MARTHA ACKELSBERG ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney and today is September 13th, 2011. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Martha Ackelsberg and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Martha, do I have your permission to record this interview?

MARTHA ACKELSBERG: Yes, you do.

CW:Thank you. So, could we start with you telling me briefly what you know about your family background?

MA:Let's see. Not a whole lot. My father's family, my father's father came from 1:00Stryy, which was somewhere, I think, we discovered in the Ukraine area. And according to my father, his father came here when he was somewhere between nine and fifteen. My brother has been actually doing a little bit of genealogical work. So, he's trying to find out a little bit more about this. But anyway, so -- and my father's mother, I don't know -- we don't know where she came from or where her family came from. My mother's father came from Galicia and my mother's mother, I believe, was born in this country. Her father, they were from Austria or Germany. My grandmother on my mother's side was one of thirteen children. 2:00That was the great-grandparental family that I knew the most about. My mother was extremely fond of her grandmother who lived in Newburgh, New York, in what was described to me as this big house with the thirteen kids. I never met her. I was named for her. Her name was Martha. And that's about -- I don't know anything about any generations earlier. It's kind of wild.

CW:Were there any family stories that were passed down from grandparents?

MA:The main story that I remember was from that particular piece of the family. My grandmother, I said, was one of thirteen children. Ten of them lived to 3:00adulthood. So, three of them, I guess, died when they were fairly young. And the one story my mother told me about that -- I mean, she used to love, I guess -- they used to love to go up to Newburgh. My mother grew up in New York City, so going to Newburgh was like going to the country for a vacation. And every once in a while, my grandmother took me on the Hudson River. There was a Hudson River steamer and we would go up for a day. Or sometimes I think we might have even stayed overnight but I don't remember that. But we certainly went up to Newburgh going up the Hudson River. That was tremendously exciting when I was a little kid. But my mother told me the story -- I guess it might have been when my youngest great-uncle was born that my -- I mean, all of that generation were born in the house. So, my great-grandmother was upstairs in bed and had just 4:00given birth and she heard some noise downstairs and it turned out that one of the other children had died. And I guess the noise downstairs was the hearse coming to take the body away. And she asked something about what happened and I guess one of the other kids, I'm not sure which one of the great-uncles, said something like, "So-and-so died, but it's all right, mommy, because now we have a new one." So, that story my mother told me, I don't know how many times she told me, but obviously it made a very deep impression on me. And then, the stories about my father's family, I really heard almost nothing. I mean, I 5:00didn't even hear about Stryy until maybe ten or fifteen years ago, at which point my father told me that his father had come over by himself when he was quite young. It turns out he probably came with a brother or uncle or something like that. But other than that, that's basically all I know. Couple years ago, I was reading the book -- oh God, I can't remember the name of either the author or the book, but about -- it was written by a philosopher historian about a family -- "The Missing" or "The Lost" or something like that. I don't know, it's about a particular family that had roots in Ukraine and he was trying to find them and he travels all over the world. It was a fascinating kind of semi-oral 6:00historical kind of thing. But anyway, one of the stops on this trip is Stryy, and the name sparked a memory, and it turned out he had in there resources that he had used, one of which was a book on the history of -- picture book, basically, of the history of Jews in the Ukraine, Russia and the Ukraine, which I took out of the library, found pictures of Stryy, showed them to my father, who got very, very excited 'cause it was the first time he'd ever seen anything from where his father had been. So, that was kind of neat. It's a more recent family story, yeah.

CW:Nice. Can you tell me, describe the home you grew up in? Would you say it was a Jewish home?

MA:It was definitely a Jewish home, not a Yiddish Jewish home. I think my 7:00maternal grandfather and probably both my paternal grandparents spoke Yiddish. My father's father died when I was three. So, I have very few memories of him. And my grandmother lived to be -- till just about fifteen years ago. And she did speak Yiddish. Not on a daily basis, but she certainly knew it. And actually, when I was in college, I took a Yiddish class so I could -- she and I would have these minimalist conversations, (laughs) occasionally. But my parents were both -- I guess we would say radical Zionists. That was their main Jewish identity through their teens and early twenties, I think. They were both planning to make 8:00aliyah to Israel. They were part of a group that was -- they had adjusted their college major so that they would have the right combination of things. They were going to found a kibbutz or at least go and live together on a kibbutz and all of this was happening, I guess, in the mid-to-late '30s. And when World War II broke out, their parents said, No way are you going to Palestine. (laughs) So, that was sort of the end of that dream. But they kept up their commitments to a kind of -- a Jewish homeland in Israel, although they were bi-nationalists initially. They were very nervous about having a Jewish state that would displace the people who were there already. And my mother explained to me -- I 9:00didn't realize until probably my twenties the degree to which that was their identity when they were growing up. My mother explained to me at that point that when they moved out to suburban New Jersey, they didn't feel like there was any way that they could express that. They had some friends in New York that they would see occasionally. But if they wanted to give us a Jewish identity, it had to be through a synagogue, they thought. So, they joined a Conservative synagogue and that was the home that I grew up in. I had no idea that there was this whole other Jewish life that had been theirs in a way when they were younger. So, we went to synagogue on Friday nights, observed the holidays. My parents kept a kosher home. I went, starting when I was ten, I think I went to 10:00Camp Ramah, which was a sleep-away camp, Conservative movement.

CW:Did you have a favorite holiday growing up?

MA:Passover. Passover was definitely my favorite holiday because I felt like -- it still is, I think. But then, I think it was because I felt like I was aware of being Jewish all the time because you had to think about what you were going to eat and stuff like that. The town that we grew up in, particularly the area of town that we grew up in, had almost no Jews in it. I was one of two Jewish kids in my elementary school class the whole time that I went through and the only one who observed anything. I would miss all the Jewish holidays. I wouldn't 11:00be at school. I refused to sing Christmas carols. So, it was a bit alienating in some ways. But somehow, Passover, with all of that ritual and not just the seders, which I loved, but cleaning the house, getting out all the chometz, and then having to eat special foods the whole time and bring my own food and all that, I really loved that. I still do. (laughs) There is something about that daily, almost hourly reminder.

CW:Are there any foods that you particularly remember as being Jewish or family recipes?

