Currently Browsing: Jan Lisa Huttner
If the holidays can be counted on for one thing – regardless of region or cultural moment – it’s turning back the clock for a month or so, and offering up brightly-wrapped nostalgia. Nostalgia literally means the “pain from an old wound,” but today its connotations include both sentimentality and irreverence for the past.… read more.
You can’t necessarily change what’s going on, no, but I can say what I think about it. I’m free to do that. And I will.
As a Black woman living in the USA, learning about my history is something that has been heavily contested. The narrative that I have learned about my ancestors is often seen as whitewashed and trauma-filled, focusing on the handful of accomplishments we have made or the trauma we have endured (and the trauma we still going through) through the remnants of slavery.… read more.
Today’s SWAN-of-the-Day is filmmaker Pearl Gluck, one of the first Jewish women to give outsiders a peek inside Ashkenazi Orthodoxy. Although we have many opportunities now – especially in streaming series like Shtisel and Unorthodox – Pearl was a courageous trail blazer.
The following is adapted from the review I wrote of her film Divan for the September 2005 issue of the World Jewish Digest:
Pearl Gluck comes from a large Hasidic family based in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.… read more.