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October 13, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under The Sun:It's a Nobel Kinda Day
What Lilith publishes really has legs! Just look! Check out this item from today’s news, and then read what Lilith said earlier on this very subject.
The dust is starting to settle after the annual flurry surrounding the awarding of Nobel Prizes. From the Medicine award for IVF (we’ve written about that!), to noting the blatant absence of women among the winners, this year gave us lots to think about. The literature prize, especially, put us in mind to re-visit Evelyn Torton Beck’s sharp-as-a-tack 1979 review of I. B. Singer’s Misogyny. Enjoy!
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October 13, 2010 by Liz Lawler
A Wildly (Maybe Not) Un-Feminist Choice
I chose my mid 20s to make a wildly un-feminist choice. I converted to Judaism. For a man.
I got a good liberal arts education, and took all of the appropriate feminist theory courses. Luce Irigaray could do no wrong, as far as I was concerned. So you can imagine what went through my head when I found myself, 8 months pregnant, wading into a mikvah like a dirigible. The woman running the show pretty much had to hold me under with a paddle, the bubble of my enormous body kept trying to surface. The idea of submersion took on a bit of a double meaning, if you catch my drift.
I’d like to pretend that I “always felt Jewish” or that discovering Judaism felt like coming home. But no such luck. (more…)
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October 11, 2010 by Sonia Isard
The Spin Cycle:Happy National Coming Out Day…?
Welcome back to The Spin Cycle, Lilith’s online forum for media analysis.
I think it started with an article in The Nation. Or maybe it was over at good ol’ HuffPo. Or maybe it was Ellen DeGeneres? I’m not sure. All I know is that one particular topic sure is getting a lot of coverage these days. Seriously. It’s all over my newsfeed.
The amazing thing is the tech piece. Good things: Dan Savage initiating the creation of an archive of personal stories on YouTube. The extraordinary Make It Better project. Sarah Silverman’s badass indictment of anti-gay policy, also a YouTube victory. Bad things: The (gay) president of the University of Michigan student assembly getting harassed by the state’s assistant attorney general, via a blog dedicated solely to that appalling purpose. The secretly recorded video of the student at Rutgers, which, blame-games aside, seems to have provided the impetus for a young man to take his own life. (more…)
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October 6, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin
Stepping Toward Minyan
If you had asked me, growing up, if the Conservative synagogue my family attended on Friday nights also offered a daily minyan, I would have answered, somewhat vaguely, that I thought a few old men got together for services on Mondays and Thursdays, and was that what you meant?
Because neither my mother, who would not have counted as one of the necessary ten in that non-egalitarian time, nor my father, spoke about or chose to go to minyan. Not even for Kaddish. When my paternal grandfather died, and then my paternal and maternal grandmothers, my father and mother faithfully attended Shabbat evening services each week for twelve months and rose each time for the mourner’s prayer. I understood that to be the way to observe a family member’s death in the Jewish tradition.
That is, until I met my husband and shared my family’s practice several months after our wedding. (more…)
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October 6, 2010 by admin
New from the Women's Roundtable Podcast
Listen in on the latest conversation with Lilith’s editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider and assistant editor Sonia Isard. This time, we’re chatting with Gabrielle Birkner and Jane Eisner of the Forward about:
* Feminists reframing the joys of cooking,
* Jane Eisner’s first-hand report on violence against women in Haiti now,
* The memorable $#*! our moms say.
Enjoy!
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September 22, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under the Sun: The Enduring Fight for Abortion Rights
What Lilith publishes really has legs! Just look! Check out this item from today’s news, and then read what Lilith said earlier on this very subject.
Whoa! What a buzz is in the air already this election season! When Planned Parenthood’s reaction to the New York State primaries fell into our hands, it reminded us of a few articles from Lilith’s long history of rigorous reporting on the state of pro-choice politics. For just one example, have a look at editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider’s 1990 piece, “The Anti-Choice Movement: Bad News for Jews.” The more things change…?
