News About the NWSA Jewish Women's Caucus

Contrary to rumors, the Jewish Women's Caucus is alive and well and moving forward. At the caucus business meeting at the conference in Oakland, Annie Dollins (Assistant Chair of School of Nursing & Health Professions at Northern Kentucky University) and Barbara Lesch McCaffry (Professor of 20th Century British and American Literature in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University) agreed to serve as co-chairs of the caucus. Many thanks to Jodi M. Nelson-Springberg (University of Nevada-Las Vegas) who chaired the caucus from 2002-2006.

The business meeting was small- again there were major conflicts with concurrent sessions and other caucus meetings-but we welcomed two new caucus members (Juidht Rosenbaum and Andrea Rusnock). They both, along with Annie Dollins, expressed interest in being involved in the scholarship committee (more on that below in Phyllis' report).

The group brainstormed options to deal with the challenge of holding caucus meetings during the actual conference and decided to have a dinner/business meeting at the next conference that would be held after the pre-conference sessions and prior to the keynote speaker. Annie has agreed to coordinate that for next year's conference! We also felt it would be helpful to have a sign-up sheet for the caucus at the business meeting and prior to the Shabbat gathering (as well as the forms for paying caucus dues).

There was a vibrant and well-attended Shabbat service that Annie coordinated with many new faces. The oneg which followed had a wonderful spread, most of which came from the Farmer's Market held that afternoon just outside of the conference hotel.

The following day a number of us attended the Creative Writing Series session in which Leora Skolkin Smith read from and discussed her recent novel, Edges: O Israel, O Palestine, as well as the session on "Witnessing Historical Trauma: Holocaust Remembrances across Gender, Genres, Generations" with Susanne Luhmann (Laurentian University, Canada), Marion Gerlind (University of Minnesota), and Sharon Rosenberg (University of Alberta).

Submitted by Barbara Lesch McCaffry

News about the Jewish Women's Caucus Scholarship
by Phyllis Holman Weisbard, Scholarship Committee Chair

The Jewish Women’s Caucus is pleased to announce the winner of our Jewish Women’s Studies Scholarship for 2007. She is Ilana Sarah Dann for a doctoral thesis in progress on "Hybrid Identities, Hybrid Creations: Contemporary Mexican-Jewish Women Crossing Linguistic, Cultural and Creative Boundaries."

Ilana is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with an emphasis on Hispanic languages and literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is studying the lives and work of contemporary Mexican Jewish women authors in an attempt to understand the "complexities of the Mexican Jewish community, as well as the particularly female experience of these complexities as expressed by these authors, many of whom are academics and cultural critics in their own rights."

As she says, "many of these authors are often criticizing not only the patriarchal culture prevalent in Mexico, but that established within the various Jewish communities in Mexico, where diasporic Judaism is understood and practiced at times quite differently" than in the U. S. This award will support her travel this summer to Mexico City to engage in further research and interview several of these authors.

Honorable Mention:

Shira Kohn, History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies Department, New York University: "A Gentlewoman's Agreement: Jewish Sororities in Postwar America, 1947-1968." She is particularly interested in "challenging the degree which sororities encouraged their members to embrace a domestically centered ideology" and also "considers how gender played a pivotal role in the way the Jewish sororities confronted the rise of the Civil Rights movement, and how, by the end of the 1960's, they reacted to charges of antifeminist behavior and conformity which stemmed form Second Wave feminism."