MA:Yeah, I remember a couple positively and negatively. My grandmother, my father's mother, used to bring an apple sponge cake every year. Huge vats of it 12:00and way more than anybody could ever eat and it would always get moldy before we finished it. And she also made gefilte fish, which had no flavor. (laughs) And my father would, as soon as she came into the house with it, he would throw it into a pot and it had all kinds of vegetables. And by the end, it would be a bit better. But at a certain point, he convinced her that it was too much work and she should not bother and he started making gravlax, which was obviously very different from gefilte fish and that became -- during my sort of adult years -- and now my brother and I both do it for seders. That's what our family now does 13:00instead of gefilte fish. We have gravlax on Pesach. And my father was very into his particular way of making charoset, also, that had almonds as well as walnuts. And I remember sitting around in the kitchen in Bloomfield, the town where I lived for the first -- till I was in college. And he had a hand meat grinder and he would put the nuts and the apples through there and it would be this whole -- the whole family would be sitting around while he made the charoset. And we still use some variant on that recipe. Yeah, those are the things that mostly stand out from Passover, yeah. Oh, and the other thing is 14:00potatoes for the karpas. My father's family, or I think it was my father's family, had a tradition of not just eating parsley but potatoes for the first blessing for fruit of the earth. And so, we would always have a small piece of boiled potato at the beginning of the seder, and my mother, almost every year as if it were the first time she'd experienced this, would say something like, "A boiled potato never tasted so good." And now -- my mother died now eleven years ago, but somebody at the seder table has to say that now every year. It's sort of part of -- it's like the Four Questions. Somebody has to make the boiled potato comment sort of in memory of my mother at the seder. Was her favorite 15:00time, also. So, her absence is especially noted at that time.

CW:And did you do the Four Questions in Hebrew, in --

MA:Yeah. I started doing them in Hebrew when I was pretty little, I don't know how small, but yeah.

CW:And did you have Jewish education as well as the public school?

MA:Yes. I went to after school Hebrew school in Bloomfield through elementary school. I don't know when I started. Maybe second grade or something like that. It was usually Sunday morning. Started one day a week and then it was two days a week. So, it would be either Sunday and then Monday and Wednesday after school or Tuesday and Thursday after school, something like that through probably sixth 16:00grade, till I was bat mitzvah. And then, I started going into -- at a certain point, I can't remember when, but probably somewhere in -- must be high school, I started going into New York to go to the seminary Prozdor, which was the high school program of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Went there for a few years and then my last year in high school, I actually took classes at the seminary college, also.

CW:So, that was after school?

MA:Yeah, that would be -- I think it was one afternoon a week and all Sunday morning or something like that.

CW:And did you like the Hebrew school growing up?

MA:Did I like it? I liked learning what there was to learn. I found the history fascinating, the language was okay. I mean, some of the teachers were awful. Most of the kids weren't really into it. And I guess we all had to do it in order to be bar or bat mitzvah. But at a certain point, my father became chair of the Hebrew school committee of the synagogue. My parents were both very active in the synagogue. And he hired a principal who was a young guy at the Jewish -- who was actually studying to be a cantor as well as an educator at the Jewish Theological Seminary. So, he became the new principal of the Hebrew school and he hired a bunch of -- they were all men, I guess. Right, they were rabbinical students at the seminary, and they would come out to New Jersey to 18:00teach the classes. Most of them were terrific. They were not like the old codgers we had the first couple of years. They were young and enthusiastic and so that was really fun.

CW:Were there any specific moments or experiences that were particularly formative to you in terms of your young Jewish identity?

MA:(pauses) Well, I guess one comes to mind at the moment, maybe because of the context, and who knows. This principal, Saul Wachs, who's now gone on to become a very major Jewish educator, lives in Philadelphia and got back in touch with him at a -- bumped into him at a conference a couple years ago. It was really 19:00neat. Anyway, he was a cantor and I used to go to junior congregation and there was another boy in my class whose name escapes me at the moment, his English name. I remember his Hebrew name was Sar, meaning "prince." But I can't remember what his English name now was. But anyhow, so this particular year, Saul Wachs was teaching the special nusach, the melodies for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are quite special for the High Holidays. And he was teaching them to this guy because he was a boy and he was gonna lead the services. And somehow or 20:00another, I was listening in. I don't know exactly how that happened. Maybe he let -- I mean, he obviously let me. It's not like I was standing at a keyhole or something like that. But anyway, he was supposed to be leading the services for the High Holidays and one of those days that particular year, he got sick. And so, I ended up having to do it even though I was a girl because I was the only person who was prepared in some way to do it. So, that's my main memory from those days. And I guess the other thing, my mother tells me that when -- Camp 21:00Ramah had, on Friday nights and Saturday mornings when the whole camp prayed together, would have -- I went to Ramah in the Poconos and everything used to be set up in this huge big semi-circle under an enormous, beautiful tree, which was referred to as eyts tfilah, the prayer tree. And one day, I had a kind of reunion, of friends from Ramah came for a weekend. I can't remember how old I was or where -- I remember we were in Bloomfield, still, so -- but I could have been -- sometime when I was a teenager, I guess. And there were a bunch of kids there and we set up -- we had a big tree, not anywhere near as big as that one, but we had a big tree in the back yard. And so, we set up chairs back there and we were going to have services back there. And my mother said that it was very 22:00painful to her that although I obviously had organized this reunion, 'cause it was at our house and I had set up the chairs and everything, I wouldn't lead the services. I insisted that one of the boys that was there lead the services because that's what boys were supposed to do. And she told me later that she found that -- that was very hard for her. But I bought into that even though it rankled to some extent.

CW:Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about Camp Ramah? 'Cause I know that was an important part of your young life. Can you describe a typical day at Ramah?

