Podcasts

December 16, 2009 by admin

“Zhid”-The Lilith Fiction Podcast Series

The next installment of the Lilith Fiction Podcast series is here!

In “Zhid,” rose-petal jam and stolen furs lure a young immigrant mother in 1940s America. The story, which first ran in the Spring 2002 issue of Lilith, is read by its author, writer and Lilith fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough.

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Plus, don’t forget: the Lilith podcasts are available through iTunes (just click here to launch it), where you can sign up to receive each new podcast automatically! If you’re playing this on your browser window, don’t worry if it takes a few moments to load.

The Lilith Blog

December 14, 2009 by admin

Chanukkah in the Diaspora

Every year, I look forward to my Channukah care package, when my mom and sister round up Channukah treats, toys, and decorations and send them to me. Here in Pocatello, Idaho, Channukah has to be imported in, or it basically doesn’t exist. Over the years, I’ve found the few local retailers who carry the precious treasures of dreidels (small, plastic, single-colored) and nonspecific chocolate coins, and I’ve built up my supply of Channukah candles in case there’s a year I can’t find any in town. And sometimes, for fun, I will walk in to the local stores, past the poinsettias and Christmas tree ornaments and ask where the Channukah section is, just to see the confused looks of the sales associates.

Friday, December 18th is Temple Emanuel’s Channukah party. We have menorahs, we have a latke buffet, we have games of dreidel, and as always, we have wine. The one thing Temple Emanuel does not have at the moment, as membership ebbs and flows in this rural community, are any children congregants. So we try and import those in for our Channukah celebration as well, drawing from friends and associates in the Pocatello community.

There are a few categories of non-Jewish people in this community who orbit the Jewish population during our major holidays. There are the non-Jews such as I remember growing up in the Chicago area—happy to be Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or…), and progressive, intellectual, and curious enough to want to expand their knowledge of other faiths and cultures for what they are.

However, it seems in this area there are a disproportionate number of non-Jews who claim an affiliation and connection with the Jewish faith, such as Messianic Jews and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons, or LDS as the more politically-correct term).

Christianity is a mystery to me sometimes; especially knowing about such historic realities as the first Council of Nicaea and the Burning Times. And it’s a little unsettling to know how many local non-Jews want to claim some Judaism for their very own, in a town where the 10 commandments are on display on the courthouse lawn and the hot debate between “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays” clogs up the local news outlets.

But, this is how December in the Diaspora works. This is one of the times of year I find there is a lot of explaining to do. Explaining why I don’t celebrate Christmas, and explaining why it’s not OK to assume everyone does. Sometimes I feel like a novelty act; sometimes I feel like an amused religious historian. And I do enjoy the opportunity to talk to other people about Channukah and other Jewish traditions. Even if I have to break out “The Jewish Book of Why,” or contact my sister Sara, a Jewish educator, to make sure I have everything straight.

So on December 18, I hope Temple Emanuel can once again gather a crowd, and give some local kids and adults the fun chance to light a menorah, play dreidel, and eat some latkes made from potatoes that have made this state famous. And I will be proudly wearing my mom’s handmade Channukah stocking cap, brand new from this year’s care package.

–Nancy Goodman

The Lilith Blog

December 10, 2009 by admin

Responding to Absurdity

In the aftermath of Nofrat Frenkel’s arrest at the Western Wall (her crime? wearing a tallit), Lilith has heard from a lot from all of you, asking what you can do. So when this letter from Rabbi Jacqueline Koch Ellenson (of the Women’s Rabbinic Network) arrived, it was clear it needed to be passed on. This is a great way to take a stand.

Dear Friends,
The arrest of Nofrat Frenkel for wearing a tallit at the kotel on Rosh Hodesh Kislev compels us to raise our voices and engage our communities in joint action. We invite you to join in a community-wide Day of Solidarity and Support for Women of the Wall (WOW), to take place on Rosh Hodesh Tevet, Thursday December 17th, the sixth day of Chanukah. With this national grassroots initiative, we will express our support for the rights of the Women of the Wall to assemble at the Kotel and to pray there with dignity, in safety and in shared community.

As with many other women’s grass roots efforts, each community, organization and institution shall develop its own program of prayer or study and shall reach out as widely as possible to its constituencies. For some groups, this day of solidarity and support will be in the manner of WOW, including tefillah and the reading of the Torah. For others, the program may be a “lunch and learn” text study session; or a women’s Chanukah observance. For yet others, it might be a gathering of three or more friends in a living room or office who will dedicate their joint prayer and/or study to the Women of the Wall. Some communities may want to add to their programs a screening of Yael Katzir’s film, Praying in Her Own Voice. We ask that you convene a program that shows your support for this initiative.

Please share your plans and document your activities by sending an email to jackie.ellenson@gmail.com. We also ask that you send a photo of your gathering to Judith Sherman Asher, judithrafaela@mac.com, who is a member of Women of the Wall in Israel. Please caption the photo with the names of the participants, the date, location of, and information about your program. Feel free to add a short message of support for Women of the Wall. This will greatly strengthen the morale of our sisters in Israel.

