V-Day Blog Archive

V-Day Looks Beyond The Vagina Monologues

Eve Ensler has faked her last orgasm on stage for “The Vagina Monologues,” which ended its off-Broadway run on Jan. 29.

By Mona Eltahawy

The play has been a major source of funding for V-Day, the global movement to combat violence against women and girls launched by Ensler five years ago. As the movement marks its birthday today, it is turning more to personal and corporate donations to replace revenue from the play.

It also focuses on two new areas of concern for its campaign against violence–spotlight on Native American and Canadian First Women, and a new initiative to end violence against women and girls in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

“It’s been three-and-a-half years, which is a very long time for a show and it’s run its course,” Ensler said. “For me as an artist I need to move onto the next pieces that I’m working on.” These include a “teen-age monologues” based on interviews she’s carried out with girls around the world about a range of issues including eating disorders, female genital mutilation, body acceptance and sex.

Next year Ensler wants to launch a one-woman production of another work called “The Good Body,” based on interviews she has conducted with women in about 40 countries about their bodies.

Ensler said she hoped both productions will generate income for V-Day.

In its first five years, the V-Day movement has raised $14 million, with half of that raised last year alone. This year, more than 1,000 V-Day benefit events are scheduled worldwide, including productions of “The Vagina Monologues” in more than 370 cities nationally and abroad to raise money for local groups.

In addition, V-Day is holding its own fund-raisers in New York City and Los Angeles and has launched its first public service advertising campaign in magazines and on television. It features celebrities and everyday women speaking to the camera about what their world would look like if there were no violence.

Last year’s V-Day launched the “Afghanistan is Everywhere” initiative, which focuses on a group of women who are working to end violence and oppression in their community. V-Day also sponsored the “Spotlight on Afghan Women” to raise funds for Afghan women working for change within their country. The title of the initiative referred to the fact that women and girls throughout the world, not just Afghanistan, are affected by violence.

This year, the spotlight is on Native American and Canadian First Nations women. The U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics indicate that the average annual rate of rape and sexual assault among American Indian women is 3.5 times higher than all other races.

Led by Native American activist Suzanne BlueStar Boy, the V-Day Indian Country Project hopes to raise awareness of the issues facing Native American and Native Alaskan women in the United States and First Nations women in Canada. It also will raise funds to provide resources for these women.

Many Native American women victims of violence are discouraged from pursuing support and justice out of fear of familial reprisal and shame and the overlapping and confusing federal, state and tribal legal jurisdictions that can hinder investigations and prosecutions, V-Day reports.

The other V-Day spotlight this year is on Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Ensler recently returned from a visit to Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, accompanied by V-Day’s special representative to the region, Hibaaq Osman.

Osman works with women’s groups in Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Pakistan and Palestine with a particular focus on bride burnings, female genital mutilation, honor killings, sexual assault, rape and other gender-based violence that are pervasive in much of the region.

She said one of her most shocking discoveries in Egypt was that some sons beat their mothers.

“It’s a heartbreaking phenomenon. It was the first time I’d heard of this. When a father beats the mother, the son joins in. I’ve never heard of this in Islamic culture before,” said Osman, a Muslim.

V-Day is helping the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women–the nongovernmental organization that hosted Ensler and Osman and others from the movement–in its launching of a shelter for women victims of violence. It would be the first of its kind in an Arab country.

While in Cairo, a group of activists that Ensler was visiting persuaded her to perform “The Vagina Monologues.”

One of the men at the performance, described by the Cairo Times as looking a “little shell-shocked” as he walked out, said it helped him “realize how important it is to know about these things and to respect women, their emotions and desires.”

“I think we should show this in public places and it should be translated into Arabic,” Ahmad Ghoneim, 23, said. “Our traditions deprive us from talking about these important issues.”

Mona Eltahawy is a staff writer for Women’s Enews. Her opinion pieces and commentaries have appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

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Ambitious Agenda for V-Day

By Cindy Richards

If Valentine’s Day 2003 turns out to be an average day in America, 739 women will be sexually assaulted, and another 13,150 women will be beaten by their spouses, lovers or significant others.

Eve Ensler hopes Friday will not turn out to be an average day. Moreover, she hopes to change the averages for women all over the world so that none of us has to walk the streets in fear or live in our own homes in fear.

It’s a pretty ambitious agenda. But she might be the woman to do it–after all, there aren’t many people who can claim to have built an international non-profit organization, raised $14 million and changed the way people feel about the word ”vagina” in five short years.

