Changing Culture

"Changing Culture," the final panel of the Ingeborg, Tamara & Yonina Rennert Women in Judaism Forum, examined feminist cultural production - from performance to playwriting to poetry - and its impact on broader social movements. Naomi Scheman, professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, led this discussion with:

• Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, international lecturer and motivational speaker;

• Rachel Havrelock, assistant professor of Jewish studies, University of Illinois at Chicago;

• Faith Jones, Bridges magazine;

• Irena Klepfisz, poet, translator and adjunct associate professor of women's studies, Barnard College;

• Alisa Solomon, director of the arts concentration, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

There are things, claims Professor Scheman, that one feels the need to say that "one just doesn't have the words for." And when you try, you either "don't make sense or, in the effort to make sense, you end up betraying what it was you were trying to say. And yet, babbling doesn't do it. Often, in those circumstances, art of one form or another . . . is what does it." Scheman continues:

By providing a container that doesn't prematurely force sense, but which the mind can hold: that's one of the most important roles that [the] arts play. And that means that they are of special importance to people who are marginal . . . because being marginal means, typically, being marginal to the apparatus of sense-making, as well as to things like economic and political power.

For Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the process of sense-making relies heavily on reclaiming those things that, to many people, don't at first make sense at all. On nonsense: "I am personally very interested in nonsense," she said. "In narishkeit. In old stories of old women, of all the things that this culture thinks [of as] nonsense. Like art." In relaying a story passed down to her by Yankel Gross, the third of her six illustrious Hasidic husbands, the Rebbetzin spoke of Truth's dependence on Parable: in order to be seen and appreciated, the naked, sometimes ugly, and usually difficult-to-take Truth needs to borrow "a little bit of jewelry. A jacket, maybe, some makeup" from her more fabulously attired friend.

Conveying the truth through storytelling is a responsibility that Rachel Havrelock traces back to her childhood Torah study:

The only commandment given to the [Israelites] in the midst of [crossing the Jordan River] is: Tell your children a story. It isn't said once, it's said two times. This commandment to tell the story, of course, repeats the earlier commandment, when an earlier generation was crossing the Red Sea, which was another transference, another moment of the birth of a new generation, a new period of Jewish history. We could say that the very first commandment of the entire Jewish tradition is to tell the story.

For a community's stories, she goes on to explain, are intimately linked to its values: "the custodians of myth, any culture's myth, are the people who form that culture, the people who influence social practice and mores."

Poet Irena Klepfisz, however, cautioned both artists and audiences against a custodial impulse that, in the name of protecting a community, either simplifies or suppresses the work. Klepfisz lamented the single and reductive criterion by which much of her work has been judged: "Is it good for the Jews?" By casting Jewish artists as "the unofficial image protectors of the Jewish people," art - and its power to provoke, to challenge, to transform, and to heal - suffers. "I want to be part of a culture of debate," says Klepfisz, "where art does what it has always done . . . which is confront the status quo, rudely, crudely, sometimes very unmusically." Alissa Solomon outlined in particular some of the ways in which Jewish youth are using the arts to critique the status quo of establishment Judaism while, at the same time, reclaiming traditions, practices, and customs from which they previously felt excluded. Jewish queers from Manhattan to Krakow, in applying their "contemporary sensibility" to such diverse art forms as Yiddish literature and klezmer music, have not only made "something new from the proudly proclaimed margins"; they have also discovered connections to their own Jewish identities that more institutionally sanctioned routes - such as "a propagandistic trip to Israel" - failed to make.

As each of the panelists and many audience members noted, the tone and tenor of the discussion changed remarkably at the mere mention of Israel. In describing the trials and challenges of publishing an issue of Bridges magazine dedicated to examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Faith Jones described the distressing ease with which cultural work can be derailed by the issues it raises. The circumscribed conversations (if not the outright silence) that surround the topic of Israel not only result in a lack of funding and support for organizations and individuals daring enough to broach the issue; they also, Jones expects, lead young people who feel unwelcome in Jewish communities where "they're not allowed to talk critically about Israel" to leave those communities. Rachel Havrelock insisted that "the defensiveness on this issue and the anger associated with it is shutting down the very conversations that we need to be having. Not only among Jews, but also between Jews and Arabs and Muslims and leftists of all stripes," while the Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross offered:

I am fascinated that the dynamics in the room changed when Israel is discussed, and with contention. Israel is for me, yes, it's a country. But Israel means to wrestle with God. It's a state of mind . . . It's a big issue, Israel. It's a big responsibility. But this conversation, interestingly, went from talking about us here at home, to something else. And our responsibility is looking at our own kishkas first. The Israel inside.

And so, we must wrestle. Wrestle with ourselves, yes, but also with our communities and our congregations. We must wrestle to shape our religious faiths, practices, and cultures so that they reflect the diversity of our lived lives. So that they honor both tradition and our commitment to fundamental human rights. So that they accommodate our commitments as feminists. For some, this will mean running for elected office or educating the next generation of Torah scholars; others will create alternative religious spaces and rituals or write plays that challenge and change the way we see the world and our place in it. There is, as we saw throughout the course of this enlightening two-day conference, much work to be done. But there are countless ways to do it, and we are, each of us, determined to get it done.