk over to the library and picked up Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, edited by Paul Zakrzewski, published in 2003.
For the young women writers featured in Lost Tribe, immigration is over, but the sense of being on the outside is very much present. I was struck by how heavily child narrators were represented—actual children, or young adults who are still very much dancing the dance of separation from their parents.
Reading Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, I found what I think is one of my favorite metaphors that I’ve encountered in the past few years-- a boy’s blue shirt is “the color of deodorized toilet water.” Goldberg’s Eliza is a girl on the margins, whose spelling bee success allows her to think of herself as the kind of the girl who’s invited to play Red Rover, the kind of girl for whom a place in the lunch queue is saved, so that she doesn’t have to worry about the chocolate cake running out by the time she gets to the head of the line. One of her father’s congregants encourages Eliza for the upcoming spelling-bee by informing her that this is her opportunity to show the same courage that’s kept the Jews alive through centuries of persecution and exile. A spelling bee is not only a spelling bee, but a way to avenge the wrongs of the millennia of ignominies against the Jews. Much like the immigrants of earlier Jewish fiction, she dreams of being one of the in-group.
In Tova Mirvis’ “A Poland, A Lithuania, A Galicia,” Bryan, now after a semester in Jerusalem, Baruch, whose parents envisioned for him a moderate future of Modern Orthodoxy, maybe kosher and shomer Shabbos, but still Ivy League, desires to reverse what he sees as a dilution of a life lived with God, dons a black hat, and shuns the knit kippahs crafted for him as part of a Modern Orthodox courtship ritual. Bryan/Baruch wants to reverse immigration. Rather than craving assimilation, he seeks to reverse it.
In Suzan Sherman’s “Knitting One’s,” Dotsy, is in her early thirties, but very much a child, whose mother’s voice constantly swirls in her head, who gets her period and bleeds on the chair of a rabbi whom she attempts to interview for a free-lance piece, finds herself taking a knitting class in an elementary school classroom. Dotsy is also an odd girl out. Dotsy, like Edelshtein, envies—the objects of her jealousy are two blond young women, whom she has dubbed “the Marthas” for the Martha Stewart-like way they take to the knitting, the mammoth diamonds presented them by their Jewish fiancés sending off beams of light as they flash their needles. Pleasure radiates from Dotsy when the father-like rabbi whom she attempted to interview publicly shames the Marthas in the knitting class as “shiksas, stealers of Jewish men.”
Edelshtein, meet Goldberg, Sherman, Mirvis. Also Rachel Kadish, Aimee Bender, Judy Budnitz. I think you will like them. They need no translators. Just try not to be too jealous.
Margie Newman is a writer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Margie was recently interviewed by Speakers' Lab in honor of its upcoming event, "Now What? The Future of New Jewish Culture," a moderated town hall-style event on Tuesday, May 15 in downtown NYC. "Now What?" brings together ten experts from across the country to discuss the last ten years of flourishing Jewish creativity in America and its precarious position today. The event is free and open to the public. To register and for more information, including pre-event panelists' statements and interviews with six emerging Jewish artists, including Margie Newman, please visit: www.speakerslab.org. This event is presented by the Posen Foundation U.S. through its new public programming initiative, Speakers’ Lab, and The Jewish Daily Forward, and is hosted by the 14th Street Y.
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