Ensler is the author of ”The Vagina Monologues” and mother of an international grass-roots movement to end violence against women, called V-Day. Ensler started V-Day, she says, as a reaction to the overwhelming number of women who approached her to share their personal stories of abuse after hearing her perform ”The Vagina Monologues.”

V-Day–the v, which stands for Valentine, victory over violence and, of course, vagina–has a very lofty goal. It asks women and men to envision and create a world without violence against women and girls.

”I’m a mad optimist. What’s the alternative? You don’t get out of bed in the morning,” she said with a chuckle during a brief phone conversation before heading off on a two-month international tour of more than 20 cities to perform ”The Vagina Monologues” in connection with V-Day.

Five years ago, there was just one benefit performance of ”The Vagina Monologues.” This year, her wonderful collection of women’s stories about their sexuality, their bodies and their vaginas will be performed in 1,200 locations around the world.

Organizers of the Chicago performance, scheduled for Feb. 19 at the DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th, hope to raise $45,000. The money will be split between Rape Victim Advocates and Family Rescue, said producer Mary Morten.

Morten is staging the show with 37 performers, the vast majority of whom are African-American.

”It was my feeling as the producer that this is a community where we have not done enough talking about violence against women, in particular sexual and domestic violence. There has been a conspiracy of silence,” she said.

Ensler said she believes her efforts already have made a difference, particularly on college campuses where the performances often are supplemented by speak-outs, conferences and other consciousness-raising activities.

At Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., V-Day 2002 became the springboard for a campuswide effort to end sexual violence at the small liberal arts school. Citing statistics that show 35 of every 1,000 undergraduate women are raped each year on college campuses nationwide, student Chanel Luck asked for and received a $20,000 grant from the administration to create a Center for Safer Sexual Studies. The center will offer counseling to victims and perpetrators and a program for educating students and support staff so they can better respond to and prevent sexual assaults.

Raising awareness among college-age women has been one of the most important parts of V-Day, according to Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

”Eve has brought a lot of visibility to this issue in an interesting way,” she said. ”Young women need something to engage them. This gives them that thing. They tend not to think about their own mortality.”

Visit the V-Day Web Site, www.vday.org and follow the links to ”Find An Event” for more information about the Chicago fund-raising performance or college performances at Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois-Chicago, Loyola, Northeastern, Roosevelt, Oakton Community, Elmhurst, Lake Forest, William Rainey Harper and North Central in the Chicago area or Indiana University Northwest or Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana.

‘Vagina Monologues’ Goes to Mexico City

By Lisa J. Adams

Eve Ensler is using her off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues” to help fight a decade of rapes and murders on the U.S.-Mexico border. Ensler dedicated a personal performance of the play in Mexico City
on Thursday night to Esther Chavez, director of a center that helps thousands of rape and abuse victims in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas.

On Friday, Ensler was to join Chavez and other activists on the border to protest the deaths of more than 300 women in Ciudad Juarez during the past decade. Police have confirmed that more than 75 of the cases are related to
a string of rape-murders.

Dozens of suspects have been arrested — and some convicted — in the murders. But bodies have continued to turn up in Juarez. “The time has come for the murders and violence in Juarez to come to an end,” Ensler said in a tribute to Chavez during her performance. “I was very, very disturbed by the murders, about how covered up they were and how unexamined they were,” the performer said later. “Whenever you allow these terrible things to go unnoticed, you plant the seeds of a deeper evil.”

Since the show debuted in Mexico City two years ago, it has helped to raise more than $35,000 for the Juarez center, known as Casa Amiga, Chavez said. Mexico is part of a 21-city world tour Ensler is making to promote V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and children. Ensler’s play — which celebrates female sexuality while decrying violence against women — has been banned at some Catholic colleges in the United States for its frank talk on female genitalia.

Chavez said it has inspired her and countless others to keep fighting for women’s rights.

“Knowing Eve changes you inside,” she said. “What she does, she does completely. … She is full of life and the energy just shimmers off of her. This energy has given me strength to continue with my work.”

‘Vagina Monologues’ Goes to Mexico City

By Lisa J. Adams

Eve Ensler is using her off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues” to help fight a decade of rapes and murders on the U.S.-Mexico border. Ensler dedicated a personal performance of the play in Mexico City on Thursday night to Esther Chavez, director of a center that helps thousands of rape and abuse victims in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas.

