My Other Favorite Jewish Newsletter Arrives by Snail Mail

GOLDA gang,

I love getting mail. I love birthday cards. I love Christmas cards and tell my gentile friends that they don’t need to call them holiday cards. I love High Holiday cards. I love the days when my Upper West Side building’s mail area is covered in stacks of AARP The Magazine or The New Yorker. 

But what I really love is the day each month when my absolute favorite thing arrives in the mail. 

It’s a newsletter called Modern Jewess, a few printed pages featuring short essays, a bit of Jewish inspiration, a recipe, and other fun tidbits. Modern Jewess is the creation of Rabbis Diana Fersko and Karen Glazer Perolman, who describe it as “a beautifully snail-mailed monthly envelope which explores what it means to be a Jewish woman today.” Their fifth issue comes out in February, and they’ve featured writers like Maya Arad, Tova Mirvis, and—you guessed it—me.  

I’ve called on Diana many times for GOLDA, asking her to share Jewish wisdom for dark times, how to bless your children on Shabbat, and to weigh in on the correct spelling of Hanukkah. She’s the senior rabbi of The Village Temple in downtown New York City and the author of the 2023 book We Need to Talk About Antisemitism. Karen Glazer Perolman is the senior associate rabbi of Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, NJ. They met in rabbinical school 20 years ago and have spent the decades since in a constant conversation about Judaism, feminism, and life.

Together they’re breathing new life into an old-school format, bringing richly textured Jewish content directly to our doorsteps. It’s soulful and meaningful in a way that genuinely surprises me each month. I reached out to the two modern Jewesses behind Modern Jewess to discuss their project. Our conversation is below.

How did Modern Jewess come about?

Rabbi Diana Fersko: October 7th was an earthquake. So much changed, and I felt like the particular way October 7th changed women's roles and women's lives was an undercovered topic. In so many cases it was women who were leading. It was women who were advocating for their children on college campuses, and women who were very active in dealing with the school system for lower school and high school. Both of us are on the front lines of what it means to be a Jewish woman, and we saw that Jewish women were going through a lot. We wanted to send them a gift, and that gift is Modern Jewess.

Rabbi Karen Glazer Perolman: We also wanted to broaden who gets to write. We wanted women to get this gift, but also to be part of it and share their own reflections. You don't have to be the CEO or a VP or senior rabbi. You can be a Jewish woman living life and trying to figure it out in whatever way you are. There's a heimishness to it. 

Rabbi Diana Fersko: We're trying to give a holistic look at what it means to be a Jewish woman now. We're creating something that has a huge amount of respect and love for Jewish women's home life—we include a recipe, for example, or we talk about the Shabbat table and what it means. And we also don't shy away from talking about women's professional lives and being a public voice. The other thing that makes Modern Jewess special is that there's a rabbinic voice. Karen and I are close to Jewish text and teaching, and we always try to include some spiritual uplift in there, something you can hang on your refrigerator or hang on your door. My friend is a teacher, and she hung one of the teachings in her classroom. 

Beyond the name, there are a few other distinctive elements of this newsletter. It’s a paper product that gets sent in the mail, and it’s organized by the days of the week. Why? 

Rabbi Diana Fersko: We want it to be slow. Everything's so quick these days—it’s like, click, click, click. That's not the energy we wanted to give in Modern Jewess. There are seven pieces—some are essays, some are poems, some are teachings—and each piece is paired with a day of the week.

The idea is, “Oh my goodness, I got this gift in the mail. Let me open it. Let me see what happens on Sunday.” 

Pause, read, live your day. 

“Let me see what happens on Monday.” 

Pause, read, tell your daughter about it. 

We’re giving you just enough: every essay is at most one page, front-and-back.

Rabbi Karen Glazer Perolman: It's really meant to be physical in a way that I think the world doesn't always value, but that we need more than ever right now. Somebody said to me, “I'm going to be traveling, can I just get it emailed to me?” And I had to say no, the point is that you actually have to open it and touch it and feel it.

Let’s talk about the name. I’m curious about the choice to use the word “Jewess,” and what you’re asserting with regard to how we speak about Jewish women and how we live as Jewish women. 

