The Lilith Blog

September 22, 2009 by admin

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The Sisterhood blog

August 20, 2009 by admin

News from The Sisterhood

The Lilith blog and the Forward’s new blog for women, The Sisterhood, will be cross-posting exciting new posts from the world(s) of Jewish women. Stay tuned for more!

This week on the Forward’s Sisterhood blog:

• In Geula, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, women and men are being asked to walk on separate sides of the street — an idea that Debra Nussbaum Cohen says is emblematic of “the growing extremism in the form of misogyny of the far-right edge of Orthodox Judaism.”
Click here to read

• Deborah Kolben, pregnant with her first child, finds meaning in declining circumcision rates.
Click here to read

• Chris Rock’s forthcoming documentary, “Good Hair,” looks at the lengths black women are willing to go to style their tresses — and Sarah Seltzer draws parallels to “the politics of straightness surrounding Jewish women’s hair.”
Click here to read

• In other hair-related related news, Rebecca Honig Friedman writes about attending a recent upsherin, or traditional hair-cutting ceremony that celebrates a Jewish 3-year-old boy’s ascent from babyhood into childhood.
Click here to read

The Lilith Blog

July 8, 2009 by admin

Share your thoughts on the summer issue

The summer issue is up! Share your thoughts and responses below.

Posts from the Field

July 3, 2009 by admin

Choices and Values

I went to an Orthodox day school. School was closed on Yom Tov as a matter of course.We all brought kosher lunches to school. No parties were held on Shabbat. Keeping mitzvot was just what was done. The halakha was kept through a mixture of school rules and social pressure.

My kids attend public school. Our home is kosher and we keep Shabbat. My kids don’t have the same level of facility with Jewish texts that I have by virtue of eleven years in Orthodox day school. I often regret that.

On the other hand, when I was keeping Shabbat and Yom Tov as a kid, there was no other choice. My kids are choosing to miss lovely events, like the senior camping trip that was held over Shavuot, or parties given by good friends. They have to struggle each year to make up all of the work that they inevitably miss during the month of Tishrei.

Our kids see exactly what they are choosing to give up, by choosing to do Jewish. My regrets at their lack of facility with say, Talmud, is mitigated by their continuing, even as adolescents and young adults to make thoughtful Jewish choices.

Not all of their choices are strictly halakhic. Those choices though, are made with thought. They, much more than my classmates in my Orthodox day school, are thinking about why they are doing the mitzvot each and every day. That too has it’s value.

–Sarah Jacobs

The Lilith Blog

July 1, 2009 by admin

Of Therapists and Old Ladies

I have a confession to make: I do not believe in therapy. Over the course of my life, I have seen countless therapists, especially during my tumultuous college years – and yet I can’t point to a single successful experience. And so in recent years, I have developed my own “talking cure” — one that enables me to interact with the world in a way that seems more sensible and meaningful given my needs and values.I say that therapy has never really helped me. But I am not even sure what would constitute successful therapy. How do we trace the course
of our own development as human beings? How do we know when we have become better or more actualized (as the lingo would have it)
individuals? Rarely does therapy (at least as I’ve known it) involve the setting of clearly-defined goals, and thus it’s very hard to judge when the patient is “better.” A therapist is not like an eye doctor who gives you a vision test and a prescription for glasses; with therapy, the test questions are ongoing, the prescriptions are vague, and often the world looks even blurrier as time goes on.

I am also troubled by the power dynamic in the therapy situation. The therapist takes money (generally very high sums!) from the patient,
and it is therefore in the therapist’s interest for the therapy to continue a long time – a clear conflict of interest, given that presumably the patient who is “healed” would not need the therapist anymore. I once tried to leave a therapist and was told that that I was sabotaging my own recovery and preventing myself from getting the help I needed. What could I possibly say in response to these words, which undermined the very foundations of my capacity for agency? And so I felt I had no choice but to return again and again to expose myself even further – if I’d fail to disclose any information, the therapist would tell me, once again, that I was sabotaging my own recovery. The therapist, in contrast, would say little (how maddening!) and reveal nothing about him/herself. A friend once told me that he paid $100 for a therapy session, only to hear himself speak for 50 minutes – the doctor grunted, but did not say a single word. “You listen to me for free,” my friend said to me. “Why should I pay for it?”

(more…)

Posts from the Field

June 25, 2009 by admin

Thank You Notes Teaching Middot

We drove our youngest to camp yesterday. The night before he left he finished the last of his thank you notes for his March Bar mitzvah.

I was struck, as I have been, as each of my three kids have gone through this Emily Post exercise in American etiquette, just how this formality can deepen the values we hope out kids learn as B’nai Mitzvah.

