A high school student and several proud grandmothers, new volunteers and seasoned social workers, the women of the New Orleans Jewish community each reacted to the devastation of Katrina in her own way.

Although their experiences and viewpoints were many and varied, the Jewish women who survived Katrina kept returning to certain themes in their stories of the storm and the recovery efforts—the difficulty of asking for help, the importance of community and family, and the impossibility of conveying this modern experience of exile to anyone who had not endured it for themselves.