How I Became a Bennington Girl 

How I Became a Bennington Girl, directed by Karen Berman, won the H.D. Lewis Award for Best Play.

The below, excerpted from Lisa Traiger’s July 2006 article for Washington Jewish Week, “How she became 'a Bennington Girl' Play based on author's transformation from sheltered Jewish life,” illuminates the autobiographical aspects of the play:

Rausch … felt like an outsider at [Bennington,] the exclusive Vermont women's college, where students were expected to develop intellectually, artistically and socially into formidable young women.

Rausch remembers her first encounter with a so-called Bennington girl: "I was at Russell Sage College in Troy, N.Y., and I had never heard of Bennington. But someone else from my high school went there. She had long earrings and this long skirt. I asked her, 'Where do you go to school?' She was a dancer and she said she went to Bennington."

Immediately, Rausch, who grew up in a sheltered middle class Jewish family from Queens, N.Y., knew she, too, wanted to be a Bennington girl.

Particularly in the 1960s, students at Bennington and a number of other Ivy League women's colleges held an unspoken mystique. Rausch says she recognized that Bennington mystique immediately, though she never felt she could attain it.

"Everyone seemed so sophisticated. Everyone seemed to come from a prep school. Everyone seemed to have lived a summer in Madrid. ... They just knew things, and there I was from Jamaica [Queens] High School."

But Rausch persisted and today her Bennington experience is interwoven into her dramatic comedy How I Became a Bennington Girl. Originally a singer and performer, she turned to playwriting to reconnect with her early love of literature and literary adventure, one that she developed at Bennington.

"You know," she recalled recently, "there were professors there [who were] famous poets and everybody seemed to know things. My most important professor was Wallace Fowlie. We learned Italian and read Dante for a year."

Those literary experiences have remained with Rausch, who was also mentored in weekly meetings by poet Howard Nemeroff…

…Bennington Girl follows a young idealistic student, Rachel Blumenthal, as she makes her way through her first year and encounters a poetry professor who carries within him internalized anti-Semitism. Rausch remembers her own sense of the unspoken anti-Semitism on the Bennington campus in the early 1960s.

"I felt very keenly aware that I was Jewish," she says. "And not in a good way, but in a way that was either you had to be very talented or you wouldn't be accepted. Now nobody said anything …” she trails off. "I was just so self-conscious. I had curly hair. I didn't know how to dress to be artistic."

The poetry professor in Bennington Girl resembles Rausch's recollections of Nemeroff. She says, "He was Jewish and he was my adviser, but he never told me he was Jewish. I could have used help in adjusting to that place."

In the play, the poetry professor is forced by his student to face his Jewishness when he is needed to participate in a shiva minyan.

"Rachel teaches him something and the play ends with a beautiful poem where she can use her Jewish images in an artistic way," Rausch explains. "He teaches her to find her voice and she teaches him his Jewish voice."

Looking back on her Bennington years, Rausch adds, "We were there to find our passion, which is very interesting because now everybody is trying to do that. We were so ahead of our time."