Sinister Wisdom 119: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century

By Sinister Wisdom

What are Jewish lesbians thinking about? Writing about? Making art about now, here in the first two decades of the 21st Century? Do we see ourselves as Jewish dykes? Jewish lesbians? Genderqueer Jews? How are we thinking about our Jewish lesbian communities and families, natal or invented? How have our relationships to the states of Israel and Palestine changed over time? Can we reconcile the contradictions between our faiths and our politics? Our gender and racial identities? How do we envision our futures and reimagine our pasts, especially in these fractious and dangerous times? With all these questions, one thing is certain: our commitments to making trouble and speaking up are strong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781944981471

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

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Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Editor: Julie R. Enszer

Guest Editors: Elana Dykewomon and Judith Katz

Graphic Designer: Nieves Guerra

Copy Editor: Amy Hong

Hebrew Glossary Editor: Yael Dekel

Yiddish Glossary Editor: Shoshke-Rayzl Juni

Board of Directors: Roberta Arnold, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Julie R. Enszer, Sara Gregory, J.P. Howard, Joan Nestle, Rose Norman, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Yasmin Tambiah, and Red Washburn

Front Cover Art: Offering - Artist: Judith Masur

Media: raku fired clay, 11h X 8 w X 8"d

Back Cover Art: Picking Pears - Artist: Judith Masur

Media: raku fired clay, 12h x 7.5w x 7.5"d

Artist Biography: My lesbian art life started in 1978 when I created Big Woman Notecards, one of the first lines of lesbian notecards in the country. I kept working in black and white until 1993 when I learned to play with color through monotype. In 2014 I found clay. First I fell in love with figure sculpture and later I started doing bas relief on vessels. I adore raku. I don’t make the pots (they are above my pay grade!) but I illuminate them with large women-loving women, grounded, joyful, and full of spirit. My writing and performing herstory is another story.

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976

Former editors and publishers:

Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson (1976–1981)

Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981–1983)

Michaele Uccella (1983–1984)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983–1987)

Elana Dykewomon (1987–1994)

Caryatis Cardea (1991–1994)

Akiba Onada-Sikwoia (1995–1997)

Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss (1997–2000)

Fran Day (2004–2010)

Julie R. Enszer & Merry Gangemi (2010–2013)

Julie R. Enszer (2013–)

Copyright © 2021 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

All rights revert to individual authors and artists upon publication.

Printed in the U. S. on recycled paper.

Subscribe online: www.SinisterWisdom.org

Join Sinister Wisdom on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/SinisterWisdom

Follow Sinister Wisdom on Instagram: www.Instagram.com/sinister_wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a US non-profit organization; donations to support the work and distribution of Sinister Wisdom are welcome and appreciated. Consider including Sinister Wisdom in your will.

Sinister Wisdom, 2333 McIntosh Road, Dover, FL 33527-5980 USA

Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Additional Note for a Special Issue in a Special Time

Judith Katz

Notes for a Special Issue

Elana Dykewomon

Notes for a Special Issue

tova

The Gift Continues: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century

Ellen Rifkin

Notes from Israel / Palestine

RD Landau

After The Shooting, I Come Home For A Lesbian Wedding

JEB (Joan E. Biren)

Another Jewish Lesbian for Peace and Freedom–

Mira Schlosberg

Loshn-Koydesh

Kelsey Jannerson

Sensory Seudah

Terry Baum

A scene from Mikvah

Kate Raphael

When Rose Met Emma (An Imagined History)

JB Brager

Rose Schneiderman

Joan Larkin

Fanny

Susan Sherman

What We See

Clare Kinberg

Excerpts from Everything I Don’t Know About Aunt Rose and Mr. Arnwine

Dorian Katz

Gluck

Chaya Green

Switch Streams

Shayne Punim

Chutzpah

Yael Mishali

Being a Mizrahi Femme in Israel

Irena Klepfisz

Der fremder in der fremd

Dorian Katz

Claude Cahun

Elana Dykewomon

Yiddish

Deborah La Garbanza

Lullaby/1975

Nancy K. Bereano

Funny, You Don’t Look . . .

