Tobe Levin

[1] Having received her PhD in 1979 from Cornell University, she is most known for combining her advocacy against FGM with her academic scholarship in comparative literature.

[5] Alice Walker expressed appreciation for the text that shows worldwide solidarity with the novelist's literary abolition efforts in the early nineties.

thesis) treated images of women in Rousseau and Diderot and represented an early encounter with feminist literary criticism.

After sacks full of letters from concerned readers reached the EMMA mailroom, the editors decided to organize interest groups in all West Germany's major cities.

In 1979, Levin co-published the first guidebook for these action committees: Materialien zur Unterstützung von Aktionsgruppen gegen Klitorisbeschneidung.

Today, FORWARD works closely with government institutions: e.g. with municipal ombudswomen for women's issues and with federal ministries for immigration, development and health.

Furthermore, FORWARD regularly cooperates with Germany's largest African women's NGO, MAISHA, initially active in Frankfurt and now throughout the country; and with many associations in INTEGRA, an umbrella for German NGOs against FGM.

While remaining at this post, Levin became an adjunct lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1985, where she became the first in Germany to teach courses on black-Jewish women writers, as well as the literature on FGM.