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Ritual

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Collection

Tamara Cohen

I floated between moments of exaltation at what we were creating and moments of exasperation and tears at the difficulty of it all.

Kim Chernin

[T]he idea of re–writing the Haggadah seemed startling and even blasphemous. Now, 30 years later, this re–writing has itself become part of an emerging Passover tradition.

E.M. Broner

This is a narrative of a community that is not in isolation but reflects the polis of the time.

Esther Broner Seder with Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Martha Ackelsberg

Esther Broner: A Weave of Women

Jordyn Rozensky

Esther Broner, or E.M. as she was known, was a Jewish feminist, prolific author, professor, and pioneer of the feminist  movement. Known for re-imagining traditional Jewish customs and rituals, she co-wrote The Women’s Haggadah, which encouraged women to devise their own version of traditional rituals.

Norwegian Circumcision Cartoon

Dagbladet, Dawkins, Intactivists & How Demonizing Choice Makes Militancy

Preeva Tramiel

This intimidating cartoon really got to me, a moderate believer who made what I thought was a minor sacrifice to tribal loyalty—twice—over 20 years ago when I chose the traditional ceremony for my newborn sons. Of course I did not like causing my babies pain, but I had seen the ceremony several times and knew that it did not last long at all, and having just gone through childbirth, I knew pain was part of life.

Topics: Ritual
Women of the Wall Prayer Service in Gan Miriam, Jerusalem

A Woman's Place is at Prayer

Leah Bieler

Nearly 20 years ago I was living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a haven for observant Conservative Jews. I had my choice of multiple minyanim to attend; even the crowded weekend city streets had an air of the Sabbath, and kosher food abounded.

There were so many Conservative and egalitarian options that I rarely ventured into the neighborhood’s Orthodox community, and I certainly never attended an Orthodox synagogue.

Sheena Levi's Bat Mitzvah, 1997

The Power of the Bat Mitzvah

Sheena Levi

When I was brought on board at the Lev LaLev Fund in May 2011, I was asked if I could run the bat mitzvah project program. I thought, sure, how hard could it be? I was once a bat mitzvah girl too after all. Yet, a year later, as I was writing about the 15th anniversary of my own bat mitzvah in my e-newsletter to the bat mitzvah girls, I finally realized just how much had changed in that short amount of time.

Topics: Ritual
"Judith" by Giorgione, circa 1504

Accessing our Jewess Tools: Judaism’s Ancient Feminist Spiritual Tactics

Wendy Kenin

How does the American Jewish woman navigate our male-dominated society in the twenty-first century? Jewish women have thousands of years of history to draw from to help make sense of and find our place. According to our ancestral Jewish tradition, women’s empowerment is central to bringing redemption for all humanity -- so let’s get to it!

Tefillin Barbie

A Woman Taught Me to Lay Tefillin

George Kelley

The event was called a “Jewish BLT: Bagel, Lox and Tefillin.” I stood there holding the newly purchased and never used tefillin in my hand as I unfolded the instructions ready to tackle this ancien

Topics: Feminism, Rabbis, Ritual
Cracked Egg Surrounded by Greenery

Strength in Fragility

Susan Reimer-Torn

With the summer’s end, my hands will no longer be gritty from tucking tangled roots into the soil, from weeding out invaders and doling out compost.

Image of Exit by G. Orcha

Leaving In Order To Return

Gabrielle Orcha

Though still in the month of Elul, we are approaching Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We are leaving 5772 behind and will soon enter 5773.

Rebecca Lubetkin Celebrating her 60th Bat Mitzvah Anniversary

Rebecca Lubetkin's 60th Bat Mitz-versary

Deborah Fineblum Raub

“It’s funny how practices that seem way out in one generation become so commonplace in another that people wonder what took so long.

Outer Space

My "out of this world" bat mitzvah

Gaby Dunn

My bat mitzvah party theme was outer space. Each of the tables were named after the nine planets in the solar system at the time: Mercury, Venus, Mars.

