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The Hands

The cover of Nashim Number 18, a special issue about Iranian Jewish women (consulting editor: Farideh Dayanim Goldin), features “The Hands,” a painting by Iranian-Israeli artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik showing her own open palm above the folded hands of her mother, artist Rina Schmuelian. “The Hands” work belongs to Schmueli Buchnik’s “Pompei Persia” series, displayed recently in a solo exhibit at the Antea Gallery in Jerusalem.

Nashim’s covers are designed by art editor Judith Margolis with a view to creating a dialogue between the works of major feminist artists with the themes of each issue of Nashim. For more on the work of the Antea Gallery, Jerusalem’s only feminist art gallery, see the interview with Mendes-Flohr published in Nashim Number 14 (Fall 2007), a special issue devoted to women in the visual arts.

Below, in a text accompanied by several more images from the exhibit, curator Rita Mendes-Flohr describes Schmueli Buchnik’s interweaving of motifs from her Iranian background with Jewish themes, Islamic and Christian motifs, and western and classical traditions.

Pompeii Persia
On a visit to Pompeii, the artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik was struck by the similarities of the friezes running along the walls, and the Persian miniatures she knew from her own cultural heritage. The common thread in these works from cultures of plenty and often excess, she found in the small size, the framing with decorative borders, and the subject matter – scenes of courting and eroticism.

Her works in this exhibit, Pompeii Persia, bring together elements from the classic visual art of east and west, while Jewish themes intermingle with Islamic and Christian motifs – as she appropriates all these traditions as her own. There is a meeting between the artist’s training in western European art and her digging deeper into the cultural traditions from the place where she was born, Iran, but left when she was still an infant.

As if staging a play, the artist carefully searches for characters and details from all her sources and lets the actors encounter each other on the framed space, as they emerge from the darkness into the spotlight, tempting the audience into a magical, make-belief reality. Indeed, she is well aware of letting the paintings take on the role of seducer – by ornament and beauty ‐ and titled an earlier work Khanfanit – the Charmer – a painting exhibited in Antea’s exhibit “Achoti /Sister – Mizrahi women artists in Israel” – held at the Jerusalem Artists’ House in 2000. But beauty might be only a ruse to draw the viewer into a painting, in which critical readings of established religion and patriarchal relations are slowly discerned.

Often the artist casts herself into the characters she gathers from the different traditions, with eyes closed in devotion, waiting for a kiss; as a voluptuous oriental dancer; or an elusive temptress with a saintly halo – uniting the spiritual and the sensuous. In the portrait of her own hand, she vulnerably exposes her open palm, placed in a field of Rococo ornamentations, above the folded hands of her mother, the artist Rina Schmuelian ‐ hands that painted as well.

The depth, both spatial and spiritual, created by the darkness and light is achieved by a her technique of glazing ‐ derived from the classic Renaissance tradition of using a monochromatic underpainting, a grisaille, and slowly building up the work, layer by layer, with thin colored glazes, bestowing a sense of transparency and luminescence. Here, it is the painstaking process of layering from which the figures emerge on their stage, while at the Pompeii excavations, it is the taking out of the covering ash that reveals the life of a city that was caught in the middle of the act and stood still.

The artist starts out by painting her canvas black, then begins to draw out her composition in white chalk – like writing on a blackboard in school and connecting with the itinerant teachers in the contemporary Iranian film, Blackboards. Writing is a central element in the works in this exhibit – as it is in Persian miniatures. At times, her use of the Persian script is purely ornamental and the decorative quality is taken to the extreme by her writing in mirror image, thus neutralizing the meaning. In other instances, the text is hastily scribbled across the painting, like graffiti ‐ as if challenging the time‐consuming effort of the painted layering process as vanitas – a theme that appears in several of the works and again connects to Renaissance art.

