The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology / Edition 1

by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, Irena Klepfisz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807036051
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	08/31/1989
Edition description:	Rev. and expanded ed
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

Editorial Reviews

It is my fervent wish that The Tribe of Dina will wander, not in the desert, but into our classrooms, our homes and libraries, and when it does wander in, I trust we will welcome it. —Women's Review of Books

From the Publisher

Although uneven in literary quality and sometimes naive, this potpourri of short fiction, poetry, essays and interviews is a vigorous, stimulating celebration of a multifaceted Jewish womanhood. Cultures outside the mainstream American experience are illuminated via memories of childhoods in a Jewish Sephardic home in Catholic Argentina and in a segregated Russian-Jewish community in China. Novelist Sarah Schulman offers a walking tour through radical Jewish women's history on the Lower East Side, 1879-1919, and Jerusalemite Chaya Shalom discusses the discrimination she has faced as a Sephardi and as a lesbian in Israel. Savina Teubal reads Genesis as the usurpation of a matriarchate by a patriarchy; and Julie Greenberg, a lesbian rabbinical student, attempts to reconcile Jewish traditions with feminism. Preserved here are a 19th century Moroccan ballad of a young woman who chooses martyrdom rather than joining the Sultan's harem and converting to Islam, and an autobiographical story by an American college student who was hidden in a Polish orphanage during WW II. The editors are both writing instructors at Vermont College. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This moving collection of essays, memoirs, interviews, poetry, fiction, and artwork, an expanded and updated version of materials published in 1986 as a special issue of the journal Sinister Wisdom , traverses national boundaries to present the diversity of Jewish women's experiences and beliefs. Reflections on the Holocaust, Zionism, feminism, and the recent Palestinian uprising are juxtaposed with writing on relationships, identity, and assimilation; traditional songs and celebrations; and translations from Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino. The anthology attests to the existence and fruitfulness of a Jewish women's literary and cultural tradition that garners strength by examining rather than suppressing conflicts. With an excellent bibliography, resource materials, and glossary. Highly recommended.-- Deborah Gussman, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

Library Journal