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Opening Presentation: Irena Klepfisz
Yiddish Women Writers: What They Have Taught Me as a Writer and as a Jew
Dr. Klepfisz discussed the significance of certain Yiddish women writers and their relevance for contemporary Jewish women writers of her generation.
Closing performance: Sara Felder
Some Antics/Semantics
"Sara Felder's slice of queer Talmudic vaudeville is a rare, original, and unforgettable celebration of love, faith, and the often hilarious art of juggling all that we are." (San Francisco Bay Guardian) "Whoever thought a dyke with three balls could rival Chagall for lyricism?" (Bay Area Reporter)
Workshop: Breathe In Life, Breathe Out Poetry: A Writing Workshop Inspired by the Poet Muriel Rukeyser
Yiskah Rosenfeld
“It is a great thing to come to the unbegun places of our living and to say: Now we will find the words.” (Muriel Rukeyser) In times of crisis, is there a place for poetry? The modernist American poet Muriel Rukeyser believed it to be a necessity. Born on the eve of WWI, her poetry bore witness to war, violence, racism, and injustice, from the Scottsboro Trial to the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam. Viewing poetry as a way to make meaning of the world and our lives, she also recorded daily experience and her identity as a woman and a Jew. Alice Walker asserted, “Muriel Rukeyser loved poetry more than anyone I've ever known. She also believed it could change us, move the world.” In this workshop, participants drew on her writings as inspiration for discovering our own creative voices. Translating life experience into words, they explored together the power and pleasure of poetry.
Workshop: A Certain "Coming Out" – The Reconstruction of Jewish and Gender Identities in Poland after Communism
Shana Penn
Description: Sixty years after the Nazi genocide and forty years after communism's one-party rule, Poland is witnessing an opening up of public life that has fostered an unexpected revitalization of Jewish culture and the growth of a strong women's movement. A new generation of Jewish women writers bridge both communities. Their provocative critiques of Polish democracy on the whole and of Jewish communal developments specifically have already awakened significant public interest in questions of gender and ethnic identity. Neither of these issues could have been publicly discussed, much less imagined, during the communist era. The newfound openness in democratic Poland has been described as a "coming out" of new identities, ideas, modes of expression and engagement. Still, these identities collide and develop unsteadily and in very different ways from American experience.
Panel: Diasporic Identifications and Cultural Memory in Recent Jewish Latina and Latin American Women Writers
Carlotta Caulfield & Beth Pollack
Presentation: Jewish Latina and Latin American Jewish Women Writers and the Search for Heritage: Memory and Writing (Carlotta Caulfield)
Writing functions as a way for accommodating diasporic identifications and exploring cultural memory. A new wave in Latin American Literature promotes the dialogues which engage personal, national, diasporic cultures. Caulfield’s presentation directed attention to the field of auto/biography. Her models for talking about cultural memory and identity were the work of Marjorie Agosin, Sabina Berman, Margo Glantz and Alicia Freilich.
Presentation: From Shtetl to City: [Con]Textualizing the Memories of our Mothers and Bobbehs in Argentine Fiction (Beth Pollack)
The mother/grandmother image is emblematic of tradition and, of change because commonly she is commonly the icon of cultural identity and a purveyor of Jewish traditions. Pollack's presentation dealt with fictional and semi-autobiographical representations in Argentine fiction, using as models works by Ana María Shua, Perla Suez and Manuela Fingueret.
Workshop: Ko b'Isha Erva: Woman’s Voice Is Obscene
Marcia Freedman & E.M. Broner
Description: Freedman discussed the sexual politics of gossip. From the earliest days of patriarchal social organization, women's voice has been considered dangerous and subversive. Barred from the public sphere, it appears that women organized into 'gossipries' within the private sphere to share their secrets and protect one another and their children. Women repeated this experience, unwittingly, and founded a powerful movement based on con-sciousness-raising groups, a 1970s version of gossipries. Why were women prohibited by the strongest taboo from speaking in public? Why was woman's speech sexualized? Is the act of first-person public expression merely a tactic of the powerless, or is it the most politically potent strategy women could ever adopt?
Drawing from her experiences as a writer, lecturer and Jewish feminist ceremonialist, and her leadership in the Jewish women's spirituality community since the 1980s, Bronner spoke on Interrupting God: Ritual as Cultural Subversion, about women altering the parade of male dignitaries who perform and define our history, religion and rituals. We rename, re-genderize, re-historicize the past and invent the present and future. All of this is possible.
Panel: Mizrahi and Sephardi Women's Voices
Judith Berlowitz & Lital Levy
Presentation: Death of a Prince: A Five-Hundred-Year-Old Memory Perpetuated in the Voices of Sephardic Jewish Women (Judith Berlowitz)
Berlowitz discussed and played recorded examples of three versions of a ballad commemorating the unsolved 1497 murder of Pope Alexander Borgia's favorite son, Juan, created in the post-1492 Sephardic Diaspora and sung by three women residing in the US in 1991. Examples were played of a Moroccan version, which bears some resemblance to the written text of the ballad, then of versions from Rhodes, Marmara and Çannakale.
