Midrashist/Poet Alicia Ostriker

To Appear at Temple Beth El this Weekend

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

SUDBURY - Acclaimed Jewish midrashist, feminist author, critic and poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Ph.D., will appear this Saturday, March 23, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Temple Beth El in Sudbury, as part of their ongoing poetry festival.

“There is an explosion of midrash writing in America today,”, says Osriker, “much of it by women, seeking to wrestle meanings for our time from the sacred texts of Judaism.”

Ostriker’s writings are renowned and have been translated into many languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. She has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation, as well as Tikkun, Lilith, Judaism, and many Jewish poetry anthologies. Among her books are Feminist Revision and the Bible (Blackwell 1992) and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (Rutgers University Press, 1994). A Professor of English at Rutgers University, she is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies at Brandeis University.

Saturday’s event will feature a talk by Ostriker on “Moving into Midrash”, with time for discussion, sociability, coffee, tea, and light refreshments.

The Beth El Poetry festival was founded 12 years ago by Rosie Rosenzweig, who is a Resident Scholar in Women's Studies at Brandeis University, and author of A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la. She is a liturgical poet as well; her poetry has appeared in the Beth El Prayerbook and many anthologies.

“We've had sellout crowds to Marge Piercy, Marcia Falk, Ruth Whitman, and Robert Pinsky,” she says, “who when he was Poet Laureate spoke about his Judaism. Sometimes we've had Sunday workshops with visiting poets including Miriam Sagan (meditative writing) and Barbara Hollander. We had a monthly poet's group until this year, when the Brandeis commitments became too demanding.”

Rosenzweig had organized a past event for Shula Reinharz, director of Hadassah Institute and then-Head of Women's Studies, which featured Ostriker, Lois Zisquit and Kinereth Gensler. “At the sellout crowd,” she recalls, “Shula and Alicia made contact, and this eventually led to Alicia coming to Brandeis.”

Ostriker is presently living in Cambridge while teaching at Brandeis. “I'm enjoying Cambridge tremendously,” she says. “I lived here as an undergraduate, so it's like being a student again.

“At Sudbury, I'm looking forward to introducing people to the excitement and insights of midrash. When we create new midrash in response to our own spiritual and psychic needs, we are simultaneously adding to and transforming the tradition, growing new twigs on the Tree of Life, and helping to create a fuller future for religious and spiritual life.”

She is nothing but prolific. Author of ten volumes of poetry, she has been teaching midrash writing workshops for years, at the Jewish retreat Elat Chayyim, universities and libraries as well as congregations. “I’ve taught midrash at the Institute for Contemporary Midrash, the Aleph Kallah, the Havurah Institute. I have also taught one-day workshops at a variety of venues in the U.S., Israel and Australia.”

She has twice been a National Book Award finalist and has received awards from the Guggenheim and the Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

“I had someone stop me at the BALI institute at Brandeis where I teach,” says a kvelling Rosenzweig, “and ask ‘how did you get Alicia Ostriker to come to Beth El? What a coup!’"

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Congregation Beth El is located on Route 27 North (Hudson Road), from Route 20 West (through Weston, beyond 128 to Wayland Center where Route 27 intersects). It was made famous by the charismatic Rabbi Larry Kushner, who is presently a Resident Scholar at Temple Emmanuel in San Francisco. For information on this event, please call 508-358-7277 or email jewmomrose@aol.com.