In this International Women's Day edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts Beata Poźniak, a multitalented Polish-born filmmaker and artist who helped convince the United States Congress to officially recognize International Women's Day in the United States, celebrated every March 8.
In this special episode, Poźniak discusses the immigrant experience and struggle with identity, the impact of growing up under Soviet rule during the Cold War, the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, the power of symbolism, mandatory school visits to Auschwitz, and her success as an artist in the United States. Along with starring as Marina Oswald in Oliver Stone's "J.F.K.," she is a noted director, poet, producer, painter, and award-winning narrator of audio books.
Born behind the Iron Curtain, immigrated to the United States in the late 1980s with, as she puts it, "big hopes and big dreams." Though she was exceptionally high-achieving in Europe -- earning a master's in fine arts with high honors at the age of 22 -- little did she know that she would one day star in an Academy Award-nominated film, much less lobby Congress to recognize a day that had long been celebrated by the international community.
"As a girl growing up in Poland, I really have beautiful memories of this day, because it was a day filled with celebration ... a lot of kindness, recognition, respect," she says. "I felt very special as a girl for that one day. It was very empowering ... My girlfriends would feel very empowered, and we felt that we could take power into our hands and also define ourselves, our own beauty, and how smart and educated we can be. And we learned all that in the schools."
The idea for International Women's Day dates back to 1910. In August of that year, at an International Women's Conference organized to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark, German Marxist and women's rights activist Clara Zetkin proposed an annual "special Women's Day." The next year, over one million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland marked the day, protesting for equal rights and suffrage for women across Europe.
When Poźniak arrived in the United States, she discovered that few Americans knew of the day.
"My English was very poor; they thought I was still talking about women's history month," she says. "I thought, 'No, no, it's a day, a day. It's a special day.'"
She decided to spearhead an education effort that eventually led to the introduction of a bill before Congress. In 1994, less than 15 years after Poźniak arrived in the United States, Joint Resolution 316 was passed.