The show that is characterizing the American high school experience is no longer Beverly Hills 90210. It is not One Tree Hill, The OC, Dawson’s Creek, or any other television series that is comprised of a homogeneous group of blonde, white, and religiously hush-hush teenagers whose differences are minimized for the sake of a cohesive social hierarchy.

No – what is representing my generation’s high school experience is Glee, the show that gives the misfits a voice and a small Ohio suburb a plethora of cultures. And yes, even Judaism is included in this model society that tries to assimilate even those who do not fit neatly into the niches provided.

There are two Jews in William McKinley High School’s glee club: Puck and Rachel, who Leah Berkenwald discussed in this earlier blog post. We know Rachel is Jewish from the first episode. She has two dads, had a Bat Mitzvah, perpetually compares herself to Barbara Streisand, and looks like the total Ashkenazi-American stereotype (pale, brunette, preppy). As for Puck, we do not know of his Jewishness until he and his family are sitting down to a TV Rosh Hashana dinner, watching Schindler’s List. During this Holocaust horror, Puck has a revelation – he must fall in love with (or, in a high school lexicon, hook up with) a Jewish girl. And this is Ohio so he only has one feasible option: Rachel.

Let’s keep in mind that before this fateful Rosh Hashana and the incredibly weird inspiration for faith-based hook ups that is Schindler’s List, Puck and Rachel had no interest in each other. Actually, Puck is the biological father of Protestant debutante Quin’s unborn child and Rachel is trying to seduce Quin’s Christian boyfriend. The sole reason why Puck begins to pursue Rachel is because Rachel is the “nice Jewish girl” his mother would approve of, that his hyper-assimilated faith-based life would condone. Forget about her personality, fabulous talent, and diva-esque glee club leadership skills. She’s a “woman of the tribe” and that’s apparently all that should matter.

Associated Content has some “Reasons to Support Rachel and Puck as a Couple on Glee." One gives voice to my critique:

“Who didn't love Puck when he serenaded her with Sweet Caroline? As Puck explained, ‘we're just a couple of good-looking Jews. It's natural!’ This is not to suggest that they should date solely on the basis of their common faith. Still, it doesn't hurt that Puck's Jewish mother would be so pleased to see her son with a 'nice Jewish girl.'”

But here’s the thing – is it natural to hook up with someone on the sole basis of their faith? Is it not demeaning to Rachel for Puck to fake attraction for her simply because she is Jewish? And it’s not just Rachel and Puck I’m talking about here – it’s the stereotype of the “nice Jewish girl,” perpetuated through popular shirts and doting grandparents. And trust me – if you watch ten minutes of Glee, you will see that Rachel may be Jewish, but she is not so “nice.”

Shira Engel is a New York City high school student and Jewish feminist who blogs at from the rib.

• Don't miss Renee Ghert-Zand's piece about JWA's On the Map project [Truth, Praise & Help]
• As a part of "Plan A," the campaign for comprehensive sex education, NCJW released a new factsheet on comprehensive sex ed's critical role in preventing and eliminating teen dating violence [NCJW]
• Disney renames the new "Rapunzel" animated film in an effort to draw more boys to the box office. Amy Stone also sees Jewish tropes of hair and gender in the film. [Lilith]
• We love Joan Rivers, but how do we feel about her nasty comments about Kate Winslet and Mariah Carey's weight at the Oscars? [Jezebel]
• The organization Efrat seeks to "save" unborn Jewish babies by offering financial support to new Jewish mothers, despite their claims that they are pro-choice. Heeb takes a look at their motives, such as, um, saving the Jewish race. [Heeb]
• Young women to head tomorrow's JOFA conference, the first in 3 years. [Sisterhood]
• Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale recently announced that he would not bestow the title of "rabba" on any other women. (He originally bestowed it on Sara Hurwitz in January.) Is this a setback for Jewish feminism? [Forward]
• The story behind Yona Zeldis McDonough's most recent children’s book, The Doll Shop Downstairs, about a Jewish girl living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during WWI, was inspired by none other than Madame Alexander's. [Truth, Praise & Help]
• An interview with Gloria Steinem touching on healthcare, casual sex, Hollywood, and the future of the women's movement. [LA Times]
• At the Oscars, Golda Meir's biographer pulls a Kanye West [Sisterhood]
• Want equal rights? Gloria Feldt says, "Just take them!" [Speaking Up]
• How one woman amassed 10,000 cookbooks [Forward]
• Nona Willis Aronowitz, co-author of Girldrive, does some feminist free-association.