Paula Gottlieb

Self-Portrait 2017

Penny Rosenwasser

But You Don’t Look Jewish

Bonnie Morris

The Incident

Joan Annsfire

The Harvest

Jyl Lynn Felman

A Lament For Zion

JEB (Joan E. Biren)

Marching as part of the Women’s Pentagon Action in November 1981

Ginny Z Berson

Radical Imagination

Amy Horowitz

Let’s not eat ourselves alive

Gila Svirsky

Jewish and Lesbian in Mombasa, Kenya: A Memoir Excerpt

Amelia Mae Paradise

Jewish Whiteness Christianism in the United States

Julie R. Enszer

WASP

Gabe Barnow

Cheshvan

Chaya Hazel Caninsky

To Leslie Feinberg, With Love

Shayne Punim

Tuches

Judy Freespirit

The Conversation

Abbie Goldberg

Next Year in New Jersey

Jennifer Abod

Turning Point

Marla Brettschneider

The Family Flamboyant 2: On the Young, Black, Bold, Bi, and Jewish

Abbie Goldberg

Bracha for Checking your Horoscope

Dalia Neis

Memories of a Northern Wind—Clitoral Visions

Barbara Ruth

Tashlich 5772

Tovah Gidseg

Ezras Nashim

Abbie Goldberg

Bracha for Taking Anti-Depressants

Rabbi Karen Bender and Rabbi Lisa Edwards

Then and Now: A conversation between two lesbian rabbis 25 years into their rabbinic careers

Isa Epstein

Returning Home

Teya Schaffer

Bible Excerpts

Dolphin Waletzky

Lesbian Daughter of a Holocaust Survivor

Kathryn Silverstein

Deep Desires: Embodiment and (Re)Writing Diaspora

Alison R. Solomon

Fear and Longing

Bonnie S. Kaplan

A Manzanita Yad

Yael Mishali

Bibliography

Amy Horowitz

Resource List

Glossary of Non-English Words

Snapshot of Lesbian Love Celebration

Obituary: Ida VSW Red

Book Reviews

Contributors

Notes for a Magazine

In my memory, that faulty tool I rely on regularly, one of the first issues of Sinister Wisdom that I ever encountered was Sinister Wisdom 29/30: The Tribe of Dina . In a hazy memory from my seventeen- or eighteen-year-old self, it was on the shelf of a used bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I remember pulling Sinister Wisdom 29/30 off the shelf, leafing through the pages, and not buying it. I wish I would have bought it, though a year or two later, I read it thoroughly encountering many of my favorite writers, Irena Klepfisz, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Enid Dame, Sarah Schulman, and more, in the pages.

Now, thirty-five years later, I am thrilled as the editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom to present another issue of the journal dedicated to Jewish lesbian writing, Sinister Wisdom 119: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century. Elana Dykewomon and Judith Katz have assembled a wonderful collection of writing and art that explores what it means To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century. Within these pages are women who have taken groundbreaking action for Jewish lesbian-feminist thought, visibility, literature, and art. In Sinister Wisdom 119: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century, readers will find familiar voices and new voices. We are in a moment of extraordinary revival and reimagining of Jewish, queer, and lesbian identities, and the work at the intersections of those identities is energizing and exciting. These pages capture that spirit; I hope we can continue to build on this work for many years to come, and I hope you enjoy every moment of reading this issue.

Since April of 2020, when the reality of pandemic America settled in my mind and my body, I have been strategizing with the Sinister Wisdom board of directors, as well as our supporters, writers, and other advocates, about how Sinister Wisdom can respond to this moment and to the needs of womxn in our community. We started by doing a few zoom readings. Those readings have grown. We have now done a reading or some sort of zoom performance every month since April. In September, we added in writing workshops and a book club. We will continue to offer other activities as a way to both meet the intellectual, emotional, and creative needs in our community and also as a way to lift up lesbian art, literature, and culture in this moment of profound uncertainty and transformation. I want to personally thank everyone who has been on this journey with Sinister Wisdom. May we all continue to be together in ways that are meaningful.

Thank you, too, to all of the women who stepped up to support the fall fundraising campaign for Sinister Wisdom. I write this note before it is over and amid a flurry of writing thank you letters, depositing checks, proofreading copy for emails and letters to ask you to support the journal. Every year, women show up for Sinister Wisdom, sending checks, calling with credit card information, joining as monthly sustainers, and giving to make the work of Sinister Wisdom a reality. It is incredibly gratifying and I thank each of you for your support. Sinister Wisdom would not exist with you. Thank you for being present for the journal and for giving.