On Friday, Ensler was to join Chavez and other activists on the border to protest the deaths of more than 300 women in Ciudad Juarez during the past decade. Police have confirmed that more than 75 of the cases are related to
a string of rape-murders.

Dozens of suspects have been arrested — and some convicted — in the murders. But bodies have continued to turn up in Juarez. “The time has come for the murders and violence in Juarez to come to an end,” Ensler said in a tribute to Chavez during her performance. “I was very, very disturbed by the murders, about how covered up they were and how unexamined they were,” the performer said later. “Whenever you allow these terrible things to go unnoticed, you plant the seeds of a deeper evil.”

Since the show debuted in Mexico City two years ago, it has helped to raise more than $35,000 for the Juarez center, known as Casa Amiga, Chavez said. Mexico is part of a 21-city world tour Ensler is making to promote V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and children. Ensler’s play — which celebrates female sexuality while decrying violence against women — has been banned at some Catholic colleges in the United States for its frank talk on female genitalia.

Chavez said it has inspired her and countless others to keep fighting for women’s rights.

“Knowing Eve changes you inside,” she said. “What she does, she does completely. … She is full of life and the energy just shimmers off of her. This energy has given me strength to continue with my work.”

American Playwright Supports Families of Women Killed in Juarez

By Chris Roberts

Throughout the Mexican border city of Juarez, poets, musicians and actors Friday joined U.S. playwright Eve Ensler in calling for action in the cases of 300 women who have been murdered over the last decade.

“I think its an outrage that so many women have died and nobody has done anything about it,” Ensler told hundreds of people who gathered in front of the state attorney general’s office, the agency in charge of the cases. Ensler has used her off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues” to raise money for women’s issues. Showings of the play in Mexico City have raised more than $35,000 for Casa Amiga, a Juarez center that helps thousands of rape and abuse victims. Of the 300 women murdered, Mexican officials have confirmed that more than 75 of the cases are related to a series of rape-murders. Many of the young women killed were workers in border factories called “maquiladoras.”

About a dozen different groups representing the murdered women and their families joined to demand that the state take action on the cases, many of which remain unsolved.

Five years ago Marla Estelle Luna Hernandez waited for her 15-year-old daughter to return from her job. Three weeks later a body was found in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Juarez. The body was mostly bones with a little skin remaining on the feet, Luna Hernandez said.

Luna Hernandez recognized her daughter’s clothing and a scar on an ankle from a dog bite. However, authorities refused to release the body and later said a DNA test showed it wasn’t her daughter.

“I kept insisting because I couldn’t find my daughter, but they closed the case,” she said in Spanish. Two years later, another DNA test came out negative. In December, a third DNA test showed it was her daughter. “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Luna Hernandez said through tears. “I wonder why only the poor girls disappear and the rich girls, never.”

Groups from El Paso and Las Cruces, N.M., walked across an international bridge to lend their support to various events scheduled around the city. “We believe this is a binational issue,” said Irasema Coronado, a political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “This issue of violence transcends the border.”

Although groups have been demanding action for years, little has changed in Juarez. Juarez police have arrested about 50 men – some who confessed, later recanting and saying they were tortured – but the murders continue. Juarez police have defended their actions, saying they have arrested the people responsible and consider many cases closed.

As recently as November, the remains of eight women were found in a ditch. “It’s difficult not to become jaded about the situation,” said Cynthia Bojarano, a co-founder of Amigos de los Mujeres de Juarez in Las Cruces. Bojarano and the others stood in the streets of Juarez with signs stating, “Hasta que la violencia termine,” which means, “Until the violence ends.” Many supporters wore masks, showing their respect for the missing and murdered women, faceless to the rest of the world.

“It’s a good thing to do,” said Juan Carlos Garcia Silva, who works near a plaza where one of the rallies was held. “The people, they don’t care and even if they care, they don’t have the voice to tell anybody. Most of them are afraid.”

Victim of “Railroad Killer” Calls Herself a Survivor

By Melinda Roeder

She’s the only known survivor of the infamous Railroad Killer and she’s ready to share her story. Holly Dunn, 26, survived an attack by Angel Maturino Resendiz in 1997. A notorious serial killer, police say he took at least nine lives in Texas, Illiniois and Kentucky.

Holly Dunn doesn’t consider herself a victim. She’s a survivor. In 1997, as a student at the University of Kentucky, Holly and her boyfriend were attacked along a set railroad tracks. He was killed. She was raped, beaten, and left for dead. “Well, I had a broken eye socket, and a broken jaw and I had a lot of cuts in the back of my head.”