Among the texts are lines from Jewish religious sources, translated into Persian ‐ such as Eshet Chayl, Woman of Valor, the liturgical poem that the Jewish man sings to his wife at the Sabbath table. Perhaps a critical reading is suggested, of the woman’s seduction, through praise and glorification, to be a faithful mother and housewife. Other texts are from the poetry of Oman Khayyam, who uses the rubaiyat, quatrain format precisely to break out of the square of prevailing norms and rigid enclosures, seeking to free spirituality from the monopoly of all religious establishments.

In the triptych “Khoda Negadar” (May God Protect) the artist juxtaposes herself as a full‐bodied dancer out of a Persian miniature, with a pious, similarly draped, but two‐dimensional figure from a medieval manuscript. In the middle panel is a catastrophic eruption ‐ a warning that all is vanity? Or is the artist spinning her magic tales, like Scheherazade, in an attempt to hold off, indefinitely, the moment of destruction?

Rita Mendes Flohr
Exhibit Curator and Antea Gallery Director

Kol Ha-Isha, founded in 1994, is a Jerusalem nonprofit organization (amuta), dedicated to promoting a multicultural feminist model of social change. Kol Ha-Isha provides the space for multicultural action of diverse groups of women in Jerusalem and speaks out in the struggle for equality and a just society, while running a variety of programs for women’s leadership, the advancement of women’s rights and the economic empowerment of women.

The Antea Gallery was established together with Kol Ha-Isha with the goal of creating a forum for the critical examination of issues related to women, art and culture and to advance the multicultural discourse of women and women artists in Israel.

Contact the artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik, Parvin105@walla.com.

Call for Papers: Women in the Responsa Literature

The theme of issue no. 21 of Nashim (Spring 2011), under the consulting editorship of David Golinkin of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, will be “Women in the Responsa Literature.”

The responsa literature -- compilations of legal opinions written by rabbis and rabbinic judges in response to specific queries or cases -- is one of the largest branches, if not the largest branch of Jewish literature. Indeed, a new bibliography (Shmuel Glick, Kuntress hateshuvot hehadash, I--III, Jerusalem, 2006–2009) lists over 4,400 books or series containing responsa. The responsa are a fount of information about Jewish women on a host of topics, such as marriage, divorce, agunot (women who remain “chained” to missing, disabled or separated husbands in the absence of a religious divorce), widows, child-rearing, and women in business, starting from about 500 CE and continuing right up to the present day. This vast literature was utilized for research on women’s lives in studies by Israel Abrahams (Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, London, 1896) and, more recently, by Avraham Grossman (Rebellious and Pious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, Lebanon, NH, 2004) and Ruth Lamdan (A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century, Leiden, 2000), but it is still only beginning to be tapped.

For this issue of Nashim, we invite submissions about women in the responsa literature, focusing on a broad topic, a specific geographical area or a specific set of responsa. How are women portrayed? What can we learn about their lives? How were they viewed by rabbis and by their societies? Can we hear their own voices in the testimony they gave before religious courts (batei din)? How did and do these rulings affect their lives? And how can we interpret all of this data using the tools of women’s and gender studies?

Proposals for submissions of up to 12,000 words, not previously published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, should be sent to Deborah Greniman, Managing Editor of Nashim, by February 1, 2010, by email (preferably) to nashim@schechter.ac.il; or by fax to +972-3-7256592. Final date for submission of articles: May 1, 2010.

All scholarly articles will be subject to peer review. Academic Editor of Nashim: Renée Levine Melammed.
Nashim is published jointly by the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Indiana University Press.

Iranian Jewish Women

Cover Illustration: Parvin Schmueli Buchnik, “The Hands”

Special Issue: Nashim 18

Consulting Editor Farideh Dayanim Goldin

Research into lives and cultures of Iranian Jewish women is relatively new. Information gathering on Iranian Jewish life accelerated after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the mass exodus of Iranian Jews from their ancient homeland. Jewish existence in Iran, some researchers believe, dates back to the destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian Exile, and the freedom granted the Jews in 539 BCE by the king of Persia, Cyrus the Great. Others assert that Jews settled in Persia (Media) earlier in two waves of exodus from the Holy Land in 727 BC and 721 BC, during the Assyrian rule. Even though Iranian Jewish population shrank from 100,000 before the Revolution to approximately 20,000 in 2009, Iran still hosts the largest numbers of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel.