With each of my kids I laid out the basic rules. The first is that no one owed them a gift. The specific gift needed to be acknowledged or commented on. The second was that each gift was given because of a relationship. The note needed to acknowledge the relationship which caused the gift giving.
It’s easy for a kid, who may be getting large cash gifts from friends or relatives with deep pockets, to be less than appreciative of a small gift from a little old lady on a fixed income. I would mention that this gift was proportionally a huge gift on the part of the giver.

I felt that my message was getting through my son would ask me before he began a note, “Tell me about _____. How do we know them?” I could then explain how _______ was friendly with my parents when they were a young married couple, or was my mother-in-law’s favorite cousin, or was the person who gave his his favorite baby toy.

As my son has slogged through the process, which has been often difficult for him, he was rewarded by the large number of people who have mentioned that unlike most Bar-Mitzvah thank you notes which get tossed in the trash as soon as they are read, my son’s notes have been kept. The notes have given my son an additional opportunity to get to know the circle of people who surround our family. They have also given our circle the opportunity to see our kid for who he is in his glorious quirkiness.

–Sarah Jacobs

The Lilith Blog

April 30, 2009 by admin

I Wish I Could Seduce You in the Nude (Bava Kama 86b)

The following is the blogger’s analysis and personal musing on seduction, inspired by Aviva Zornberg.

Yesterday’s Daf (Bava Kama 86) considers the question of whether a naked person can be embarrassed. The Talmud begins by quoting a Braita which states, “If one embarrasses someone while he is naked, he [the embarrasser] is liable, and embarrassing someone naked is not the same as embarrassing someone when he is clothed…. Our master said: If one embarrasses someone when he is naked, he is liable. But is a naked person capable of being embarrassed? (?ערום בר בושת הוא) Rather, this refers to a case where the wind has bunched up his clothes and a person comes and lifts his clothing further, thereby embarrassing him.”

The Talmud, although at first asserting that it is indeed possible to embarrass someone while that person is naked, goes on to question this assumption. As Rashi explains, “Since he does not care about walking around naked in front of others, what does he have to be embarrassed about?” Presumably a person who does not mind if others see him naked is immune to other people’s opinions of him, and is therefore not susceptible to embarrassment. The Talmud is then left with the question as to why the Braita taught that a person is indeed liable for embarrassing someone who is naked, and concludes that this was a person who was at first only partially naked. The embarrasser comes along and exposes him even further, and thus he is considered to be liable.

(more…)

The Lilith Blog

April 14, 2009 by admin

Jewish Women's Writing Groups

Have you seen the spring issue’s article on Jewish women’s writing groups? (You can even download the article from our homepage!)

Well, in the spirit of that article, we want to hear from you. What are your experiences–with writing groups, with other writers, as a Jewish woman who writes? Please leave your stories, anecdotes and recollections below!

The Lilith Blog

March 2, 2009 by admin

My Cup of Tea

The only thing I consume as often as books is tea. A box of tea, like a good novel, usually lasts me about a week; by that point I am sick of the characters and ready for a new flavor. Yet I buy my tea in boxes, and it always seems wasteful to throw away so much cardboard. And so a few years ago I developed a strategy for my reading and drinking lives: I began cutting up tea boxes into book marks—four per box—and using them to mark my place.

My tea-drinking habits have changed as I have moved around the globe. When I lived in New York I would drink steaming cups of Celestial Seasonings Swiss Mint, and with good literary precedent – this was also Ruth Puttermesser’s favorite flavor. My childhood bedroom walls are still plastered with the inspirational quotes I cut out from the backs of the Celestial Seasonings boxes, and once, in high school, I even wrote to the company headquarters in Boulder Colorado to suggest various literary selections. They responded by sending me free coupons for their newest flavor, which kicked off a teenage habit of writing suggestion letters to companies. (Somewhere in my files I have responses from Nutri-Grain (does the locust bean gum you list in your ingredients really contain locusts?!), M&Ms (before there was green, I suggested it), and Pringles potato chips (who responded to my complaint about the paucity of green flakes on the Sour Cream and Onion chips by sending me a case of eight free containers, which arrived on our doorstep one week before Pesach.) With time, I like to think that I have become a healthier eater; the one constant has been the steaming mug of tea that accompanies nearly every meal.

In England, I tried to learn to drink Earl Grey with milk after I made the mistake of inviting an esteemed Cambridge don to tea – only to find him horrified that my refrigerator contained neither milk nor clotted cream. (He was unimpressed by my dainty little cucumber sandwiches – apparently being earnest is far less important that knowing how to serve a proper brew.) After most of my British literature seminars, all the students would retire to the local pub. I had never drunk a glass of beer or even a social glass of wine, and I quickly learned that ordering tea in the Red Lion or the King’s Arms was simply not done.