But she survived and later testified at trial against her attacker — Angel Maturno Resendiz. “Hearing a train still is very hard for me,” Holly said. “Two trains went by during the attack and hearing trains now really bothers me.”

Holly’s physical and emotional scars remain. But she wants to share her story with others. “It makes me feel good to know that I can help other people and that I have soemthing that can inspire them and can tell them something that will make them more aware.”

That’s why Holly was eager to accept a role in an upcoming benefit for the Albion Fellows Bacon Center. With the help of organizers, she’s writing her own monologue that she’ll perform live on stage in the “Vagina Monologues.”

“I love performing and being on stage and acting.”

The monologue will focus on how Holly envisions a world without violence. That’s almost impossible for the victim of such a horrible attack. But Holly isn’t a victim, she’s a survivor. “I live my life knowing that I could’ve died and that I am a survivor. I want to live my life to the fullest.”

The “Vagina Monologues” will be performed March 8 at the Victory Theatre. The play explores women’s thoughts about themselves and their sexuality. Money from ticket sales will got to the Albion Fellows Bacon Center.

[note: for more information on this V-Day event, visit the V-Day Evansville page.

“Intimate Portrait: Eve Ensler” Premieres as Part of Lifetime’s “Stop Violence Against Women

Celebrities Including Dylan McDermott, Calista Flockhart, Glenn Close, Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez Speak to Lifetime About Ensler’s “V-Day” Movement

In tandem with Lifetime’s unprecedented 2003 campaign to “Stop Violence Against Women,” the original INTIMATE PORTRAIT: EVE ENSLER will premiere on Tuesday, February 18 at 7:00 PM ET/PT. This INTIMATE PORTRAIT chronicles the career achievements and enduring accomplishments of the remarkable activist and playwright of “The Vagina Monologues.” It is also one of the network’s programs to raise awareness of the pervasive problems of domestic abuse and sexual assault, as well as to encourage women and men to work together to stop all violence against women.

INTIMATE PORTRAIT: EVE ENSLER looks at the powerful life of Ensler, an influential activist who — among other works — wrote the groundbreaking, award-winning play, “The Vagina Monologues.” As part of her extensive work on behalf of women, Ensler founded and is the artistic director of the global movement, “V-Day,” dedicated to ending violence against women and girls. INTIMATE PORTRAIT: EVE ENSLER includes interviews with famous “V-Day” supporters, such as Dylan McDermott, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart, Glenn Close, LisaGay Hamilton and Rosie Perez. These celebrities and public figures speak about the woman who transformed the pain from her abusive childhood into incredible drive as an activist, raising millions of dollars for anti-rape and anti-violence groups domestically and in countries like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Kenya.

Additional components of Lifetime’s “Stop Violence Against Women” campaign include extensive on-air original programming, online content and outreach nationwide to raise awareness of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

LIFETIME is the #1 cable television network in primetime and the leader in women’s television. LIFETIME is committed to offering the highest quality entertainment and information programming, and advocating a wide range of issues affecting women and their families. Launched in 1984, LIFETIME serves over 86 million households nationwide, available on more than 11,000 cable systems and alternative delivery systems. In 1998, LIFETIME launched a 24-hour sister service, the Lifetime Movie Network, now in nearly 36 million homes, and a second sister service, Lifetime Real Women, launched in August 2001. On the web, Lifetime Online (www.lifetimetv.com) features informational resources and interactive entertainment. All four services, LIFETIME Television, Lifetime Movie Network, Lifetime Real Women and Lifetime Online, are part of LIFETIME Entertainment Services, a 50/50 joint venture of The Hearst Corporation and The Walt Disney Company.

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Contact: Shari Kaufman, (818) 990-1035, sharikaufman@thekaufmancompany.com

Jerusalem Post: Playwright Eve Ensler Is on a Mission to Raise Consciousness

By Eetta Prince Gibson

‘I can’t give an interview right now,” Eve Ensler apologized as she collapsed in her hotel room last week. “I just had 32 orgasms in public.”

Celebrated playwright, acclaimed actress, and feminist activist, Ensler had just returned from Neveh Shalom, the Jewish-Arab village near Latrun, where she performed excerpts from her award-winning play, The Vagina Monologues. Ensler came to the region, together with several prominent US women artists, activists, and philanthropists (including Academy-award winning actress Jane Fonda), to meet with Israeli and Palestinian women in a visit that was sponsored by V-Day, the organization she founded based on the tremendous success of The Vagina Monologues.