MA:Well, the main thing about Ramah when I was there as a camper was that it was a Hebrew-speaking camp. So, we were supposed to be speaking Hebrew all the time, 23:00which obviously we couldn't do entirely. But we did a lot in the bunk, in our activities. So, the whole thing was a learning experience, but it was a kind of a fun learning experience. And when I first got there with my however many years of Hebrew school Hebrew, I was pretty lost. But you pick it up. I mean, it's kind of like an immersion situation. It was a regular kind of camp with boating and swimming and sports and arts and crafts and all that kind of stuff. But all the activities were conducted in Hebrew. And there were classes each day. I think we might have had two classes. I can't remember -- maybe a Hebrew class 24:00and then something like we studied Bible or history or -- and again, all in Hebrew. I remember when I was older, at one point we were reading Buber's study of Moses and we read some Freud along with it. So, the readings weren't necessarily -- but when I was little, it was all in Hebrew. So, it just felt like it was an amazing opportunity to learn and be with other Jewish kids 'cause there were very few opportunities I had to be in a Jewish environment, really, when I was growing up, because the town was not -- the neighborhood that I lived in was not Jewish at all. And to be with kids who were serious about learning and school and, at the same time, liked to have a good time. So, it was sort of 25:00Ramah that gave me that sense that one could be fun-loving, energetic, into sports, and still like school, and that you could be kind of a whole person. That was the place that I experienced it in my life. So, for me, it was a tremendously important -- I mean, the Jewish piece was obviously a part of that, but it was also just kind of being able to be a whole person that I got a hint of there. More than a hint, yeah.

CW:Yeah. I mean, was there sort of an affinity to the Hebrew language as well? Did you feel that it was important for you to be learning Hebrew?

MA:Yeah, definitely. And that felt to me -- that was the Jewish language, I hoped at some point to go to Israel and I wanted to be able to speak. I loved being able to understand what we were davening when we went to shul and eventually to be able to read Hebrew literature, which I was able to do. So, yeah, that felt very important. It was really the first foreign language that I learned. And I mean, it almost seems funny to call it a foreign language, but yeah.

CW:Second language, maybe, yeah?

MA:Yeah.

CW:Yeah. You mentioned that it took you a while to sort of realize about your parents' early radical Zionism. Was there any connection as you were studying Hebrew and going to Ramah to that -- your parents' political views?

MA:Not so clearly. To the Hebrew for sure. I mean, my father had gone to the seminary as a college student. He had taken courses at the seminary. They both grew up in New York and my mother went to Hunter College, my father went to City College. They were totally New York City people. And my father went to the Jewish Theological Seminary college while he was at City College. So, he had a pretty extensive Hebrew knowledge. And he'd also gone to some kind of a Talmud Torah, I think, as a kid. I'm not really sure what his childhood Jewish education was about. But so, the Hebrew my father and I shared. My mother, she 28:00had not really learned Hebrew as a kid. She started studying later, had an adult bat mitzvah when she was sixty and read Torah for the first time when she was sixty-five. But that was something that my father and I shared as I was growing up.

CW:And can you tell me a little more -- can you describe the neighborhood that you grew up in? What did it look like and what did you do after school when you weren't going to Hebrew school?

MA:I guess it was probably a lower middle-class neighborhood. Small. It was in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where we lived from the time I was six until somewhere when I was in college, they moved. There were blocks of unattached houses. Ours 29:00had, what, six rooms? Something like that. So, they all had -- and there were two or three bedrooms, one bathroom, small yard, sidewalks in front. Actually, our house backed onto a -- Upper Montclair Country Club, so there was a huge golf course behind the house, which we weren't allowed to go onto. Was a private country club. But in the winter, you could go there because obviously they weren't golfing out there and we could sled on the hills and there was actually a pond back there where you could ice skate. And that was interesting, too. The 30:00Upper Montclair Country Club on which our house backed didn't allow Jews and we were very aware of that. And we had Irish setters. First one who developed a brain tumor, so then we got another one. But anyway, the dogs were in this backyard and there was a big fence, just a wire fence to keep the dog in. And I remember every once in a while, the golfers would -- golf balls would come into the back yard, which was all very exciting to us as young kids. But there were a number of times -- the dog would pick up the golf ball and the golfers would come over and try to get the dog to bring the golf ball back to the fence so they could get it. And my mother reported to me on a number of occasions the golfers would say, Come here, Red, come here, Red, so the dog would come over 31:00and he would have the ball in his mouth and he'd be standing by, just sort of out of their reach by the fence and they would be trying to get him to give them the ball. And then, they would get more and more frustrated and a certain point, the dog would just go -- (clicks teeth) and smash the ball. And my mother got great pleasure out of this, because they weren't gonna let us on the golf course, why should our dog give them back their golf balls? So, it's another one of those things that made (laughs) a deep impression on me. I love the story, too.

CW:Yeah, and what was the --

MA:So, after school, there were lots of kids on the block and we used to play cowboys and Indians, which nobody plays anymore, (laughs) but we used to play cowboys and Indians. So, we used to play tag and hit the bat and all kinds of games. I mean, you could play on the street and we would roller skate on the street. People were up and down the street hanging out, doing stuff pretty much 32:00all the time.

CW:And what were the relations between the ethnic groups? You mentioned the golf course, the country club, but what was -- yeah, what was your sense of that?

MA:That's an interesting question. I was very aware of who was Jewish and who wasn't. People next door to us were Catholics. We hung out a lot with them. They were probably my -- I didn't really have great friends on the street, but they were probably the people I hung out with most. But they went to Catholic school, they would go to confession and all this stuff, and I was always fascinated by that. But the families didn't ever really get together. I don't think the families of really anybody on the street got together. And the kids did. So, 33:00they were Catholics next door. There were Protestants across the street. And then, there were some other Jews on the block and we were very aware of who those Jews were. There were two boys up the street who I used to play with a lot. And then, there was one family in the corner, in the largest house on the street, that was kind of stucco and everybody called it the castle 'cause it was shaped like a castle. Was way bigger than anything else. And I think they were way wealthier and they were Jews, also. And that was kind of like, we knew they were Jews but they were somehow -- they belonged to the Reform shul, they were a 34:00different class somehow than the rest of us. I mean, the relations were fine but it's interesting now, I hadn't really thought about it, but as a kid, I was very aware of what all these different ethnic -- there were Italian Catholics next door and it was just interesting, yeah.

CW:Well, there's a lot that we've covered but we've mostly talked about your early life. So, I'm wondering -- we'll go back a little bit, but if you can just give me a snapshot of your life today, what are the organizations you're a part of and where do you work?

