As April comes to a close and as we kick off Jewish American Heritage Month in May, we're featuring an oral history clip of Rita Arditti as our podcast of the month. With her lilting Spanish-accented English, Arditti's voice is striking, as her journey is unique - perhaps one that many of us don't immediately associate with Jewish American heritage.

I started off my Friday with some morning enlightenment from Maira Kalman's meditations on law and women breaking barriers—women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sojourner Truth.

Writing a blog post about a feminist theorist as sharp and influential as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is an intimidating prospect, which is why it's taken me more than a week to get to this post in memory of Sedgwick, who died on April 12.

Happy National Poetry Month! To celebrate, I've been reading some new poems and revisiting old favorites by women like Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Kumin.

Yesterday,the Jewish Women's Archive sent out a Passover e-greeting with the subject line: "Who says there are only four questions?" One of several responses to ourgreeting was from Nina Amir who affirmed that, indeed, there are far more than four questions to explore on Passover.

Our Bodies, Ourselves has created the Women's Health HeroesAward and is seeking nominations! I'm so excited about this opportunity to celebrate the activists I admire and to learn about the women whose work I'm not yet familiar with.

In case you thought New York was the ‘be all, end all' of Jewish life, think again. Step aside, Upper West Side, because Ann Arbor, Michigan is where the action's at today.

You might have read in the New York Times or in the Boston Globe that Janet Jagan, the first woman elected president of Guyana, died at age 88 this past weekend.

To cap off Women's History Month, we want to recognize two stellar women who were recently honored in Chicago as part of JWA's Women Who Dared project. You may have seen our online exhibition of Women Who Dared, which features interview segments with over 50 pioneering women in Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

Passover is next week. How did that happen?! I haven't even begun to prepare, but was reminded that I better get on the ball after reading the opinion piece "Raising Cups, Dropping Oranges" by Aurora Mendelsohn in the Forward. Mendelsohn discusses the ways in which her Seder's feminist rituals have changed over the past decade: Miriam's Cup has endured while the orange on the Seder plate has disappeared.

The third and final feature in JWA’s Women’s History Month podcast series, Jewish Women and Political Leadership, is now live! Listen to four political activists reflect on their journeys in shaking up the political “boy’s club” and tipping the gender scales -- from confronting miniscule quotas for women in law school, to pushing women’s health legislation in Congress, to becoming the first Jewish woman elected to the Maryland State Senate.

Ninety-eight years ago today, 146 people (mostly women, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, mostly young) burned to death in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The tragedy was particularly galling because it was the result of unsafe working conditions, a lack of fire escapes, and locked exits.

Unbelievable as it may seem, today the feminist pioneer and icon Gloria Steinem turns 75!

Until this week, I knew of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla) as a fellow Jewess with Attitude who had campaigned tirelessly for the creation of Jewish American Heritage Month and effectively raised funds for the Democratic Party. Now I know that she is also part of a sisterhood of Jewish breast cancer survivors and activists.

Barbara Glickstein, a loyal reader of JWA's This Week in History feature, also happens to have a weekly program on public health on WBAI in NYC. Last week, she decided to do a piece on one of her personal heroes, Lillian Wald, to commemorate Wald's March 10 birthday and Women's History Month.

Out from the balcony and onto the bimah! Introducing JWA's second Women's History Month podcast feature, Jewish Women and Religious Innovation. Learn how Hadassah Blocker, Sally Priesand, and Marcia Falk created religious experience on their own terms, expanding opportunities for women's religious participation in their own communities and for American Jews at large.

In week three of my Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia self-education program, I've been thinking about Annie Leibovitz.

Judith Kaplan (Eisenstein) made history 87 years ago today when she became the first American to celebrate a Bat Mitzvah. As the daughter of an innovative rabbi - Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism- she benefited from his belief in egalitarianism and his willingness to challenge tradition.

A few weeks ago, MyJewishLearning.com released "How Jews Look", a four-and-a-half minute film profiling a few Jews reflecting upon their own appearances in connection with their Jewish identities. A lively and somewhat heated conversation about "How Jews Look" emerged on Jewschool.

Happy Women's History Month! This may come as a shock, but at the Jewish Women's Archive, every month -- correction: every minute of every month -- is Women's History Month. Still, there's no reason why we shouldn't do something special on cue with the Gregorian calendar, right? Of course.

Think you can't survive without your computer? The Internet? The blogosphere? Me too. It's easy for me (and for many of us, I think) to forget about the brains, number crunching, and rigorous research that enable us to post blog entries, read the NY Times online, or shop for shoes with just the click of a mouse.

I have to admit that I didn't grow up with Barbies. Born to a feminist mom in the 1970s, I only had Skipper, Barbie's flat-chested cousin. But as much as Barbie's boobs kind of frightened me (and still do), Skipper just didn't have her charisma.

Purim starts in a few hours, and while the holiday is considered by many to be the most joyous in the Jewish calendar, there is a somber side as well.

I've been meeting a lot of interesting Jewish women lately. And all without leaving my computer! No, I'm not trolling JDate or chatrooms for a hot date (my life is complicated enough with a husband and two kids, thank you very much) -- I've been wandering through the couple thousand entries in the new online Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia! 

Happy Women's History Month!

Earlier this week, the Jewish Women's Archive proudly launched the online version of Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Paula Hyman of Yale University and Dalia Ofer of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and originally published by Alice and Moshe Shalvi of Shalvi Publishing, Ltd.