Contributors to This Issue

Yaffah Berkovits Murciano studied French, Spanish, and Arabic at Westminster University, London, and Social Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She emigrated to Israel in 1980 and works there as a translator. She has translated several books on Jewish history and philosophy, including A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century (Brill), by Ruth Lamdan. She translated the Arabic section of Voices Within the Ark: An International Anthology of Modern Jewish Poetry, edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf (1980).

Nitza Druyan, who received her Ph.D. in Jewish History from Bar Ilan University, is a recognized expert on Yemenite Jewish history and culture. She has published extensively on immigration of Jews from Moslem countries and on issues of ethnic diversity in Eretz Israel. Professor Druyan is the author of the books Without a Magic Carpet (1981) and Pioneers of the Yemenite Immigration (1982). Among her scholarly articles are: "Yemenite Jewish Women, between Tradition and Change" (1992), "Yemenite Jews on the Zionist Altar" (2000), and "Jews from Islamic Countries in Jerusalem at the End of the Ottoman Era" (2002). She is currently the Director of the Long Island Center for Jewish Studies and teaches at Hofstra University.

Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman, of the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at The Open University of Israel, has long been studying Yemenite Jews, while in Yemen and after their immigration to Palestine/Israel. Her publications revolve mainly around the history and culture of Yemenite Jews; messianism—ideology and movements; Jewish–Muslim relations; social and cultural interactions: "Center" vis à vis the "Other"; Jewish conversion to Islam; and women and gender studies. Her last book: The Jews of Yemen: History, Society, Culture, was published in 2004 by the Open University Publishing House.

Dr. Aharon Gaimani is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and the Interdepartmental Division of Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is engaged in teaching and research in the Program for Sephardic and Oriental Jewry Studies. His major fields of research include: the Torah of Eretz Israel in the era of the expulsion from Spain, the spiritual heritage of Yemenite Jewry, Yemenite ketubot and gittin, and the Jewish woman in Muslim countries.

Naomi Graetz is the author of Silence is Deadly: Judaism Confronts Wifebeating (Jason Aronson, 1998), S/He Created Them: Feminist Retellings of Biblical Stories (Gorgias Press, 2003), The Rabbi's Wife Plays at Murder (Shiluv Press, 2004) and Unlocking the Garden: A Feminist Jewish Look at the Bible, Midrash and God (Gorgias Press, 2005). She teaches English at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Yael Guilat received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University and currently teaches at the Oranim Academic College in Tivon, where she is Head of the Art Institute, and at the University of Haifa. As a social and communal activist and a scholar of contemporary Israeli art, she is especially concerned with cultural identity, visual memory, and museum studies. Her recent research focuses on Jewish ritual artifacts as cross-cultural and gender-based representations of body and sexuality. Her book, provisionally entitled The New Hebrew Visual Culture in Palestine and the Jewish Traditional Yemenite Arts, is forthcoming from the Ben Gurion Center of Research–Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Vered Madar grew up in Midrach Oz, a moshav in the north of Israel. She currently teaches in the Jewish and Comparative Folklore Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is completing her Ph.D. dissertation, "Yemenite Jewish Women's Song: Body Language and the Body as Language," focusing on the Yemenite lamentation tradition and songs for birthing women, under the supervision of Galit Hasan-Rokem. She has published articles on this topic in various Israeli academic journals. Madar is an activist in Mizrahi identity and feminist politics, as well as in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement.

Judith Margolis, MFA, is a painter and book designer, the art...