Women We Love!

It’s been a couple of weeks since the feminist biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky passed away, and I find myself returning to her work as a way of honoring her memory.

When Jane Jacobs died earlier this year, we heard a lot about her urban activism to save neighborhoods from the destruction of a proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. (We at JWA, by the way, learned as we researched a memorial piece on Jacobs that, contrary to popular belief, she was not Jewish). Friday’s Forward has a great article about a woman named Lillian Edelstein, whose own urban activism preceded Jacobs’.

Every day, I look at the poster of labor activist Rose Schneiderman in my office, and I draw inspiration from the stories of Jewish women who shook up the American labor movement in the early 20th century. So it was with both sadness and interest that I read the obituary of labor lobbyist Evelyn Dubrow last night.

By now you all know I’ve got a lot of issues with what our world looks like these days. Near the top of my list is popular media’s degrading representation of women and girls, who are objectified and usually valued only for their appearance and sexiness (as defined by men). So all hail the REAL hot 100 – a list compiled by a bevy of kick-ass young feminists to counter Maxim Magazine’s annual “Hot 100” list and to redefine what makes women hot.

Kudos goes to Kelly Kulick, who is the first woman to qualify for the Professional Bowlers Association Tour. She's a 29-year old from Union, N.J. who works in her father's auto-body shop.

When a reporter of the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. asked Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator and executive producer of WB’s acclaimed series Gilmore Girls, whether she’d be introducing more Jewish characters into her TV show, Amy replied: “By year seven, everyone on the show will be Jewish,” she says. “Believe me, it’s going to be the Chabad telethon.”

I guess the line is funnier if you know Gilmore Girls—a show about a single mom raising her teen daughter—is set in a fictional WASPy Connecticut town.

I know, hardly words you expect to see on an archive for young Jewish women. Why should we make special mention of the fact that a Roman Catholic nun who grew up in a farm in Wisconsin died last Saturday? Because this sweet-’n’-powerful sister made it her life's mission to better relations between Catholics and Jews in some pretty awesome ways. Here are 5 of those ways, according to her NY Times obit on Monday.

• She traveled around the world while lecturing and writing in her quest to improve the “often-strained relationships between Christians and Jews.”

Caitlin Flanagan, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has been stirring things up among women for a while now. She’s been writing her controversial views on domestic life since 2001 in magazine articles (she got her writing break with The Atlantic), taking the stance that women should stay at home while raising their kids. “When a mother works, something is lost,” she wrote. She is a self-described “anti-feminist,” who claims she “was virtuously willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her children.”

In my online preparation for Passover, I came across a site called “japshopper.” How is this connected with Passover, you might ask? It’s actually the site of an artist named Melissa Shiff, and JAP stands for “Jewish art projects, products, politics.” Redefining the term, Shiff is selling her Jewish-themed, activist art creations (e.g. the Crush oppression matzo pillow and Matzo Ball Activist Kit) and donating a percentage of the profits to feed hungry people and to support progressive art projects.