Maybe it’s lurking in your basement—or your subconscious. A baby carrier with tzitzit? Your IUD? Your Tia Malka’s cooking spoon? Tefillin Barbie? The pants you wore to your bat mitzvah? 

From the totally transgressive to the completely obvious, we want them all, in the full range of our identities—ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual, geographic, religious, tragical, comical.

Don’t hold back! Baby Jewish feminists need your wisdom. Send nominations to 40objects@Lilith.org with your name and the why behind the object(s). We’re standing by to select 40 for Lilith’s fall issue—kicking off the magazine’s 40th anniversary year.

For some samples of ​Lilith writing on objects and material culture​ (stuff we’ve loved in the past)​, see these articles:

The Samovar
She’s never had a cup of zavarka-infused tea from it, because this samovar — a treasured heirloom from Odessa — now serves only the best, long-evening inflected, artisanal stories. 

How Museums Invent Us
Your great-aunt’s soup pot in a museum? Priceless artifacts in your attic? Introducing the new wave of feminist curators, who’ve fought to have shoes, cookbooks and miscellaneous tchochkes-cum-folk art included in the exhibited history of the Jews.

Flesh and Blood
The author inherited her father’s meat grinder, a reminder, literally, of flesh and blood. Now it sits on its side, an unused object of beauty, in her own kitchen, where she realizes that Jews think about meat more than most people.

About Those Canaanite Shoes That Have Been In Your Closet For 2,000 Years
Walking the narrative of Zionism.

The Once and Future Womantasch
What is a hamantasch? A sacred vulva filled with black seeds.

An Ode to Plastic Bags
“I’ve used mine as boot liners, shower caps, packing protectors, gloves for picking up gross things, doggie-bags for saving food, guarantors of a dry place to sit on a wet day, and as rain gear.”