In honor of Women's History Month and our Women's History Month sale, today's excerpt comes from a book published in 2008, Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother's Life in Politics by Beth Boosalis Davis:

"An unfamiliar voice at the other end of the phone asked, "Is this Mary Beth?" Immediately the question engaged my Nebraska self—Nebraska, where I was known for eighteen years as Mary Beth before going off to college, where I was M.B., and eventually dropping Mary altogether by the time I married. Mary Beth had always sounded southern to me anyway, though I liked being named after my grandmothers, Mary and Bertha (Beth and Bertha are the same in Greek: Panayiota).

This disembodied phone voice was calling me by my familial, familiar, Nebraska name—and not my grown-up name, Beth. Who was it? "You don't know me. My name is Neil Oxman and I'm working with your mother's campaign."

"Oh hi," I managed to interrupt the increasingly emphatic, eastern-accented caller.

"Look, you don't know me. I don't know you. But everyone I've talked to here in Nebraska agrees that you need to come home. Your mom needs your help and people say you'll know what to do. Besides, you're the only child, so it's up to you."

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother’s Life in Politics by Beth Boosalis Davis”

Now available in a paperback edition, read from the Preface of Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books by Ilana M. Blumberg:

"The story I tell in the pages to come begins in 1988, when I landed in Israel, eighteen years old and female. My crosscultural education began with a lesson in language. The term ‘‘yeshiva’’ (seminary), I quickly learned, did not apply to girls or women. In America, our teachers had talked about our year of study in ‘‘yeshiva’’ without distinguishing between male and female students and institutions. But when I got to Israel, conversations in Hebrew came to a standstill when Jews, both religious and secular, asked me why I’d come to Israel and I explained that I’d come to learn in ‘‘yeshiva.’’ I’d used the wrong term, they explained. Girls and young women went to mikhlala (women’s college), not yeshiva.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books by Ilana M. Blumberg”