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An Evening With Author and Musician Alicia Jo Rabins

Join us for an evening with Alicia Jo Rabins, a musician and the author of 'When We're Born We Forget Everything: A Memoir'.

Hear from Alicia Jo Rabins, author and musician, as she performs a short reading followed by a conversation between her and fellow author Matthew Check. There will be time for a short question and answer session and a book signing, with books available for sale from Roebling Books. There will also be a short musical set.

When We're Born, We Forget Everything

From the creator of the internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter project "Girls in Trouble", Rabins wrote a memoir following her journey from a secular Jewish childhood to 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," Rabins spent her time practicing violin and rolling 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 those two years of immersing herself in traditional observance were only the start of a journey full of twists and turns.

When We’re Born We Forget Everything follows Rabins's relentless, often embarrassing and sometimes enlightening search for the sacred in everyday life as she tours the United States 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. Rabins braids this personal narrative with the hidden stories of biblical women, uncovering a path of queer identity, feminist awakening and spiritual self-invention. This lyrical, searching memoir is a meditation on longing, lineage and what it takes to find meaning in a fractured world.

If you have any questions about this program, including accommodations, please contact Amy at nwprograms@cc-pl.org. Please see all our program offerings in our online newsletter at cc-pl.org/connections.

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