Photos By Gail

Andi LaVine Arnovitz (b. 1959) transformed her wedding dress, handmade by her grandmother, into the sculpture What We Bring (2023). Thousands of laser-cut women’s names – all 2,611 entries found on the Jewish women’s archive website at the time of making – fill the space that the artist’s body once occupied and spill out to form a teeming train.

The women invoked range from the biblical prophet Deborah to the comedian and actress Fanny Brice, all of whom Aronovitz considers tzon barzel, or iron flock. This Hebrew expression is used in the Talmud (the compilation of Jewish law and rabbinic teachings) for the property a woman brings to a marriage that revert to her in the event of a divorce. Thus What We Bring suggests the vastness of Jewish women’s contributions through history and a woman’s material and intellectual assets that transcend the concept of a bride.

Photographed in the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.