• "Good Job Women!" SNL's Will Forte salutes women and Women's "Herstory" Month. A sadly accurate depiction of what some understand Women's History Month to be about.

There exists no guide to physical landmarks in Jewish women's history--until now.

Yesterday was an exciting day at the Jewish Women's Archive because yesterday we literally put Jewish women "on the map."  A user-generated map hosted on jwa.org, On the Map showcases significant places in Jewish women’s history, including sites both marked and unmarked, familiar and obscure. You can put your own stamp on history by clicking on a location and adding a photo and description of the new landmark. 

On the Map was featured this morning in eJewishPhilanthropy, on Google Maps Mania, and in a wonderful post by Renee Ghert-Zand on her blog Truth, Praise & Help. She wrote:

Our famous wandering notwithstanding, connection to place – even when it has been through memory or longing – has been among the things that have sustained us Jews for millennia.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about how my Bubbe’s rootedness in the the Canadian prairie town where she was born in 1912 has served to shape my family’s identity. 

In recognition of the powerful role actual, physical locations and presences play in history and herstory, the Jewish Women’s Archive has just launched an exciting new, interactive project called On The Map on its website. Thanks to the wonders of Web 2.0, readers can add to a map the location, biographical/historical information and photos relating to specific events in the history of Jewish women in North America. Having gone live this morning, the map is already beginning to fill up. What a fabulous collaborative educational tool!

It is so gratifying to see this project resonate with so many people, many of whom have added wonderful new landmarks to the map including Harvard University, where Rabbanit Sharon Weiss-Greenberg became the first female Orthodox Jewish chaplain in 2009, and the Brooklyn home of Anna Boudin, founder of the Women’s American ORT. Since its launch, I check the map quite often and each time I am delighted to see the new additions, conveniently highlighted on the right hand side. The map has only been up for one day and already I have discovered a number of Jewish women's stories previously unknown to me! The potential here is unreal.

Still, On the Map's success depends on you.

Play a role in mapping our common heritage and add a landmark to the map today! A landmark can be a physical marker (such as a statue, plaque, or gravestone) a site where history was made (the site of a famous speech or protest) or the home or birthplace of a "history maker." These landmarks don't need to be the kind found in history books. They may have special meaning to you, your family, or your community and you can add them to the map with or without a photo.

Click here to get started, and help us put Jewish women "on the map!" 

For more information about the project, check out our press release and an earlier blog post, "Putting Jewish Women on the Map"

I remember precisely where I was in the Glenn G. Bartle library—what part of the stacks, which corner, what bench—when I realized that Lillian Wald and I shared the same birthday, on March 10th.   I was a junior at State University of New York at Binghamton, enrolled in a U.S. women’s history course that was gradually changing the direction of my life.  It was here that I discovered Lillian Wald, a Jewish woman who was deeply involved in American Progressives’ campaigns for immigrant, women’s, and civil rights, for public health and world peace.

As got to know more about Wald, now the subject of my undergraduate senior thesis, I did not dedicate a lot of energy to thinking about my relationship to her.  Would our shared birthday make me see her through a rosier lens than I might otherwise?  What impact would it have on my scholarly assessment of her life?  Thoughts about my own subjectivity emerged in full force later, as the thesis grew into my doctoral dissertation and then a biography recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Sitting on that bench, all that I knew was that I admired her, and wanted to know more about her.  With the naiveté of a twenty-one year old, I surmised that I could easily spend a year reading her letters and speeches on microfilm.   And so I did.  When the thesis was completed, my applications to American history graduate programs were in.  I still felt, though, that there was a piece missing, and so I visited Wald’s institution, Henry Street Settlement House on New York’s Lower East Side.

