1st Edition

A Minyan of Women Family Dynamics, Jewish Identity and Psychotherapy Practice

Edited By Beverly Greene, Dorith Brodbar Copyright 2011
    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book explores the diverse manner in which family dynamics shaped Jewish identities in ways that were unique and directly connected to their experiences within their families of origin. Highlighted is the diversity of experience of ethnic identity within members of a group of women who are similar in many respects and who belong to an ethnic group that is often invisible. Jewish people, like members of other ethnic groups are often treated as if their identities were homogeneous. However, gender, social class, sexual orientation, factors surrounding immigration status, proximity of family members to the holocaust or pogroms, the number of generations one's family has been in the US and other salient aspects of experience and identites transform and inform the meaning and experience by group members.

    The book explores these diversities of experience and goes on to highlight the way in which the intermingling of family dynamics and subsequent Jewish identity in these women is manifested in the practice of psychotherapy.

    In 2012, the book had been awarded the Jewish Women Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology Award for Scholarship, for that year.

    This book was published as a special issue of Women and Therapy.

    Foreword  1. Introduction: A Minyan of Women: Family Dynamics, Jewish Identity and Psychotherapy Practice  Narratives  2. Sara, Without the ‘‘H’’  3. A Jewish Woman Who Celebrates Nature  4. Being Jewish and Being a Psychotherapist  5. The Jewish Nonsheep as Lesbian Feminist Therapist  6. From Hidden Child to Godless Jew: A Personal Journey  7. Nu! You Make a Living at This?  8. A Journey From the Big Apple to the South and Beyond  9. Jewish in Alaska: Scanning the Room  10. Somewhere Else: The Geography of a Life  11. Beyond Silence and Survival  12. A Process Without End: Seeking the Unrealized Yet Irrepressible Aspects of Self  13. Elijah’s Ghost: A Female Jewish Therapist Explores the Legacy of Love, Fear, Social Action and Faith  14. French, Catholic, Jewish. Outsider Within  15. From the Outside, Looking In  16. Culture as Both a Lens and a Veil  17. Am I Jewish?  18. Reflections on a Carpathian Legacy  19. I’ve Always Known I’m Jewish, but How Am I Jewish?  20. I Am the Rabbi’s Daughter  21. How I Lost My Yiddische Kop and Found It Again: The Un-M-Bellished Truth  22. Journey to the Start of Day: Ancestry, Ethnicity, and My Work as a Clinical Psychologist  23. Growing up Jewish: The Shaping of One Activist  24. My Names  25. On Being and Not Being Jewish: From Pink Diapers to Social Activist=Feminist  Commentaries  26. One Particular Minyan  27. On Poets, Revolutionaries, and the Power of Naming  28. Looking Beneath the Surface: Trauma, Invisibility, and the Negotiation of Identity in the Minyan  29. Leah with an ‘‘H’’ or How I am Jewish, But Not Really  30. Speaking Truth to Power in the Minyan  31. Healing the Self, Healing the World: A Feminist Journey  32. Memories, Reflections, and Questions  33. The Minyan: Through the Lens of a Black Child of Harlem  34. Culture and the Self: On Paradoxes and Contradictions  35. Mazel Tov  Epilogue  36. Intersectionality and the Complexity of Identities: How the Personal Shapes the Professional Psychotherapist

    Biography

    Beverly A. Greene is a Professor of Psychology at St. John's University and a practicing clinical psychologist in New York City. The author of nearly 100 publications, nine are the subject of national awards that include the APA Division 35 Psychotherapy with Women Researh Award (1995, 1996, 2000), The Association for Women in Psychology's Women of Color Psychologies Publication Award for making substantial contributions to the psychological literature for raising the visibility of previously overlooked populations.

    Dorith Brodbar, MA, MS. Ed, PhD is a counselor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York and a clinical psychologist in independent practice at Lindenhurst, N.Y. Dr. Brodbar has worked with deaf individuals and their families in academic and clinical environments including six years with deaf mothers and their hearing children in the Parent-Infant Therapeutic Nursery Program at the Lexington Center for Mental Health Services.

    I loved this book, and so will you, if you are a psychotherapist, a woman, a Jew, as I am, or any one of the above. The insights which the contributors share will resonate with you as they did with me, even though each of us brings our unique perspective to our roles. Treat yourself to A Minyan of Women. It will be a rare experience.

    Dorothy W. Cantor, Psy.D., Former President, American Psychological Association