We hope you will join in a groundswell of support of American women for the Women of the Wall. We encourage you to send this letter to any other women’s groups who might want to participate. As Rosh Hodesh Tevet takes place during the week of Chanukah, the holiday of religious freedom, what better time to affirm the right of women to raise their voices in prayer at the Wall!

Sincerely yours,

Rabbi Jacqueline Koch Ellenson
Director, Women’s Rabbinic Network
Jackie.ellenson@gmail.com
Rivka Haut
Women’s Tefillah Network
rivkahaut@yahoo.com

The Lilith Blog

December 8, 2009 by admin

"Malka in the Promised Land"-The Lilith Fiction Podcast Series

The next installment of the Lilith Fiction Podcast series is here!

In “Malka in the Promised Land,” a young yeshiva girl breaks loose. The story, which first ran in the Winter 2002 issue of Lilith, was written by (now Rabbi) Danya Ruttenberg. “Malka in the Promised Land,” is read by Meredith Steinberg.

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Plus, don’t forget: the Lilith podcasts are available through iTunes (just click here to launch it), where you can sign up to receive each new podcast automatically! If you’re playing this on your browser window, don’t worry if it takes a few moments to load.

The Lilith Blog

December 8, 2009 by admin

Introducing Jewdaho

Within two hours of telling my parents that I was moving to Pocatello, Idaho, my dad found the local synagogue on-line and contacted the religious leader on my behalf. There would be no escape.

Not that I wanted an escape from Judaism; no. I am of good immigrant Jewish stock; I had a Bat Mitzvah, I went to OSRUI in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin for summer camp—one of the many who attended on scholarship. Yet since my early 20s, I’ve been drawn, led to the eclectic caravans roaming the far perimeter of the Diaspora—where Jews mix primarily with non-Jews and talk about weird things like feminist spirituality, Buddhism, and pre-Judeo and pre-Christian paganism. Not to mention neo-psychedelia, neo-Jungism, and neo-feminism, terms I made up myself to catalog the thoughts that dance around in my head—sometimes to Death Metal.

So on a bright August morning in 1998, we removed the last of my residual belongings from mom and dad’s house in Skokie, Illinois, and headed west. It was comforting to have the contact information for Temple Emanuel in Pocatello, although the information I also had about the First National Bar in Pocatello proved to be more socially fruitful those first few years.

My original plan, moving to a town I had never heard of in a state everyone kept confusing with Iowa, was to live in Pocatello for a year, get some post-graduate professional experience, and then flee out to the real world. Because Southeastern Idaho is no place for a nice, single, Jewish girl who doesn’t want to die alone.

That was over 11 years ago, and I’m still here. In what seemed like a divine reward, I met my husband at age 35 after finally surrendering to my unshakeable feelings of sacred place, holy land in Pocatello and committing to stay, spinsterhood be damned. Five seconds after I got engaged I lost my job—again. Life has scuffed me up as much here as it would anywhere else, I suspect, and I’d rather have life run me though the thrasher in historic Old Town Pocatello than anywhere else on the planet.

I’m grateful for the opportunity from Lilith to sift through this past decade to see how, in this high desert, my experience of being Jewish has developed. Here in Pocatello, Idaho, where the dusty summer earth beneath my feet feels oddly familiar. It is hot. It doesn’t rain. Bushes catch on fire–often. And at night during a new moon, the triangle of sky behind my house explodes with stars.

Given my spiritual nature, living in a small town has perhaps created a stronger Jewish identity than if I lived with a kosher deli on every corner. So much to explain to non-Jewish friends and paramours, such a sense of protective cultural solidarity. And being Jewish in Pocatello is like being in a college class with only nine students—every voice counts, and it’s hard to hide in the back.

There are Jews in Pocatello—sometimes a lot, and sometimes not so many. There is a free-standing paid-for synagogue on a generous lot. Temple Emanuel is the only Jewish act in town, and lay rabbi and philosophy professor Dr. Carl Levenson skillfully navigates the come-as-you-are congregation in a sea of on-lookers, many who like to call us Gentiles.

The Jewish population in Southeastern Idaho is as colorful and surprising as the region itself. We work in the desert, we work in the mountains, we work on the farms. We have a matriarch we share with half the Pocatello community. There are those with children in Israel, and those with a dozen chickens in their backyard.

So now that you know a bit about me, let me also show you how wild west Judaism is done.

–Nancy Goodman

The Lilith Blog

December 1, 2009 by admin

"Pri Chadash"–The Lilith Fiction Podcast Series

The next installment of the Lilith Fiction Podcast series is here!

In “Pri Chadash,” a young woman marks a year through food. The story, which first ran in the Summer 2007 issue of Lilith, was written by Darya Mattes. “Pri Chadash” is read by Melanie Weiss.

