|
 In Our Own Voices is a how-to guide for conducting life history interviews with American Jewish women. Designed for use by individuals, as well as community groups, the guide invites readers to become "makers of history" by using oral history to capture and preserve the stories of their mothers and grandmothers, teachers and colleagues, community members and friends.
INTRODUCTION
IN HER BOOK, The Creation of Patriarchy, HISTORIAN GERDA LERNER, THE grand “mother of women’s history,” distinguishes between history as the unrecorded past – all the events of the past as recollected by human beings – and history-making, a historical creation usually left, until recent times, to a professional class of male historians.
While women have always been actors and agents in history, they have been left out of most of the annals of recorded History. Yet they have not only participated in sharing the world and its work with men, they have had unique experiences and have developed their own oral traditions by which these experiences were preserved.
Women’s scarce presence in the written record deprives all people of a fully rendered chronicle of past events and the opportunity to draw meanings from them. When one-half of the human population is excluded from history-making, history fails to serve as a source of both collective memory and personal identity.
Because women’s experiences have gone unrecorded and unrecognized, most narratives of American Jewish history offer only a partial account of our past. Marginalized or ignored, or absorbed into universalized categories of “Jews” or of “Americans,” ...
Visit In Our Own Voices: Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women Download Page
You can download In Our Own Voices: Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women in PDF format.
JAYNE K. GUBERMAN, Editor
Photographs by Joan Roth
Introduction by Joyce Antler
Copyright © 2005 Jewish Women’s Archive
ISBN 0-9752967-3-6
CONTENTS
Preface by Nicki Newman Tanner ...................................................... 1
Foreword by Jayne K. Guberman .......................................................3
Introduction by Joyce Antler ............................................................... 7
PART 1 ◆ CONDUCTING LIFE HISTORY INTERVIEWS .........................11
Getting Ready ............................................................................... 13
Choosing a Narrator ................................................................... 13
Pre-Interview Questionnaire ........................................................14
Background Research ................................................................. 15
Developing Your Questions ........................................................... 15
Learning How to Ask Good Questions ............................................ 16
Choosing Your Equipment ............................................................ 18
Release Forms ........................................................................... 21
Setting Up the Interview ...............................................................23
During the Interview ............................................................... 24
Establishing Rapport with the Narrator ....................................... 24
Recording an Opening Announcement .......................................... 24
Ask Easy Questions First ..............................................................25
Dealing with Difficult Subjects .....................................................25
Obtaining a Signed Release Form .................................................26
Completing the Proper Word Form .................................................26
Protecting the Tape or Disc ............................................................ 27
After the Interview ....................................................................28
Saying Thank You ......................................................................28
Interview Logs ...........................................................................28
Transcribing and Editing ............................................................29
Getting the Interview Out ........................................................... 30
PART 2 ◆ JWA’S TOPIC GUIDE FOR LIFE HISTORY INTERVIEWS .....33
Introduction ...............................................................................34
Family Essay by Paula E. Hyman ..............................................38
Education Essay by Pamela S. Nadell ....................................... 44
Work Essay by Hasia Diner ........................................................ 48
Community Service Essay by Dianne Ashton ..........................52
Jewish Identities Essay by Karla Goldman ...............................56
Home and Place Essay by Jenna Weissman Joselit ...................62
Leisure and Culture Essay by Riv-Ellen Prell ......................... 66
Health and Sexuality Essay by Beth Wenger ............................70
Women’s Identities Essay by Joyce Antler ................................74
History & World Events Essay by Regina Morantz-Sanchez ....78
JWA’s Guiding Principles for Women’s Oral History .........83
PART 3 ◆ APPENDICES ................................................................. 85
Sample Forms
Pre-Interview Questionnaire ........................................................87
Preliminary Release Form ...........................................................92
Final Release Form .................................................................... 93
Interview Log ............................................................................ 94
Proper Word Form ...................................................................... 96
Selected Bibliography on American Jewish Women ................................. 98
Selected Oral History Resources ...........................................................101
Contributors ................................................................................... 102
 |
eBook Categories 
Subscribe to the RSS feed.