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer

January 2020

Additional Note for a Special Issue in a Special Time

On the night of Memorial Day 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, at the intersection of 38 th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis where Judith lives, a white cowboy cop, Devin Chauvin, knelt on the neck of a forty-six-year-old Black man, George Floyd, for almost nine minutes and choked the life out of him. If you look at the first viral video, it looks as if Chauvin alone is on Mr. Floyd’s neck. But if you look at the video shot from security cameras across the street, you can see two other cops kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s back as he pleads for them to get off. In both videos you can see a fourth cop pacing back and forth, threatening alarmed onlookers, including the seventeen-year-old woman who took the video. We are grateful that he did not confiscate that young woman’s cell phone.

The mainstream media is crediting the horrific death of George Floyd at the hands of a killer cop with starting a movement. But we know that the Black Lives Matter movement and the Movement for Black Lives have been actively organizing as such since 2013, after vigilante George Zimmerman took the life of seventeen-year-old African American teen, Trayvon Martin, as he was walking home from a trip to the store.

Black Lives Matter has its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and is connected to other protest movements for human rights and liberations—for workers, for Palestinians, for Jews of all colors, lesbians and queers—as testified to by the authors and artists we present to you in this issue of Sinister Wisdom.

Black lives absolutely matter. Until all Black lives matter, we cannot begin to change and heal the centuries of systemic racist oppression that degrade every U.S. citizen. We state here our unequivocal support for the Black Lives Matter movement and the Movement for Black Lives.

In sisterhood and struggle,

Judith Katz and Elana Dykewomon

Notes for a Special Issue

Judith Katz

What are Jewish lesbians thinking about? Writing about? Making art about now, here in the first two decades of the 21st Century?

Do we see ourselves as Jewish dykes? Jewish lesbians? Genderqueer Jews? How are we thinking about our Jewish lesbian communities and families, natal or invented?

How have our relationships to the states of Israel and Palestine changed over time? Can we reconcile the contradictions between our faiths and our politics?

Our gender and racial identities?

How do we envision our futures and reimagine our pasts, especially in these fractious and dangerous times? One thing is certain. Our commitments to making trouble and speaking up are strong.

This issue of Sinister Wisdom: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century, which takes its title from that life-giving stanza in Muriel Rukeyser’s epic poem Letter to the Front, is a gathering of answers, challenges, and opinions directed at these and other questions. We present it to you thirty-five years after the initial publication of Evelyn Torton Beck’s groundbreaking Jewish lesbian anthology, Nice Jewish Girls, and thirty years after the publication of Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz’s The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. Those weren’t the first glimpses into what Jewish lesbian writers were thinking about. Elana’s first novel, Riverfinger Women, was first published in 1974. Alice Bloch published The Law of Return in 1983, and The Sophie Horowitz Story by Sarah Schulman came out in 1985.

Following those, through the 1990s and beyond, came novels, poetry, and short fiction collections published by Jewish dyke writers and poets such as Jyl Lynn Felman and Joan Larkin, and inspirational, historical work by visual artists such as Paula Gottlieb and Joan E. Biren (aka JEB). Nancy K. Bereano published the first editions of my own novels in her groundbreaking publishing house, Firebrand Books. You will find work by Nancy, Irena, Jyl, Joan, Paula, and JEB among others, whose names you may recognize in these pages. And we are also proud to publish writing by women whose work was new to us—Kelsey Jannerson’s Sensory Seudah and Shaya French’s To Leslie Feinberg with Love, for example, challenged us as (older) readers and editors in the best ways possible.

This project began in March 2018 when my publicist, Michele Karlsberg, suggested that my old pal Elana and I edit a Jewish lesbian issue of Sinister Wisdom. Now, Elana edited Sinister Wisdom from the late ‘80s until 1994. She’s a pro, she’s tough, and she knows what she’s doing. Me, the most editing I’ve done until now was my own work and that of my creative writing students and some of my writing group pals. The task seemed daunting, but I thought maybe I could use it as a way to get out of the house. By that I mean the house I stuck myself into, away from art and activism as I recovered from a years-long bout with chemo fog.

I am happy to say that, thanks to the work you will find between these pages, I have emerged. I am delighted to be making noise and causing trouble again—part of a team presenting you with this collection of writing and art by Jewish lesbians, now, in this second decade of the 21st Century—indeed, this gift.

Judith Katz

January 2021

Notes for a Special Issue

Elana Dykewomon

It’s been some twenty years since I edited an issue of Sinister Wisdom . I thank Julie Enszer for the opportunity, Michele Karlsberg for somehow persuading Judith and me to undertake this, Judith for her good judgement and tenacity, and all the contributors who trusted us.

