It all started at a preschool Hanukkah party a few years ago. That's when an offhand remark led Rabbi Minna Bromberg to start Fat Torah, a project to end fat stigma in Jewish communal life. In this episode of Can We Talk?, Judith Rosenbaum speaks with Minna in her home in Jerusalem about how fatphobia plays out in Israel versus the US, the ways it intersects with gender, and how Jewish tradition can teach us to be more body positive.
Maayan Zik is a community organizer, activist, and proud Black Jewish woman within the Brooklyn Crown Heights community. After the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, she founded several initiatives, including the “Tahalucha for Social Justice,” in order to mobilize her community to advocate for positive change. Since beginning her activism, she has been nationally recognized by prominent organizations such as TheJewish Week’s “36 under 36” for her important social action and community impact.
Do you have an abortion story that you’d like to share? JWA, in partnership with the National Council of Jewish Women, is collecting the following kinds of stories: a story about your own experience of having an abortion, a story of helping someone else secure an abortion, a story of advocating for abortion rights. (JWA reserves the right to share your submission and contact information with NCJW and with scholars for research purposes.)
On September 15, 2019, the first day of Latinx Heritage Month, Dr. Analucía Lopezrevoredo founded Jewtina y Co., an organization for Latinx Jews. Lopezrevoredo is a Peruvian-Chilean-Quechua-American Jewtina who is passionate about preserving Latin Jewish heritage and culture and claiming her identity as both Jewish and Latina. She founded Jewtina y Co. to provide a space for other Latinx Jews to do the same.
Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, known as Tania the Guerillera, was a German-Jewish guerrilla fighter in the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, led by Che Guevara. As the only woman guerilla fighter, much rumor and mystery surrounds her life and role in the Marxist revolutionary movement in South America.
I think about Molly Picon, and how she utilized her love of storytelling to bring laughter to those who needed it, to foster pride and compassion in the Jewish community, and to fight to keep Yiddish theater alive.
Menstrual justice is the latest front in the global fight for gender equality. Author Anita Diamant's new book, Period. End of Sentence, explores the stigma around menstruation and efforts around the world to ensure that menstruating people are not denied access to education, work, and full participation in society. Anita, whose 1997 best seller The Red Tent imagined a special retreat where the Biblical matriarchs went when they were having their periods, says in the modern day, menstrual justice has become "part of the justice language."
Amy Schumer is one of America’s most loved and successful comedians. Her career is built on a true riches-to-rags-to-riches story and is firmly centered on growing up in an unconventional Jewish upbringing.
Marjorie Agosín is an award-winning Chilean Jewish poet, memoirist, novelist, literary critic, editor, educator, and human rights activist. Her work, which she writes in Spanish, is widely translated into English and other languages. She is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Wellesley College.
Judy Heumann is a lifelong disability rights activist—from fighting for her own right to live in a college dorm, to lobbying for the Americans with Disabilities Act, to leading major initiatives at the World Bank and State Department. Judy is committed to removing the barriers that prevent disabled people from fully participating in society, a topic she explores in-depth in her memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist. She tells her story for Can We Talk? and for JWA's revised and updated edition of the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.
"We don’t want to exist, we want to thrive and create a better world." In this episode of Can We Talk?, three young Jewish women reflect on how they became active in fighting climate change, how their identities influence their activism, and what inspires them to keep going. Isha Clarke is an activist with Youth vs. Coal and Youth vs. Apocalypse; Noa Gordon-Guterman is an Avodah Service-Corps member working with Interfaith Power and Light; and Tali Deaner is the campaigns director at Jewish Youth Climate Movement.
Noa and her sisters pushed for something which, at the time, wasn’t recognized as an inherent right. Today, we need to do the same with broadband internet access.
Sarah Rodrigues Brandon (1798-1828) was born poor, enslaved, and Christian on the island of Barbados. By the time of her death thirty years later she was one of the wealthiest Jews in New York and her family were leaders in Congregation Shearith Israel. This entry explains Sarah’s life journey and highlights how her story relates to that of other women of mixed African and Jewish ancestry in early America.
JWA's politics writer talks to Jewish activists from Never Again Action about keeping the pressure on the incoming presidential administration when it comes to immigration justice.
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