June 2022

By Thalia Gur-Klein From one step on a ladder to heaven, I dreamed I was seen and seeing her, far beyond my locked down horizon. Yet underway back I tarried on a thoughtful mountain to wrestle a muscled angel, all night long, or was it my angry twin, until dawn, belatedly to realize how one-sided her end meanwhile came.   Unresolved syllables of dreams and regrets, dripple into the Jordan, receding sign and […]

By Talya Gordon After moving to a new city during a pandemic as a single twenty-four-year-old woman, I have grown to see the incredible gifts that Judaism has given me. With all the chaos around the world, I have needed the Jewish community more than ever to provide light at the end of a very

By Laurie Dinerstein-Kurs I am perplexed. I am amazed. I am also pleasantly moved by the degree to which I read and hear so many people lamenting the difficulties they have faced this past year and a half. Why pleasantly? To sum it up in one sentence: Welcome to my world.Although many people believe they

Educator of Jewish EducatorsJOFA mourns the passing of Dr. Chaya Gorsetman, a master teacher, champion of women’s inclusion in the day school curriculum, and mentor of Jewish educators. In her role as co-chair of the Education Department at Stern College of Yeshiva University, she inspired and mentored a generation of novice teachers in Jewish day

Edited by Erin Leib SmoklerBen Yehuda Press. 2021, $24.95 Review by Atara Cohen How do we make sense of the suffering of the COVID-19 pandemic within a Jewish framework? Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler has gifted the broadly defined Jewish community with a compilation of essays by a diverse range of authors offering a variety

By Michal S. RaucherIndiana University Press, 2020, $24.Reviewed by Roselyn BellIf you are tired of Ḥaredi women being portrayed as oppressed, uneducated, and subservient to their husbands, Michal Raucher’s Conceiving Agency provides a much-needed corrective, reframing our notions of reproductive agency and religious meaning in the ultra-Orthodox community. Using the tools of ethnography and anthropology

By Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld“I don’t know when window shades were invented, but clearly that isn’t an option the Gemara is considering here,” I found myself saying to a class of fifteen college-aged students. At the time, I didn’t realize this would be a life-altering observation, tossed out nonchalantly in the middle of my course on

By Devora Steinmetz “But why do you call it a yeshiva?? A yeshiva is for men. Women learn in midrashot!” This is often the first question that people ask when they hear about the yeshiva that Drisha opened in Israel a year ago—especially in Israel, where there is no other learning program for women that

Drisha opened its doors in September 1979. Brochures had been distributed listing classes from morning till evening, Monday through Thursday. Women could come to a single class or could come to learn full-time. We were to hold classes in a rented space in a synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—in the upper story,

The Evolution of Women’s Learning—and My OwnBy Pam ScheiningerAs international women’s Jewish learning and scholarship have evolved in previously unimaginable ways, so has my own relationship with Jewish text. When I think of myself as a learner, I remember that during high school, I routinely lost my Humash and Navi books during the first week