Ensler, 49, is wickedly articulate, wildly funny, and deeply wise. Like many of her other plays, The Vagina Monologues is based on interviews with women who told her how they felt about the most intimate parts of their bodies. The results are irreverent, cheeky, and profound.

“Let’s just start with the word, ‘vagina,'” the play opens. “It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: ‘Hurry, Nurse, bring me the vagina.’ ‘Vagina.’ ‘Vagina.’ Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. Vaginas. There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them – like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.”

Audiences, mostly – but not only – women, giggle, laugh, and identify with the stories and with Ensler. And they weep when the monologue, “My Vagina Was My Village,” the story of a woman raped in Bosnia, is performed.

“The soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me,” the passage reads. “So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don’t know whether they’re going to fire it or shove it through my spinning brain.”

FIRST PERFORMED in 1996, The Vagina Monologues has become an international phenomenon, freeing up women’s repressed feelings about their sexuality, their negative body images, and their social and political inferiority. In the US, Ensler has enlisted actresses such as Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Joanne Woodward, Shirley Knight, and Susan Sarandon to perform the Monologues. Worldwide, the play has been performed in nearly two dozen languages in more than 800 cities (including both an English and Hebrew version in Israel).

For most women, the play is a consciousness-raising experience.

For Ensler, it was a catalyst to political action. She created V-Day – the V stands for Violence, Valentine, and Vagina – an organization dedicated to putting an end to violence against women. Through V-Day, millions of dollars from the hit play are transferred to countries all over the world to help women who are victims of violence. In local V-Day benefits, performers raise money for local services to women. V-Day benefits in Israel last year, produced in cooperation with Habimah and Na’amat, raised over NIS 120,000 for battered women’s shelters in Tel Aviv.

In its first five years, V-Day has raised over $14 million and over $7m. in 2002 alone.

For the past three years, V-Day delegations, led by Ensler, have traveled to dozens of locations, including places as far apart as Kenya, Rome, the Philippines, Brussels, and Kosovo, to meet with girls at risk, victims of domestic violence and war, and to provide encouragement and support for local feminist organizations. In Afghanistan, Ensler wore a burqa (the tent-like cover that women have been forced to wear) for days, to understand women’s oppression.

For some members of the delegation, the trip to Israel and Palestine was another stop on this program. But for Ensler the trip had additional meanings. In the US, Ensler is actively involved in the organized Jewish community, and has even been awarded a “Lion of Judah” in recognition of her activities and philanthropic donations. Her life-partner, Ariel Jordan, a psychotherapist and filmmaker, was born and raised here, and they have visited several times before.

The delegations take advantage of the women’s prominence to bring attention to the cause, yet Ensler, Fonda, and the other V-Day women tried to avoid press and commotion while they were here and gave few interviews.

“We came to listen and learn,” explained Ensler. In five hectic days, they met with women MKs and Palestinian political leaders, peace activists, and members of Hadassah. They talked to artists, authors, and playwrights, at-risk teenage girls, and to physicians and professionals who try to help victims of terror and victims of the occupation.

They visited Neveh Shalom where, under a bubble-tent, led by singer Amal Murkus, they sang “We Shall Overcome” together with the enthusiastic audience. They went to see the wall erected in the middle of the neighborhood of Abu Dis, meant to prevent terrorists from infiltrating into Jerusalem. On a rainy Friday afternoon, they stood with Women in Black to protest the occupation.

At Hadassah Hospital, they met with a young man who suffered brain damage after two suicide bombers blew themselves up in Jerusalem on December 1, 2001. Lying flat on his stomach on a hospital bed, he began speaking again only three months ago.

They crossed the Kalandia checkpoint to see a physical rehabilitation center and meet with Palestinian women in Ramallah. They talked with a woman who lost two sons, both shot by Israeli soldiers.

ENSLER LISTENS intently and actively. Her whole body is engaged. She leans forward, she smiles, she sighs, she exclaims, and she cries. She reacts, giving each woman the feeling that she has been deeply heard. By the end of the trip, she had begun to tentatively articulate her impressions. Ensler has a striking ability to empathize without siding with either side, grasping complexities without resorting to zero-sum analyses.

“Israelis have the power, and the suffering of the powerful is different than the suffering of the weak. Israelis have to accept that the occupation is wrong – and that it’s not working. But that must never mean that suicide bombing is acceptable, either,” she says.

