A community event to celebrate International Women’s Day 2024.

A lecture by S.L. Wisenberg is part of the Friday night service of Temple Beth-El, followed by an Oneg complete with a light dinner and a performance by the Florida Tribe Women’s Drum Circle. All are welcome!

On March 8, 1908, women needle trade workers, hundreds of Jewish women among them, marched through New York City’s Lower East Side to protest child labor and sweatshop working conditions and to demand women’s suffrage. Since 1910, March 8 has been celebrated as INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY, recognizing the continual struggle women face.

S.L. Wisenberg will weave a story of resistance using readings from her own books to illustrate this constant struggle. Wisenberg is a Jewish feminist writer in Chicago who writes about history: her own, Jewish, American, European, and women’s. Whether about living one-breasted (cancer), or the history of male “experts” on the womb, she writes with depth, insight and humor. Her most recent book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, was awarded the Juniper Prize in nonfiction and shortlisted for the Chicago Review of Books nonfiction award. Wisenberg also authored The Sweetheart Is In, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions, and a nonfiction chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. In a roundup of Jewish memoirs about cancer, Jewish Woman magazine noted the book “is among the most Jewishly informed of the recent memoirs. It’s also the most poetic.”

The Leif Nissen Social Justice Lecture Series is sponsored by Karen Lieberman & Bruce Nissen to honor their son Leif (May 21, 1980-November 19, 2008) of blessed memory. Leif was dedicated to social justice issues and his family chooses to honor him through these lectures. The series is supported by the Temple Beth-El Social Action Committee.

Sponsored by Temple Beth-El in conjunction with the League of Women Voters St. Petersburg Area and co-sponsored by Pinellas NOW, Allendale United Methodist Church, and the Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater.