Jodi Eichler-Levine - Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis

An old man draped in blue and white robes rests on my office windowsill. He is there because of Grandma Salle.

This needlepoint rabbi in a golden frame is the precise sort of bearded old sage I often wish I could displace from the center of imagined Jewishness. I grew up at a time when women were at long last becoming rabbis in America but female faces in the pulpit were rare. This rabbi reminds me of the centuries before those changes. In that same ancient vein, even the color palette feels Old Worldreds and oranges and bits of bright, garish yellow adorn the background and the Torah he holds. Despite my dread and revulsion for that yellow, I admire the stitches that created the man: just one kind of stitch, on the diagonal, they slant so neatly, and the threads are all the same weight. I see none of the more complex, multidirectional stitches or beading that stymied me when I attempted needlepoint at a workshop in Atlanta. Yet, Grandma Salle crafted this man from a ton of stitches, hundreds, thousands, so even, with nuances up close that I cant see at a distance.

A few years ago, in November 2017, I was in the midst of moving, and my parents accompanied me as I cleaned out the rental house basement. They had come about some of my childhood toys, but then they saw Grandma Salles needlepoint propped against a baseboard in the dust-bunny-filled suburban gloom.

My fatherGrandma Salles sonsaid I should get rid of it. Its ugly. His statement carried the weight of other things, including my mothers inability to let go of my childhood toys, which now even my own daughter has outgrown. Throw it out, he suggested, grumpily, urging me to let it go.

My mother was aghast. But she made it! she insisted.

But she made it. Hands and emotions matter. I touched its dusty frame. Something of the essence of my grandmother lingered in that piece decades after her death. It was vibrant matter, a way to feel a tactile, crafted Judaism.

Rather than emphasizing texts and rabbis, which have long been at the center of how we think about Judaism, this book calls our attention to crafts and laypersons, mostly women. In that process, I have found both new practices and new styles of objects made by people who are crafting a Judaism of feeling on multiple levels. It is a Judaism of literal feeling, one attuned to the sense of touch, and a Judaism of feeling emotions, a Judaism of affect. This Judaism is one of waves, not static substances, one of subtle frequencies, of sensations that cannot always be expressed in language. Those feelings accrue at the intersections of bodies, objects, and the making of those objects. It is a Judaism in which matter has tremendous power. At the same time, this is a Judaism that is always in motion, always being constructed, never finished.

For Grandma Salle, needlepoint was a daily devotion, then a visual, everyday presence signaling her Jewish identity in her home. As much as I know that making Jewish homes in America is an ambivalent, layered process, that day in the basement I found myself of two minds about what to do with the rabbi. On the one hand, I was the one who had kept the needlepoint for so many years, dragging it across the country to multiple jobs, though I had never hung it up. On the other hand, I had too much stuff. As we quibbled in the basement, I thought of the many artists and crafters I had already encountered, how their objects hold tremendous power linked to identity, memory, and Jewishness. How could I throw away my own ancestors careful stitches?

It was decided. Its totally ugly, I said, but she made it. Im keeping it. It can go to my office. My campus office is filled with objects: a Star of David quilted mat; a Fraggle Rock puppet; the Judah Maccabee Huggable Hanukkah Hero doll that inspired my dissertation; a bobblehead of Bernie Brewer knitting from a Stitch n Pitch night in Milwaukee. Grandma Salles needlepoint rabbi would fit right in.

I imagined what my colleagues would think when they saw him perched among my collection. Isnt it