Reflecting on JWA's First Pomegranate Fellowship Cohort

When I try to explain why I am just as excited about the Pomegranate Writing Fellowship for Jewish Women of Color at Jewish Women’s Archive today, as the first cohort comes to an end, as I was in January 2025, when we began selecting the first cohort, I often forget that I am one of only two people in the world who have read the equivalent of a 1000-page anthology of writing by 120 Jewish women writers of color. As the fellowship's founding director—and a Jewish woman of color myself—reading those applications, I felt deeply connected to people who had had experiences that were just like mine and so very different from mine. The three weeks when I was immersed in them day and night, and the finalist interviews that followed, constituted one of the most intense periods of my life. 

The 120 Jewish women who applied for 5 spaces self-identified as Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, Mizrahi, Sephardi, Bukharan, and so many other identities. They ranged in age from 18 to nearly 80; they were recent college graduates, stay-at-home mothers, award-winning authors, nonprofit executives, activists. Across those identities, they had been told that their stories from the Jewish diaspora weren't "Jewish enough," or that their particular experiences weren't relatable, or that their writing was only needed when the yearly holiday that aligned with their identity came around. Even so, they shared their hopeful visions of a vast and diverse community of Jewish women of all backgrounds dreaming together. Their stories could be heartbreaking, revolutionary, experimental, or laugh-out-loud funny. Reading their collective body of work has made me a better writer, a braver writer, a more confident writer. Choosing five of them was agonizing.  

But these five Fellows! Sai Jallow Edelstein, a lawyer and writer who has lived across three continents; Rachel Faulkner, a national leader in Jewish social justice; Hannah Joy Sachs, a global educator who leads programs for young adults; Emily McDonnell, a PhD candidate researching Indigenous identity and geography; Anjelica Ruiz, a Jewish educator, librarian and communal leader. Each writes from her own intersection of identity, Jewishness, history, perspective, and personality. They are five voices who have more stories to share, who brought openness and vulnerability to a program and project that were entirely new, and whose generous feedback—along with the unexpected survey of need the applications gave us—has taught me so much about how creativity can and should be nurtured and grown. 

When we began this work in the comparatively sunny and optimistic environment of Fall 2024, we could not possibly have predicted the ways in which our country and world would change in 2025. How can we build creative community when writers' very identities are under attack? How can we hold space for women who are leading fights to support our freedoms to write about their own experiences? Sometimes, it was as simple as meeting for an hour at a time, developing the practice of fitting a block of writing into an ordinary, hectic day. We listened to Duke Ellington or Santigold and wrote “alongside” one another. Babies and cats and partners made cameos. At the end of our sessions, some writers shared ideas and phrases that would later make their way into published work, or just sentence fragments that communicated a feeling or an image. Jewish women of color, writing together, when some people are trying to erase work like ours from history—writing exactly the work that Jewish Women’s Archive was founded to preserve. 

Humans create through danger, hardship, violence, and oppression. Some sang their escaping siblings to freedom with melodies that would one day rise up out of the Mississippi Delta to become the songs their descendants would sing as they marched for equality. Others scribbled in secret diaries and on discarded scraps of paper so that we would have the records of human cruelty—and human resilience—that laid the groundwork for modern human rights. And countless more have created art that makes us laugh in dark times, reminds of the love and kindness all around us, reminds us that times like these have come—and gone—throughout history. The drive to make and create, and the work of those who follow that drive, sustains us when we think all is lost, and reminds us of everything we stand to regain.  

As their writing continues to be published this spring and beyond, I urge you to look out for and boost the work of Rachel, Anjelica, Sai, Emily, and Hannah and the many other Jewish writers of color whose work is already changing the world. As I move on to a new chapter in my own career, I feel so privileged to have shared this one in theirs.