The Lilith Blog

March 9, 2011 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

Israel’s Starry, Starry Night

The first time I visited Israel in 1979, Sadat and Begin signed the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. The announcement came over the radio while I sat on the ground near lush grapefruit trees and drank coffee poured from a thermos, on break from picking the yellow fruit. The Israelis who listened to the news with me responded with weary skepticism, “We’ll see what this means.”

The first time my daughter visited Israel on our family trip this February, Egypt was again taking a momentous step as the people of Egypt forced out Mubarak and demanded greater freedom. The Israelis we met along the way again expressed skepticism, “We’ll see how this plays out.”

And while the calls of democracy that began in Tunisia and Egypt and spread to Libya suggested a seeming realignment of longheld stars, during our stay in Eilat, in the south of Israel, my husband, daughter and I, along with a group of other families, saw the Israeli night sky in its full array of comforting constellations, the stars in place in their trusted positions.

A friend had organized the trip through Dark Sky Safari with guide Eitan Schwartz who brought his telescope to a site outside the mountains of Eilat. He spread out blankets so we we could lie down and see the sky. He also brought a powerful, green laser pointer that traced a direct line to the stars in their patterns.  (more…)

The Lilith Blog

March 1, 2011 by Maya Bernstein

Witch

When my grandmother babysat for us when I was young, we always played “Witch.” This was a glorified version of Hide and Seek, in which the witch hunted for the innocent children with the hope of capturing and cooking them in her cauldron for supper. My grandmother was the witch, of course, since, hands down, she had the best cackle, and since she had invented the game. We hid (I remember the soft feel of the velour on the back of the chair in the corner of my parent’s bedroom), and she walked around the hallways, cackling and talking in her witch voice, threatening to find us. I don’t remember if she actually found us, or if we simply emerged, terrified, but she appeased us with pots of spaghetti and slices of mozzarella cheese. She’d sing us to sleep in her low alto, and laugh that she was a terrible babysitter, and that we weren’t allowed to repeat anything she said to our parents.

Memories of playing Witch with my grandmother came flooding back at me when I opened last week’s New Yorker magazine to Tina Fey’s article about the challenges of being a working mother. Fey’s daughter comes home from preschool one day with a book with a witch on the cover called “My Working Mom.” Though her daughter is pre-literate, Fey reads into this – my mother the witch who voluntarily goes to work – unleashing her relentless, unforgiving internal debate about whether or not she should take a break from her thriving career to have a second baby. On the one hand, she argues: “And what’s so great about work, anyway? Work won’t visit you when you’re old. Work won’t drive you to the radiologist’s for a mammogram and take you out afterward for soup.” On the other, in addition to the fact that many people depend on her for their jobs, she is also breaking through glass ceilings in comedy, an industry still dominated by (sexist) men, which is why, she writes, “I can’t possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody’s business and I’ll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life.” (more…)

The Lilith Blog

February 28, 2011 by admin

A Look Back on Black History Month

As we come to the end of Black History Month, let’s take a look back at some of Lilith’s writings on the topic.

Fall 1996: “Are You Black or Are You Jewish?” Resisting the Identity Challenge
by Sarah Blustain
The children of those black-Jewish marriages forged in the halcyon days of the 60’s Civil Rights movement have come of age. They talk here about their Jewish mothers, their pain at having to choose an identity, and the confusion they feel about a society that denies them their double birthright.

Fall 1999: Unsung Heroines of the ‘60s: Jewish Women Who Went South
by Debra L. Schultz
Women in the civil rights movement integrated bus terminals, taught in Freedom Schools, registered black voters and served time in Southern jails. Now they talk frankly about the danger, their mothers’ reactions, and what in their Jewish consciousness propelled them.

Winter 2002: Jewish Girls and African-American Nannies
Lilith asked readers to dig deep, for the first time, into these experiences. The results are stories of love and complexity. In these pages grown-up Jewish daughters begin to think through the lessons, the gratitude and the guilt of these intensely intimate dyads. We also listen to three nannies on the other side of these relationships.

The Lilith Blog

February 8, 2011 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

Shabbat Tales

The first Shabbat my husband and I said the parents’ blessing for children our daughter was an infant, her delicate head with fine hair soft to my touch, and the final words of the prayer a quiet hope for the future, “May God turn God’s spirit to you and grant you peace.”

When the pre-school years came, we continued the parents’ blessing for children and taught Rachel to say, hamotzi, the prayer over our challah covered with blue velvet, an easy-to-learn Hebrew sentence.

Soon she moved on to helping me light the candles when I received a gift of a candle lighter, a long silver wand with a candle stub at the end whose lit wick, in turn, lights the two Shabbat candles in our brass holders.

As elementary school started and our schedules became more complicated, we didn’t sit down every day for dinner as a family. Except on Shabbat. On Friday nights our only plans are to be with each other.

“What’s the parashah for the week?” my husband now asks Rachel, after the meal and before dessert.

He knows the parashah from his own day school days, Rachel is learning it now in fourth grade, and I try to keep up reading weekly Torah translations online, as I never learned the texts back in my Hebrew school years.

