In Search of Jewish Women: My Travels into Light.

ABZUG, Bella S., 1920-1998; CHISOLM, Shirley

Nashim Art Editor Judith Margolis writes : A survey of feminist activity in America for the last five decades will reveal that, while history was being made on our behalf, Joan Roth was often there with her camera, taking iconic photographs of women celebrating victories and mourning losses. At National Women's Conferences, reproductive rights rallies, women's marches, vigils and demonstrations, Roth framed for posterity the likes of Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisolm, Alice Shalvi and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Meanwhile, another body of work was also coming into being. Fueled by a fierce desire to search out and learn about the lives of Jewish women living far from the familiar centers of North American modern life, Roth, armed only with her camera and her curiosity, traveled to Ethiopia, Yemen, Morocco, the former Soviet Union, eastern Europe, South America, Bukhara and India. With determination and grit, Roth found ways to go to places she had never been and to find and communicate with women with whom she often did not share a language. Sometimes travel arrangements were organized by Jewish communal organizations and institutions in the U.S. or the destination country. But mostly Roth arranged and paid for her trips on her own. With disarming modesty, she related to me, while we were preparing this article: Until I met Lenny [her second husband, now deceased], I was a divorced woman raising two daughters by myself. I traveled mostly on my own dime. It wasn't easy. I couldn't just jump on an airplane and go; there were difficult and tangled travel logistics, visas and all kinds of documents and permissions to get, arrangements to stay in places. I had never done this before. The men in these communities were flabbergasted at the idea of a woman photographer. I always won them over somehow, but nothing came easy.... I had to deal with security and all kinds of tough, scary stuff. I was not brave. Before this I had never gone anywhere in my life. I was scared to walk out the door. But I was possessed. And then there was developing the film—not like today when you just pop a chip into a computer. Getting prints made and having the money to do it all. It was hard! To understand the difficulty of having made these journeys is to recognize Roth's work as not merely a professional achievement, but a Calling. The images of the women she encountered in Jewish communities around the world emerge, manifesting narratives in one's consciousness in the way that photographs in developing fluid slowly bloom into clarity. The resulting works define a trajectory of exemplary artistic and documentary accomplishment. Life stories are revealed that might never have been told. But we also see a portrait of the photographer herself. Revealed as well is Roth's astuteness, her ability to invite, convince, seduce—allow—these women she had just met, in so many places she had never been, to stand unselfconsciously before the unflinching gaze of her camera and allow us to see them. We offer here a glimpse of the prodigious inventory of photographs that Joan Roth took wherever she went and the stories she brought home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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