In richly diverse essays, stories, memoirs, poems, and interviews, the contributors to this collection affirm the depth of Jewish women's participation in Jewish life and give strength to feminist struggles in the Jewish community.
An American historians search for her mythical birthplace leads her to an isolated mountaintop utopia and the passionate world of a medieval Jewess. When Professor Henry Henner Marcus receives an urgent plea for help from his cousin and fellow historian Nina Aschauer, he abruptly leaves Chicago and travels to the South of France where Nina has suddenly rematerialized after having disappeared without a trace five years before. While on sabbatical in Toulouse, France, Nina is compelled to search for the mythical place in the Pyrenean Mountains where she was born during her parents flight from Nazi persecution. All she knows is the name, but no Valladine can be found on any map. Her inquiries lead her to an encounter with Alphonse de Sola, a rough-hewn shepherd who offers to take her to the place. What she finds is love, a medieval outpost arrested in time, and a mysterious codex written in Hebrew letters that arouses her scholarly interest. As Henner, Nina, and her best friend, Etoile Assous, conspire to decipher the writing, they enter the passionate world of a fourteenth-century Jewess, who calls herself Dina, whose family was forced to flee France following the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom in 1306, while she herself had fallen victim to the sexual intrigues of a fiendish priest.
The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.
Exposes and challenges the common assumptions about whom and what Jews are, by presenting in their own voices, Jews of color from the Iberian Peninsula, Asia, Africa, and India. Kaye/Kantrowitz delves into the largely uncharted territory of Jews of color and argues that Jews are an increasingly multiracial people. From publisher description.
Names We Call Home is a ground-breaking collection of essays which articulate the dynamics of racial identity in contemporary society. The first volume of its kind, Names We Call Home offers autobiographical essays, poetry, and interviews to highlight the historical, social, and cultural influences that inform racial identity and make possible resistance to myriad forms of injustice.
"The issue is power in this collection of essays, speeches, and reviews spanning 15 years of writing and organizing. Political activist and writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz brings an insightful eye and a sharp analytical mind to address a wide range of issues in contemporary America: race, class, anti-Semitism, lesbian culture, war, sexual power, identity politics, Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, international and domestic violence against and by women. Kaye/Kantrowitz is indomitable in the fight against being worn down, hushed up. Her work reminds us of the strength in community."--BOOK JACKET.
"An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue"--Amazon.com.
This is a new view of the role of power in social evolution. It shows how, as human societies evolved, intersocietal conflicts necessarily developed, and how humanity can choose peace over war.
Pundits on both the right and the left often portray religion and feminism as inherently incompatible, as opposing forces in American culture. Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers seeks to dispel that notion by asking sixteen well-known religious figures to tell the story of how they became involved in the women's movement. Their work-much of it ongoing-has helped transform the way religion is practiced in this country. They have worked for the ordination of women, for inclusive language and liturgy, for new interpretations of scripture, theology, and religious law, and for an end to religious teachings that contributed to destructive gender stereotypes. Authors include Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, Evangelical, and goddess feminists. The personal stories of the fascinating contributors include watershed events in American religion and society over the last forty years. Each one of the women inTransforming the Faiths of Our Fathers has made history and seen it made, and gives her own version of what she has witnessed and experienced. They demonstrate the roots of their feminist activism in religious commitments, and the significance of struggles within religious arenas for expanding women's possibilities in society and culture.