June 25, 2020 by admin

Safe in America

1. The Diary of Anne Frank, because its writer was still a young girl and showed this safe. American Jew a different, horrendous world of the persecuted Jew. I also loved Anne’s honesty about her sexuality.

2. Little Women, because Jo was a strong woman and a writer—which I longed to be—while considered a misfit, which I felt was (as an intelligent girl and part of a tiny Jewish minority in town).

3. The Israeli-Jewish Jordana in Uris’ Exodus, because of her courage and warm sexuality.

Paula J. Caplan is a psychologist, actor and playwright. Her hooks include Don’t Blame Mother, The Myth of Woman’s Masochism, and They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, on which she has based her first play.

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The Lilith Blog

January 22, 2020 by Sarah M. Seltzer

I Thought I Was Jo: Revisiting “Little Women.”

I thought I was Jo.

Most people thought they were Jo, it’s true, but I really did, as I inhaled Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I tucked it in between the pages of my siddur on Yom Kippur, standing and sitting as instructed by the rabbi, but frolicking in Concord Massachusetts all the while. I was so much like her: mad about injustice, messy, impulsive, bookish, bossy on the playground as I dictated to my friends what we would be pretending that day. 

Greta Gerwig’s new, much-ballyhooed film adaptation of Little Women emphasizes Jo’s journey from director of childhood theatricals and imaginary games to successful novelist. Yet it’s not a simple triumph. Jo loses her sister, the possibility of romance torpedoes her closest friendship; her other sisters face their own cares, and her writing life is often more mercenary than glamorous. The film draws out a particular current of bittersweetness from the book, rueing the onset of adulthood; for women, who face pigeonholing (but really for all children, even Laurie, a young man who wants to be part of the play-acting of his girl neighbors) the bigger story is of the gradual winnowing down of childhood’s wild potential. 

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