Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues articles from September 2008

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues archives from September 2008

Reading Rayna Batya: the rebellious Rebbetzin as self-reflection.(Biography)
September 22, 2008... This paper seeks to examine the life and contemporary afterlife of the nineteenth-century Rebbetzin Rayna Batya Berlin. Although there are no surviving writings by Berlin, and only one extant source written about her by any of her peers, she...

Women and Jewish literature.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... This essay explores the genesis of "Women and Jewish Literature," a course I developed at the University of Maryland. The course emphasizes the interconnectedness of reading and writing, particularly within a feminist Jewish literary context,...

A woman within Zionism: the path of Myriam Schach (1867-1956).(Biography)
September 22, 2008... Women have a hard time of it going down in history independently of men. Myriam Schach's career is a striking case in point. Her singular career in the Jewish nationalist movement notwithstanding, she has been deemed worthy of no more than a...

Israeli women's leadership today: a panel discussion.(Discussion)
September 22, 2008... Leah Shakdiel, Chair I am here today replacing a very dear woman to whom I'd like to dedicate my opening remarks. It is not every day that a woman receives the Israel Prize for her life accomplishments. It is not every day that a...

The illuminations of Ellen Frank.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... I'm in words, made of words, others' words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I'm the air, the walls.... Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York, 1955), p. 386...

A Wicked Hand.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... A Wicked Hand Smoke rose in the slanted light And my daddy was hitting me. Everyone there laughed at the sight, I'm telling the truth, and nothing but. Smoke rose in the slanted light. Daddy slapped the palm of...

Delight.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Delight There did I know a delight beyond all delight, And it came to pass upon the Sabbath day As tree boughs reached for the sky with all their might. Round and round like a river streamed the light, And the wheel...

Warm Memories.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Warm Memories Imagine: Only the dust was at my side, I had no other companion. Dust walked me to nursery school, Ruffled my hair On the warmest childhood days. Imagine who was at my side And all the girls...

Like Rachel.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Like Rachel To die like Rachel when the soul shudders like a bird, wants to break free. Behind the tent, in fear and dread, Jacob and Joseph speak of her, a-tremble. All the days of her life turn head...

Finally I'm Talking.(Poem)
September 22, 2008... Finally I'm Talking Yona, shalom, this time I'm the one who's talking and you won't interrupt anymore. Now, God help us, you're in the ranks of the holy and pure. Who would've believed you'd come to this, that...

Cinderella in the Kitchen.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Cinderella in the Kitchen The few good hours in Cinderella's day were spent down there in the kitchen. She had freedom of mind, we may venture to say. She pressed her hands to her temples, her hair was all...

Marina Haddad.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Marina Haddad Marina Haddad lay alone on the bed, on her eyes a wreath, cinnamon on her mouth. The field reporters and the TV corps walked in the wrong door and that was her only bit of luck that night....

The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Marcia Falk New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004. 288 pp. When I sent my Israeli friend a copy of Marcia Falk's translation of Zelda's...

Eva Martin Sartori and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (eds.) Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women Writing in French.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Eva Martin Sartori and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (eds.) Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women Writing in French Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier in association with the European Jewish Publication Society, 2006 The interest in women's...

Edward Fram: My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland With a transcription of Benjamin Slonik's Seder mizvot nashim (The Order of Women's Commandments).(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Edward Fram My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland With a transcription of Benjamin Slonik's Seder mizvot nashim (The Order of Women's Commandments), translated by Edward Fram and...

Anne Lapidus Lerner: Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Poetry.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Anne Lapidus Lerner Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Poetry Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2007 Genesis 3:6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that...

Ellen Frankel: The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman's Commentary on the Torah.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Ellen Frankel The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman's Commentary on the Torah HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. 384 pp. The eternal text has not been exhausted yet, and it still enfolds mysteries that make the reading and studying of it...

Gender, penmanship and the primacy of speech over writing in the Jewish society of Galicia and Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... One of the codes exposed by the maskilic challenge to rabbinic authority is that of the primacy of orality over writing. In the first part of this article, I will discuss the meanings of this code in light of its treatment by Plato on the one...

Introduction.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... In November 1971, the Hunterian Library at the University of Glasgow held a special exhibition on Women and Books. The exhibition, samples from which can still be seen on the Internet (http://Special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibnsl women/women.html),...

Hava Shapiro's letters to Reuven Brainin.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Over the course of her Hebrew writing career, which included some of the first feminist Hebrew fiction and criticism, Hava Shapiro (1878-1943) wrote close to 200 Hebrew letters to the famed writer and editor Reuven Brainin, with whom she had...

"May the writer be strong": medieval hebrew manuscripts copied by and for women.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Jewish books, to learn from and to pray from, were in demand long before the invention of printing, and the only way of fulfilling that demand was to produce them by hand. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, we know of named Jewish...

The demands of integration--the challenges of ethnicization: Jewish women's Yiddish reading circles in North America between the two world wars.
September 22, 2008... In the second decade of the twentieth century, Yiddish reading circles for Jewish women began springing up in various cities of North America. Some of them were sponsored by the local public library, while others were affiliated with schools,...