JewFem Blog

When the announcement was made that the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize would be given to three women, including Leymah Gbowee (pronounced LAY-muh BO-wee), some Jews were particularly proud.

Gbowee, an extraordinary Liberian activist and founder of Women Peace and Security Network-Africa (WIPSEN), who has been influential in mobilizing women for peace and bringing democracy to Liberia, has credited the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) with being one of the first organizations to believe in and to provide financial support for her work.

“AJWS is a name I will remember”, she said recently at an AJWS event. “It is an organization with a heart and a soul. I mean it – and I don’t take my words lightly.”

It is impossible to overstate the intensity of emotion felt in Israel at the news of Gilad Shalit’s impending release. Many of us have been glued to the television screen with unrelenting tears in our eyes since we first heard about the imminent deal. It feels like we just let out a collective breath, like a balloon that had been about ready to burst just let out all its air. And I think this entire episode says something profound about Israel as a society and culture.

I had a conversation with my father over breakfast this morning about fundraising in Israel. My father, Matthew Maryles, who is visiting Israel for the holidays, is currently the CEO of American Friends of Bar Ilan University, responsible for raising considerable sums for both operating costs and capital campaigns of this seminal Israeli institution. This is how he’s spending his “retirement”. In his pre-retirement, he was a Wall Street executive with fundraising just a “hobby” – he worked in fundraising as a layman for too many organizations for me to recount: UJA Federation of New York, The Yeshivah of Flatbush, Gesher, Yeshiva University, JCRC, and the list goes on. Given his vast experience and decades-long perspective, I decided to possibly ruin the casualness of the morning and pick his brain about the current state of Israeli fundraising.

“This is a very difficult time,” he said. Although the organization is still substantially meeting its goals for operating support, and has a successful planned-giving fundraising operation, he said it is very difficult to raise money for capital campaigns. “Hardly anyone has a high level of confidence about what the next five years will look like economically and financially. There is no clear sense about what the future looks like, and in that climate, it is very difficult to secure long-term commitments, and thus create a sustainable long-term strategic plan.”

With the election of Shelly Yachimovich to head Israel’s Labor Party, two major political parties are led by women for the first time in the country’s history. This is an encouraging development not only because it helps advance gender fairness in Israeli society, but also because it potentially signals a new era for Israeli politics, one that has implications for issues as wide-ranging as the military, the peace process, the role of the Haredim and the movement for social justice.

My spouse, master chef and master of kids in the kitchen, offers a sticky idea for making Rosh Hashana extra sweet. Published in The Forward Rosh Hashana edition.

If the purpose of dipping apple slices into honey on Rosh Hashanah is to bring about a sweet year, caramel candy apples offer a kind of extreme dipping. The recipe puts a new twist on a custom that is hundreds of years old.

Some believe that the tradition of dipping apples in honey originated from Solomon’s “Song of Songs” which says, “As the apple is rare and unique among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved — Israel.” In addition, a midrash, or biblical tale, says that trees and all vegetation were created on Rosh Hashanah eve. Others argue that the tradition came from Eastern Europe, where few biblical fruits, other than the apple, were common. Apple trees were also harvested around the holiday season. Either way, it is a beautiful custom: apples, the fruits of love, created on Rosh Hashanah eve, dipped in nature’s sweetest goo. It’s a sticky, finger-licking reminder of a sweet year.

Caramel candy apples are a snazzy version of the practice, like an ancient tradition on steroids. The process of making them is rather straightforward and a fun way to spend an afternoon in the kitchen, especially with kids. Each caramel apple is dipped in a delicious lacquer of the gooey stuff and individually designed with endless options for colorful toppings.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/143487/#ixzz1cqpW7EZf

The news that Saudi women will soon be given the right to vote – if the year 2015 is considered “soon” – is being hailed around the world as remarkable. The BBC called it “groundbreaking”, the White House called it an “important step forward”, and Saudi women’s activists called it “great news”. But this change, which arrived a century late (Finland became the first country to grant universal suffrage in 1906, and a dozen other countries followed suit), is also a troubling indicator about the reality of women’s lives, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. It demonstrates just how far behind Arab culture is from the Western world, and it is a disquieting reminder of just how dangerous the language of “slow change” can be, especially for women – in all cultures.

For Huda Naccache, Israel’s 2011 representative in the Miss Earth beauty pageant, wearing a bikini is important for career advancement.

The 21-year old Christian Arab from Haifa has modeling ambitions, and in order to get noticed, she posed in a bikini for the cover of the Arab Israeli women’s magazine Lilac.

This may not sound like a big deal in a world where everyone from rock stars to child television icons seems to be willing to pose nearly nude for some photo or another. But in Huda’s community, such exposure for women is still taboo.

The ancient walls of the City of David have never witnessed such a scene. Over four thousand women gathered outside Jaffa Gate last Thursday for the first ever mass festival of women’s athletics in Jerusalem. Women wearing scarves and long skirts shook their bodies alongside women in tank-tops and Lycra shorts to the overpowering thump-thump of dance-music as instructors shouted out motivating instructions like, “Come on, girls! Move those hips!”

The ancient walls of the City of David have never witnessed such a scene. Over four thousand women gathered outside Jaffa Gate last Thursday for the first ever mass festival of women’s athletics in Jerusalem. Women wearing scarves and long skirts shook their bodies alongside women in tank-tops and Lycra shorts to the overpowering thump-thump of dance-music as instructors shouted out motivating instructions like, “Come on, girls! Move those hips!”

Nurit Engelmeyer is a champion bicyclist. Only 15 years old, she has already taken home a slew of medals and won this year’s National Road Bicycling championship and the Time Trial National championship, though with her shy modesty and gentle demeanor, she is the last person to let anyone know. She trains six days a week, can often be seen on theModi’in roads with her gear, and she gives many of us – by us, I mean her Mom’s friends – a huge, vicarious thrill.