Wald founded the Settlement in 1893, a few months after her twenty-sixth birthday.  I began with that fact and then learned of her conventional, upper-class upbringing in Cincinnati and Rochester; her lack of a Jewish education; her decision to attend nursing school in Manhattan after she met the nurse who attended the birth of her sister’s child.  As I pieced together Wald’s first years in New York City, I came to see the profound impact those years had on her life.  She was surrounded by women who had made choices other than those of her mother, aunts, and sister.  Wald described herself as completely fulfilled by her friendships with Mary Brewster, Lavinia Dock, and other nursing colleagues, along with women she would later meet, such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley.  As a lesbian, she was sustained too by her intimate, physical relationships with women throughout her life.    

Within these women’s networks, and through her encounters with the industrial poor of New York, Wald’s thoughts on the need for cross-class and cross-race cooperation, for restraints and regulations on capitalism, and for active women’s roles began to crystallize.  While teaching a home nursing class to Jewish immigrants downtown, Wald was taken by a child to a sick woman in a tenement, the family living in desperate conditions.  She called this moment her “baptism of fire.”  “Deserted were the laboratory and the academic work of college,” she wrote, “I never returned to them. My mind was intent on my own responsibility.”

That winter, she founded the Nurses’ Settlement, as Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York were first called.  It offered non-sectarian nurses’ visits to its neighbors, giving health care to the poor on a sliding fee scale.  Wald’s cosmopolitan, secular Jewishness gave her audience with wealthy New York Jews, and they—especially financier Jacob Schiff—were the first benefactors of her work.  With their help, her institution grew into a full-fledged settlement house. In my biography of Wald, I study her from these vantage points:  as a nurse, a feminist, and a secular Jew.  Above all, I charted her lifelong commitment to what she called the “mutuality” of society, the idea that the fate of one class of people was inseparable from any other. 

I saw this living ideal of mutuality at Henry Street before I began graduate school, when my visit there grew into a summer job.   Coincidentally, that year was the 100th anniversary of the Settlement, which continues to serve the needs of its diverse neighbors.  (The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, now further uptown and independent, is also thriving.)  I was in charge of the Greening Program, a cutting-edge environmental awareness group that was part of New York’s summer employment program for urban kids.  At the huge, loud, joyful street festival that celebrated Henry Street’s centennial, I was in charge of the recycling.  Never have I had a happier moment when dealing with garbage.

For the entire summer, really, I was in heaven, walking in Wald’s spaces.  My colleagues – social workers who were huge fans of Wald’s – told me Wald ghost stories:  footsteps in the attic, shadows in the hallways of Wald’s old haunts.  At one lunch with my dear boss, I confessed the secret of our shared birthday.  She urged me to investigate the numerological importance of 104, the number of years that separated Wald’s and my birth.  I never did. 

But the sense of our connectedness, born of historical accident, deepened over the years, as they would, no doubt, with any biographer and her subject.  After the biography was published, colleagues would introduce me at conferences as “a woman who spent over a decade with Wald.”  Indeed.  Those years coincided with my making my own important, adult life choices.   I am not romantic enough to think Wald guided me through those choices.  But a birthday, and some political ideas:  we share these.  So as I mark the passage of time on our birthday each year, I look to her as someone who made me see what was—and still is—possible.

Marjorie N. Feld is an Associate Professor of History at Babson College, and author of Lillian Wald:  A Biography.  

"You know Barbie's getting a new job," says my friend Mimi to me. "People can vote for her new career."

