Judy Bolton-Fasman
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
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Life The Sweeping Arc of Jewish History: An Interview with Jessamyn Hope
The late, great Italian novelist and memoirist Natalia Ginzburg once observed that everything that one writes is a little autobiographical. Glimmers of Jessamyn Hope’s personal story are scattered throughout her lovely, memorable and newly published novel, “Safekeeping.” Hope’s impressive roman a clef takes place in 1994 and its events are set into motion early on…
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Life Two Jewish LGBT Poets Remember Their Mothers
Aurora, the daughter of Rosario. Lesléa, the daughter of Florence. The mothers are invoked; their names are eternal. Aurora Levins Morales and Lesléa Newman came together on a recent Sunday afternoon in Boston under the auspices of Keshet—a national organization dedicated to the inclusion of LGBT Jews in all aspects of Jewish life — to…
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Culture Why My Father Wouldn’t Let Me Read Marjorie Morningstar
When I was a young teenager in the late 1970s, my father forbade me to read “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel chronicling the eponymous Marjorie’s coming of age in the 1930s. Marjorie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked their way out of the Bronx and to Manhattan’s Upper West Side,…
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Culture ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’ Gets a New Look For Mother’s Day
Leslea Newman’s iconic picture book “Heather Has Two Mommies” had a simple beginning. A woman approached Newman on the street in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she lived at the time, and said her family needed a book to which her daughter could relate. Meaning that she wanted to read a book to her daughter that featured…
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Life A Poet’s Lens Into a Violent Marriage
Photograph courtesy of Jehanne Dubrow The Arranged Marriage is Jehanne Dubrow’s powerful new volume of poetry, and it bears witness to her Jewish Honduran mother Jeannette’s complicated life story. Her family left Germany in the late 1930s for Honduras, and Jeannette was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1946 for medical reasons. Immediately after the…
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Life Quitting My Meds, Slowly
illustration by Lior Zaltzman Three years ago I decided to take Abilify, an anti-psychotic medication, prescribed to me to boost the waning effectiveness of my anti-depressant. I had been on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) since the fall of 2001, and Abilify would be the third psychotropic prescription in my pill organizer. Almost immediately, though,…
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Life A Havana Love Story for Purim
Nothing in Brooklyn could rival the formal dances in Havana at the Patronato de la Communidad Hebreo de Cuba. And nothing in the world could rival the exquisite Purim Ball of 1954 at the Patronato. Although my nineteen-year old mother was not selected as the Queen Esther of the ball that night, she was one…
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Life A Monster Love Story
I met my first boyfriend Monster by way of the Hebrew Home for the Aged when I was sixteen and he was eighteen. His great-grandfather had a room across the hall from my grandmother. My mother and his grandmother were often the only relatives visiting the retirement home. They started talking about this and that…
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