A New Take On Text Messages

Actor-dancer Etta Abramson is giving new life to little-known biblical figure Serach bat Asher. Kae Newcomb

Actor-dancer Etta Abramson is giving new life to little-known biblical figure Serach bat Asher. Kae Newcomb

by Randi Sherman
Staff Writer

After immersing herself in the language and storyline of Genesis, poet Carly Sachs — who had never connected her work to her heritage — is now writing a series of poems about Adam and Eve. “At this point in my life, I’m thinking about relationships, romance, what being in a relationship really means,” says Sachs, 29, who has been studying at Drisha, the advanced Jewish learning center for women on the Upper West Side.

Sachs, whose debut collection in 2006 garnered a Washington, D.C.-area writers’ prize, says, “My studies have provided a whole new tapestry to weave into my poems.”

Etta Abramson, a 24-year-old actor and dancer, is also grappling with Jewish texts, finding new meanings in ancient words and stories. After months spent learning

Gemara and halacha at Drisha, Abramson chose as the subject of a new solo performance piece the biblical figure Serach bat Asher, “a witness to Jewish history.” In Abramson’s hands, Serach eventually bears witness in modern-day New York. “There is a shrine to Serach in India,” says Abramson. “She is a vessel of all the events in time.”

For documentary filmmaker Laura Wiessen, whose new film focuses on converts to Judaism, her study at Drisha helped provide a deeper understanding of the conversion process. The lesson she learned from those making the long journey to a Jewish life, she says, is that “each person has the right to read the text and argue with it, struggle with it.” Wiessen is now working on how to weave Jewish text into the film; it will certainly be found in accompanying educational materials, she said.

The three artists are among 16 who just completed Drisha’s Arts Fellowship program, double the number in last year’s inaugural class. Working at the intersection of Judaism, feminism and art, the Drisha fellows spent a full year at the institute, some taking courses in biblical Hebrew and interpretation, others studying Talmud and halacha. They are part of a widening trend that finds women artists increasingly reinterpreting — and challenging — Jewish tradition. In a sign of the growing acceptance of such art, when San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum opened in June it chose as its first major exhibition the text-inspired “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis.” Three of the seven artists featured are Jewish women.

And later this year The Jewish Museum here will feature the work of 31-year-old muralist Leola Bermanzohn, referred to as “an emerging artist” by museum chief curator Norman Kleeblatt. She will create a mural based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

This new crop of artists follows on the heels of Jewishly knowledgeable visual artists such as Helene Aylon, Bruria Finkel and Ruth Weisberg, all of whom have wrestled with, questioned and confronted “the patriarchal premises embedded within Judaism,” according to Gloria Feman Orenstein, a University of Southern California comparative literature professor who has written on Jewish women artists and gender issues.

Author and Jewish feminist Nessa Rapoport has been observing this trend as it has developed. “This is the first era, and it’s very recent, that Jewish women in critical mass can be Jewishly literate,” she said. “I think it is easier for women to make art that draws on or engages with the Jewish textual tradition because we were never authorities in rabbinic Judaism.”

Eve Grubin, the arts fellowships coordinator at Drisha, believes there is “tremendous interest right now” in Jewish women artists who blend text and art, not only at Drisha but in other fellowships, journals and programs. She noted the increase of poets like Sachs in this year’s class, who now make up a quarter of the fellows.

“It’s an explosion from all different places, a celebration of our Jewish heritage ... There was a time when many Jews felt you couldn’t be an artist and be [religiously] observant,” Grubin said, but those times are gone.

“[Our arts fellows] are steeping themselves in Jewish learning, taking that experience to the work they do as professionals,” Grubin said. “They are grappling with tradition ... creating transcendent connections to tradition.”

Abramson, now 24 and living in New York, has been trying to forge those connections since she was in college. As a senior at York University in her native Toronto, she created a theater company that focused on women in Jewish text. Although the project “never got on its feet,” it resonates in an excerpt from her work-in-progress, “The Consistency of Flour,” which she performed at the Drisha fellows’ end-of-year performance event on June 16. After immersing herself in Gemara and halacha, Abramson — with director Yoni Oppenheim — conceived the piece, a solo performance in which she acts, sings and dances.

Abramson’s piece follows the immortal Serach all the way to contemporary New York. The work incorporates song and dance to help bring the text alive. “Judaism lives inside your body,” says Abramson. “It takes a place inside yourself, not just in your mind. Let the text become a song, become a piece of theater. Instead of just putting it in a ketubah, put it in the body and let it grow.”

