by Susan Reimer-Torn on May 12, 2012
I returned to my native New York City after spending twenty-two years in self-exile, working and raising a family in Paris. During those decades away, I was on the run from my family and friends’ obsession with the Jewish Question.
When I took off for France while still in my twenties, I was in search of the larger world. Above all, I was a rebel against my father’s militant, Orthodox religious observance. I wanted to live, work, think, raise my children, practice journalism in a place where not everything was measured in terms of its impact on Jews. A secular, sophisticated culture, where no one would raise their eyebrows in disapproval of my iconoclastic ways, awaited me.
A couple of decades have gone by and now I’m back. And here’s the thing: I’m no longer fighting the obsession. The truth is that rarely does a day go by when I am not taken up in some region of mind, body, or spirit with something having to do with yidishkayt. [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on March 14, 2012
Kate Bornstein, a transsexual writer, actor and television personality who is a self-described “gender terrorist,” was born a male in Neptune, New Jersey on this date in 1948. Bornstein underwent sex-reassignment surgeries in 1985-86 and has written six books since, including Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (1994); My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely (1997), and Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws (2006). She has also toured with several one-woman/man/whatever plays on gender issues. “The women’s movement has certainly looked at how the cultural role of ‘woman’ has limited women,” Bornstein says. “And the men’s movement has looked at how the cultural role of ‘man’ has limited men. But very few people have looked at how the system of having only men and only women has limited all of us.” Bornstein describes maintaining a fluid gender identity as a path to enlightenment. “[T]o unattach yourself from the perks of both genders” is similar to meditation, she says, and “some people might find it easier to explore the path of gender than to explore the path of meditation.”
“I’m not a man. I’m not a woman. I’m at the next stage, which is in a third space that includes man, woman and lots of other genders.” — Kate Bornstein, interviewed at EnlightenNext Magazine
by Lawrence Bush on March 13, 2012
Judith Plaskow, who co-founded The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and wrote the groundbreaking Jewish feminist theology, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990), was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1947. “Jewish feminists,” she proclaimed in her book, “. . . must reclaim Torah as our own. We must render visible the presence, experience, and deeds of women erased in traditional sources. . . . We must expand the notion of Torah to encompass not just the five books of Moses and traditional Jewish learning, but women’s words, teachings, and actions hitherto unseen.” In collaboration with her partner, Martha Ackelsberg, and other pioneering Jewish feminists such as Rachel Adler, Marcia Falk, Drorah Setel, and Sue Levi Elwell, Plaskow has brought many Jewish women and men into a creative tussle with the Jewish tradition, which opened synagogue life and rabbinical seminaries to a regenerative feminist influence. Her other books include The Coming of Lilith : Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003 (2005) and Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (with Carol Christ, 1980).
“The conviction that personhood is shaped, nourished and sustained in community is a central assumption that Judaism and feminism share.” —Judith Plaskow
by admin on March 8, 2012
Sheva Zucker, editor of Afn Shvel (On the Threshold), the all-Yiddish magazine published by the League for Yiddish, launched a blog of Yiddish poems about mothers in February, in memory of her own mother, Miriam Pearlman Zucker, who died on January 25 of this year.
Sheva has given Jewish Currents permission to post these translations, along with the Yiddish originals (and in transliteration) at our website on a regular basis. We urge readers to visit her blog as well as the website of the League for Yiddish (for non-Yiddish speakers, the website can be viewed in English).
The second poem, “How Did You Get So Wise, Mama,” by Malke Heifetz Tussman, was translated by Marcia Falk in her volume, With Teeth in Earth: Selected Poems of Malke Heifetz Tussman. [click to continue…]
I returned to my native New York City after spending twenty-two years in self-exile, working and raising a family in Paris. During those decades away, I was on the run from my family and friends’ obsession with the Jewish Question.
