Item descriptionIn honor of International Women’s Day I wrote a piece for Blue: The Tatter Textile Library about the women whose hands and whose research have shaped my textile practice.

I first read Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years when I was 11 or 12. It was given to me by the woman who taught me to crochet: Priscilla Roy, who owned the Lake View store in Averill, Vermont. She was an incredible fiber artist. Her home was the first place I saw a spinning wheel, the first place I experienced multiple generations of women fiber crafting in the same room.

As I do the work of historical patterning, reverse engineering the work of often anonymous hands, I am keenly aware that the majority of those hands belonged to unnamed women whose art went unrecognized as anything other than craft or hobby. It’s an honor to remember them, to try to understand their work and their lives. I learned this skill in large part because of Elizabeth Wayland Barber and her descriptions of her own work attempting to understand extant historical textiles through recreation. You can read it here on the Fold.

For National Button Day (November 15th, 2023) I wrote a blog post on the history of the button. You can read more on the Fold.

November 4th, 2023, I wrote a short history of the Palestinian traditional dress and how Palestinian objects— especially these dresses— end up in museum collections around the world after violent episodes of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government, namely the Nakba and the Naksa. Palestinian artist and dress historian Wafa Ghnaim assisted me in my research and edited the piece. You ca read it on the fold.

I wrote this research paper the spring of 2023 for my self-directed independent study ‘Queer Bodies in Jewish Literature and Law’. In the paper, I explored how 1920s Jewish lesbian activist Eve Adams was characterized by the media and the government as a masculine Jewish woman and how she characterized herself and her fellow lesbians in her book “Lesbian Loves”. You can read it here.

Anorexia mirabilis, or “divine lack of appetite” has long been misunderstood as an earlier iteration of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. In this research paper, I explore through the life of a single saint how modern biases have impacted the study of anorexia mirabilis and how further study using the primary sources as a guide can change the way we see fasting among 12th to 14th century European saints. This a much abridged piece of a much larger topic to which I hope to return, but it does make what I think is a novel and important claim: that anorexia mirabilis is not characterized by the absence of food but the presence of spiritual sustenance. You can read it here.

In October of 2021, I interviewed Ezra Furman, a transgender Jewish singer-songwriter whose rock and roll album Transangelic Exodus had an enormous impact on me as a young transgender person. We spoke about transness, what it means to be in love with a book that legislates our death, and how becoming a mother has impacted her relationship with Judaism and her art. You can read it on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

In 2021, I wrote a piece on a planned picnic in Prospect Park on Yom Kippur for Jews who wanted to keep the holiness of the day despite being unable to fast. To say that this piece was controversial would be an understatement: complaints poured in from Orthodox readers who insisted that a picnic on Yom Kippur would be deeply inappropriate. However, most of my sources for the piece were Orthodox New Yorkers who had either battled eating disorders themselves or lost friends and family to complications from disordered eating. You cae read the piece on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.