I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known as Tefillin Barbie. Tefillin Barbie has a religious-girl denim skirt, a T-shirt, the tallit and tefillin more generally worn by Orthodox men during morning prayer, and a volume of Talmud; a whimsical activity for a vacation morning, she generated an absolutely vast and wholly unanticipated amount of reaction, positive and negative.

"Hurrah," people say. "Now we can have Rabbi Barbie!"

But why, people? Why? Barbie put on tefillin and picked up a gemara, so now she has to be a rabbi? Why can't she be an IT engineer who prays with tefillin and learns gemara in her lunch break?

See, we have this little problem in the liberal Jewish world. We assume that anyone who's Jewishly invested must be on the rabbinical track. Not completely Jewishly illiterate? Surely you are in rabbinical school. Pray with tefillin? No one does that except rabbis. If Barbie is wearing tefillin and learning gemara, how can she possibly be anything other a rabbi?

It's fair enough, in a way. We managed to create a world where the default level of Jewish education is impressively minimal. The only people who cared for advanced educations were rabbis. The only way to get an advanced education has been to go to rabbinical school. So there is an extensive correlation between liberal Jews who - like Tefillin Barbie - lay tefillin and learn gemara, and liberal Jews who have been through rabbinical school. More's the pity.

It's not an exclusive correlation, and really it would be jolly nice if we could stop assuming that it is. I'm no rabbi; I have a degree in mathematics and a career as a calligrapher-scholar. I pray with tefillin, observe Shabbat in accordance with halakha, and learn Talmud for fun. I and those like me feel vastly frustrated when people assume that we must be rabbis.

We're lucky, now, to live in a time when women can obtain high-level Jewish education in contexts other than rabbinical school; if we keep assuming that only rabbis can have Jewish knowledge, we damage ourselves as Jews.

Barbie's new career is, it seems, a combination of computer engineer and TV anchor (even Barbie has to work two jobs to make ends meet?) In her role as computer engineer, she's apparently supposed to convince little girls that one can be feminine and technically minded.

In assuming otherwise, we damage ourselves as women; the assumption is that only social misfits can be engineers, engineering is only a career for women who fail at being feminine. But no – actually you don't have to be a feminine failure, an ipso facto man, to be an engineer. You can be a perfectly ordinary woman and an engineer; while I question whether pink-laptopped Computer Engineer Barbie entirely demonstrates this, it's a point that needs making.

What Barbie's New Career theoretically demonstrates in the plane of socially-acceptable femininity, we could also apply in the plane of Jewish engagement. Barbie says, regular girls just like you can be engineers. Likewise, regular Jews just like you can be engaged and educated. You don't have to be a social misfit to be an engineer, and you don't have to be a rabbi to be an engaged Jew. You can be a perfectly ordinary professional and an observant, liberal Jew. Tefillin Barbie certainly does not demonstrate this and she was never intended to, but when I resist the idea that she should be Rabbi Barbie, the point is made. The richness of the professional world is not limited to men, and the richness of the Jewish world is not limited to rabbis.

If Tefillin Barbie is Rabbi Barbie, she thoroughly reinforces the idea that only rabbis can pray with tefillin, only rabbis can learn Talmud, only rabbis can be educated, committed, engaged, contented Jews. So no; let our Jews be computer engineers, and let them also pray with tefillin and learn Talmud. Let us not assume that being female prescribes a life of Barbie-pink frippery, and let us not assume that being a committed Jew prescribes a career in the rabbinate. Let us rather assume that Jewish life is worthwhile for all of us – women and men, clergy and laity - and proceed accordingly.

Jen Taylor Friedman is a post-denominational halakhically-observant egalitarian Jewish ritual scribe and scholar. She is notorious for having created Tefillin Barbie, and notable for being the first woman in modern times known to have written a sefer Torah. She blogs and sells Tefillin Barbie from www.hasoferet.com.

Check out JWA's Go & Learn lesson plan Teffilin Barbie: Considering gender and ritual garb. Three versions available: for youth, families, and adults.