Presentation: A Jewish Woman in the Arabic Renaissance: Arabism, Feminism, and Judaism in the Writing of Esther Azhari Moyal, 1893-1914 (Lital Levy)
Description: Esther Azhari, born in Beirut in 1873, was a celebrated journalist, writer, translator, and activist who traveled across the world at age nineteen to represent Syrian women in the Chicago World Fair. By 1910 she had founded the first Arabic newspaper for women ("Al-A'ilah" or "The Family"), translated a dozen novels from French to Arabic, and published a biography of Emile Zola (Tarikh Hayat Imil Zola, Cairo, 1903). She and her husband, the doctor/writer Shim'on Moyal, lived in Cairo and Jaffa, were deeply involved in politics, and even named their first-born son after the famous Egyptian nationalist writer 'Abdallah Nadim. Yet in 1944, when a researcher in Palestine learned of the Jewish woman who had been well-respected in Arabic literary circles, he discovered that no one knew what had become of her. He eventually found her living alone in a shabby room in Jaffa, without a single relic of her literary past and unable even to remember the titles of the books she had translated. What had happened to the pioneering woman who had crossed so many barriers and fought so tirelessly for justice, for the causes of Arab women, world Jewry, and Arab-Jewish cooperation and solidarity? This sad conclusion to her story, historically telling in and of itself, sets her achievements in poignant relief.
Levy’s talk, a slice of her dissertation, "A Forgotten Enlightenment: Jewish Writers in the Arab East, 1870-1950," presented the life and work of Esther Moyal, focusing on her three ideological commitments of feminism, Arabism, and Judaism. Levy’s sources include a letter in defense of women's intellect to al-Hilal, the premiere cultural journal of her time; select issues of Al-'A'ilah from 1899-1904; and the introduction to her biography of Zola. Close readings of selected passages demonstrate how she skillfully used her mastery of Arabic language and of the classical Arabic canon both to enhance the rhetorical power of her prose and to suggest an intercultural Judeo-Islamic heritage.
Panel: New Directions in Feminist Rabbinics: Women in Aggadic Narratives and their Role Vis-à-vis Hegemonic Discourse Dina Stein
This workshop discussed some of the feminist approaches to rabbinic texts, exploring recent initiatives in the feminist study of rabbinic literature and looking ahead to the issues and problems still to be engaged.
Through a close reading of a number of midrashic narratives, Stein explored the role of female characters and a "feminine voice" in the construction of rabbinic identity. In what ways do these female speakers either bolster or undermine the dominant discourse of the rabbis?
Workshop: Portraits of Women: Feminism and Peace Work in the Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld
Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005) was one of the great Hebrew women poets of all time. This workshop examined poems from her entire oeuvre, with special attention to the way feminism and political awareness increasingly reinforce each other in the course of her life in poetry. Bloch and Kronfeld dealt with issues that arise when translating into English from a textually resonant Hebrew.
Workshop: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish
Naomi Seidman
This workshop explored the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish in Ashkenazic culture, paying special attention to the "femininity" of Yiddish and the "masculinity" of Hebrew. This relationship was traced from its origins in the traditional “women’s literature” of pre-modern Ashkenaz to the waves of Yiddish feminism in twentieth-century America and the Hebrew-Yiddush language wars of the 1920s and 1930s.
Workshop: The Shechinah Sings: Women’s Voices in Prayer
Roslyn Barak & Sharon Bernstein
A presentation on the history of women in the cantorate and a discussion of the halachic, esthetic and vocal issues involved, including musical demonstrations and dialogue. Cantors Barak and Bernstein offered musical demonstrations and an opportunity for dialogue and questions.
Workshop: Stand up Schmand Up: Confessions of a Jewish Lesbian Comedian and Comedy Producer
Lisa Geduldig
San Francisco-based stand up comic and comedy producer, Lisa Geduldig, revealed secrets to being a comic and producer as well as her philosophies behind performing and producing diverse shows (Funny Girlz: A Smorgasbord of Women's Humor; Feygelah Schmeygelah: An Evening of Queer Jewish Humor; The George Bush Going Away Party: An Evening of Political Comedy; Make Laugh, Not War; Queer Comedy Quack Up...and even Charo!!). She spoke about the Kung Pao Kosher Comedy phenomena she created 13 years ago (Jewish comedy on Christmas in a Chinese restaurant), and the role it plays in the lives of thousands of Bay Area Jews each year. The workshop also included comedy video clips and group participation.
Workshop & Exhibit: The Tallit as Personal Expression: A Sampling of the Creativity of Bay Area Women & Girls
Nancy Katz
 “When I became bat mitzvah, many years ago, girls didn't own tallit, and they certainly didn't make them.” - Donna Dubinsky, tallit maker. The relationship of a Jewish woman with tallitot in general has been a complicated one and has been changing over time. For over a dozen years, Nancy Katz has opened her East Bay studio, empowering women to “unpack” the mystery of the tallit and create one for themselves.  This exhibition was an ingathering of work by Katz's “students.” The intention of the exhibit and workshop recognized and honored the power of both creativity and spirituality as they are manifested in the creation of a personal tallit. Included were the tallitot themselves, artists' statements, and additional photographs. A discussion with Katz and community tallit makers took place as well.
Workshop: Women’s Creativity and Jewish Meditation
Nan Gefen
Description: The creative impulse too easily can become thwarted in women's busy daily lives. Jewish meditation, which has been practiced formally by small groups of men through history, can lead the way to greater expressiveness. Women now are claiming this spiritual practice as their own and discovering its connection to creativity. In this workshop, participants learned two meditations drawn from the Jewish tradition and explored how they open the mind to greater imagination.
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