12 frogs read think get curious

Trust me, I’m telling you stories

I just got home from JWA’s tenth anniversary celebration. These kind of events aren’t really my thing — arguably, any social function involving more than three other people and leaving the house isn’t my kind of thing — but I’m glad I went.

Gail Reimer, the executive director and founder of the Jewish Women’s Archive, lived up to the evening’s “Inspiration” theme when she spoke. Gail is a visionary — now that I no longer work there, I can say that without worrying if I sound like a suck-up — and listening to her talk about the important, inspiring places stories create for us was more than worth schlepping over to Boston University in the drizzle to hear.

What she really delivered was a rallying cry for engagement in the world. Current events and the messiness of our political “leadership” mean we have a greater need than ever for access to inspirational stories. Stories are what we have, stories are where we came from. At their best, stories inspire us to go into the world and work to change it when it isn’t the place we see in our hearts.

Listening to the speakers tonight, I was reminded of one of my favorite college professors, Eva Kollisch, and the time I interviewed for her Cather Colette and Woolf seminar. (Sarah Lawrence, beloved freak school, requires that you meet with potential professors before you can register for their classes.) It was the beginning of my sophomore year, and I’d never read any of those authors. In fact, I remember looking nervously around Eva’s office at all the books on her shelves, and realizing most of the books I’d read — and virtually all those novels I’d read on my own — were written by men. I had read very few books written by women. And that is what I told Eva — I needed one of the fifteen spots in her year-long class because I thought that needed to change.

So when I heard Woolf quoted tonight ( “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman” ) I thought both I knew that and not any more.

I hope everyone else at the party tonight left feeling good about being there, left fired up about the stories they know, about the stories they can listen to and remember, and plotting what to do next.

[...] You can hook up to the flickr photo display, or read the online guestbook at birthday.jwa.org. You can also read a great blog post by my predecessor at JWA, Jen Spadafora describing what the event meant to her. [...]

Gail Twersky Reimer absolutely is an inspiration. I unfortunitely was unable to attend the 10th anniversary celebration, but believe that she spoke beautifully. As her daughter she has always inspired me. I was always encouraged to work towards whoever I wanted to become and be whoever I believed I was. It is this philosophy that I think is essential to understanding Gail Twersky Reimer and the JWA. The strong feminist comes in no one particular form. It is an attitude not a lifestyle. When we speak up and insist that our voices are heard, whatever if it we have to say, we become the women my mom wants us to be.