MA:Okay, I work at Smith College, where I've been for almost forty years. So, the main part of my day is -- that's what I do. For the last -- I guess it's now 35:00a little over ten years, I've been singing whenever I'm here with a community chorus that's based in Greenfield called Amandla. So, every Tuesday night, I go up there for rehearsals and we have a few concerts every year, which is -- source of great fulfillment and joy. I love singing. I am a member of Congregation B'nai Israel here in Northampton. I'm a member of Havurat Ha-Emek, which is a havurah [Hebrew: learning community] here in Northampton, which has been going for many, many years. I've been in it probably since around 1980, 36:00early 1980s, 1981 maybe, something like that. And we meet roughly twice a month, either on a Friday night or Saturday morning to pray and talk and schmooze and eat together. Those are the main organizational foci, I guess, of my life. And my partner lives in New York, so I do a lot of commuting. We do a lot of commuting back and forth.

CW:And just what do you teach at Smith, too, so we can get it on tape?

MA:I teach political science and study of women and gender.

CW:I just want to ask one question that I forgot and then I want to talk a 37:00little bit --

MA:Okay.

CW:-- about the havurah. Looking back on your childhood, what values and practices do you think your parents were trying to pass on to you?

MA:What would I say primarily? Definitely a commitment to social justice. That was certainly one of the most profound and deep things I got from them. I think all of us kids did. Another story from my childhood was when my father refused to cross a picket line and he didn't know -- a picket line at his job and he didn't know whether he would lose his job by refusing to do that. But for him, that was the more important value. So, that was a really important one. Standing 38:00up for what you believe is right. A commitment somehow to the Jewish people and to Israel, but not a kind of Israel right or wrong. I mean, my parents, because of this sort of radical Zionist background, were really -- they wanted to see what they understood as Jewish values and ideals of social justice applied in Israel and the Middle East, as well. They were very distressed by the occupation, by the treatment of the -- I mean, we were all elated in '67 but everybody thought, Okay, land for peace, Israel will finally have peace. They 39:00were very distressed by the treatment of the Palestinians. They were very involved with organizations like what became New Israel Fund and things like that. Oh, and I was involved with Breira back in the early days, which means "choice," and it was an organization founded when, I guess, in the late '70s -- precisely to oppose the mainstream right-wing view that Israel had no choice, "eyn breira," they have nothing to do but continue this occupation. And we kept saying "yesh breira," there is a choice, for which many of us were excommunicated from the Jewish community by some Orthodox rabbis in Baltimore. So, I would say those are the -- and the value of education, using one's 40:00intelligence to better the world, stuff like that.

CW:Can you just describe the havurah movement?

MA:Okay.

CW:A little background?

MA:Yeah. The havurah movement arose, really, in the late '60s as, I would say, as part of the countercultural movement in general, the sort of Left countercultural movement in the United States. And the particular context, I think it was most -- I think it arose initially, I think this is correct, out of people who came from largely Conservative movement backgrounds. And it was a reaction against the alienation of large suburban synagogues that were getting 41:00bigger and bigger and bigger and they were performance spaces where people would go to show off their clothes or I don't know what they would do, but it didn't feel like anything that had anything to do with the spiritual life. And so, people started founding havurot, which means "fellowship," just these small kind of informal groups. I think one of the first started at Case Western Reserve in Ohio, certainly, and there was the Havurat Shalom in Boston. There was Fabrangen in Washington and there was the New York havurah in New York that started in 1969, I believe. And they were -- I mean, some of them, like Havurat Shalom in Boston and I think the New York havurah were meant to be almost alternative 42:00seminaries where people could study together. But the kind of mantra we had was that the people you prayed with should be the people you studied with, should be the people you did politics with. So, the New York havurah, which was the first one that I was a part of -- I joined with my then-husband in 1970. We would meet once a week on, I think, Thursday nights. We met, we would have a potluck supper and have a discussion about whatever, something or another. We would get together, however many people wanted to, on Shabbos morning and do some kind of davening. We started classes if there were things people wanted to learn, a lot of us. We were mostly graduate students in the New York area at that time. Gershon Hundert was one of them. He's now teaching at McGill. He was studying Jewish history, so he taught classes on Hasidism or Jewish history and European 43:00Jewish history in seventeenth century, eighteenth century. A bunch of us were interested in studying creation and Genesis, so there was a class about that and we would get suggestions of things to read from people who were teaching at the seminary or wherever. And that was the origins of what became Ezrat Nashim. There was a group of us interested in studying the situation of women and Judaism. So, we started a class in the havurah and there were, I think, two or three of us from the havurah, not that many people -- it was mostly guys in the havurah. So, they weren't particularly interested in this whole women's thing, so we brought in other women friends of ours in New York and that class lasted 44:00for a couple years. And then, we did politics together. We went down where there were -- it was during the era of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. We went down to Washington many times together as a group and marched against the war. We would be in demonstrations in New York, stuff like that. So, it really was a very intense, intentional community. We weren't living together but -- and then, once a month, actually, we would go away on a retreat, also overnight for Shabbat. And that kind of very intense level lasted for two or three or four years, I guess. I was part of it for two years and then I moved up here. Now, the havurah here meets -- is much less intense in that people don't have that 45:00much time and we have -- our lives are shaped differently. But we do get together roughly twice a month to daven and eat. We have, on occasion, undertaken tsedakah projects together. We sponsored a family, a Cambodian family in the late '80s, when a lot of Cambodian refugees were here. So, we provided money but also personal support, helped them get settled, set up a household, navigate the medical system, get jobs, cars, all that kind of stuff. That was really a major project. And we still, together, do -- I think it's one meal a month at the cot shelter. We provide food. So, yeah, that's, I guess --

CW:Within the havurah movement, from how you've described it, there seems to be -- and also from your parents' connection between your Jewish identity and political views, can you talk a little more about that? (laughs)

