Celebrating the women who are building a better world
On International Women’s Day and everyday, we give thanks for the incredible women in our families, our communities and around the world who are fighting for social justice.
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Posts
Hip-Hop in their DNA: How Senegalese Activists are Building a Movement with Their Music
Just after sunset on a Friday night in Pikine, Senegal — one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital, Dakar — the energy at a local community center is electric. Spotlights make the courtyard glow as a headphone-clad DJ plays music from two massive speakers. Kids and teenagers — hundreds of them — sprint through …
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Claiming a Seat at the Table: The Feminization of Politics in Senegal
In the corner office of a municipal building in Dakar, Senegal, Adama Mbengue sits behind a huge, wooden desk. She interlocks her fingers and stretches her mouth into a wide grin. It took a long time to get here — generations, even — but Adama has arrived: in January 2022, she was elected as the …
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Know Your History, Master Your Future: How One Senegalese Activist is Mobilizing Youth By Illuminating his Community’s Forgotten Tragedy
In Thiaroye, Senegal—less than 10 miles from the country’s bustling, metropolitan capital of Dakar—a rusty metal gate separates bumper-to-bumper traffic and densely-packed produce markets from a painful but forgotten piece of Senegalese history. Inside the gate, the noise of the city disappears. Tall palms offer some shade, but the sun bears down on unmarked stone …
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Planting the seeds for reconciliation in Senegal
In a garden in Casamance, Senegal, sprouts poke hopefully out of the soil. They are the simple beginnings of carrots, onions and radishes. But they represent so much more than food. The women who planted and nurtured them are recovering from years of fear and violence. Casamance, the southwestern region of Senegal, has been ravaged …
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Binta Diao
Giving girls control over their bodies and futures
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Seynabou Male Cissé
Mobilizing women to make peace
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Supporting Women Peacemakers in Casamance
Thirty years of armed conflict in Casamance have left many people—especially women—feeling powerless: powerless to stop the frequent deadly bursts of guerilla violence, and powerless to feed and educate their children in the midst of the chaos of conflict. But one woman, Seynabou Male Cissé, a former high school teacher, saw the potential of women …
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Tostan
Tostan—which means “breakthrough” in Wolof, the national language of Senegal—is among the highest-profile social change organizations working on the African continent. AJWS was one of its earliest supporters, first funding the organization just a year after its launch in Senegal in 1991. AJWS stood by Tostan and its founder, Molly Melching, as the organization grew …
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Publications
Dvar Tzedek
Acharei Mot
Sweating in the hot sun, my rabbinical student peers and I sat opposite a group of Senegalese villagers, most of whom were in their late teens and twenties. We were in Senegal for a 10-day AJWS service-learning program, and this meeting of American rabbinical students and Senegalese villagers was an opportunity for cultural exchange.
Read MorePekudei
The Israelites’ first building project—the Mishkan—is about to be completed. We can recognize similarities between its construction and the building of our own communal structures: raising the funds, enlisting a contractor and choosing design elements. And yet, though modern communal leaders often ceremonially lay the cornerstone—complete with the entertaining and tellingly odd juxtaposition of dress clothes, shovel and hard hat—they rarely actively participate in the physical construction.
Read MoreChayei Sarah
When read with modern sensibilities, Bereshit 24 is a traditional tale about a man who travels to a far-off land to find a woman to marry his master’s son. Imagine that you are that woman, going about your daily chores when a strange man approaches you. He gazes at you for a bit, and finding you to be a beautiful virgin, inquires as to your family lineage. Then he meets with your father and brother, who, seeing the many gifts that the servant has bestowed upon you and them, say without hesitation, “Take her and go, and let her be a wife to your master’s son.”
Read MoreNitzavim-Vayelech
Parashat Nitzavim continues Moses’s final address to the entire Israelite community in which he instructs the Israelites to adhere to the Torah and avoid worshipping idols. Toward the end of this parashah, Moses utters one of the most famous passages in Torah in which he stresses the accessibility of our sacred texts.
Read MoreNitzavim-Vayelech
Parashat Nitzavim continues Moses’s final address to the entire Israelite community in which he instructs the Israelites to adhere to the Torah and avoid worshipping idols. Toward the end of this parashah, Moses utters one of the most famous passages in Torah in which he stresses the accessibility of our sacred texts.
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