Ilana Blumberg
By Ilana Blumberg
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Life Thousands gather to celebrate women’s Talmud study in Jerusalem
“Come in”: There’s Room Now for Women Too in Talmud Learning Ilana Blumberg On a cold night in Jerusalem, more than 3300 women and men gathered for the first public celebration of women’s Siyum HaShas. The seven-and-a-half-year global cycle of daily Talmud learning came to its close for the thirteenth time since the practice began…
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Life Hiring Passover Cleaning Help Woke Me Up To My Own Privilege
Passover is around the corner. This year, as I begin to prepare in Jerusalem, where cleaning products went on sale the morning after Purim and municipal posters wishing everyone a happy spring holiday decorate the streets, I think back to preparing for Passover four years ago, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was still winter and…
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Life Hiring Passover Cleaning Help Woke Me Up To The Realities Of American Poverty
Passover is around the corner. This year, as I begin to prepare in Jerusalem, where cleaning products went on sale the morning after Purim and municipal posters wishing everyone a happy spring holiday decorate the streets, I think back to preparing for Passover four years ago, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was still winter and…
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Life While American Orthodox Feminists Fight for Clergy Recognition, Israeli Feminists Revolutionize Israel
In Jerusalem, at the tenth bi-annual conference of Kolech, the Religious Women’s Forum, Dr. Ronit Irshai stood up and looked around the full conference room. “Where is everyone?” she said. Irshai is a scholar of gender studies and Jewish law at Bar-Ilan University, a leading feminist and author of ground-breaking work on fertility and Jewish…
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Life An American Mom in Israel
In August, my family and I left Ann Arbor for a yearlong stay in Jerusalem. Ann Arbor is hardly a place devoid of intellectual and cultural ferment. Yet coming to Jerusalem was, for me, the chance to enter into a different ferment of ideas in a different language: Jewish ideas in Hebrew. At the summer’s…
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Life Social Justice means Justice for Women
This year, I knew a month in advance what I would be doing to mark November 25 as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I am affiliated with a variety of feminist organizations, plus I am a graduate of Barnard College and a university faculty member in gender studies, but this…
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Life Being A Mom in the Midst of War
To protect has always seemed to me to be the first duty of the parent. Living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with my husband and three young children, I knew what it was I wanted to shield my children from: violence, fear, social disorder so profound that it would unsettle their very sense of safety in…
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Books Serious Biblical Thought, in Paperback
Avivah Zornberg’s classic studies of Genesis and Exodus are now available in paperback. That itself is a strange thing, because if you enter the home of most scholars of ancient Jewish texts, the books lining their walls will be leather-bound volumes with titles printed on the spine in gold or silver lettering — a Jewish…
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