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September 7, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
Return
It is a time of returning. Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, is upon us. We are in the midst of the Hebrew month of Elul, which, in preparation for the Days of Awe, is a period of Teshuva, often translated as repentance, but which literally means to go back, to return. PJ Library sent us a book called Engineer Ari and the Rosh HaShanah Ride, about a man who turns his train around and returns to his friends. Jews around the world are involved in spiritual preparation, returning to God, returning to the selves they wish to be. So, I feel, it is an especially fitting time for me to return.
Except that I’m returning to work.
In preparation for the auspicious day, I’ve been maniacally going through drawers and scrubbing under sinks. We had to rearrange our house to make room for the new baby, and I’ve been uncovering every crevice in an attempt to find more space. Unlike the mother hummingbird, who spent less and less time on her nest before her babies flew off, I have become obsessed, spending hours going through bookshelves and re-arranging the angles of chairs before I fly off. I am trying to leave my mark, so that when I’m no longer home when the baby cries, turning his head from side to side in his crib, searching for me, he will know that I love him, because he has a dresser now, and a cubby at the bottom of the crowded closet, and a quilt hanging on the wall. Maybe I’ve been trying to make the new seem old, and comfortable, before the old routine returns, belying its name, and bringing more change.
It’s a strange business, this “returning” to one’s self. Pregnancy and childbirth are especially powerful physical metaphors for the reality that we are always in flux. My grandfather used to say that change is the only constant. In the past months, I have watched my body wax and wane like the moon. I have cut dozens of white crescent fingernails, surprised at how quickly they grow. I have built sandcastles by the side of a lake, and thought of nothing else but how much more water we need for the moats, and how sweet it is that children of a certain age don’t walk, but run, no matter how small the distance. And my ears are full of the sweet sighs and grunts of a new life. I have been present in my motherhood, having nothing else tugging at my attention. I return now to a life conflicted. I will have to go through my internal drawers and closets and create more space. Perhaps I will uncover a moonlit stream of space for spirit and self and soul. For God to leak in and help me to be present. And remind me to leave some drawers unoccupied, some walls blank, some space between my ribs to breathe.
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September 7, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under the Sun: In Ruth Gruber’s Own Powerful Words
What Lilith publishes really has legs! Just look! Check out this item from today’s news, and then read what Lilith said earlier on this very subject.
A British soldier led me down a flight of slippery stairs into the prison cage, into which hundreds of half-naked men, women and children were wedged. It was a black and white drawing of the inferno. Blindly, I shot photos of their agony. Back on the dock, a young Haganah woman standing next to me said, “Now you will see the birth of the Jewish State.”
This is just one of the many stunning images which appeared in Ruth Gruber’s 1988 article in Lilith Magazine, “40 Years of Rescue.” Now you can get the full text here! Gruber is featured in this recent New York Times piece, and is the subject of a brand new documentary film opening at the Angelika in New York on September 10. And a happy upcoming 99th birthday to Ruth Gruber!
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July 30, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin
Bema Comfort
I attended religious school, called Hebrew School back then, at a time when girls didn’t see much bema action.
Yes, I had a Friday night bat mitzvah and chanted a haftorah. And I had the privilege of being the first girl in my synagogue to say Kiddush during her bat mitzvah service. My sister had celebrated her bat mitzvah seven years earlier and chanted the Kiddush during her bat mitzvah when we lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and my parents, who wanted no less for me, took months to persuade our rabbi in Trenton, New Jersey to allow my chance.
But come Shabbat mornings, the mechanics of the Torah service eluded me, as I wasn’t taught to chant from the Torah or to dress it after the reader finished chanting from the scroll. Yet somehow I was taught the prayers for an aliyah, to sing along with my whole Hebrew School class.
So flashforward forty-some years when I find myself a member of an egalitarian congregation with ushers who one Shabbat morning offer me the sixth aliyah. (more…)
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July 29, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under the Sun: Chelsea Converts Lately?
Chelsea Clinton’s looming nuptial festivities have the gossip blogs in a tizzy: what’ll she wear to walk down the aisle? Can mixed-faith marriages work? Who’ll she invite to the ceremony? And, is she really going to convert? Angela Himsel has a few insights into what that might be like, from her frank Lilith article 10 years ago on “What Converts Talk About (When Jews Aren’t Around).” Can’t wait to hear what Chelsea has to say!
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