Muriel Rukeyser wrote To be a Jew in the twentieth century /Is to be offered a gift.In the 21st century, we are compelled to take that gift up again. What´s the gift? Everyone we´ve published here, as well as the ones we didn´t have room for, has their own answer. Many are longtime activists who experience core Jewish values as goads to action. Most are horrified that the Jews of the Israeli power structures don´t appear to share those values (e.g., welcome the stranger as your friend; work for justice for all; envision peace and honor the creativity of its practitioners). Some are atheists, some have led religious lives, have been religious leaders. Some are sex workers, students, clerks, poets, librarians, teachers, rabble-rousers, technicians in a host of fields. It is Jewish to have something to say about being Jewish and to disagree about what that is.

Is being Jewish a culture or a religion? Consider that Jews come in all races; that we are Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi. A people is not a religion, or not only a religion. And that’s one of the central paradoxes of Judaism. We are a long, varied collection of responses to seasonal change; somewhere in us we remember when we were shepherds making up poems that became the Song of Songs; we have complex, portable sets of instructions for burial and mourning—traditions that have given me comfort as I face the deaths of those I love. I have felt held in the practices of my people, though I have no belief in a god who can speak from a burning bush. But I also know a good metaphor when I see one—California burns as I write, and many voices speak from its forests.

And, since I originally wrote this, California—most of the U.S., much of the world—is sheltering in place, responding to a pandemic that makes no distinctions between us, although those who suffer the most are those who always suffer the most—people of color, working class and poor communities, refugees, disabled and old folks. In a vulnerable category, I have rarely left my house for a long time, and likely this pattern will continue for awhile. Those of us with the means to shelter-in-place in relative comfort are, I hope, reaching out to those who are on the edges, supporting Black Lives Matter initiatives, individuals, health care workers and food banks. We can counter our impulses to horde by reaching for the clarity of sharing what we can. And many, many are. Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world, a useful precept now from traditional Jewish teaching.

One of the side-effects of being home is going through old papers. Prompted by a question on Facebook, I went through a box of Judy Freespirit’s papers, a dear friend who died in 2010. I found a story she wrote, and which we often performed together, The Conversation. With Judith and Julie Enszer’s approval, I included it in this issue—and found a depth of pleasure in being able to honor Judy’s memory. In times of plague, it can be soothing to remember the work, creativity and inspiration of the women we loved and admired.

So, what does being a Jewish lesbian mean to me? Always to work with a commitment to intersectional justice. This year it’s an opportunity to work with my old friend, Judith, and encourage other dykes to get their words out as Jews. Being a Jew is coming from a people, a particular set of histories on this planet, knowing at least parts of our traditions. This self-knowledge helps us recognize and appreciate the traditions of others—and makes it possible to create something new with our inheritances.

Being a Jewish lesbian means being attuned to catch a shift in the wind (and damn, but they’ve been shifting lately). Like beautiful treyf snails, we have sensitive twitching antennae that can taste salt in the air. Some of us hide, some of us fight alone, others organize. We are stigmatized, we are often crushed. But here we are again. Hiding, fighting, organizing; struggling to survive and to make our survival meld with the survival of every other oppressed and displaced being. Suffering to be free, / Daring to live for the impossible, as Rukeyser said.

I saw Rukeyser read at an antiwar poets’ event in Chicago in ‘68 or ‘69. All the other poets were men. They treated her with deference, as though an alien had entered their midst. She was self-possessed; she had something to say. She read Delta Poems, personalizing the tragedies of the war in Vietnam—both of the Vietnamese and of those of us Americans who felt powerless to stop the horrors of our government, even as we took to the streets. She gave me a great gift—an epiphany that my life was possible. As a Jew, as a lesbian, as an activist, as a fat woman, as a writer. She lit a way, a path, a reality that I had only held in secret. Then as now.

Often I have to remind myself that being visible, that speaking out in whatever ways we can, creates possibilities for others we have no idea about. We don’t know where our impassioned pleas, our metaphors, the metaphor of being ourselves, will take root and change lives. But we know that it happens. So we take the chance. Here, here are many Jewish dykes taking a chance. Find out what happens when you listen.

Elana Dykewomon

January 2021

The Gift Continues: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century

tova

To be a Jew in the twentieth century

Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,

Wishing to be invisible, you choose

Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.

Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:

Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood

Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God

Reduced to a hostage among hostages.

The gift is torment. Not alone the still

Torture, isolation; or torture of