Salon Radio presents: Susan Reimer-Torn, Feminist Storytelling of Ancient Texts; visual artist Catarina Mantero

Salon Radio Release 4 August 2019

 

Salon Radio Special: Susan Reimer-Torn, Feminist Storytelling of Ancient Texts

Unrequited Love: When Smart Women Study the Talmud

or- When Women Are Attracted to Texts that Don't Love them Back

 

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 Salon Solo {Radio} presents Catarina Mantero (b. 1988) is a classically trained contemporary visual artist from Portugal.

This episode is hosted by Amy Hughes with Pangia Macri presenting our special feature guest and Amy presenting our Salon Solo {Radio} guest. Salon Radio is rounded out with our Women in The Arts world bulletin highlighting news about women in all The Arts, from this week’s editor Amy Hughes, and our Salon Bulletin highlighting Salonistas work around the world.

 

This podcast was recorded at our production partner Funkadelic Studios.

 

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Guest Profiles

 

 

Catarina Mantero (b. 1988) is a classically trained contemporary visual artist from Portugal.

 

Mantero’s work showcases a series of autobiographical paintings that seek to make sense of the experienced world through the medium of paint. A diversity of moments – people, places, objects – serves as the focal point through which she scrutinizes her understanding of self and the human experience. 

Struggling to make sense out of the chaos, ambiguity, and obscurity that is our existence, Mantero performs a systematic excavation of her most self-defining recollections via paint and canvas, pinpointing moments that have for one reason or another most strongly survived time in the distorted filter that we call memory. Mantero’s painting process resembles an archaeological dig, as she painstakingly excavates layer upon layer of buried memories and works to understand their precious stratification in her mind. 

Mantero seeks in her paintings to emphasize the surreal and dreamlike quality which is inherent to any interpretation of the real, especially when these moments now exist solely in that intangible realm known as memory. The dreamlike compositions that she sketches as a result of her memory exploration become the backbone to her pictures, a skeletal frame that will sustain the story of paint. 

 

 

Susan Reimer-Torn

Susan Reimer-Torn, is a journalist, playwright, educator, workshop leader and the author of the acclaimed memoir, Maybe Not Such a Good Girl: Reflections on Rupture and Return (Blue Threads, 2014). She has presented panels in many venues, including Congregation B’nai Jeshurun; Women Leadership of the American Jewish Committee, New York City; Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance conferences; Columbia University Hillel. Her work has been featured in the Jewish Week, the Forward, Lilith, Jewish Currents, Na’amat Magazine, and the International Herald Tribune, as well as on several websites and blogs. Raised in an Orthodox family and educated at The Ramaz School, she has a master’s degree in education from Columbia University and is certified as a life coach and hypnotherapist.

In recent years, to her own astonishment, Reimer-Torn has been drawn to the study of the notoriously misogynist, yet revered ancient Jewish Talmud, this giving rise to a popular essay (2018) Unrequited Love: When Smart Women Study the Talmud. She has been teaching Talmud classes, with an emphasis on reclaiming its story narratives, to a broad spectrum of women. Reimer-Torn’s next book, Modern Love with a Talmudic Twist, in which she shares these ancient tales with her French husband of now 40 years, will be out next year. An online forum is planned with real-time events for contemporary women who are, each in their own way, reclaiming the heretofore off-limits, 38-volume repository of lore and law known as the Talmud. She hopes to present a model for all women everywhere looking for techniques that allow them to reclaim classic literature that they may find themselves loving, even if not feeling fully loved in return. Reimer-Torn's play, Madre Nostra, exploring the religious conflicts and inner life of a 19th-century, Italian Jewish woman who was enigmatically ahead of her time, is now in development.

We are ingathering women who are interested in the tales of the Talmud and inviting them to make these their own. This will take the form of a blog, dedicated FB page, podcasts and classes. It is an invitation to visual artists, songwriters, playwrights, memoirists to reinterpret these often quirky stories in a way that yields fresh insight.

 

About SRT …

The Jewish Week:  http://www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/well-versed/susan-reimer-torns-soaring-spiritual-memoir

The Ramaz Alumni Newsletter 

The Forward: http://forward.com/sisterhood/199078/susan-reimer-torn-on-coming-back-to-jewish-life/

Lilith magazine: http://lilith.org/articles/making-art-where-religion-and-rejection-intersect/

 

Maybe Not Such a Good Girl: Reflections on Rupture and Return

Susan Reimer-Torn

Publication Date: June 11, 2014

Between rupture and return .....   where are you on the spectrum?

 

 www.susanreimertorn.com