A Minyan of Women: Family Dynamics, Jewish Identity and Psychotherapy Practice

This book explores the diverse manner in which family dynamics shaped Jewish identities in ways that were unique and directly connected to their experiences within their families of origin. Highlighted is the diversity of experience of ethnic identity within members of a group of women who are similar in many respects and who belong to an ethnic group that is often invisible. Jewish people, like members of other ethnic groups are often treated as if their identities were homogeneous. However, gender, social class, sexual orientation, factors surrounding immigration status, proximity of family members to the holocaust or pogroms, the number of generations one's family has been in the US and other salient aspects of experience and identites transform and inform the meaning and experience by group members.

The book explores these diversities of experience and goes on to highlight the way in which the intermingling of family dynamics and subsequent Jewish identity in these women is manifested in the practice of psychotherapy.

In 2012, the book had been awarded the Jewish Women Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology Award for Scholarship, for that year.

This book was published as a special issue of Women and Therapy.

Beverly A. Greene is a Professor of Psychology at St. John's University and a practicing clinical psychologist in New York City. The author of nearly 100 publications, nine are the subject of national awards that include the APA Division 35 Psychotherapy with Women Researh Award (1995, 1996, 2000), The Association for Women in Psychology's Women of Color Psychologies Publication Award for making substantial contributions to the psychological literature for raising the visibility of previously overlooked populations.

Dorith Brodbar, MA, MS. Ed, PhD is a counselor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York and a clinical psychologist in independent practice at Lindenhurst, N.Y. Dr. Brodbar has worked with deaf individuals and their families in academic and clinical environments including six years with deaf mothers and their hearing children in the Parent-Infant Therapeutic Nursery Program at the Lexington Center for Mental Health Services.