Letters

Sex-Segregated Schools

by Sarah Blustain

Paradoxically, just as the most progressive Jewish schools are more committed than ever to coeducation, there’s a push (based on the work of Carol Gilligan and others) to create all-girls public schools. What’s the risk?

Magid: The Telling

by Bonnie Theiner

“Ich Bin a Yid.” What Grandpa told Pharaoh in 1945, and how a tape recorder transformed his story into sacred text last Passover. You can do it too.

Separated at Birth

poetry by Andrea Adam Brott

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women

by Dorothy Gitter Harman and Nitza Brown Rosovsky

Here we beat a path to the doors of 16 important Jewish women. There are plenty of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, but none that focus on females—-until now! And, in celebration, Rabbi Susan Schnur sacralizes our tour with an update of “Woman of Valor.”

The Woman with Israel in her Head

poetry by Netta Blatt

“She is in bed with the juice from a cyprus tree . . . She is in bed with a country,” writes Blatt in her love poem to Israel.

My Muslim Ancestor Hagar

by Azizah Y. Al-Hibri

Jewish women aren’t the only ones writing feminist midrash. Here, a Muslim woman beautifully re-imagines Hagar’s life (and Sarah’s). Plus . . . the Qur’anic etiology of female genital mutilation and the author’s response: revulsion.