The Islamic Revolution accelerated the pace of research, information gathering and recording data about the Iranian Jewish culture that many scholars feared could be soon lost. The resulting series of books on Iranian Jews do include some information about women, their lives, cultures, and lifestyle. They foster a sense of pride and appreciation in the earlier generations’ resiliency and cultural achievements

Examining this new scholarship, I personally have learned  to appreciate my own heritage, and to reclaim it. In my research and in my personal life, I now look for wonders of the Iranian Jewish life that had been bestowed upon me. Once, I believed that my grandmother Tavous was a superstitious woman because she was illiterate; now I know that her wisdom was beyond any formal education;  and I regret that I don’t have the knowledge of her herbal remedies. Through her recollections, she taught me the history of the Jews of Shiraz as well as the art of storytelling.

It is my hope that the collection of essays in this issue of Nashim, devoted to Iranian Jewish women, will intensify this  sense of connection and appreciation of Iranian Jewish heritage, that it will spark and intensify further scholarly work, and that it will help to create a network among the scholars of Iranian Jewish women.

Special Issue, Bridges 14.2: The Bridge of Translation

Special Guest Editor Faith Jones

Translations from German, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, as well as essays about translation and reflections on particular translation projects, come together in this collection to illuminate feminist Jewish practice. Translated material includes stories, poems, letters, diaries, and fables in a rich blend of genres, styles, and subject matter. This diverse collection speaks to the centrality of translation for creating an inclusive Jewish feminist movement. It explores a variety of ideas about the historical pressures resulting from the multilingual nature of Jewish culture, with careful attention to how women’s use of language(s) is marked and meaningful.

For twenty years Bridges has published translations in nearly every issue; this issue's introduction highlights the reasons for doing so.The desire to bring a particular woman writer to light; to make our vision of Jewish life more complex; to engage with painful or important histories; to honor women’s knowledge and participate in the transmission of women’s knowledge; and to recover what has been dismissed, minimized, or hidden from view are some of the reasons being explored in this issue.

Writers whose work are translated include historical women such as German feminist Bertha Pappenheim; Polish Orthodox poet Miriam Ulinover; Soviet writer Shira Gorshman; Hungarian Holocaust survivor Borbála Szabó; and Brazilian writer Rosa Palatnik. Contemporary women include French novelist Marlène Amar; and Israeli poets Nurit Zarchi and Agi Mishol. A series of Holocaust-era family letters show everyday people struggling to find the language to reflect their lives. Essays by translators from German, Hebrew and Yiddish each discuss the specific issues related to the language they work in and to their translation practices in the light of Jewish feminism. Original poetry in English and visual art explore themes of language, speaking, listening, disclosing new worlds, and excavating meaning from wordless experience. Book reviews of recent translations highlight the variety and complexity of work underway in this field, and provide a starting point for those wishing to immerse themselves further in this fascinating, emerging area of study.

One of the World’s Coolest Cities: Tel-Aviv at 100

 

Israel Studies 14:3 / Special Issue: Tel-Aviv Centenary / Guest Editor: Maoz Azaryahu

From the Introduction:

"Anniversaries are powerful reminders of the human need for signposts to mark the continuous flow of time: they are perceived as extraordinary points in time that occasion, even compel, a celebration.

…

In the spring of 2009 Tel-Aviv celebrated its centennial with festive events and inauguration ceremonies of long due public projects, TV documentaries, academic conferences in Israel and abroad, albums, and anthologies. The idea of devoting a special issue of Israel Studies to Tel-Aviv on the occasion of its centennial appears self evident: it is a truism that Tel-Aviv occupies a special place in the history and geography of modern Zionism and Israel. 

