Hannah Senesh, Golda Meir, and now Kate Bornstein

By Bonnie Rosenbaum My introduction to Jewish heroes can be traced back to one amazing Barbie doll. It was 1986, I was in 7th grade, and my Sunday school class at Temple Sinai had started a unit on “Great Jews.” Carrie Horrowitz marched to the front of the classroom, launched the blond statuette into the air, and began her oral report: “Hannah Senesh was a brave woman who parachuted into Yugoslavia to save the Jews during the Holocaust.” Barbie quickly crashed to the floor and my classmates and I tried to stifle our laughs. Thus began our lesson on Jewish heroes. As a 12-year-old girl who spent her lunch hour playing football with the boys, Hannah defined awesomeness through her parachute alone. Only years later did I learn the full story of her life, her poetry, her defiance. When it...

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De-constructing a City of Queer Borders

By Lily Hoffman Simon If you were to ask someone to picture the queer community in Israel, it is a fair bet to say that they would picture the group as homogenous, fixed, marginalized.  The term queer itself, initially a derogatory label for homosexuals, was reclaimed as an all-encompassing umbrella term for anyone who defines themselves as having an “alternative” sexual expression, emphasizing the uniform oppression of queers. What happened to the complexities of that oppression, and of those identities? What about the places/spaces that encourage these complexities? Enter City Of Borders, a new documentary following the lives of queer Israelis and Palestinians.  The directorial debut of Yun Suh, a Korean American filmmaker who gained interest in Israel/Palestine while working as a broadcaster and reporter in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel, the film demonstrates exactly what is...

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