Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Deborah & Letty

I was most influenced by my bat mtzvah haftarah reading, the story of Deborah. It was February 1952; I was not quite 13. I had never’ encountered Deborah in Hebrew school. I’d only learned about the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, and Queen Esther, but here was a woman who was in the Tanakh in her own right, not because she was the mother or wife of an important man. Deborah was a prophet, a military commander, and the only woman among the Bible’s thirteen Judges. I was deeply impressed by the fact that she led her people in their victory over the Canaanites and then presided over forty years of peace. Thirty-one centuries passed between the reign of Deborah and the era of Golda Meir. As a little Jewish girl growing up in the 1950’s, I drew my inspiration from both.

P.S. Earlier in my childhood, I loved The Adventures of K’tonton because I was a tiny kid myself. Maybe K’tonton was an unconscious metaphor for the powerlessness of being a girl.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, is the author of eight books. Her most recent titles are Getting Over Getting Older (Little, Brown, 1996) and Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America (Doubleday, 1992).

 

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Sugar & Spice – and Beyond

The articles in this special section:

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Deborah & Letty

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Please Write One More…

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The Book under My Pillow

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Girls Who Thought about Sex

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Jewish Rabbits

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The Impact of Reality

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Sarah Was My Soulmate

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Something Good from Hebrew School

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Safe in America

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So I Had to Write it Myself

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They were all Orthodox

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