sarah in nyc

I was invited to exhibit my work at this conference What to Wear- Women, Clothing, Religion .  I’m really excited. It’s a good fit for me. Much of my work is made for women. When I was asked to exhibit  at the conference, I came up with this piece, a head covering to wear while lighting Shabbat candles that is covered with  the prayer recited by women with special requests from the divine. Several years ago I came up with this. Arba kanfot, Tzitzit for women. Yes, it is a very limited market, but it’s my market. Anyway, I needed to make some more sets  of Arba kanfot.  I decided to use a silk camisole that was a hand me down from a neighbor.  I liked  the camisole because the construction was so cool. It was cut in two sections, but not as one might expect with a front and a back, but rather two entirely differently shaped  wedges that fit together to make the garment. I cut apart the camisole, copied the pattern pieces onto newspa...

One overarching precept of Jewish law is that in general, women are exempted from time bound commandments.  If they choose to take on those time-bound commandments, they may do so, but given that women in traditional times were primarily responsible for child rearing, that, as all of us know, makes the time bound a little difficult to manage.     I reached my teens in the 1970's when the role of women was being re-thought not just in the world as a whole, but also in the Jewish world. Women were more and more taking on roles that they were excluded from by reason of custom. During those years, I was studying Talmud in my Orthodox Jewish day school and also reading essays on the halachic role for women written by scholars like Judith Hauptmann. It was a heady mix. I spent lots of time during my teen years thinking seriously about the role of women in Jewish ritual life and how to take part in areas, that had, by custom, been men only. It was very clear when reading t...