Jewish Women’s Writing Groups

by Susan Schnur

From Austin to Boston and everywhere in between, Jewish women in writing groups are learning to take seriously their skills, themselves, and the bonds that emerge from these homegrown groups. The groups have become safe, intelligent places full of debate, ribaldry, neurosis, semi-colons, and food. Edited by Susan Schnur, with reports from the field by Karen Propp, Shelly R. Fredman, Mara Sokolsky, Esther Mizrachi Moritz and Michelle Brafman

• Believing in Ourselves by Karen Propp
• Sharpening Our Pencils by Shelly R. Fredman
• After Laura Died by Mara Sokolsky
• After Growing Up in a Orthodox World: by Esther Mizrachi Moritz
• Sundays at the JCC: by Michelle Brafman

Love Letter

by Shira Spector

A short story, hilarious, poignant and graphic--in every sense--about a moment in middle school when a bat mitzvah-aged girl faced a crisis of sexual identity.  Uh-oh.  Grown-up, she's exactly the kind of girl she'd insisted she wasn't.

Partisanas

by Ingrid Strobl, translated from the German by Paul Sharkey

Uncovering female resistance to the Nazis, historian Stobl notices a modest self-dismissal: many of these women never identify their profoundly serious, courageous and - yes - defiant behaviors as actual fighting back. They shy away from being labeled heroes.

No, Margaret Sanger Wasn’t Jewish

by Melissa R. Klapper

But an astounding number of doctors who pioneered the 20th century’s birth control movement were Jewish women! Sometimes arrested for promoting contraception and sex-ed in neighborhood clinics, they paved the way for today’s repro-rights activists. Plus… Helen R. Cordes tells us how to mark the 50th anniversary of the Pill.

Two Doctors/One Friendship

by Salomea Kape-Jay

The haunting memoir of two survivors who meet in a post-war Polish medical school, and learn in the most devastating way that not all scars are visible, nor can every ailment be treated.

Bathing

fiction by Alice Shechter

A Little Woman Made the World

poetry by Dahlia Ravikovitch; translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld