Wonder Woman: Online Tour
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Wonder Woman Online Tour Script
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WONDER WOMEN FILM TIMINGS: WONDER WOMAN Film timings.docx
| Timings for Film Wonder Woman tour in collaboration with The Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women chat New museum opened March 2021$100 million renovation72,000 square feet Carol Humoy – The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel Jacqueline Nicholls – LondonMaternal Torah: The Yeshiva In-between Womens boothdiscover WonderWomen Henrietta Szoldfounder of Hadassahsaved 30,000 Jewish children Lena Revenkoartist of 50 communities Helen SuzmanSouth African politiciantwice nominated for Nobel Peace Prize Osnat Barzani1590 KurdistanTanna’it=female rabbi Queen Gudit 10th century Ethiopiadescendent of the High Priest in Jerusalem saved her kingdom from forced conversion Mentioned by Marco Polo and Benjamin of Tudela Donna Graziaconverso from Portugal Emma LazarusAmerican author and poetfamily was also from PortugalCame to America before the revolution Highly educatedadvocated for Jewish immigrants started aide societies Women's History Month HonoreeNational Women's Hall of Fame Clara Lemlichlabor activist came from Russia International Ladies Garment Workers Union 1909 her yiddish speech causes the largest strike in history March 25, 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire Estee LauderI never dreamed about success. I worked for it born and raised in Queens, NY Gift with purchase Leonard Lauder – son runs company Ronald Lauder – U.S. Ambassador to Austriapresident of the World Jewish Congress Stella Corcousborn 1858 NY married moved to Mogador, Morocco created schools for girls that became international models of education Tamar PaleyIsraeli artistBat Mitzvah cuff | 12 women:Carol Hamoy- AmericanJacqueline Nicholls- EnglandHenrietta Szold- AmericaLena Revenko- Belarus/IsraelHelen Suzman- South AfricaOsnat Barzani- KurdistanQueen Gudit- EthiopiaDonna Gracia- PortugalEmma Lazarus- AmericaEstee Lauder- AmericaStella Corcos- America/MoroccoTamar Paley- Israel Welcome to ANU Museum of the Jewish People. Hello and welcome to ANU, the Museum of the Jewish People located on the beautiful campus of Tel Aviv University in Israel. We are so excited to have you with us for the Wonder Women tour of our museum, which was created in collaboration with The Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women. My name is _____ and I will be showing you around. This tour will last around 40-45 minutes, with time for questions throughout and at the end of the tour. Thank you to _______ (client organization) for having us on today. Before we begin the tour, there are a few important logistic points to review: In just a moment, I will be sharing my screen and we will figuratively walk through the museum together. Just like our in-person tours, our online tours are filled with questions and opportunities to share our own stories and learn from others in the group. I will be asking you questions throughout the tour, and you are welcome to answer them, or ask questions of your own as we go along. If you feel comfortable doing so, please write your questions and answers in the chat, which can be found by clicking the ‘chat’ button at the bottom of the screen. If you prefer to ask a question anonymously, you can send me a question directly instead of to the whole group. Please keep yourself on mute throughout the tour for the convenience of others. Now, let’s get started! Question: Raise your hand if you have been to Israel before? Now raise your hand if you have been to ANU, which was previously called Beit Hatfutsot or Diaspora Museum, before? Question: If you have been to our museum before, write which year you were here in the chat. Our new museum opened to the public in March of 2021 after a ten year, $100 million-dollar renovation with over 72,000 square feet of exhibition space with countless artifacts from around the globe and displays of the unique as well as the everyday, modern and ancient Judicia, and art. We have 54 specially produced films, and 25 interactives across 4 wings spanning 3 floors waiting to welcome you. Today's tour will focus on the amazing women of Judaism: our Wonder Women. We will meet some women we may already know and some that may be new to us. So, without further ado, let's start exploring! I’d like to start with an inspiring piece of art for our women's focused tour; New York artist Carol Humoy who works in mixed media sculptures that express an understanding of her Jewish heritage and her history as a woman. The piece we are seeing here is called The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel. The work consists of 100 transparent vinyl dresses accompanied by pages listing the names of Biblical women whose accomplishments are not celebrated in the Torah or whose names are not known or have been lost to time. Her work challenges us to restore to the Jewish people the stories of the missing 50% of her people who have been overlooked many times throughout