Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community (Where Religion Lives)

by Jodi Eichler-Levine

Exploring a contemporary Judaism rich with the textures of family, memory, and fellowship, Jodi Eichler-Levine takes readers inside a flourishing American Jewish crafting movement. As she traveled across the country to homes, craft conventions, synagogue knitting circles, and craftivist actions, she joined in the making, asked questions, and contemplated her own family stories. Jewish Americans, many of them women, are creating ritual challah covers and prayer shawls, ink, clay, or wood pieces, and other articles for family, friends, or Jewish charities. But they are doing much more, Eichler-Levine shows: armed with perhaps only a needle and thread, they are reckoning with Jewish identity in a fragile and dangerous world.

The work of these crafters embodies a vital Judaism that may lie outside traditional notions of Jewishness, but, as Eichler-Levine argues, these crafters are as much engaged as any Jews in honoring and nurturing the fortitude, memory, and community of the Jewish people. Craftmaking is nothing less than an act of generative resilience that fosters survival. Whether taking place in such groups as the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework or the Jewish Hearts for Pittsburgh, or in a home studio, these everyday acts of creativity - yielding a needlepoint rabbi, say, or a handkerchief embroidered with the Hebrew words tikkun olam - are a crucial part what makes a religious life.

• ISBN13: 9781469660639
• Publish Date: 19 October 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis is an interesting and very well written ethnography of crafting and its intersection with Judaica, written by Dr. Jodi Eichler-Levine. Due out 19th Oct 2020 from The University of North Carolina Press, it's 240 pages and will be available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats.
This is a meticulously researched and annotated survey course on Judaism and its symbiotic relation to crafting and generative art mostly against the backdrop of the melting pot which is the United States. How, in such an assimilative culture, have Jews managed to hold onto ethnic identity while at the same time integrating into and becoming a part of American culture? How is creating art a part of that identity and how does it relate to Jewishness? While not, strictly speaking, a rigidly academic ethnography (the identities of the subjects are for the most part not anonymized), there is an undeniably academic flavor throughout.

The author is an academic and this is what I would call a layman accessible academic treatise of the subjects in all their incarnations as they intersect culture and history. As an academic work, it is *full* of annotations, notes, illustrations and minutiae (in a good way). The author definitely "shows her work" in full. I loved poring over the notes and the exhaustive bibliography and full chapter notes and annotations (did I mention that this is an academic work?). The notes and references are likely worth the price of admission for anyone interested in the subject and there's obviously been a swoon-inducing amount of time spent on research and resource gathering on the part of the author.

I found the entire book quite interesting and fascinating. It is, admittedly, a niche book and will appeal to readers interested in cultural anthropology and ethnography, but might not appeal to readers looking for an easy read. The language is rigorous and formal. I definitely don't think it's inaccessible for the average reader, but it will take some effort (and I think that's a good thing). This would make a good support text for classroom or library use, for Jewish studies and allied subjects, as well as a superlative read for the particularly arts-history-interested.

Five stars. This is well and deeply researched and engaging.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.