Adding Our Voices (AOV) is a feminist-model social change initiative that invites, documents, curates, makes accessible, celebrates, encourages, and promotes Jewish Feminist and Gender-Inclusive music history, composers, and their music. Over 1200 works have arrived to date and been professionally juried with some 400 pieces selected for inclusion.
AOV is a project of the 501C3 non-profit Reclaiming Judaism and Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media in Germany.
A. Composers of accepted works receive a page of honor on the International Adding Our Voices: Jewish Feminist and Gender-Inclusive Music Archive, are honored at Zoom or real-time concerts where they sing and speak about one of their accepted pieces (or if deceased a professional vocalist in this progest sings for them), and they and their works will be under consideration for a documentary or film, songbooks, related curricula, social media, and conventional media promotion, and special activism and educational events.
We the only group actively seeking, collecting, and documenting the over forty years of Jewish feminist music that has changed the voice, face, and content of Judaism after thousands of years of solely patriarchal approaches to Judaism. While this initiative started as a Jewish feminist songbook project, it has bloomed into a multi-dimensional gender-inclusion advocacy initiative.*
B. BACKGROUND
New music became needed as Jewish women and girls and those from other unaddressed genders cried out from their narrow places in Jewish life, “Aren't we, and all who live, created in God's image, too?” Soon new ceremonies and rituals to honor the female mind/body/spirit cycle in time, began being created through a Jewish lens.
Jewish women began to find male allies and advocated for inclusion of women’s studies in Jewish studies and demanded access to leadership roles. Traditional and new spiritual titles - ranging from Rabbi, Cantor, Chaplain, Mashpi’ah, Kohenet, Maggidah, President of the Board and Executive Director of Jewish organizations and more are now open for not only women, our campaign for justice has shown and included the way for all genders. New songs and musical liturgy arose to raise up energy to power this healthy evolution in Jewish life.
Despite women and girls leading on the bima and in many Jewish settings today, most of the accessible, in-use music, liturgy, and lyrics for Jewish worship, holy days, and rites of passage still have been written by men, from the point of view of men, and represent their experience.
Often the English (or other local language) lyrics give a false impression of what is typically generally being prayed in the Hebrew—which is written in the masculine in patriarchal formats. Hence this effort to support composers to be able to compose in the feminine, gender-balanced, gender-neutral, and nonbinary in the Jewish sacred languages and the local languages when it comes to Jewish musical liturgy, musical midrash, song and sacred text citations in their works.
C. THE ADDING OUR VOICES INITIATIVE INCLUDES:
1. Call for Submissions and Professional Jurying. Over 1200 works have been received from 157 composers and composers' estates. Almost 400 jury-accept works to date. Call and Criteria for Submissions. [2]
2. The world's first Jewish Feminist and Gender-Inclusive Music Database and Archive, being developed by the award-winning team of the 501C3 non-profit Reclaiming Judaism in conjunction with Hannover University. The organizers, composers/performing artists, and concert attendees have donated $200,000 to date and are at capacity, so now we need additional sponsors to match this amount to realize the fullness of initiative goals.
3. AOV Collection-themed Jewish Feminist & Gender-Inclusive Music Concerts. The first five of some ten envisioned concerts in this Zoom series have been attended by a total of over 1400 people during the pandemic to date. The composers speak about their pieces and perform them at these concerts. Concerts are recorded, and professionally edited for educational and archival use, and the recordings are supplied to all who register for the concerts (so long the Zoom recording works).
4. Jewish Feminist and Gender-Inclusive Music Songbook(s) are projected to be published by our non-profit subsidiary, Reclaiming Judaism Multimedia Press.
5. Talks, Workshops, Seminars, Composer Meetups, Retreats, and Curriculum Units. Our first 1.25-hour introduction to the music in this project is now going out live on Zoom (til the tridemic ceases) to communities based on the wonderful response to our pilot series. AOV composers will be resourced with materials to be able to offer these locally. And the meetups will facilitate language, ideals, skill-sharing, and new Jewish feminist and gender-inclusive music partnerships and works.
6. Documentary of Jewish Feminist Music and its transformational impact on Jewish life, for which an executive documentary filmmaker will be sought.
7. Social Media Campaigns. To promote collection concerts, composers and their music on an ongoing basis.
THE ADDING OUR VOICES INITIATIVE IS LED BY:
Rabbi Dr. Goldie Milgram, Founder and Executive Director of Reclaiming Judaism (1998), award-winning widely-published author and innovator in the fields of Jewish experiential, Spiritual, and Gender-Sensitive Education. She is also a liturgist and visual artist, Co-President of the Association of Professional and Aspiring Jewish Artists. Early on a bioethical researcher and Jewish Federation Executive Director, Goldie also founded and chaired the first program of Jewish Women’ Studies at any Jewish institution of higher learning, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and served Dean of Admissions and Practical Rabbinics for the Academy for Jewish Religion. She also founded, and long co-hosted, and directed the first public health talk television series, Health Watch, (NBC then CBS), and continues to teach bioethics. Goldie also founded Reclaiming Judaism Multimedia Press, where she has created award-winning gender-inclusive and spiritual Jewish books, resources, and programs. Goldie invites: “Come Celebrate the Jewish Cultural (R)evolution you can pray, sing and dance to!”
Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael, singer-songwriter-liturgist-recording artist-visual artist-author and playwright. She gathered music from peers and created the foundational collection for AOV after a discussion about the need for Jewish feminist music in1985, when the then-named B’nai Or, now ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal organization held a gathering called a Kallah in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Geela Rayzel has nurtured this initiative along with different teams of colleagues over the years until it is now coming to fruition. She has penned a herstory from her point of view of how Jewish feminist music and the AOV initiative came to be that is available here [3].
Prof. Dr. Sarah Ross, Director of the European Center for Jewish Music, Hannover University, author of A Season of Singing: Creating Jewish Feminist Music in the United States. (Brandeis University Press, 2016), is creating the Jewish Feminist Music Archive for the AOV collection at the sharing heritage website “Soundscape Synagogue” (SoSy). SoSy is a community based online project drawing on the method of cultural mapping that is hosted by the European Center for Jewish Music which Prof. Dr. Ross heads at the Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media in Germany.
When you bring these compositions, recordings, and ideas into your range of influence, and create or encourage the creation of new, inclusive Jewish music--you will help a full array of gender-inclusion to become a norm in Jewish music and throughout Jewish life.
Inquiries: Rabbi Dr. Goldie Milgram [4]