June 25, 2020 by admin

Books for the 90s

These books tackle issues which are only now the topics of public discussion with children: senility, body image, divorce. Many of them also portray Judaism infused with feminism, with mothers as rabbis and women taking major roles in the classic biblical tales. An idiosyncratic sampler:

Belinda’s Bouquet (Alyson Publications, 1991), by Leslea Newman, handles the self-image problems girls face from our culture’s pervasive pressures to starve themselves. Newman also wrote Heather Has Two Mommies (Alyson Publications. 1989), a story of one girl’s acceptance of her lesbian parents.

Grandma’s Soup (Kar-Ben, 1989), by Nancy Karkowsky, poignantly shows how one girl copes with the slow onset of her beloved grandmother’s mental deterioration, while emphasizing the family’s continued love.

Once I Was a Plum Tree (Morrow, 1980), by Johanna Hurwitz, is the story of a girl who has to teach herself about her Jewish identity because her family is so assimilated.

Ima On the Bima (Kar-Ben, 1986), by Mindy Avra Portnoy, shows how some mommies are rabbis too (and some rabbis mommies), in a natural and comfortable depiction of a girl and her mother’s Jewish rituals. Another of Portnoy’s books. Mommy Never Went To Hebrew School (Kar-Ben, 1989), tells how one child learns to understand that his mommy didn’t grow up Jewish.

Who Will Make Kiddush? (UAHC Press, 1985), by Barbara Pomerantz, shows how a family doesn’t need to lose stability after the parents divorce. The family’s Judaism and daughter’s special relationship with each parent continue.

Esther’s Story (Morrow Junior Books, 1996), by Dianne Wolkstein, is one of many new books of feminist midrash, with its 14- year-old Purim heroine going from orphan to queen. Similar is But God Remembered (Jewish Lights, 1995), by Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso; she creates four new tales about oft-forgotten biblical women, including our own Lilith.

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June 25, 2020 by admin

Jewish (But Not Feminist)

When we set out to re-examine the books which influenced us religiously, we needed to ask, where are the girls and women? Many otherwise good books wound us with their absence of female characters. Although these works were very important to our development as Jews, the Judaism they model is incomplete.

Chaim Potok, for example, gives us novels for teens and adults about traditionally observant men who grapple with complex religious and emotional issues. The Chosen and The Promise tell of two friends from different religious backgrounds (read: Chassidic and Modern Orthodox) who confront divergent expectations for their futures. My Name is Asher Lev is a narrative of a young ultra-Orthodox painter who must reconcile his artistic impulses with his strict religious teachings. These books (often assigned to junior high school students) delineate the conflicts these men feel between their personal aspirations and their religious fervor.

The novel which most influenced my own religious development was Milton Steinberg’s As a Driven leaf (Behrman House, 1939, recently reissued), the fictionalized and spiced-up story of the sage and heretic Elisha Ben Abuya, which I read at 14. This book shows Elisha grappling with whether belief in God should motivate his religious observance. While I disagreed with his conclusion—if you don’t believe, you shouldn’t practice Judaism—I definitely empathized with his inability to see God in his everyday life. But there is no female counterpart to Elisha. Even Bruriah, a potential female Tannaitic role model, is Just used as a love interest in the book, following the theory that only men have earth-shattering religious struggles.

These few books are key in defining the challenges which face intellectual religious Jews. Where are the novels about women wrestling with these spiritual crises? Potok’s underappreciated Davita’s Harp has its eponymous female character, but she rarely grapples seriously with the religious issues which so absorb the men in Steinberg’s and Potok’s books. Although these texts can help us develop into thoughtful Jews, they’re little help transforming us into aware Jewish women.

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June 25, 2020 by admin

Feminist (But Not Jewish)

While discussing in the LILITH office the young adult books that influenced us the most, we were all struck—despite the wide range in our ages—by the incompleteness of many of the books we’d read. Lots of our favorite books had strong female role models, but no Jewish content. Others had powerful Jewish characters, but were far too… well, male. Our literature presented us with a very compartmentalized picture: we learned how to be women, we learned how to be Jews. But where were the Jewish women?

Our nominees in the “Feminist (but not Jewish)” category were not so different from those of our respondents: Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie and Little Women, with their strong and somewhat iconoclastic female role models. Betty Smith’s books, notably A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Joy in the Morning, still reach readers today with their realistic and exhilarating stories of life in poverty torn Brooklyn. (Despite scattered anti-Semitic passages, many of us had the sense that Francie and other characters felt Jewish, even when they obviously weren’t. What do we make of that?)

Some of the most familiar and admired personae in modern children’s literature are women, attracting a wide spectrum of adolescent readers, both male and female. Cynthia Voight’s books about Dicey Tillerman and her family {Homecoming and Dicey’s Song, among others) feature many powerfully nonconformist women of all generations, such as the teenage Dicey, who leads her siblings across the East Coast, and the unconventional grandmother who takes them in. Madeleine L’Engle’s books, too, are replete with female role models, though very Christian: Meg and her scientist mom in the award-winning A Wrinkle in Time fantasy series are two.

In a category all by itself is Judy Blume’s assortment of wonderful books for teens and young adults. Many girls, teetering on the edge of puberty, turn to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for their first exposure to issues of adolescence in a humorous and personal way. Her novels that portray young women coping with a parent’s death (Tiger Eyes) and divorce (It’s Not The End Of The World) have proved invaluable for young adults going through these difficult times. Several of her books also contain Jewish characters; in Margaret, the protagonist struggles with her parents’ intermarriage as she these to “choose” one religion in sixth grade.

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