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Plus, don’t forget: the Lilith podcasts are available through iTunes (just click here to launch it), where you can sign up to receive each new podcast automatically! If you’re playing this on your browser window, don’t worry if it takes a few moments to load.

The Lilith Blog

December 1, 2009 by admin

Am Israel (Cross-Post)

This post is cross-posted from the Israel Religious Action Center blog.

By Beth (Elisheva Hannah) Frank-Backman

Several years ago when I used to join WOW for Rosh Hodesh prayers, my fellow liberal Jews used to ask me, but “why pray at the wall? I don’t see the point of praying there. Let them have their wall if it means so much. We know better that God is not restricted to a place.”

I never had an answer to that question then, but after the recent tallit arrest, I think I do. Divided though we may be in practice and even sometimes belief, we are still Am Israel – one people. Just as God is One despite all appearances to the contrary, so we too are one.

What saddens me most about the arrest is the way some of our fellow Jews try to explain away the fact that the women at that prayer service, were, of all things, praying. In our tradition the gates of heaven are always open to heartfelt prayers: “Since the time of the destruction, all the gates of heaven are closed except the gate of tears” (Berachot 32b). The model of prayer taught to both men and women alike is a woman – Hannah. There is no getting around the profound connection between woman and prayer within Judaism.

So in order to justify their behavior those who support the arrest and prohibitions against women praying with tallit must tell themselves and others that the Women of the Wall were not really praying. Reading through the comments to the Jerusalem Post article, I see many such excuses: they were being political; they wear tallitot as a fashion statement; they are ignorant; they can’t really mean it. But it isn’t just the rabble that gather around the comments of on line news that say this. Even the esteemed Ovadiah Yosef, discounts the sincerity of the women’s prayers at the wall: “These are deviants who serve equality, not Heaven. They must be condemned and warned of.”

Doubting the sincerity of a woman’s prayers is nothing new. Eli himself had similar things to say about Hannah, accusing her of being drunk, when in fact she was pouring out her heart to God. But Eli merely rebuked Hannah. When she explained herself he listened with compassion and told her “Go in peace and may the God of Israel grant your petition”.

The same cannot be said of the guardians of the Wall or Ovadiah Yosef. They do not listen with compassion. Nor do they have halakhah on their side. There is no universally accepted issur against women wearing tallit to aid their prayer, or for that matter, reading Torah. The inability to listen with compassion therefore must come from something deeper and far more concerning: a hardening of the heart of one Jew against another.

A hardening of the heart. The Temple fell because of baseless hatred. The Temple fell because we hardened our hearts against one another and failed to hear each others prayers.

Each Yom Kippur we are told that “prayer, teshuvah, and tzedakah” will avert the decree. There is no more appropriate place for women to pray, tallit and all, than at the Wall. There, of all places, is the battle ground of baseless hatred, the mark of what divided and nearly destroyed us as a people. It is there we need to heal the breach. It is there we need to come to acceptance that there are many ways to pray and serve God, Torah, and Israel. It is there, we need to pray until those who scoff like Eli, can hear the prayer of all women, however strange, as prayer. Like the prayers of Hannah, the prayers of the Women of the Wall are the longing of women to take their part in an act of creation and healing, hand in hand with God. Even if Eli isn’t listening, God is.

Beth (Elisheva Hannah) Frank-Backman has lived in Jerusalem since 1996.

Podcasts

November 24, 2009 by admin

The Lilith fiction podcast launches!

Welcome to Lilith’s first fiction podcast! This is the first in a series of four, which you’ll be able to download weekly here on the Lilith blog, and soon in the iTunes store! You can play this podcast on the blog, download it to your desktop and play it there, or put it on your iPod or any other mp3 player. (Have questions about how to work a podcast? Email our webmaster.) You can also subscribe to the Lilith fiction podcasts here.

This podcast is “The Things We Do,” by Rachel Hall, first published in the Fall 2001 issue, and winner of Lilith’s first-ever fiction contest. The story is read by Jennifer Silverman.

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UPDATE: The Lilith Fiction Podcast series is now available through iTunes. Click here to launch iTunes and see our podcasts. Subscribe and enjoy!

The Lilith Blog

November 3, 2009 by admin

The Fall Issue is Out!

Please leave your thoughts, comments, questions and more as comments below!

The Lilith Blog

September 22, 2009 by admin

Get More Lilith!

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The nonprofit Lilith magazine brings you dispatches from the front lines of Jewish feminism, like the “Jewish hair” issue, JAP-baiting on campus, how Jewish women handle money, life stories of transgender Jews, teen sex at bar & bat mitzvah parties, the stained-glass ceiling for women rabbis, what converts talk about when others aren’t around, the how-to of feminist funerals and much, much more.

What’s coming next? You’re going to get more of Lilith’s unique content, plus more ways of connecting to Lilith: podcasts, blog posts, videos, interacting with other Lilith readers and change-makers.

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