For Annalouise Paul, chutzpah is a superpower.
It’s about speaking your truth, being resilient and expressing the power within you. It’s what she hopes young women and girls learn from the new book Chutzpah Girls, which she is honoured and excited to be part of.
Describing Chutzpah Girls as a call to action, the flamenco dancer said it was her connection to the art of flamenco dancing that drew the authors – Julie Silverstein and Tami Schlossberg Pruwer – to her story. The writing team wanted to share how Paul discovered her Sephardi roots through flamenco, the story of which was detailed in this masthead in 2020.
The AJN article is actually how the writers found Paul.
“It’s an incredible honour, but at first it was ‘why me? What have I done to be on par with some of the women?’” Paul told The AJN. “They told me that it’s a really unique story and that’s how it all came about. Standing shoulder to shoulder with people like Anne Frank or Golda Meir is quite extraordinary.”
Chutzpah Girls details 100 real-life tales of proud Jewish women who, as written in the preface, “shaped history, rewrote the future and helped create a better world. When it was hard to be a Jew and hard to be a woman, Chutzpah Girls dared to speak when silenced, pressed forward when stopped and made their mark when others wanted them erased”.
The book spans the ages, from our matriarch Sarah right through to modern-day women like Inbal Lieberman who protected her kibbutz, Nir Am, from the Hamas terror attack, as well as big names like Barbra Streisand, Mayim Bialik, Golda Meir, Noa Tishby and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The book also has lesser-known but equally as impressive stories such as Paul’s, and that of the Polgar sisters who were chess champions, space doctor Sheyna Gifford and Asenath Barzani who became the head teacher of the yeshivah in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Paul’s story details how a young girl who dreamt of dancing on stage discovered the passionate, intricate and expressive dance known as flamenco and ended up discovering her personal roots in Spain. Paul was raised by her Ashkenazi mother and when she sought to find her father’s heritage, she was told that they were expelled from Spain in 1492. Silverstein and Schlossberg Pruwer write, “Flamenco was not just a beautiful dance but part of Annalouise’s core being, her DNA.”
Paul described flamenco as a story told by the body. And flamenco has become the story of her family, of her roots.
“Dancing flamenco speaks to my Jewish soul. Cante jondo or ‘deep song’ is a lament for life. We do not shy away from grief or the deepest sorrows, we turn them into joy, strength, self-pride. In flamenco, we alchemise pain in order to celebrate life,” she said.
Paul found the world of flamenco purely by chance, wandering past a sign that simply said ‘flamenco’. She decided to give one class a try. And she has danced her way around the world ever since.
Flamenco very quickly became a central part of Paul’s identity. “I know I’m Jewish, but it became a way for me to express my identity and expressing it through dancing. It’s not just talking about my Jewish identity, it comes through the body when dancing flamenco,” she told The AJN. “There’s a quote on my page in the book and I asked them to put it in there. It says: ‘We carry stories in our bodies.’ It’s really important because beyond dance, it’s about movement. The body carries history and memory, ideas and imagination. When we move, we release these things. Movement is a language.”
As for Chutzpah Girls the book and all the girls who have chutzpah, Paul said she hopes the stories inspire people to go deeper within themselves to find their own power.
“We have the power within ourselves to achieve what we want and the more we believe that, the more that power becomes real and manifests,” she said. “Sometimes people think that power means you have to be tough. But it’s not about that at all. It’s about just finding your truth within yourself. And the power follows. When you speak your truth, nobody can question that.”
Indeed, chutzpah is not about being tough. But rather, as Silverstein and Schlossberg Pruwer define in the opening to the book, chutzpah is “the daring to speak when silenced, to take action when others won’t, to try when they say it’s impossible, to persevere in times of doubt, to be yourself when it’s easier to conform, to stand tall when made to feel small, to believe when it all feels hopeless, to shine your light in the face of darkness”.
We all have chutzpah within us. We just need to reach in and grab it.
For more information, visit chutzpahgirls.com
NCJWA will be launching Chutzpah Girls in celebration of Women’s History Month in Sydney. To book tickets, visit events.humanitix.com/ncjwa-chutzpah-girls.
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