…

The fact that it is celebrating its centennial is a powerful reminder that despite views to the contrary, Tel-Aviv is a success story at the center of which stands the transformation of a Zionist vision into a thriving metropolis. Although the founding of Tel-Aviv dates to 1909, the ideational constitution of the city was formulated by Akiva Arieh Weiss in the prospectus he wrote in 1906. In this visionary document, the ‘genetic code’ of a projected and still nameless city (the name Tel-Aviv was applied to the neighborhood under construction in 1910) was formulated: a modern city that would represent the redemptive aspirations of the Jewish people. The new city to be built on the sand dunes north of the mixed, Arab-Jewish port city of Jaffa would be ‘the first Hebrew city’. Moreover, his vision foresaw that “[T]he same as New York is the main entrance to America, so we have to modernize our city and one day it will become the New York of the Land of Israel.” A century later, Tel-Aviv’s skyline is dotted with towering high-rises. Although an eyesore for many Tel-Avivians who fear for the traditional character of their city and the social implications of residential towers as enclaves for the rich, these prominent structures suggest that the early quest to make Tel-Aviv a modern city has not lost its appeal."

About the Guest Editor: Maoz Azaryahu

Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies

Azaryahu is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa. He has written extensively on urban landscapes, memory, and society, and has recently published Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (2006). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Penn State University, and at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada.

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Susan Weiss wins "Women in Law" award

Jerusalem lawyer, Susan Weiss is one of the contributors in the newly published issue of Nashim 17. We have just learned that Susan was awarded this year’s “Women in Law” citation by the Israel Bar Association, at a ceremonial dinner held on June 2 in Eilat.

Susan Weiss is the founder and executive director of the Center for Women’s Justice in Jerusalem, which is committed to advancing the rights of women to equality, dignity and justice under Jewish law.

You can check out their website at www.cwj.org.il.

Susan's contribution to Nashim 17 is Under Cover: Demystification of Women's Head Covering in Jewish Law and can be found in Nashim's newest special issue titled: Sexuality in Jewish Contexts.

Sexuality in Jewish Contexts

NASHIM 17: Special Issue

Sexuality in Jewish Contexts

From the introduction by Tova Hartman

"For many feminist women and men, religion continues to be a place they not only return to for comfort, but also continually and substantively revisit, with passion and rigor. Once it might have been possible to take for granted that religion is inherently oppressive in its patriarchal hierarchies; but if it were exclusively oppressive, more people, and certainly more feminists, would have made a clean break. Instead, we have Muslim academics like Fadwa El Guindi claiming the veil as tool of feminist liberation. In my own research, I have heard women express a wide range of feelings about the traditional Jewish woman’s menstrual rites, from enthusiasm, to indifference, to contempt—some times all voiced by the same woman! And I have watched gay men and women, who readily acknowledge that their sexuality is delegitimized within traditional Judaism, converting to much higher levels of observance, in some cases becoming Orthodox.

What binds these people – what binds all of us – to remain within this seemingly endless conversation?
One reason for the tenacity with which feminism and religion have held onto each other, is that, on the one hand, sexuality is an embodied experience that cannot ultimately be relegated to theoretical analysis. At the same time, religion itself, while always open to criticism, proves curiously (or naturally) resistant to ultimate dismissal. The analyses of sexual cultures undertaken by the writers in this issue demonstrate in different ways that, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, it is “bodies that matter” as much as the more abstract formulations of sexual ideology. Each author adds richly to our sense of what can be included within the protean field of sexuality and feminism, and expands the range of implications that jump, like sparks, out of the friction between theoretical models and the sense people make of their daily lives." 

Special Issue Price $19.95

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Jewish Women and Philanthropy

Jewish Women and Philanthropy

A Nashim Conference

On July 16, 2009 the first conference sponsored by the academic journal Nashim will be held at Tulane University in New Orleans.

This unique, one-day conference brings together academics, philanthropists and professionals to assess the past, present and future of Jewish women in philanthropy.

