“I’m a children’s and young adult book author, which means I am in a rare industry that’s largely dominated by women. YA is, as a genre, so mature in its intersectional feminism, and so writing within that framework gives authors interested in that incredible leeway to ask difficult questions, to play more with more risk.

“There will always be a market for books about exceptionally beautiful girls who are deadly with a sword or something, but it’s a real gift not to be limited to that tough girl trope as a market expectation. However, the real world is not our very niche corner of a niche industry, and so there’s this bizarre mismatch between the general world that bumps up against our work and those of us who are immersed within it. And it’s in the moments when that mismatch is most apparent that I feel like it’s possible anything I’ve written could have some minute value in the world; a girl will reach out and tell me she’s come out because of something I wrote. Or she’ll write to tell me that she’d been sexually assaulted, and my goofy book helped her feel like she could talk about it. And it makes me grateful for the many women who’ve made YA what it is. Without them neither myself nor the girls who’ve written to me would have found our place.”
– Maggie Tokuda-Hall

“For the vast majority of my professional life, my focus has been to ignite positive social change through strategic communications, advocacy and partnership creation between the private and nonprofit sectors. Growing up, I was taught kindness, curiosity and compassion from the earliest days of my upbringing. Now as a grown Jewish woman, a day does not go by that I don’t incorporate those values that were embedded in me by my parents.”    – Susan McPherson

“I was raised in the radical secular Jewish tradition. A central tenet of which is ‘always stand up for the underdog.’ That’s what my mom taught me being Jewish meant. I have a Jewish lens, a radicalized Jewish one at that – so when I look at a site or receive a commission, I consider the land, the history, the people. My composite read of psychogeography is gendered and Jewish, and centers womxn’s struggles and joy. Centering womxn uplifts the whole mishpucka. 

“As a social practice and conceptual artist, I have always been interested in distributed action and wellness. The idea for the Cell Phone Sleeping Bag for Reboot’s National Day of Unplugging came to me as a contemporary addition to my collection of just three very old Jewish family artifacts. My maternal ancestral line consisted of women-led households who worked on the Sabbath. For some reason, what I still have are things to hide things in. I drew on this history and conceived the idea of hiding one’s cell phone on the Sabbath and find screen-free rest and restoration.”
– Jessica Tully