Susan Landau

Learning and teaching bat mitzvah: It goes both ways

Susan Landau

“But there’s so much to learn!” This is the traditional lament of every bat mitzvah girl I have tutored, and I’m sure it escaped my lips a few times when I was preparing for my own bat mitzvah as well. Between the prayers, the Torah portion, the Haftarah, the d’var Torah, and everything else a bat mitzvah entails, there is no doubt that in becoming a bat mitzvah there is quite a lot to learn. But I would like to offer an alternative framework: the bat mitzvah girl not as a learner, but as a teacher.

"Today I am a Woman," Eds Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz, 2011

Book Review: Today I Am a Woman

Etta King Heisler

Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World, (Eds Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz, Indiana University Press, 2011) is at once intellectual and imaginative.

Roller Skates

My super-uncool, roller-skating bat mitzvah

Jessica Leader

I remember the crackling sound of late nineties alt-rock and the stench of roller-rink pizza like it was just yesterday.

Alexandra Kukoff

A Jewish girl’s guide to a bat mitzvah project

Alexandra Kukoff

I felt overwhelmed when deciding what to do for a bat mitzvah project.

"My Bat Mitzvah Story" Logo

Bat Mitzvah: A Balancing Act

Etta King Heisler

A few months back, I dragged my 12-year-old, Harry-Potter-enthusiast sister to go with me to see the new Disney princess movie Tangled (which retells the Rapunzel story). In one part of the film, Rapunzel has just escaped from the tower against her mother's wishes and is encountering the World, and her independence, for the first time. (Watch the clip here.) While her companion patiently waits for her to come to terms with her new-found freedom, Rapunzel goes from one extreme to the other, from excitement to shame and worry.

Esther M. Broner, 1927 - 2011

I know how many thousands of lives Esther has touched and how many Jewish women walk taller for having followed in her groundbreaking footsteps.

Rabbi Kleinbaum at Gay Marriage Demontration

Reinventing Rituals: June, a month of Pride and same-sex marriages

Elyssa Cohen

June is full of irony: not only is June Pride month, but it is also the unofficial start to wedding season. So many are still fighting for equal marriage. As I write this, lawmakers in Albany are struggling to garner enough votes to make same-sex marriage legal in New York state (see resources to get involved at the end of this post).

We remember Esther M. Broner

Leah Berkenwald

We were saddened to wake up to the news that Esther M. Broner passed away yesterday. A beloved novelist, playwright, ritualist, and feminist writer, Esther M. Broner was born on July 8, 1927, in Detroit, Michigan. Her writing, including Her Mothers (1975), A Weave of Women (1978) and many others, made her one of the most important teachers of Jewish feminism and feminist Judaism.

Charoset Medley

Eating Jewish: Charoset medley

Katherine Romanow

Although most, if not all, Jewish holiday meals use certain foods and dishes to symbolize various elements of the celebration, the seder meal does so in a way that is integral to the ritual of the meal itself. From the maror to the zeroah, each has its place in the structure of the seder. Of all these symbolic foods, charoset is definitely my favorite and I have to agree with Gil Marks when he says in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food that it “is unquestionably the most flavorful and arguably everyone’s favorite of the seder foods.”

JWA's Women's Voices Passover Poll

Why, on this night, do we include women's voices?

Leah Berkenwald

In collaboration with JewishBoston.com, JWA are putting the finishing touches on a new Haggadah that highlights women's voices. (Keep an eye out for it next week.) As we've been thinking about seders and traditions and the different ways we could include women's voices in the Haggadah we're creating, I wanted to hear more from you about your traditions and how you include women's voices.

Savina J. Teubal, 1926 - 2005

Savina reclaimed the stories of Sarah and Hagar through her writing, and through her life. Like Sarah, Savina went forth into new lands, without maps or mentors to guide her. Like Sarah and Hagar, Savina lived in a patriarchal world, challenging that world with her choices and her clarity about the work she was called to complete….

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