Female Torah Scribes Breaking Barriers

Shoshana Gugenheim, one of the first women in modern times to train and practice as a soferet (a female Torah scribe), will do a workshop and/or lecture on the scribal arts and being a female in a “forbidden role.”
Shoshana is an interdisciplinary artist, Torah scribe, curator and educator. Shoshana is occupied with questions about Judaism and patriarchy, ritual, feminism and gender gaps. Influenced by her studies in and work as an educator, Shoshana addresses ways of schooling and un-schooling and engages institutional critique as a way to imagine new possibilities, often through publicly generated solutions. Her work reinvents traditional practices, primarily, but not solely, Jewish ones, and reinserts them with new forms into familiar contexts. Some subjects of her artistic research include the Jewish female body, branding and logos, citizenship, animal welfare, silence, loss, and death and dying.
Her scribal work inspired her international collaboration, Women of the Book, launched with the Jerusalem Biennale 2015, and is informing her current work on high animal welfare parchment manufacturing.