MA:Yeah, I don't know -- certainly the founding havurah generation was all roughly on the Left, progressive in some way. That's certainly true of everybody in our havurah here. I think what's happened over the years is that there are many, many groups and organizations now that call themselves havurot. There are 47:00havurot that have been established within synagogues that will meet maybe one Friday night a month. People will get together for a Friday night meal or something like that. I think -- my sense is -- I mean, I don't really have much to do with them, but my sense is that the connection to politics there is much less, that these are mainly efforts by synagogues to try to claim or take advantage of the kind of energy that comes from creating community and keep people in synagogues. And in fact, I think when I said that the havurah movement arose out of the counterculture movement of the '60s, I think -- my sense is there are many fewer of these kinds of havurot that are still in existence or 48:00being created. That idea that if you see a need you should fix it, you should do something, make it -- self-help, kind of, but not individual self-help. Community, collective self-help, that's not such a big part of our culture. You don't find that out there very much. So, there aren't all that many people now, I think, who are interested in, let's say, joining a havurah. We've had members who've moved away or whatever. It's not been so easy to fill it up because most people are not interested in putting in the time and energy that it takes to be part of a collectively-run community. They'd rather just go to shul and there'll be a rabbi there and an administrative director or whatever you call them, people who take charge and you just have to show up. If you're part of a 49:00havurah, part of a community, you actually have to do something. You have to contribute to keep it going. There is now, I think, a new wave of them actually, certainly in New York and Washington. They're not called so much havurot, they're called minyanim, and they're forming, basically, more narrowly around prayer experiences. But I think for a lot of those people, the community part of it is also really important. And the idea is that they're, again, self-created, self-sustaining, and not part of an institutional structure. I find that very compelling and obviously other people do, too. Not everybody, but it's one model for how to do a Jewish life.

CW:Yeah. I know that where you teach now in the department of women and gender 50:00-- and that that has been important in your life, I think. Can you talk a little bit about feminism and the Jewish experience for you? Yeah, were you involved in the feminist movement and how did that interface, I guess, with your Jewish experience?

MA:I was involved with the feminist movement, starting really in the late '60s. I mean, the interface was intriguing. You know, that story that I told before about having to take over for this guy -- Steve Richter, that's what his name was. Just came to me. Anyway, I happened to take over from him when I was, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen, I can't remember. So, there was always something 51:00that I was aware of, that even though I was equally competent in terms of our Hebrew knowledge, in terms of our singing ability, he was the one who was getting trained to do this and I could listen in if I wanted to. When I was in college, I remember sitting, I don't know, the first or second Rosh Hashanah with Paula Hyman, who was also in college with me at the same time. We were both very active in Hillel and she also had a very extensive Jewish and Hebrew education, even more extensive than mine. She had gone to and was continuing to go through college, to Boston Hebrew College. And we were sitting there for services and whoever it was was leading the services, a boy, guy, and we were 52:00sort of saying to each other, We could do a lot better than this. But it didn't occur to us that we should even ask, because of course, men were supposed to be the leaders of the services. And I remember that at a certain point, Ben-Zion Gold, who was the Hillel rabbi at Harvard, tried to get both Paula and me to lead services. And we were both really hesitant, reticent. We thought, This is not right, this isn't what's supposed to be. We sort of each bought that whole thing that if women start leading services, men will stop coming and it'll be like the Catholic Church. And I don't know, whatever all this stuff people were 53:00saying, you know, if you destroy sex roles in Judaism, Judaism as we know it will collapse, the sort of fall of Western civilization theme. And we bought into that until, I guess, maybe by our junior year, he had worked on us enough that we finally conceded and we started leading services, too. And Paula has also become a major Jewish feminist. She's done tons of writing on Jewish feminist things. But we both had this initial reaction that we're not really supposed to be doing this. But then, when the secular feminist movement began, I think it was just -- I don't know, it was one of those pulling the film from your eyes or something like that and all of a sudden it was like, Oh, this is 54:00stupid. Why would we have thought -- I mean, it's hard for me to connect with that person who believed that that deeply. But then, all of a sudden, you're reading feminist critiques of this kind of sex role stuff and you realize it's garbage and so obviously Judaism has to change, too. And so, we started working on changing Judaism. (laughs) It's almost like an overnight -- once your eyes are open, it's hard to see it any other way.

CW:And how did you go about making change?

