When History Repeats

Seventy-one years ago today, Broadway got a little bit feistier when 27-year-old choreographer and dancer Anna Sokolow made her debut with several politically and socially charged compositions.

Crossposted on JVoices

You may have noticed a former beauty queen in the news lately, but I'm not going to write about her. Instead, I'd like to focus on Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss American, who won her title on September 8, 1945, just four months after V-E Day. Ms. Myerson's victory was seen as a symbol of America's post-war rejection of Europe's anti-Semitic horrors.

Crossposted on JVoices

A few years ago, I read Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's non-fiction account of the history of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, complete with architecture, politics, and a murder mystery.  Good stuff.  But I didn't realize that the Chicago World's Fair was also the site, 115 years ago this week, of the first Jewish Women's Congress, which was part of the Fair's World Parliament of Religions.

Crossposted on Jvoices.

Thirty-eight years ago today, thousands of women nation-wide responded to Jewish feminist Betty Friedan's call for a Women's Strike for Equality. In addition to a huge march down New York's 5^th Avenue, women around the country demonstrated in support of three main goals: free abortion on demand, free 24-hour community-controlled child care centers, and equal opportunity in jobs and education.

 Crossposted on JVoices

Crossposted on JVoices

I made the mistake of picking up The Zookeeper's Wife and reading it as though it were a novel.  Maybe I was just in that headspace because the first two books on the Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List were fiction.  The Zookeeper's Wife, however, is a genre-bending piece of prose that de

It goes without saying that Jewish women have so many accomplishments to be proud of.  A quick search through the Jewish Women's Archive's Discover pages reveals women bot

Never in my relatively short life do I remember a time where there wasn't a sense of urgency, even panic, in the American Jewish community around intermarriage and Jewish continuity. According to Sylvia Barack Fishman of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute,

Summer? Summer is the time that you eat sticky popsicles, ride your bike to the beach, and watch fireworks, right?