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Yay Julie, in the New York Times!
What I like best about this is that she's in the paper not for being A Woman Coo Ur Gosh, but as A Torah Scribe Doing Something Unusual who just happens to be a woman. That is tremendous. That's the world I want to be part of - where women doing things isn't remarkable just because they're women.
Ms. Seltzer’s performance — an admittedly odd word for what she’s up to, and one she doesn’t like — at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco [is] unique and compelling...
As the central element of a new exhibition, “As It Is Written: Project 304,805,” a simply and elegantly organized introduction to the fundamental role of the Torah in Jewish life, she is creating a new holy scroll.The work is indisputably artful, but it’s not intended to be expressive. The idea is to copy exactly; writing a Torah is less an act of creativity than of sublimation.
“I know the museum sees it that way, but if I thought this was a performance, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Ms. Seltzer said.
And indeed, in that very denial lies the art in her performance. Watching her impossibly steady hand, the deft maneuvering of the quill (each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet requires its own separate technique) and the inexorable progress of the text across a column and down a page yields a palpable sense of ancient ritual that slows your breathing, and you can’t help seeing that she is communing deeply with the text as she copies it. The writing is an act of faith...
What I like best about this is that she's in the paper not for being A Woman Coo Ur Gosh, but as A Torah Scribe Doing Something Unusual who just happens to be a woman. That is tremendous. That's the world I want to be part of - where women doing things isn't remarkable just because they're women.