About Jewish Women in Global Perspective: A Documentary Film Festival at Indiana University

Jewish Women in Global Perspective, founded in 2007 by Indiana University graduate students Devorah Shubowitz and Jessica Alpert, fosters a pluralistic conversation about women's identity and authority among Indiana University students, academics, activists, and artists. The organization is home to a free student-initiated, two-day film festival from October 11-13, 2008, which assembles a group of filmmakers to join with commentators from the Indiana University and Bloomington communities.

The films focus on Jewish women around the globe and the ways in which they negotiate, struggle with, assume, and manage authority in all aspects of life, from health, reproduction, and beautifying their bodies, to work, money, family, and relationships.  By focusing on a specific identity group from around the world, Jewish Women in Global Perspective hopes to spark conversations about the complexity of identification: its set boundaries and unset meanings.  By viewing the specific local setting from a global perspective, we hope the festival helps draw connections from the questions the women face in the films to questions women may face in many cultural contexts. 

As a forum for scholarly and cultural exchange, the film festival includes ten documentaries, followed by carefully assembled discussion panels.   We draw on a team of student, staff, and faculty volunteers from Indiana University, and members of the Bloomington community. In addition, the festival established two, for-credit, undergraduate internships from the Jewish Studies Department.  Ultimately, the festival aims to create a rich and diversified portrait of contemporary global Jewish women's identity for campus-wide audiences, while highlighting the similar life questions that women ask worldwide.