In Israel, I lament the weakness of Wissotzky and need to put two tea bags in every glass I drink. I have read in the novels of Meir Shalev that early Russian immigrants to Israel used to hold sugar cubes between their teeth as they sipped their tea, but I cannot adopt that habit; I often drink tea while snacking on gummy candies (which explains a lifetime of dental woes), but the sweetness must always be outside of the mug. If anything, I put slices of lemon in my tea, a habit I learned from my mother, who also relishes the bittersweet. In Israel I drink tea with every single meal, since I still can’t get used to the taste of the water but also can’t be bothered with all the wastefulness that bottled water entails. Once, during a particularly long dark teatime of my soul, a friend served me loose leaf tea from the shuk, offering me her own blend of tea and sympathy. It was the best tea I’ve ever drunk, and I’ve purchased it several times since; unfortunately, though, each time I drink that tea I am overcome by a flood of memories so intense that I cannot abide another sip.

I suspect that my rate of tea consumption outpaces the rate at which I lose bookmarks, since I have an entire top desk drawer filled with cut-up tea bookmarks waiting (along with New Yorker subscription cards) to be called up for reserve duty. Sometimes, if I do not want to write in the copy of the book I am reading, I scribble notes on the back of the tea box cut-out and then shelve the bookmark along with the book, as an index to my favorite passages. My grandmother, who used to review books professionally, did this as well – the books from her personal library not only reek of her sweet perfume, but are also stuffed with torn-up sheets of paper with her scribblings, which she used as both post-its and bookmarks. In many books I have finished, though, I do not need bookmarks: I have a favorite passage that I quote so frequently that the book naturally falls open to that place when I open the front cover, as if it knows just what I am seeking.

In my current apartment I have a reading couch with a ledge that perfectly balances a cup of tea. I like to spend several hours each Shabbat steeped in a good book besides a steaming mug, my own celestial taste of the world to come.

–Chavatzelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

December 3, 2008 by admin

Missing

While in China this summer, I read as much as I could about the country’s “orphan problem.” I particularly loved The Lost Daughters of China, written by Karin Evans, an American adoptive mom of a Chinese baby girl.

Evans’ book overflows with perspectives personal, academic, and literary. She talks about how the complete unprecedented-ness of this international exchange that brings babies from poor, rural families on one side of the earth to grow up with upper-middle-class families, usually of a different race and culture, on the other side of the earth (30,000 in America alone); shares an adoption researcher’s belief that adoption does important work stretching the notion of “family”; quotes a poet who addresses “these women of the world’s first international female diaspora”; and discusses the hundreds of thousands of women “missing,” scientifically speaking, from the world’s population.

What this means is that in many countries, especially in East and South Asia and the Middle East, there are not as many women in the population as are biologically expected: in nature, a birth rate of about 105 males to every 100 females and a better survival rate for females yield a nearly 1:1 ratio.

I had heard of China’s “gender gap” before, and I knew about female infanticide in China and of gender-selective abortions there and elsewhere (India especially), but I had never thought of the women missing as just that…real, individual people, people of all ages, across the world, who aren’t where they should be.

In China, old women, who were killed as infants in the 1930s and 40s, are “missing”; middle-aged women are “missing,” whose brothers were more likely to get their family’s last bits of food during the famine of 1958-61; girls and young women are “missing” from the advent of sex-determining ultrasound (since outlawed); and females of all ages who have been the victims of poorer health care, nutrition, and basic care than those received by their male counterparts are “missing.”

This is so haunting. I was glad Evans educated me about these women so I could think about them, honor their memory. In hindsight, the idea of not knowing about them made me sick.

I didn’t think until much later that this haunting presence had surely echoed, for me, our phantom population after the Holocaust: the millions, and the millions upon millions that their descendants would now be. They are in our peripheral vision when we look at our own community; to the left and right of us we know, eerily, the invisible branches on our family trees. I think, at our core, we are simply horrified knowing of so many people for whom no one was even alive to say kaddish.

Fifteen years ago, a government-sponsored survey in China showed more than 12% of that country’s baby girls missing, or more than one and a half million babies yearly. In all, about 30 million females are missing there, and worldwide, 100 million.

If we as Jews are the primary remembers of lost Jews, then we as women should – and will – be the primary remembers of lost women. They are an enormous and greatly diverse group that has amassed over the centuries right up to today. How can we memorialize them?

Info about infanticide on Gendercide Watch:
www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

An appropriately angry blog post on the subject with an interesting slant (those articles about how hard it is for men in China to find wives):
http://www.anglofille.com/2007/01/13/the-chinese-holocaust/

–Anna Schnur-Fishman