history. We are so happy to be able to shine a light on some of these amazing women! Question: why do you think womens’ names or accomplishments were often not recorded throughout history? Another beautiful representation of a Wonder Woman is by an artist Jacqueline Nicholls called the Maternal Torah:The Yeshiva In-between. The artist is a London-based visual artist and Jewish educator. She uses her art to engage with traditional Jewish ideas in untraditional ways. In this piece we see the shape of this Sefer Torah corset is based on the shape of a pregnant woman. The Talmud describes the fetus as learning Torah from an angel and as the baby leaves the womb the angel touches the baby above his lip causing the baby to forget everything it once knew. The cupid’s bow of the lip is the sign of the angel's finger. Because of this touch we must spend our lives retrieving the Torah knowledge that was once ours when we were in the womb. Question: what does this mean to you? How do you interpret it? We’ve now met two Jewish artists who have set our tone for what will come. On the 3rd floor of our museum we have a special glass booth, without a glass ceiling, that is the home to the amazing women of the Jewish people. In this booth are 2 interactives that allow us to discover various Wonder Women. The interactive allows us to scroll and search and discover many amazing women. One is Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, philanthropist, and zionist. Through her hard work and dedication in the United States and Israel, she organized hospitals and youth villages. She saved over 30,000 Jewish children from Europe during the second world war through her Youth Aliyah programs that brought children to Palestine in 1933. There is so much we can learn from these amazing women, but let's focus on some of the Wonder Women that we have in our museum. Let’s take a look at another female artist and her amazing work. Lena Revenko, is an Isaeli artist born in Belarus. She is featured on our second floor in an installation that deals with the 50 main communities of Jews throughout history. Each panel represents one of the 50 main Jewish centers throughout history. The interactives below the pictures allows you to get the history of each of the locations. Let’s begin with Helen Suzman, representing South Africa. Helen was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician. She was born in 1917 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in a small mining town outside of Johannesburg. She was first elected to the House of Assembly in 1953. Her party rejected race discrimination and advocated for equal rights for all.For years she endured verbal abuse and prejudice and was subject to insults and prejudice for being a woman, for being Jewish and for being a supporter of human rights. She exposed prison torture and inhume conditions, and was a champion of Nelson Mandela. She was at Mandela's side when he signed the new constitution in 1996. She died at the age of 91 in 2009 and is considered a national hero in South Africa. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The next Wonder Woman we’re going to meet may surprise you! She is a learned Talmudic scholar, a Tanna’it, and the head of a Yeshiva rabbinical school and a poet. You may think that we will meet her in the modern streams of Judaism. But you won’t find her in modern Judaism, you have to go back in time over 400 years. This amazing woman comes from northern Kurdistan, what is now Iraq, and was born in 1590. Yes! 1590! Many people believe that female Talmudic scholars are a modern phenomenon, but here we have a Tanna’it in a time and place we do not expect. Osnat Barzani. She was a trailblazer well ahead of her times in many ways! She was supported by both her father and later her husband in her education and in the role she played, which showed an uncommon show of strength by both, in a time when it was very unusual. Her son followed in her footsteps and became a learned Rabbi in Iraq, and more fitting with the times, her daughter was lost to history. We won’t meet another female Rabbi until the 1830’s in Ukraine with Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, followed by Ray Frank in the US in the 1890’s and in 1935, when Regina Jonas was ordained privately in Germany and became the world's first ordained female rabbi. Another WonderWoman we meet here on our Wall of Communities is representing Ethiopia; Queen Gudit of the 10th century. She was a legendary queen who, according to a tradition, laid waste to the Kingdom of Aksum and ruled for 40 years. She was a descendant of their first king, Phineas, a descendant of the Jewish High Priest of Jerusalem, Zadok. According to the tradition of the Beta Israel, literally, 'the house of Israel' in Ge'ez, the language of Ethiopia at the time, these Jews had origins going back to the 4th century CE. It is claimed that the community refused to convert to Christianity during the rule of the monarchs of the Kingdom of Aksum who embraced Christianity. This was the impetus for Gudit’s revolt. The Golden Age of the Beta Israel kingdom took