Aline Kominsky-Crumb was a pioneer of the autobiographical comics genre and a leading figure in the feminist underground comics movement. Her career as a cartoonist began in 1972, when she joined the Wimmen’s Comix collective in San Francisco and published her first comic Goldie. A Neurotic Women. She went on to author, publish and co-edit several books and magazines, including the comics anthology Love That Bunch (1990), and the graphic Memoir Need More Love (2007).
Susan Stamberg, the first full-time woman anchor of a national nightly news broadcast, played an important role in making National Public Radio (NPR) a news organization that offered pioneering opportunities to women journalists. Her half-century career at NPR opened the way for other women by demonstrating competence, originality, and compassion in reporting and interviewing.
Starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin used her camera to document her own life and that of her friends, her alternative family. Her pictures revealed intimacy and violence, love and abuse, sexuality and addiction, in the downtown punk scene of New York in the 1980s, a world subsequently devastated by AIDS. She adopted a slide show format to be a mirror to her friends, and ended up mirroring their lives to the outside world.
Elizabeth (Liz) Swados was an American composer, writer, and theatrical director. Best known for her 1978 Broadway musical, Runaways, Swados created a diverse body of work that included novels, poetry, plays, music, and musicals.
Twenty-first-century Jewish women’s writing in the United States is wide-ranging in genre and topic. In this body of literature, we can find insightful and nuanced stories of contemporary American life as well as fiction that delves into lost or forgotten Jewish histories. From a female Spinoza to a female golem, a strong feminist ethic is pervasive in these writings.
Born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, Jamaica Kincaid is a Jewish Afro-Caribbean author. She was sent to the United States from her birthplace in Antigua at the age of sixteen and became a writer while living in the United States.
Yehudit Katzir (b. 1963) is an Israeli author who emerged as a leading female voice in what had been a male-dominated literary field until the 1980s. Her novels and short stories are noted for their idiosyncratic and lyrical language, as well as their focus on female identity and treatment of taboo themes.
The history of Jewish women’s comics and graphic novels can be traced back to early and mid-20th-century progenitors. With the underground comics scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s, several Jewish women laid the groundwork for the themes, styles, and communal ties that would be taken up by the post-underground. In the 21st century, the works of Jewish women in comics and graphic novels is booming.
Louise Glück, American poet, essayist, and educator, was the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as numerous other awards for her writing; she also served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. One finds the personal, the mythological, and the Biblical woven intricately throughout Glück’s oeuvre.
Every family has hidden stories, but some are more deeply hidden than others. Esther Safran Foer’s parents both survived the Holocaust, but most of their relatives were killed. Like many survivors, Esther’s parents rarely spoke about their experiences… which left her with a lot of unanswered questions. Esther has spent much of her life piecing together the truth of her family story. In this episode, Judith Rosenbaum talks with Esther about her new memoir, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here, which chronicles this lifelong search.
Author and transgender activist Abby Stein grew up in a tight-knit, insular Hasidic community in Brooklyn; she calls it one of the most gender-segregated societies in America. From early childhood, she knew she was a girl, but for her entire life, her community celebrated the fact that she was a boy. In this episode of Can We Talk?, Stein describes her upbringing, her discovery of non-binary genders in Jewish mysticism, and how she parted ways with her community. This is the final episode in our three-part fall author interview series.
Exclusively for JWA, Angela Himsel reflects on seeing her book A River Could Be A Tree in stores for the first time and meditates on the uncategorizable nature of books... and people.
Julie Rezmovic-Tonti teaches middle school Jewish history and serves as Outreach Coordinator at Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax, Virginia. She has a BA in Women's Studies from the University of Maryland and an MA in Jewish Studies from Siegal College. She also studied at Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with her husband, three children, typewriter, pottery wheel, and garden.
Carole King has been a constant source of inspiration and fascination to me since I first listened to “You’ve Got a Friend” in second grade and was entranced by the live performance of Beautiful in Los Angeles. As a young Jewish girl hoping to one day pursue music journalism, I have learned many lessons from King as both an artist and as a strong, independent female.
Rachel Calof’s memoir of life as a mail-order bride in Devils Lake, North Dakota vividly depicts the hardships of life as a western pioneer through the unique lens of a Jewish woman’s experience.
Tova Mirvis is the author of the recently released The Book of Separation, a memoir chronicling her growing doubts about her Orthodox faith and her ultimate decision to leave after forty years in the community.
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