Jewish philanthropy has its roots in tikkun olam, a communal obligation to ensure social justice in our world. Jewish women have always played a critical role in tzedakah, but their contributions have often been neglected.

Proceedings will be featured in a special issue of the academic journal Nashim. Scholars will present their insights on the topic, and attendees will join in for a spirited roundtable discussion on just what it means to be a Jewish woman in today's economy.

Among the confirmed conference speakers are:

Sylvia Barack Fishman
Chair, Department of Near East and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, Director of HBI

Susan M. Chambré
Professor of Sociology, Baruch College

Barbara Dobkin
Founder of Ma’yan, the Jewish Women’s Project and Jewish Women Professionals and the Jewish Community

Shifra Bronznick
Founder of Bronznick & Co., LLC, and founding President of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community

Gail T. Reimer
Founding director of the Jewish Women’s Archive

Brenda Brasher
Visiting Professor, Tulane University, Sociology Department

Jewish WWII Soldiers in the Israeli National Narrative

From Exclusion to Inclusion: Jewish WWII Soldiers in the Israeli National Narrative by Sveta Roberman

Israel Studies
VOLUME 14, ISSUE 2

Summer 2009, Vol. 14, No. 2, Pages 50-71
Posted Online April 28, 2009.

From the abstract by Sveta Roberman

This study focuses on the case of 1.5 million Jewish soldiers who fought in the Allied Armies in WWII and explores its place in Israeli social memory. For decades the story of military combat and sacrifice of WWII Jewish soldiers was marginalized in the Israeli mnemonic narrative. Over the years, different groups of ex-servicemen living in Israel kept alive the memory of their involvement in the combat and contested its silencing and marginalization. Weaving the texture of those events from the dual strands of forgetting and remembering, I elucidate on the process by which the national historical narrative was formed, revealing the dynamics of Israeli nationalism and showing how symbolic boundaries of national belonging were reshaped over time.

Jewish Feminists and our Fathers

Reflections across gender and generations

A Special Issue of Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal

Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal Volume 14.1— Jewish Feminists and Our Fathers
Guest edited by Rebecca Alpert and Laura Levitt

The spring 2009 issue of Bridges includes personal essays, poems, art, and review essays about Jewish feminist daughters and fathers. In this volume Jewish feminists have much to say about their own complicated relationships to their fathers. The contributions build on the legacy of Jewish feminist writing about fathers that began with Adrienne Rich's now classic essay "Split at the Root" and take seriously the personal as well as the familial. Taken together, the works offer a critical lens. They acknowledge the legacies of patriarchy and masculinist power as well as a deep appreciation for the loving and emotional bonds that characterize these relationships.

This special issue addresses what gender and feminist work, writing, theory, politics, and practice has meant for shaping relationships, for reimagining and looking in new ways at the legacies of our fathers, the men who have mentored and parented us, and those we parent in a world that remains very much under the sway of patriarchy despite all of the heretofore unimaginable possibilities that have opened up for how we make homes and families in the present.

The volume includes poems by Hara Person, Diane Greenberg, Bernice Mennis, Davi Walders, Kathryn Hellerstein, Marjorie Agosín, Karen Margolis, Lisa Grunberger, Judith Arcana, Daniel Morris,Willa Schneberg, and Helène Aylon; prose by Susannah Heschel, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael, Malkeh Henne, Arlene Stein, Esther Kane Meyers, Mónica Gomery, Rebecca Alpert, Nitza Agam, Rebecca Elisabeth Trabin, Ruth Behar, Lori Lefkovitz, Alicia Ostriker, Alice Nakhimovsky, Faye Ginsburg, Lynn Alpert, Emily Glazer, Miriam Solomon, and Deborah Bauer; and reviews by Carol Zemel, Ruth Zoë Ost, Judith L. Goldstein and Sharon G. Teitelbaum, and Laura Levitt, with an introduction by the editors. 

To subscribe or to purchase a single issue of Bridges, visit the IU Press/Journals site, INscribe at http://inscribe.iupress.org.