Blog author: Leora Jackson

Leora Jackson is a graduate student in Toronto who likes reading, writing, baking, and radical embroidery (though her talent is slim). Depending on the season and the time of day, you can find her studying for school, enjoying the sunshine, sipping a hot cup of coffee, or whiling the hours away watching the latest soapy television drama.

  • Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity: Bringing it home

    Last week, I had the great privilege of attending the conference “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity: Uncovering a legacy of innovation, activism, and social change.” (JWA was

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  • Interview: Vlada Bilyak on young, Soviet identity in the US

    I spend a lot of time thinking about Jewish identity: what it means to be Jewish, what kinds of obligations I have because I identify as a Jew (if any), and what kinds of factors moderate or mediate the ways in which Jewishness and Judaism can be understood. Because of this, I really enjoyed watching Vlada Bilyak’s documentary about Jewish identity for young people from the former Soviet Union.

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  • Graphic Details exhibit opens in Toronto

    Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, has been getting some great press and publicity at JWA lately – and on the Read more >

  • UJA misses the mark with its 2011 campaign

    Two threads on my Facebook news feed have gotten me thinking about the impact of advertising in the last couple of days. The first is this video, a really beautiful trailer for a Seattle-based group that educates about gender and sexuality. The trailer features a diverse group of young people talking about what we should be teaching when we teach gender and sexuality in schools. It challenges assumptions, makes connections between issues of identity and daily life, and charges viewers with the responsibility to take action.

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  • The scary subtext of "rethinking egalitarianism"

    Last week in the Forward, Jay Michaelson writes about the need to rethink egalitarianism.  Egalitarian synagogues, he says, tend to be egalitarian in only one way: everyone is equally bored.  (“Egalitarian” in American Jewish life has historically referred to prayer services where men and women can both participate fully and take on leadership roles.)  He talks about friends who attend Orthodox prayer services because they find more meaning in the service, and about how attempts at inclusiveness and egalitarianism often translate

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  • The words of Iranian Jewish American Women

    After a long hiatus filled with applications for scholarships and preparation for standardized tests, I have recently returned to my primary duty as a graduate student: graduating – that is, fulfilling the requirements necessary to graduate. In this case, that means writing my MA thesis, which is an examination of memoirs and personal essays by Iranian Jewish women who are living in the United States. It’s an interesting project, if occasionally overwhelming, and it reminds me every day that my own experience of Jewish life is not consistent with the lives of Jews everywhere.

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  • What is the Jewish "Happily Ever After?"

    HBI eZine editor Michelle Cove’s latest book, Seeking Happily Ever After, was profiled at Feministing. I’ve seen news about the book in a couple of places, and there is a documentary film (here’s the trailer of the same name that Cove co-made).

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  • "You're doing it wrong": Finding my voice on Simchat Torah

    At twelve (or sometimes thirteen), a Jewish girl becomes a Bat Mitzvah. Bat Mitzvah means daughter of the commandments, which, for a religious girl, means taking on the obligations and traditions of the Jewish religion. The Bat Mitzvah celebration and ceremony is a relatively new invention, as compared to an equivalent ritual for boys, but it is important and beautiful nonetheless. After my Bat Mitzvah, I was eager to participate at my synagogue as much as I could.

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  • Hannah as a Precedent-Setter

    On the first day of Rosh Hashana last week, I listened to a congregant at my synagogue chant Haftorah, the additional reading from Jewish scriptures that follows the reading of the Torah on Shabbat and holidays. This particular Haftorah continues to hold great relevance and importance for Jews today, and particularly for Jewish women. It tells the story of Hannah and her desire to bear a child. In the story, we learn that Hannah and Peninah are both the wives of a man named Elkanah. Peninah goads Hannah because Hannah, like many of the Jewish matriarchs, is barren.

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  • The Spiritual and the Material: Wealth and Stereotypes on the High Holidays

    I just came home from a trip to my local suburban mall with two friends from elementary school. The mall is looking good – the walls are an upscale beige accented with stained wood, and new stores like Coach and BCBG emphasize that those who shop here must have ample money to spend. The mall is clearly marked as Jewish, too, with shoppers wearing long skirts, kippas, or less modest clothing adorned with Jewish symbols and summer camp logos.

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  • Women reading Torah: Empowerment in Photos

    Earlier this week, a post on The Sisterhood blog (with whom JWA regularly cross-posts) publicized a call from Women of the Wall for photographs of women with Torahs as part of a solidarity movement with WOW, who have been subject to harassment and arrest over the past several months in their attempts to hold egalitarian Rosh Chodesh services at Robinson’s Arch in Jerusalem.

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  • Adding Irena Klepfisz to the Canon

    In women’s studies classes, we spend a lot of time talking about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and how it moves.

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  • The Dark Side of Jewish Pluralism

    One of the benefits of being in my parents’ home is access to a whole range of print media to which I would otherwise never subscribe. On the flip side, it also means I encounter a whole range of political opinions that I would otherwise avoid like the plague.

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  • Summer camp's complex legacy

    Last week, this article about summer camp in Tablet caught my eye. I’m sure it was intended as humour, but when the article showed up in my RSS feed, promising advice on surviving the return from camp, I half-expected a full-length article for young 20-somethings who have non-camp jobs for the first time.

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  • Tu B'Av and the Question of Gendered Rituals

    Yesterday marked Tu B’Av, the 15th day of the month of Av, a minor Jewish holiday that Wikipedia tells me has become a Jewish equivalent t

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  • Thinking about women and food on Tisha B'Av

    This Tuesday marked Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. Tisha B’Av is a Jewish fast day marking the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but over the years, it has come to serve as a symbolic day of mourning for tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people over the course of history.

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