Rabbi Karen Glazer Perolman: The name comes from The American Jewess, which was the first women's Jewish magazine. Long, long, long before us, in the late 1800s, there were Jewish women writing about being Jewish women. “Jewess” has all of these connotations, it's sort of like other words that have been reclaimed, like balabusta or even shiksa.

Today when you're ordained as a rabbi or cantor, you can choose if you want the masculine or feminine Hebrew on your ordination certificate. You couldn’t do that when Diana and I were ordained, so ours say Rav. But now you can actually choose if you want it to say Rabba, which is female. I think part of it is that there's been this sense of, “Oh, we can do everything men can do.” Modern Jewess is trying to wink at that, and trying to say we are different. And we are having a different experience in a post-October 7th world.

Many Jewish women, even if we’re having it all, we're also doing it all. We're taking our kids to school, we're trying to figure out how to keep them safe, we're trying to figure out how to talk to them about everything going on in the world, and also instill Jewish pride and Jewish joy. It’s that sense of “I have to make latkes, but I also have to make a living.” Modern Jewess is all of those things. We’re Jewish, we're women, and we're living in the world as it is.

Rabbi Diana Fersko: I also feel like the word has some glory in it. It feels regal to me. When I hear Jewess, I think long, flowy hair or a headdress. It's a little bit magical. And that's how I think about Jewish women.

I love that. It’s hard to make this point in a print interview, but how you pronounce the word impacts what you're saying with it. Like, putting the emphasis on the “-ess” makes it sound proud and bold, but hearing it with the beginning accentuated is sort of like Nazi-era grossness.

Rabbi Diana Fersko: To me, it's Jew-ess as in princess, in a good way. Like “queen.”

I have this memory of the old school mimeographed synagogue bulletin, and this feels like a real glow up of that. There's something warm and inviting about it, but there's also something elevated.

Rabbi Diana Fersko: That's the highest compliment you could give to two congregational rabbis. The design process was fun for us. There's almost an old world sensibility about it, but the content is of the moment. The offerings are diverse and substantial.  

I contributed an essay where I shared something very personal, which I had not shared publicly, about a pregnancy loss. And I felt safe doing that because there’s an element of privacy afforded to this format. I think for for Jews, and for Jewish women in particular, having that closed circuit is really valuable in this moment. Is that something you think about?

Rabbi Karen Glazer Perolman: In the first issue I wrote a piece that I've been ruminating on for a long time, about my admiration for and connection to the writer Glennon Doyle. She was kind of a guru or spiritual teacher, I was very into her work. I wrote about my disappointment and my sadness in her post-October 7 response. And ultimately, the piece is about how I decided to let her be in the past.

I quoted from a letter that I co-authored from a group of women rabbis who said, “We think there's actually an opportunity here to widen the conversation a little bit. We are Jewish women who are brokenhearted about what's going on in Gaza, and yet we are also brokenhearted for what's happening in many other communities, and we wish you were able to have a broader conversation, rather than this very narrow one.” You have a podcast called We Can Do Hard Things. You can talk about sexual assault and breast cancer and eating disorders, and then it's like, oh actually, this one thing you can’t talk about. You can't talk about it with kindness. 

I don't know that I would have wanted to put that on the internet. I felt very similarly to how you did, which is that I was able to be a little bit freer on the printed page. I think there is something really beautiful about the safety of it.  

Rabbi Diana Fersko: One of the reasons that Modern Jewess exists is exactly the dynamic Karen is describing: Jewish women being pushed out of mainstream life in one way or another. Whether that's in media, in publishing, in arts and culture, being asked to check our Jewishness at the door. October 7th made me question feminism itself—the goodness there, does it still remain? That's a very crushing question for someone who has grown up as chief feminist rabbi and really been a leader in that space. I felt like the reactions to the sexual assaults of October 7th were totally deplorable. They failed the morality test. 

So one answer is that Jewish women need to make our own stuff! We need to be the ones to make the publications and give space for Jewish women to articulate whatever on earth they want to. That’s what we’re doing with Modern Jewess.

You can sign up to receive Modern Jewess here—and submit your own work here. 

Shabbat Shalom and stay GOLDA,

Stephanie