Every time Roberta Garris produces a quilt for one of our silent auctions, I can’t resist bidding on it. Her colorful tapestries now brighten several rooms in my house. When she announced that her “A Year in Patches” quilt was accepted into the prestigious International Quilt Festival in Houston this year, I knew I had to join her. Her “Weather” quilt features 365 squares, each square representing a day in a year in Greenport, its temperature and level of precipitation. Roberta is not only a talented fiber artist but also a dedicated member and supporter of our community. Supporting her in this proud moment felt natural. Roberta shared that the festival draws around 40,000 visitors, making it the largest of its kind in the world.
The festival was a stunning display of creativity — painting in fabric. It was a celebration of colors, textures, and, overwhelmingly, women. As one of only a handful of men attending, this phenomenon was particularly vivid to me. In fact, the attendees were strikingly uniform: 99% women, 99% white, and mostly between the ages of 50 and 80. I felt as though I had stepped into a unique slice of Americana. Later, I learned its origin. Quilting began as a craft tied to women’s roles in the home. In a time when women were expected to focus on household management, quilting became a way to express creativity while prudently saving and reusing scraps. It’s no wonder that quilting has remained “woman’s turf.” In its current form, quilting had its revival in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Later that weekend, I attended an event at the largest synagogue in America — a grand building resembling a mega-church, complete with a three-story Aron Kodesh. On that day, the featured speaker was Noa Tishby, a passionate pro-Israel activist, her appearance drawing a vibrant gathering of 1,500 American Jews. There, I observed a contrast to the largely-white quilting crowd, reminding me of the rich diversity within the Jewish people. Like quilting, this, too, was a tapestry — a tapestry of people who were “off-white,” as Karen Brodkin describes us in her 1998 book How Jews Became White Folks.
The magnificent celebration of colors and textures at the events also served as a sanctuary in the midst of the election season. The artwork represented diverse themes in American society, history, and folklore — no arguments or tension, just interwoven stories. Let this be an inspiration for us as we sit around the Thanksgiving table this year. America weaves a narrative of many threads that form our collective story.
Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Hanukkah. And blessings for the New Year.
Photos by Rabbi Gadi Capela.