From February 26 through May 2006, Mills College, The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, and the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center hosted a series of events titled Kol Isha – Jewish Women’s Voices Unbound: Creativity, Scholarship and Performance.

Kol Isha Series Events
Sunday, February 26, 2006
The event series opened with an all-day conference at Mills College and featured poet and scholar Irena Klepfisz, performance artist Sara Felder, and a series of concurrent workshops and panels on the creativity and scholarship of Jewish women.

Thursday, March 2, 2006
Ada Rapoport-Albert
Making a Home for God on Earth: Women in Habad Hasidim
The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union
Ada Rapoport-Albert spoke to a packed room of perhaps sixty participants on the role of women in Habad Hasidism. She spoke of the absence of women’s participation in the early Hasidic movements, in Habad as in others, as a missed opportunity; because of a spiritual system that was open to the material world, Hasidic thought could have easily incorporated women as full members of the community. That it did not could be explained by the lingering anxieties around Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, who had included women in their spiritual worlds but drifted into sexual deviance and, ultimately, apostasy. The Hasidism thus began by taking the conservative path of excluding women, although Habad Hasidism had moved, by the first few decades of the twentieth century, into recognizing women as important to the continuation of Hasidism and providing for their spiritual education and social inclusion.

Thursday, March 9, 2006
Celebrating Dahlia Ravikovitch – 1936-2005
Morrison Library, University of California, Berkeley
This event, hosted by the UC Berkeley Jewish Studies Program and the Doe-Moffitt Library Judaica Collection, included readings in Hebrew and English of selections of Dahlia Ravikovitch's work, some with musical accompaniment. Translations of Ravikovitch’s poetry were part of a larger book project by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

Monday, April 10, 2006
Daughters of the Dream: A Conversation with Yolanda King and Susannah Heschel
Mills College Concert Hall
The eldest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Yolanda King joined Susannah Heschel, daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to discuss their fathers’ legacies and contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. This dynamic conversation about the struggle for equal rights and justice challenged attendees to use the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement in pursuing their goals and achieving dreams of equality.

Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Creative Dialogue: Jewish Women in Prose and Poetry—A Conversation and Reading with Chana Bloch and Elizabeth Rosner
Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center
The poetic voices of Chana Bloch and Elizabeth Rosner were celebrated in this special program exploring the relationship between Jewish identity and writing. The event explored the landscape where prose and poetry meet, and discussed the influences of gender, history and silence on the creative process.

 Kol Isha was sponsored by generous grants and in-kind contributions from: Koret Foundation Funds, The Jewish Community Foundation and the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay — Fund for Jewish Learning & Culture, The James Irvine Foundation, Department of Women’s Studies at Mills College, Mills College, The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, Emily L. Blank and Daniel G. Weiss, Eva Lokey, Alan and Susan Rothenberg, Morton and Amy Rothschild Friedkin, Ilene Weinreb, Afikomen — Jewish Books & Arts, Bar-Ristorante Raphael, and Hagafen Cellars.