place between the years 858–1270, in which the Jewish kingdom flourished. Even Marco Polo and Benjamin of Tudela mention an independent Ethiopian Jewish kingdom in the writings from that period. The brave Queen who saved her people from forced conversions at that time would be so proud to see her people in Israel, returned to the fold of the Jewish people. I’d like to introduce you to another amazing woman that some of you may have heard of. I wonder if anyone can guess who she is… Question: I’ll give you a few clues. If you have an idea, write your guess in the chat: She was the Bill Gates of her time, a very wealthy business owner and a political force that wielded power like a King and gave to charity and worked to help her Jewish brethren. She has a hotel named after her on the shores of the Kinneret. Can you guess who we are talking about? Donna Grazia! I’d like to show you a film that was made especially for our museum that tells us her story. Enjoy! This film can be found in Gibborim, or Heroes, our children’s gallery at the museum. As the daughter of a family of conversos from Portugal she knew of the horrors of the Inquisition and persecution. Donna Grazia used her influence to protect Jews. With all these stories of persecution it is easy to see why we want some freedom! Listen to this familiar quote by another Jewish woman of Portuguese descent: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" We all know these words from “The New Colossus" sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus. She wrote the poem in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level. Question: raise your hand if you have seen this quote on the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus was an American author and poet, as well as an activist for Jewish causes. She was born in New York City, July 22, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family as the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant and sugar refiner, and Esther Nathan. One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany; the rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and were residents in New York long before the American Revolution. They were among the original twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam fleeing the Inquisition from their settlement of Recife, Brazil. Privately educated by tutors from an early age, her family moved in high society. She became interested in her Jewish ancestry as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, and the poor standard of living in Russia in general, thousands of Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York. Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of these Jewish immigrants. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. Emma volunteered in the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society employment bureau and in 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. Question: Did anyone’s family leave Central or Eastern Europe in this time period, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Write in the chat where they came from. In 1992, she was named as a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. Lazarus was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included on a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She is proudly represented here in ANU as one of our Wonder Women! The amazing work of these two amazing American Wonder Women allowed other women to follow. One great looking – and smelling – Wonder Woman is Estee Lauder. Her most famous quote was “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” Estée Lauder, the founder of the company that bears her name, was a visionary and a role model. She was ahead of her time in every way. She created and ran one of the world’s most prestigious and innovative companies. Born Josephine Esther Mentzer, Estée Lauder was raised in Queens, New York, by her Hungarian mother, Rose, and Czech father, Max. Like most of her eight siblings, she worked at the family's hardware store, where she got her first taste of business, entrepreneurship, and what it takes to be a successful retailer. Her interest in beauty was sparked in high school when her Hungarian uncle came to live with her family and created velvety skin creams, first in the kitchen, then in a laboratory in a stable behind their home. From her uncle, Estée not only learned how to concoct the wonderful creams but also how to apply them to women’s faces. Estée married Joseph Lauder January 15, 1930. They had two children: Leonard and Ronald. Estée got her start selling skin care and makeup in beauty salons, demonstrating her products on women while they were sitting under hair dryers. Estée had innate instincts for what women wanted and was the consummate saleswoman and marketer. She believed that to make a sale, you had to touch the consumer, show her the results on her face and explain the products. She was also the inventor of the "Gift with Purchase" idea, elevating it such that it became standard industry practice. Question: Estee died at the age of 95 in 2004 and her