Wiessen, who lives on the Lower East Side, had been writing and directing for the news media for “a long time” before she decided to turn a serious eye to documentary filmmaking.

At the Drisha performance, she screened for the first time parts of “More Beloved by Gd” [her spelling], her film that follows a diverse group of Jews-to-be through the conversion process. Among them are a hip-hop artist named Yitz, a young mother named Jennifer and a young woman named Rain. (The trailer can be seen on YouTube.)

“I had been living in Jerusalem, traveling back and forth to New York,” Wiessen said of the film’s genesis. “I was meeting really interesting converts from all cultures and backgrounds” — African, Dominican and Dutch — “and I was fascinated by what drew them to Judaism.”

Wiessen was compelled by their stories and determined to teach others about the little-publicized conversion phenomena.

While so many organizations focus on Jews intermarrying and becoming more secular, “people are not looking at who is coming in and why,” she said. “What is it to be a Jew in the 21st century?”

One of the things that draws converts to Judaism is text, Wiessen believes. “[They] tell me this a lot. ... [Text] isn’t just for the priestly class, the teachers.”

As one of only three visual artists in the Drisha program, Lia Lynn Rosen combines Jewish elements with European and Native American artistic traditions of ceramic art. She also brings a unique perspective as a Jewish woman living in Albuquerque, N.M.

Her work consists mainly of ritual objects, chanukiot, ceremonial goblets and prayer bowls for anything from a wedding to breast cancer survival, as well as mezuzot and an indigo women’s tallit-poncho. Her Web site, ClayKodesh.com, is “making a holy place for the visual, ceremonial arts,” Rosen said. “My work is more about the ceremonial, the practice and prayer, tradition than halacha.”

Rosen’s work is also creating “grounded-ness” for Judaism. “This is a way to say we have a corporeal culture that’s going to last,” she said. “Living in the Southwest, the people who made pottery stayed in one place, creating. Now it’s as if we have a landed past.”

Rosen sees herself as continuing the long Jewish tradition of “taking from where I live,” adding Jewish calligraphy to the art methods she observes in her surroundings.

As an artist-educator, Rosen will use the knowledge she gained at the Drisha program in her work with students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and even beyond if she is hired as director of education at her local synagogue. “I want to teach what I’ve learned. You can teach Hebrew, Talmud, through the arts,” she said. She sees her work as “keruv [Jewish outreach] through art.” This month, she returns to the East Coast to teach a course about Pueblo pottery at New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum.

Sachs, whose debut poetry collection, “the steam sequence,” won the 2006 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Book Prize and who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, didn’t see a connection to Judaism in her work at all when she began the collection as her graduate thesis at The New School.

“I thought I was writing about water,” she said, telling how the theme of water evolved into a narrative about a female Holocaust survivor. She had seen an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, “Art Auschwitz,” and, as usual, “life was filtering in. You can’t plan for it; it just explodes onto the page.”

Her learning at Drisha has had a similar effect. After a class on Genesis, her focus is on Adam and Eve and Midrash Raba, considered the classic, Talmudic-era legends that illuminate the Bible. Her work brings the words of women to the fore. In most of the texts the group studied, “there was no women’s voice, and there needs to be,” she said. “You start to wonder, if there had been a woman’s voice, what would she say?”

This kind of implicit challenging of tradition can be liberating for artists.

Artist/educator Tobi Kahn, a well-known artist in Jewish circles whose work straddles abstraction and Jewish tradition, believes that, as outsiders to tradition, women can take more artistic license. “If you don’t feel something is applicable to you, you have much more freedom when you deal with it,” he says. “It’s a matter of obligation versus the power of choice.”

For the night of the Drisha performance, Sachs worked with two other fellows — dancer and choreographer Dages Keates and composer Basya Schechter — in a work that incorporated passages from “the steam sequence” along with music and dance.

“[Poetry] is my form. I’m so concerned with the page, a tiny world not much bigger than a napkin,” she says in light of her recent collaboration with performing artists. “Moses breaks the tablets and the letters fly off; that’s what it’s like to collaborate.” The result is that, from an initial idea, a completely new and different experience is born.

Sachs reports that her experience at Drisha was so moving and helpful to her work that she’s applied to extend the fellowship another year. “It’s not often that you look around the room and see so much talent and energy. “That’s why I want to stay.”