MA:Well, I mean, I think it started with Ezrat Nashim, it started with this class in the New York havurah and we had been going for -- can't remember 55:00exactly when the class started. A year or two, I would say. And we -- and it's another whole long story which I won't go into, but a bunch of people went to Boston for a weekend to meet with another group of Jewish women that was doing something similar there and that they were sort of loosely connected with Havurat Shalom. And in the course of that weekend, we were sort of discussing what we had learned from our studies, which led us to believe that this kind of extreme sex role differentiation was not necessary. And they said, You really need to go public with this. You really need to do something about it. Don't 56:00just keep this within a study group. And we said, Well, how can we go public? And they said, Well, just do something. And I remember this was also one of those very important turning points. I was among the people who said, How can we go public with a critique if we don't know what we want to replace it with? And if we say Judaism has been defined up until now by men and for men and that all of the sex roles are products of this, how do we know what a more woman-friendly Judaism would look like? Until we know that, we can't really criticize. And they said, If you wait until you figure that out, (laughs) we'll be here till God 57:00knows when. And they sort of won the argument because my side didn't really have anything -- there was nothing to counter that. So, shortly thereafter, that's what impelled us to send a letter -- it was a meeting coming up like a month or two later of the Rabbinical Assembly, which was the rabbis' movement of the Conservative movement. They met every year in the Concord in Kiamesha Lake in the Catskills. And so, there we were, the eight or ten shleppers from Ezrat Nashim and we sent them a letter saying, We want to come and make a presentation to the rabbis about equality for women. And they wrote us back and said, Thank 58:00you very much, but this program has been under construction for a year. It's too late now to make any changes. This is the name of the person who's gonna be president next year and you can contact him and maybe you can get on the program for next year. And we thought, This is ridiculous, they're giving us the brush-off. I mean, we didn't know anything about creating conferences like this. We thought, They're giving us a brush-off, they're not taking us seriously 'cause we're women. So, we decided we'd go anyway and we made copies of the two or three articles which had by then been published about the situation of women in Judaism, two of them by Trude Weiss-Rosmarin and one by Rachel Adler. And we wrote up a one-page thing called "Jewish Women Call for Change." And we called 59:00"The New York Times" and the "New York Post." The "New York Post" was a different "New York Post" then -- as this rag that's now there now. Was a pretty left-ish kind of magazine, newspaper. And we said, We're going to the Rabbinical Assembly. And they came and interviewed us and took pictures. And we went. We drove up in two cars. It was March 1972. And we appeared at the Rabbinical Assembly. And the fact is, they were really nice. (laughs) We demanded a room to speak to the rabbis and to speak to the rabbis' wives, because at that point there were no female rabbis, of course. And they would have programs in flower-arranging and fashion and stuff like this -- I mean, it was really disgusting -- for the rabbis' wives. So, we said we wanted to meet with the rabbis' wives as well. And they were really sweet. I mean, they made a space and 60:00a time for us to have a meeting with the rabbis who wanted to come. There must have been, I think, a couple hundred probably came. Oh, and that morning, a story with a picture appeared in the "New York Post." So, there it was. We were shocked. So, we spoke to these rabbis about the need for equality and equal participation. We were calling for counting women in a minyan, allowing women to be full members of synagogues, giving women access to rabbinical school and cantorial school and positions of leadership within the Jewish community, equal access to Jewish higher education. Pretty minimal equality stuff, basically equality. We didn't know what to ask for beyond that. And there was a very 61:00heated debate among -- we brought copies of these articles and of this call for change and asked the rabbis to take the message back to their communities and some of them basically said, If this happens, it'll be the fall of Judaism and the fall of western civilization. And others were very excited. And then, we met with, later that afternoon, I guess, with the rabbis' wives. And we didn't really know what kind of reception we would get from them. And I remember very clearly at one point -- what I remember now is this little old woman stood up and we thought -- we didn't know who -- what she was gonna say. And she was, turns out, the wife of H.L. Ginsburg, who was a major biblical scholar and rabbi and teacher at the seminary. And she said, "What I want to know is where have 62:00you been all these years?" And it was so wonderful. It was just really exciting. And in the meantime, a blizzard started, so we couldn't -- they said, We won't let you go back to New York, it's too dangerous. They put us up overnight. So, in the end, we basically crashed the conference and they let us do what we wanted to do. So, that was really the beginning. And up until that time, we had just been this study group within the havurah and we realized we couldn't -- we had to have a name if we were gonna go speaking to people. So, that's when we came up with the name Ezrat Nashim, which means women's section, basically, and 63:00it was the name for the area in the temple courtyard in the temple in Jerusalem where the women stood. But it also literally means help for women. So, we were sort of playing on that double meaning. And that was the birth of this, I guess, what we think was the first sort of modern Jewish feminist organization, eight or ten kids (laughs) from New York, which -- then, the rabbis took these things back. We started getting letters from all over the country, "How can I join your organization?" And we would write back to them and say, We're not an organization. You can't join, but you can start something in your town. So, that was that. That was 1972. And then, I guess it was just about nine years later, 64:00eight years later, 1980 at one of the early summer institutes that was organized by the national havurah committee -- there was this loose association of havurot from mostly on the East Coast and people would get together once a year for a kind of study week. And this was, I think, the second one of them, in 1980. And at that point, Judith Plaskow was teaching a course. That was the first time she taught something on Jewish feminist theology. And Sue Elwell was there teaching something on Jewish women's history. And I think Chava Weissler was there and 65:00she might have been doing something on tkhines [women's prayers], which she was just starting to work on at that point. Or maybe not. I can't remember. And I had started taking a course with, I guess, Arnie Eisen, who's now the chancellor of the seminary in New York who was, at that point, professor of Jewish studies someplace, I forget. And I remember there was one of those sort of click moments for me. The first day of the class, we were studying text in Genesis, when Abraham tells Pharaoh that Sarah's his sister so that Pharaoh won't kill him so he can gain access. Sarah -- and the conversation was supposedly about this as a 66:00strategy of Jewish survival. And I said, "Well, (laughs) what about the fact that he's giving up his wife, potentially to be raped by" -- and nobody wanted to talk about that. That was somehow off-topic. So, I decided I wasn't gonna stay in that class. And I ended up taking Judith's class. And there was a whole group of people there who were just so excited between Judith's class and Sue's and maybe Chava's, whatever, studying all these Jewish feminist stuff for the first time. And we started talking to one another and saying, Wow, do you think we could do something like this, have an extended period of study just on Jewish feminism? So, that was like, a first kind of spark, and then six or eight months 67:00later, Judith and I bumped into each other at a friend's wedding and we said, Oh, remember that idea we had last summer. If anything's gonna happen with that, we should probably see if we can get something started. So, we wrote to a couple of other people who were either -- had been there or were interested and there was another -- Sue Elwell and [Dvora Settel?] had had a similar conversation, I guess, at CAJE, which was then called Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education. And that led to the establishment of what has come to be known as B'not Esh. We spent a long weekend together, Memorial Day in 1981, at the Grail in Cornwall-on-Hudson. And our plan was to reconfigure Judaism in a way that 68:00took women seriously, to pick up that question that I had had, really, nine years before. If we don't want just equality in something that was created by men, what do we want? So, we thought, All right, we'll spend a weekend and we'll answer this question. And we're still at it thirty years later. But anyway, so that was the origins of what became B'not Esh. And then, that group meets once a year, but it's become just tremendously important as a kind of support network for people who will go out and then people write, they speak, they do all kinds of things. And it's generated enormous resources that have been taken up in various places around the Jewish community and sources of pressure and change, 69:00so, yeah.

CW:I'm curious now, a couple decades after that, looking at your students. What do you see in their generation as sort of the impact of the work you've done or just sort of observations about what is important to them? What questions are they asking?

