Our Lives are but Stories: Narratives of Tunisian-Israeli Women

Our Lives are but Stories is a welcome and appealing addition to the small but valuable corpus of studies of Jewish women whose ethnic heritages, as much as their Judaism, shape their life experiences and their narratives telling of those experiences. Joining books such as Lisa Gilad's Ginger and Salt: Yemeni Jewish Women in an Israeli Town (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989); Jael Silliman's Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001); Joelle Bahloul's Le Culte de la Table Dressée: Rites et Traditions de la Table Juive Algérienne (Paris: A. M. Métailié: Diffusion, Presses universitaires de France, 1983); Rachel Simon's Change Within Tradition Among Jewish Women in Libya (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); and my own Women As Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York: Oxford University Press 1992), Schely-Newman's Our Lives are but Stories makes a substantial contribution to the study of Jewish women of Asia and North Africa.