Extrapolating from the success of her play, Ensler talks about vaginas, monologues, and narratives. To her, these are both concrete images and metaphors for life and change. By taking “the V-word” out of the closest, putting it in front of people, she hopes to release them to deal with other secrets – like violence and rape, fear, and death.

She hopes for creative, vagina-like atmospheres and “vagina-friendly leaders who will reflects the best in us, instead of the leaders we have, who pander to our fears.”

“Women must come into power,” she continues. Not women who are male-identified, but women who are female-identified, who are in touch with their vaginas.” She believes that by listening to others’ narratives, we can begin to understand and to stop treating each other as enemies and as “others.”

“I was profoundly sad when I stood by the checkpoints,” she says. “Those walls, the checkpoints and the blockades – they are all signs of failure.

“Something fundamental isn’t being addressed. Everyone is afraid, and so they look for false promises of security. Those walls can’t provide security, and they can’t ease your fear. Only resolving the conflict can do that.”

The violence, she believes, is a desperate substitute for the grief and fear that people truly feel.

“It is terrifying to grieve. People here think that if they let themselves cry, they will forever, that they will never stop crying. Instead of grief, male leaders provide violence, filled with testosterone. Testosterone does not effective policy make.”

SHE USES her own experiences to reach incisive political conclusions, fluidly – she might say vaginally – connecting between personal experience and political implications.

As a child, Ensler was physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by her father. Her activities today, she says, are motivated by her desire to stop being the poor little girl, victimized by her father.

“I was violated and betrayed. But there comes a moment in life when you have to make a fundamental decision if you’re going to let your identity coalesce around yourself as victim, and live your life filled with bitterness, suspicion and distrust, or ask if you want to be someone else.

“You come to realize that the wrong will never be made right, what was done can never be undone. You have to decide if you can move on from there, so that something bigger can be born.”

In the Middle East, she says, “everyone has been victimized. You have to move beyond that, or continue to die.”

Ensler knows that she met only with representatives of the Israeli left and with Palestinian moderates, and that the bubble tent of Neveh Shalom doesn’t hold the whole reality of the conflict. Yet she trusts her ability to listen to women’s stories.

“I know that there’s so much more to hear. The challenge is to find the language that will allow us to listen to each other, and to give everyone here the space to finally feel and to tell their narratives.”

Although she says that the details have not been worked out, V-Day is planning to become actively involved in the region. A V-Day benefit is being planned in Ramallah, and another in Israel as well. And while she would not give details, Ensler revealed that they are beginning work on a “large project that will enable women on both sides to tell their narratives.”

She describes herself as both sad and hopeful for the region.

“Every woman I talked to in Israel and in Palestine wanted to figure out a way to make things work and stop the suffering. They were all like mothers, who try to support her children and her loved ones, and still support her own integrity, too.”

This article can also be read at The Jerusalem Post (free registration required).

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Copyright 1995-2003 The Jerusalem Post – www.jpost.com/

Ha’aretz Daily: Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler in the Holy Land

Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler did not rest for a moment; they evinced courtesy and caring almost non-stop during their brief visit to Israel this weekend.

Fonda only complained a little about the photographers who would not leave her alone. From time to time she hung her head down or hid her face in her hands, or quietly and politely asked them to stop taking pictures, although to a large extent she came her precisely for this – to draw attention to the matter she wants to promote. [more]

AP: News Brief from the V-Day Visit to Israel and Palestine

Jane Fonda visited Israelis wounded in suicide bomb attacks and met with Israeli peace activists Thursday.

The 64-year-old actress and activist is on a weeklong trip to the region and plans to attend meetings of Israeli and Palestinian women organized by a global movement to stop violence against women.

The movement, called V-Day, was inspired by the off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues” and its playwright, Eve Ensler, who is also in Israel.

Fonda and Ensler were to speak later Thursday to Jewish and Arab doctors and patients at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital after a performance of selected passages from “Monologues” put on by a group of Israeli women.

Earlier, Fonda, a two-time Oscar winner and fitness guru, visited Israelis recovering from chronic injuries at the hospital’s rehabilitation center.

She appeared emotionally moved when she met 23-year-old Sharon Maman, who suffered brain damage after two suicide bombers blew up simultaneously in downtown Jerusalem on Dec. 1, 2001. The young man, who lay flat on his stomach on a hospital bed, only began speaking again three months ago.

On Saturday, Fonda is to visit the West Bank town of Ramallah to see a physical rehabilitation center, a Palestinian refugee camp and Yasser Arafat’s headquarters complex, most of which Israeli troops have destroyed.