MA:Well, I would say it's mixed. I would say some people -- a substantial number of people -- take so much for granted, the changes that that feminist movement has made, both secularly and in the Jewish community, that they think it's 70:00passé. There's nothing to do anymore, there's nothing to worry about, everything's fine. And people from my generation often find that difficult because, to us, it still feels like a lot of these things like, let's say, the right to abortion, even contraception, these are still fragile. We know what it was like before they existed and there are many people around in the country who want to roll the clock back. So, I don't think these things are passé. I think within the Jewish community, it's particularly complex because -- let's say both within the national havurah, the larger havurah community and at havurah institutes, there are now people who say, Oh yes, egalitarianism is so 71:00established as a basic principle here, we can allow a minyan with a mekhitse [partition] for those people who want it, and what's the problem? I don't see any problem here. And it makes people of my generation go bonzo. (laughs) It's, like, no, if egalitarianism is a principle, then you go by a principle of egalitarianism. And if you want people who come from Orthodox backgrounds to come and experience what the institute is like, they should experience what it is to be part of an egalitarian community. And we wouldn't expect to go there and have an egalitarian minyan, so they shouldn't expect to come here and have a mekhitse minyan. If they want to have a mekhitse minyan, let them do it in the privacy of their room. We don't have to organize it for them. And that, it's 72:00like sometimes -- it often feels like we're sort of talking past one another. And I think that's the ambiguity of making change. We couldn't have imagined when we started thirty, forty years ago that this would now be so normative for a new generation, that they can't imagine a time when there weren't women rabbis, when women weren't counted in a minyan, when bat mitzvah wasn't the same as -- so, it doesn't feel -- nothing feels threatening. And that's what we wanted. So, on the one hand, it's a sign that we succeeded in some ways and on another hand -- so, it's tricky. And the same thing in the secular context. I 73:00mean, I think it's amazing that this next generation of students has grown up in this totally -- they can't imagine a world without women's studies, they can't -- I had two women teachers the whole time I was in college. I never read an article or a book that was written by a woman. I mean, it would be hard to get through college these days with that kind of experience. So, it's an enormous change that has happened. And the world seems totally different and yet we remember -- I don't think all -- there's no way that all of that change can be reversed. But there are things that are fragile, and I think the fragility, we're much more aware of than the younger generation, for good and for -- it's 74:00the price of success in some ways, I guess.

CW:Right. Well, I have lots of questions about that, but I want to make sure to have time to talk a little bit about your experience in Spain in sort of a different building of Jewish community. So, we have about twenty minutes --

MA:Okay.

CW:-- and I want to talk about that. So yeah, I guess let's just jump right in. Can you tell me why you went to Spain and then what you found when you got there?

MA:Okay, I went to Spain last year to live in Cordoba for the year as, well, academic year, as director of a program called PRESHCO, Programa de Estudios Hispánicos Cordoba, which is a consortial junior year abroad program for 75:00students from Smith, Wellesley, Trinity, Wheaton, Oberlin, and College of Wooster at the University of Cordoba. And this had been a fantasy of mine for a long time. But the possibility of going as director only opened up to people outside of Spanish departments the year before. And I figured, give it a try, 'cause I have a long history with Spain, which we don't have time to go into here. Anyway, so I went to Cordoba and one of my major concerns, actually, about going was being in a place where there wasn't anything, so far as I knew, of a Jewish community. I mean, I hadn't lived in a place like that, really, ever. And I was really quite nervous about what that was going to mean. But shortly after 76:00I got there, I met a young man whose name had come to me from a number of different roots, whose name is Jaime or Haim Casas, who's the manager of a relatively new museum there called Casa de Sefarad, which was founded to reclaim and remember the history and culture of the Jewish community in Spain, which we know as the Sephardi community. And the museum opened about seven years ago but it opened a second floor just about a year and a half ago, I guess, and has incredible exposition on the Expulsion and the Inquisition, which is really 77:00amazing. But anyway, Jaime, who had recently himself become a Jew but had been working for some years trying to create possibilities for Jewish experiences there -- he had organized a seder for the last two or three years -- started last fall and I didn't realize this till sometime later. Last fall, he started having Friday night services on a regular basis in the room that was created within the museum so that people could see what a synagogue was like. So, the museum lent him the room to use as a synagogue and I started going. And we hit 78:00it off. I mean, he's just a total sweetie. Energetic, enthusiastic, deeply committed to trying to revive a Jewish community in Cordoba. He insists that there are somewhere between twenty and twenty-five -- not families, but Jews -- in Cordoba, which is a city of about 310,000 people and was known as the second Jerusalem in the tenth and eleventh century and was one of the major Jewish cities of the world. It had an incredible -- it's where Maimonides was and ibn Gabirol. I mean, there were major poets and writers and philosophers. And there are basically no Jews left. Of those supposedly twenty or twenty-five, I think we met four or five during the course of a year. (laughs) But he was sort of 79:00indefatigable and it was really amazing. I mean, we would meet every Friday night and basically the service ended up being some combination of Ashkenazi tunes that I brought from the States and Moroccan modes of prayer that he learned in Marrakesh, which is really where he learned his Judaism and his davening. And pretty much any Jew who came through Cordoba, if they stopped in at the museum, would find out that there were services Friday night. So, if it wasn't too late, some of them would stay. So, sometimes you would have a minyan, sometimes we would have thirty people, sometimes we would have four or five. But 80:00he kept the thing going all year long and it was really amazing. I mean, Rosh Hashanah, he was there, I was away on tour with the kids. I spent Rosh Hashanah in Barcelona. And Yom Kippur, he had gone to Marrakesh and I went to Madrid to find a service. But Sukkot, he wanted to build a sukkah, so I participated in this. There was the first sukkah, so far as we know, that had been built in Cordoba in over five hundred years. We had a little celebration for Simchas Torah, again probably the first time in five hundred years. We lit candles for Hanukkah. We had a seder. It was quite amazing to be doing that in Cordoba down 81:00the hall from this exhibition on the Inquisition. And it was really interesting because to be singing the Shema in that context where probably -- I mean, this is overly dramatic but the last times that that was said was when people were saying it when they were being put to death. Or reading Megillah on Purim in that context, the story about the attempt to destroy the Jews. It just was multi-leveled, multilayered. And it was very interesting because Judith came and joined me in December and was there for the rest of the year. And we were both 82:00very much aware that the services -- I mean, the Friday night service that we did was out of a traditional siddur. It's the most traditional davening I have done, either of us had done in year in years. Mostly we don't go to synagogues. We daven together in the havurah. We make our own -- I mean, there are a few things that we do from the traditional liturgy, but a lot of it is creative, chanting, singing, reading poetry, blah-blah-blah. This was just straight. But it was all right, sort of -- I wouldn't do that here. But there, in that context, it just felt so amazing to be able to be part of a community saying, 83:00Here we are again. We are back in some ways. It was very, very powerful. And I think the other thing that it did, certainly for me, I think for both of us, was to really make me realize, in ways that one particular friend of mine has been trying to beat into my head for years and I never really got it, that the history of the Sephardi community is our history, as well. I mean, my own family, the communities that I've been a part of here, completely Ashkenazi. I never thought of myself, really, as having any connection with that. But, of course, it's all part of the same. I mean, a lot of the liturgy that we use was 84:00created by Jews, either in Spain or left Spain and created cabalistic communities in Israel. And I feel that connection now way, way, way more than I ever did before. And actually, interestingly enough, after Spain, just before we came back to the United States, we spent twelve days in Turkey and had the opportunity to meet there with a woman who's sort of trying to do in Turkey -- on a model of what the Book Center is doing here. She's trying to collect whatever she can of Ladino culture, which was much less written and much more songs in some -- so, she's been collecting songs from the older generation 85:00before they die out. And she's just published a two-volume book and DVDs and CDs with these songs and the music and et cetera. And we also got to meet with older generation of Jews in some of the synagogues in Turkey. And Turkey is one of the places that the Jews went to after they were expelled from Spain. And I was able to communicate with those people in Spanish. I didn't know any Turkish. Their English was adequate, but we did much better in Spanish. And it was just like, (buzzer sound) I mean, if one had gone back to Eastern Europe or Russia or Ukraine or something, maybe there would be people you could speak to in Yiddish, but I don't speak Yiddish. But here was Spanish as the universal Jewish language within this community. It was really quite overwhelming. It was really quite amazing.

