Recently, we asked you to add Jewish women to our GLBT Pride Month feature on jwa.org. A contributor pointed out that we didn't have any transwomen, and suggested we add Joy Ladin. What an excellent idea! Not only should she be mentioned on jwa.org, she should be put On the Map. I used this as an opportunity to create a tutorial video to explain how to add an entry to the map.

Take a look, and try it out for yourself. Celebrate GLBT Pride Month with us, and put an activist On the Map!

Transcript below:

 June is GLBT Pride Month and at the Jewish Women's Archive we are celebrating Jewish women who have dedicated their lives working for GLBT rights and inclusion in the Jewish community.

On our website we have a feature called Jewish Women and GLBT Pride. On it we feature the stories of 9 women who have contributed to the richness of ht GLBT experience and worked toward the full inclusion and acceptance of GLBT-identified Jews in American Jewish life.

One contributor pointed out that there were no Jewish transwomen on our list, and suggested we add Joy Ladin, a poet, educator and proud Jewish transgender voice. I couldn’t agree more, and it occurred to me that Joy Ladin’s story should be “On the Map.”

Earlier this year, the Jewish Women's Archive embarked on journey to put Jewish women’s history “On the Map.”  With this user-generated Google map, we can write our own history by adding stories and landmarks that we consider significant. I decided to add Yeshiva University to the map, since it was an important site in Joy Ladin’s fight for acceptance as a Jewish transwoman.

I thought this would also be a great opportunity to walk us through the process of adding a new entry to the map.

Once you are on the map homepage, at jwa.org/onthemap, click the “add a location” tab. That will take you here. The first step is to fill in the location details. Try to fill this form in the best you can, but even if you don’t have all the information, your entry will still be added to the map. For example, if you didn’t know the address but knew that it was in New York City, the balloon would appear in the center of New York City on the map.

Next you get to fill in your description. Here is where you get to tell a story – explain what the landmark is and why you think it is significant to Jewish women’s history. It’s a good idea to include links to articles about the site or the person so that people know where to go to learn more. I used some basic html code to make her book titles italicized and hyperlink the names of the articles, but you don’t need to use any html at all. If you want to include a hyperlink, just copy and paste the url and it will work just fine.

Next I had to find a photo to go along with my entry. I had trouble finding a photo of Joy Ladin that I had the rights to use, so I went with this photo of the Stern College for Women instead. I found this using an advanced Flickr search for Creative Commons photos. This means that I am free to use the photo, as long as I attribute it. I did so by added a photo credit at the bottom of my description.

Now it’s time to fill in a little information about myself, not too difficult. I also checked the box at the bottom to sign up for occasional email updates from JWA.

Now you get to classify your addition. Mine is the workplace of a history maker.

Now we make sure that I have the rights to the photos and text that I used, and then finally, when everything is ready, I get to click “add” at the bottom.

Uh oh – a Captcha. Here I need to write out the characters in the box so the computer knows I’m not a robot.

Success!  The entry was added to the map, and it comes up as the most recent addition on the sidebar.  If I click “details” I get to see the full entry.

So that, in a nutshell, is how you can put Jewish women’s history On the Map. I hope you will try it yourself, and join all of us at JWA in celebrating GLBT Pride Month by adding a woman to our list or putting her On the Map.