Month: February 2021

It is the week of Jewish Purim celebration and of hamantaschen baking. My condensed version of the Jewish holiday is: they tried to get rid of us, we overcame, we baked cookies, now let’s eat. Cookies as the ultimate Jewish agency. This week stirred also another Jewish cookie tale. The Davelaar bakery announced to the… Continue reading An ode to Jewish cookies

This week I was struck by a new reading of a text I have read a gazillion times: the book of Esther, about the Jewish holiday of Purim. The one with the dressing up and over-eating of the triangular Hamantaschen – or, what I like to refer to as the vagina-cookies. It is all about… Continue reading Esther’s intersectionality

The newspaper headline cuts straight to the core of the message: ‘This Government will not apologize for the slave trade’. Again? I am having flashbacks. After last year’s BLM protests the question of an official apology for the Dutch role in the transatlantic slave trade came up in Dutch parliament. It was debated and declined.… Continue reading Apologies?

I never thought of myself as an activist. I am a mother, a lover, film scholar, birthworker. I am many things packed into one human being. As I think we all are, multifaceted creatures. Did I mention I am jewish? Well, here is where things recently started getting murky. I spent the first half of… Continue reading why I write