CW:Is there -- particular person that you met that was part of that experience? I mean --

MA:Well, this Karen Sarhone was certainly one of them, although we ended up speaking to her in English. I mean, she's one of these multilingual people. But there were two guys whose names I have written down someplace. I don't remember them at the moment. But one who was like the shammes -- what the name is in Ladino, I don't know, but of the synagogues in Izmir and one of the synagogues in Istanbul and it was just -- they were incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic and excited about their communities and how they work. And yeah, so both of them 87:00made very deep impressions on us, yeah.

CW:Wow.

MA:So --

CW:So, coming back, is there sort of -- you mentioned that there are things you did in Spain that you wouldn't do here. But are there sort of lessons or ways that it has changed the way you do things now that you're back?

MA:Well, it certainly has changed the way I think of myself in relation to this sort of history and culture, as I said. I have made an effort to bring back some of the tunes that I learned from the synagogue. So, we're singing them now in our havurah here, which feels really neat. And one person from the havurah had 88:00come to visit us. So, she helps to link those two places before. And, in particular, I guess the Sephardi version of "Shalom aleichem" which you sing on Friday night has an extra verse in it that's not in most Ashkenazi siddurim. So, the traditional version goes, "Welcome to the angels, come in, bless us, and leave," which I always thought, That's kind of rude. But the Sephardi version has, "Welcome, come in, bless us, stay a while, and then leave." So, that's the way we sing "Shalom aleichem" now, so that -- which I really like. I had heard that before. Art Green in Boston, who was one of the founders of Havurat Shalom had been doing that for years. But this was the first time I'd sort of heard it 89:00in situ and it really made its mark. And I feel like it's going to -- that it has changed me in some ways. But I haven't figured out how to integrate that all yet. There's a lot more work to be done, both in terms of the Jewish piece and also, I feel like I learned a lot about life in Spain and in Europe and sort of the social-political system that needs to have some impact on my teaching and I haven't figured out how to integrate that yet, either. So, some of the stuff is still -- it's very fresh. So, it's still kind of in process. I hope that it will have more implications as it settles in and figures out ways to come out again.

CW:I wonder if you would be willing to hum or sing a favorite tune that you learned there?

MA:Ah! Let's see if I can recall something. Yeah, okay, I can get started, anyway. There's one for -- (singing) "Mizmor l'david./Havu la'adonai, benei elim,/havu la'adonai kavod va'oz./Havu la'adonai [Hebrew: A Psalm of David./Ascribe unto God, oh sons of might,/ascribe unto God glory and strength./Ascribe unto God] --" (sings wordlessly) Then it starts again. (sings 91:00wordlessly) I don't remember all the words but, yeah, they're very haunting, yeah.

CW:Yeah. Well, I have just two more questions and we have five minutes, so (laughter) I'll see if I can get them in.

MA:I'll try to be brief. (laughter)

CW:I'm wondering if talking about Spanish and Hebrew in this interview, how has language influenced your Jewish identity, if at all?

MA:Whoa, that's a really good question. I don't know, really, how to answer it. Hebrew has obviously been a very important part of it. I think it deepened my identity in a sense that I was able to read more things in the original language and feel connected with that history and with that culture. Times before when I've traveled, Hebrew has been the language that I've used to speak with Jews that I've met. I think there was something -- this year, I think, there was -- 93:00maybe part of what was so profound for me was that the Spanish and Spanish anarchist piece of my life had never been connected with the Jewish piece. And this brought them together in a way that I guess I hadn't even ever really thought was possible. I hadn't really thought about that before. So, I think that's probably a very, very important part of what happened over the course of this last year, that I guess one of the themes in my life has always been to try and put pieces together and these were pieces -- it's almost like I hadn't even realized they were apart, but they came together. So, yeah, language as access to culture and then, as it turned out, access to parts of myself.

CW:Yeah. And then, I'm just wondering if you have any advice for future generations based on (laughter) all of this? (laughs)

MA:My advice, I guess, most simply is just go for it. I think if there were things that we saw that we thought needed to be fixed and we just started doing things to try to fix them, not -- mostly thinking of ourselves, not as individuals but as small groups of people and thinking, Well, maybe this will -- if it works for us, it'll work for other people, maybe this will make some kind 95:00of a difference in the world, and it really has. So, I guess my advice is just don't think anything is impossible. Start. Make a start. One of my favorite lines, I guess, is from "Pirkei Avot [Ethics of the Fathers]." Rabbi Tarfon said, "It's not for you to complete the work, neither are you free to desist from it." And I guess that's -- if you think I'm not gonna be able to complete it, therefore I shouldn't start, nothing will ever get done. So, take a first step and hope, know that somebody will be there to take a next step after you.

CW:Thank you.

MA:Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]