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Memoirs

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Collection

Angèle Guéron

Angèle Guéron was an educator in Edirne, once an important city in the late Ottoman Empire, now a border town in northwestern Turkey. The eloquent journal she kept during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) provides a rare glimpse of life in a besieged Ottoman city and the struggles of a Sephardi Jewish woman against a conservative communal patriarchy. 

Episode 111: Ladino Makes a Comeback

Segun el tiempo, se abolta la vela. That’s a Ladino saying that means, “According to the weather, shift your sail.” And it's an apt way of describing Ladino's recent comeback. Ladino—or Judeo-Spanish—the language spoken by Sephardic Jews in Turkey, Greece and North Africa, saw a major decline after the Holocaust destroyed communities of native speakers. But like a sailboat shifting course when the wind changes direction, Ladino has adapted to the times. In this episode of Can We Talk, you’ll hear how from Naomi Spector and Nesi Altaras, two Ladino enthusiasts, and from Hannah Pressman, one of the people spearheading Ladino’s resurgence.

Marra Gad cropped headshot

7 Questions For Marra Gad

Jen Richler

JWA talks to author, speaker, and writer/producer Marra Gad. 

Bettina Aptheker, April 1967

Bettina Aptheker Saved My Life

Ariadne Wolf

Seeing a Jewish woman defy efforts to silence her was life-giving.

Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle is an activist, writer, and educator known for her work on lesbian identity, sexuality, culture, and history, among other topics. Nestle also co-founded the New York-based Lesbian Herstory Archives, the largest lesbian-focused archive in the world, in 1975. Her essays and stories, which she began writing in the late 1970s, have been published in three anthologies.

Image shows book cover reading "Places we Left Behind - A Memoir-in-Miniature" with the authors name, Jennifer Lang, on an open cardboard box; right hand side shows woman with brown hair and glasses standing ourdoors

Q & A with Jennifer Lang, Author of "Places We Left Behind"

Jodie Sadowsky

JWA chats with author Jennifer Lang about her forthcoming book, Places We Left Behind: a memoir in miniature. 

Topics: Marriage, Memoirs, Israel

Helen Epstein

Born to two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, Helen Epstein has spent her life building an impressive journalistic career. She has also explored her own lived experiences, as well as the repercussions of intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust, on both her own family and the families of other survivors, in several memoirs and non-fiction books.

Jean Trounstine

Project
Women Who Dared

Judith Rosenbaum interviewed Jean Trounstine on July 21, 2000, in Lowell, Massachusetts for the Women Who Dared Oral History Project. Trounstine details her Jewish background in Cincinnati, how it shaped her political lens, and her prison reform work, including theater productions with incarcerated women.

Episode 89: Samira Mehta On The Racism of People Who Love You

Samira Mehta is the daughter of a white American mother and a South Asian immigrant father.  She’s also a Jew by choice and a scholar of American religious history and women’s and gender studies. Her new book, The Racism of People Who Love You examines the subtle, everyday racism of intimate interactions. In this episode of Can We Talk?, Judith Rosenbaum speaks with Samira about her identity, the differences between racial and cultural privilege, and the conversations about racism and belonging that inspired the book.

Galina Nizhnikov

Project
Women Who Dared

Judith Rosenbaum interviewed Galina Nizhnikov in Peabody, Massachusetts on January 12, 2003, as part of the Women Who Dared Oral History Project. Nizhnikov talks about her upbringing in Russia, her family's Jewish pride, experiences with workplace antisemitism, involvement with refuseniks, the decision to leave Russia, and the struggles they faced to secure their departure.

Susan Stamberg

Project
Washington D.C. Stories

Deborah Ross interviewed Susan Stamberg on March 28, 2011, in Washington DC, as part of the Washington D.C. Stories Oral History Project. Stamberg shares her groundbreaking experience as the first female national news anchor, highlighting her successful career in interviewing and her passion for the future of radio.

Cover of Uncultured book and co-authors of book

During Shmita, Finally Learning to Let Go

Brandi Larsen

In the year after co-writing a memoir, also the year of shmita, I learned how to let go of my failures and begin anew. 

Roz Chast

One of New York’s most distinct Jewish cultural voices, Roz Chast is most famous for her New Yorker cartoons over the past four decades. Her works range from whimsical, irreverent, and quirky to poignant and heartbreaking, and she is widely considered one of the most comically ingenious and satirically edgy visual interpreters of everyday life.

Episode 75: Eleanor Reissa's Invisible Birthmark

After a career spent telling other people's stories, Eleanor Reissa has finally uncovered her own. It started with 56 letters she found in a drawer while cleaning out her late mother's apartment. They were letters from her father to her mother, just a few years after they had both survived World War II. The letters sent Eleanor on a search to retrace her family history in Europe, which she chronicles in her new memoir, The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey. In this episode of Can We Talk?, Nahanni Rous talks with Eleanor about how her life has been defined by being the daughter of people who lived through the Holocaust.

Photo of Riva Lehrer on left and cover of her book Golem Girl on right

Interview with Riva Lehrer, Artist and Author of "Golem Girl"

Jen Richler

JWA talks to artist Riva Lehrer about her recent memoir, Golem Girl, and the way her disabled, queer, and Jewish identities intersect.

Roya Hakakian’s First Book, "Journey from the Land of No," is Published

August 1, 2004

Author and poet Roya Hakakian was born in Tehran in 1966 and fled Iran with her family in 1985, seeking asylum in the United States. Hakakian is the author of two collections of Persian poetry, an acclaimed memoir, and essays on Iranian issues.

Amy Schumer

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.

Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales is an author, artist, activist, and historian whose work as been critical to third-wave feminism, Puerto Rican and Latinx feminism, disability justice, radical Judaism, climate change activism, and grassroots. organizing.

Marissa Miller and book cover

Marissa Miller Says Being Weird Is Good

Julia Métraux

JWA talks to Marissa Miller, author of new book Pretty Weird.

Topics: Memoirs

Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman is a radical feminist writer and activist and a leader in the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s through 1980s.  She is best known as the author of “The Marriage Agreement” (1970) and the best-selling Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), which was heralded as the “first important novel of the Women’s Liberation movement.” She was honored with a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism in 2018.

Ruth Behar

Award-winning cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar has conducted groundbreaking research in Spain, Mexico, and her native Cuba. Her innovations in cultural representation have transformed ethnographic writing and reached a broad, non-academic audience through her film, poetry, personal essays, and young adult fiction.

Marjorie Agosín

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.

Myriam Moscona

Myriam Moscona is a Sephardic Mexican poet, novelist, journalist, and translator. She is the author of Tela de sevoya/ Onioncloth, an award-wining novel about the Sephardic experience, reflecting on death and Ladino, and Ansina (Like that, 2015), a book of poetry entirely written in Judeo-Spanish.

Alejandra Pizarnik

With a vast body of work that includes books of poetry, prose works, essays, and diaries, Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936-1972) stands out as one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century Latin American poetry.

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