son, Leonard, became the chief executive of Estée Lauder and chairman of the board. Her second son, Ronald, was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and was U.S. Ambassador to Austria in 1986–87. As of 2021, he is the president of the World Jewish Congress. The Lauder family has opened, and continues to support the Lauder Jewish Schools, private Jewish schools across Central and Eastern Europe. I want to introduce you to another Wonder Woman who worked for the education of girls as a way to make society better in a time and place that did all it could to stop her. Stella Corcos was born in 1858 in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Abraham Duran, was a wealthy tobacco merchant who immigrated to America from Algeria, and her mother, Rebecca, was from an aristocratic British Jewish family. Stella grew up surrounded by governesses and servants and received the finest education. After moving to England, she became a principal of a private school in London, then married in England to Moses Corcos, a successful tradesman from Mogador, in which they settled after their marriage. Mogador was a vivid port city in Morocco, where Jewish artisans, rabbis, and scholars formed a vibrant community. Due to the large number of Jewish merchants, the port of Mogador stopped working on Shabbat. The elders recall that after the morning prayer of Shabbat, Jews used to leave the Mellah (the Jewish quarter), and walk to the beach, where they would spend the day relaxing and bathing. By the end of the 19th century, there were approximately 12,000 members in the Jewish community of Mogador. One of them was Stella Corcos, a brave inspirational woman who dedicated her life to hold out against the Christian mission’s intentions. The Corcos family was one of the most wealthy and distinguished families in the city. They were invited by the Sultan Muhamad Ibn Abdalla to develop the city’s trade and economy. These families were called “Tujar Al Sultan”, tradesmen of the Sultan. After realizing the schooling options for Jewish girls was almost nothing, Stella established a school for Jewish girls, the first of its kind in all of North Africa. In time her school became one of the finest and most successful girls’ institutions in the entire Jewish world. Her school was named “Kavod ve-Ometz” (honor and courage) It set up a wonderful model of education and pedagogy. Stella insisted that the teaching language would be English, and offered lessons in French, Arabic, and Hebrew. Initially, for lack of means, the school was located in the home of Stella and Moses. Later they had enough funds to relocate to its own building. Stella introduced a teaching method called advanced excellency, that directed the girls to self-studying as well as to community volunteering. The pupils studied history, geography, grammar, literature, general education, mathematics, reading and writing, translating, poetry, sewing, piano, and drama. One Alliance principal who visited the unique school noted that Kavod ve-Ometz could compete with the best Alliance schools in Morocco. English pedagogues, who came especially to Mogador to inspect the educational wonder, said that Stella Corcos’ institution was even better than similar schools in England and that the students are no less educated than their British equivalents. Surpassing herself, Stella established a theater class, considered the first Jewish theater ensemble in Morocco. A replica of a rare program of one the productions, dated 1888, kept all these years with Stella’s great-granddaughter, Sidney, is on display in the ANU museum collection. It's the perfect example of a small artifact telling a large story. We began our Wonder Woman tour by looking at the artwork of two amazing women artists, let’s end our tour by looking at another modern art work and by meeting another female artist. Let’s take a look at an amazing jewelry accessory that represents Jewish women through the ceremony of Bat Mitzvah. Here we see an arm bracelet called A Sign Upon Your Hand by an Israeil artist, Tamar Paley. This work deconstructs the different elements of arm tefillin and reassembles them into a new composition with a contemporary femine perspective. The Hebrew letter “shin” represents the command to “bind them as a sign upon your arm” and is meant to be placed on one's upper arm where the tefillin box would sit. Under the “shin” is the parchment scroll with blue threads streaming off representing leather bands that would normally bind the tefillin. This piece was designed to challenge the status quo regarding women and tefillin. Much of Tamar Paley’s work offers a reshaping of traditional patriarchal forms to a female perspective of the physical and spiritual experiences of women in Judaism. Question: Did you have a Bat Mitzvah? How did you celebrate or mark this special occasion? We have covered 12 amazing women to tie into Tamar’s Bat Mitzvah work. Thank you for coming on this tour of Jewish Wonder women. Question: What ‘Wonder Woman’ in your life would you add to our galleries? Why? We hope to see you in our museum in Tel Aviv soon. |