From the creator of the internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter project Girls in Trouble, a memoir following her journey from a secular Jewish childhood to becoming a modern queer woman owning ancient teachings and finding her own meanings in them, refracted through feminist interpretations of the lives of Biblical women.
As a self-described '90s suburban high school weirdo, Alicia Jo Rabins spent her time practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall while secretly dreaming of setting out on a spiritual quest no one around her seemed to understand. She often found herself drawn to the more ritualistic and rigorous Judaism that her parents had abandoned to assimilate and "become American." In college, a chance meeting led her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to study rabbinical texts (and play bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash). But that two years of immersing herself in traditional observance was only the start of a journey full of twists and turns.
When We're Born We Forget Everything follows Alicia's relentless, often embarrassing, sometimes enlightening search for the sacred in everyday life as she tours America playing with a klezmer-punk band, falls in and out of love, scrapes through the initiations of motherhood, and witnesses the beauty-and danger-of mysticism. Interwoven throughout, her brief retellings of Biblical women's stories mirror the mythic structures that permeate contemporary life, bringing the reader on a quest to uncover the feminist teachings that lie buried beneath our patriarchal traditions. The result is both a highly personal, poetic memoir and a universal meditation on spiritual longing. ALICIA JO RABINS is an award-winning writer, musician, performer and Jewish educator. Rabins holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and an MA in Jewish Women's Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is the author of Divinity School (winner of the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (finalist for the 2018 Jewish Book Award) and the collection of personal essays, Even God Had Bad Parenting Days. As a musician, she has released three albums (and accompanying feminist Torah study guides) with Girls in Trouble, her indie-folk song cycle about Biblical women, and she continues to tour internationally with this project. Rabins is the creator and star of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an independent feature film about the intersection of finance and mysticism, which the Atlantic calls "a blessing."