But recently I found wedged in my bookshelf, While Standing on One Foot: Puzzle Stories and Wisdom Tales from the Jewish Tradition by Nina Jaffe and Steve Zeitlin first published in 1993. Why not add this to Shabbat, I figured. Besides, some of the tales are short, two pages, not too long to postpone dessert. (more…)

The Lilith Blog

January 14, 2011 by Emma Gray

Music, Feminism and Debbie Friedman

My first memory of Debbie Friedman’s music came from my mother. At the tender age of three, before bedtime I would listen to my mother sing “L’chi Lach.” I had no idea who Debbie Friedman was, but I already knew that her music was good for my soul…or at the very least, my sleeping patterns. When I first started thinking about writing this piece I wanted to explore the connection between feminism and music.

After Friedman’s tragic passing, it only seemed fitting to focus my thoughts largely on her.

As much as music in general, and Friedman’s in particular, played a part in my sleeping life, as I grew more cognizant of the world around me it began to hold equal weight in my waking life – specifically in my burgeoning feminism. As long as I can remember, my feminism has been connected to and encouraged by empowering, woman-centric music. Music is a powerful political and personal tool and therefore the perfect medium with which to make “the personal political.” Music evokes emotion, takes us back in time to a specific place or person and calls us to action.

Friedman’s music managed to call Jewish women to action; to remind us that we could and should take ownership over our religious identities. For years I didn’t even realize that “Miriam” and “Mi Shebeirach” were Debbie Friedman’s songs. I just thought that they were universally acknowledged, Jewish classics—which goes to show how much she was embraced by the larger community. The song “Miriam” stuck with me so firmly because it spoke explicitly about a woman and gave her a current importance that traditional Jewish History often does not. Although today the lyrics might not seem particularly revolutionary or subversive, they still give voice to Biblical women and by extension affirm the importance of women in the Jewish community today.

The earliest groundwork for my musical feminist awakening was surely laid by Debbie Friedman. As I grew up a little more and began attending a progressive, Jewish summer camp, I continued to embrace and be empowered by women musicians. Dar Williams is the most obvious example of this (and it is worth nothing that she and Friedman were both influenced by Joan Baez). Her words pushed listeners to question the rigidity of gender roles and religious affiliations, and pushed back at the consumerism that so often fuels these divisions. I remember being eleven or twelve, listening to “When I Was a Boy” and realizing what it meant to connect in a real way to lyrics:

And now I’m in this clothing store, and the signs say less is more
More that’s tight means more to see, more for them, not more for me
That can’t help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat

We live in a society where we are constantly bombarded with commercials urging us to buy this and that in order to be a real woman or real man. Songs that speak to this and other flawed realities, and make the listener feel angry enough to want to change them, are powerful tools. Luckily there are quite a number of rocking, lady-empowering artists out there whose songs do just that. In recognition of a few of them I have created a suggested listening playlist for this post.

1.     Dar Williams, “As Cool As I Am”
2.     No Doubt, “Just A Girl”
3.     Alix Olson, “Eve’s Mouth”
4.     Salt-N-Pepa, “None of Your Business”
5.     Mirah, “Jerusalem”
6.     Ani DiFranco, “Not A Pretty Girl”
7.     Rilo Kiley, “It’s A Hit”
8.     Jewel, “Who Will Save Your Soul”

My father, a childhood friend of Debbie Friedman’s, recently reflected upon her assertive nature and the way that she constantly encouraged her audiences to interact with her music. This interaction is exactly what makes “politically charged” music so moving. So readers, I encourage you to listen closely, get inspired and create some change; just the way Debbie surely would have liked it.

-Emma Gray

The Lilith Blog

January 9, 2011 by admin

Sad News: Beloved Singer and Composer Debbie Friedman Dies in Los Angeles

Debbie Friedman, known for her Mi Sheberach and her special Jewish feminst songs, has died in Los Angeles. Lilith magazine’s board and staff join with Debbie Friedman’s multitude of other friends and fans in grieving her shocking and untimely death today. Debbie’s music –and her presence–helped lead thousands through healing moments and in joyful celebration.

What was planned as a healing service for Debbie Friedman will now, sadly, be a memorial service, at 8 PM tonight at the JCC in Manhattan; it will be available live-streamed. We will be posting it on all Lilith’s platforms.

In 1988, asked to share a “sacred moment” she had experienced, the beloved late singer and composer Debbie Friedman wrote in Lilith magazine:

“My confrontation with death and my acceptance of aloneness freed me to incorporate spiritual consciousness into my life. For me, there is no separation between spirituality and living. Spirituality is at the core of all that is.”

May Debbie’s family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

The Lilith Blog

January 5, 2011 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

Three Faiths and a Pizza

The day was supposed to be a date with my husband, without my daughter, that included lunch and a visit to the New York Public Library to see Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, an exhibit of texts from each religion.

We decided to stop at a restaurant where we could order white pizza and, after a discussion of whether we should get a small or medium, decided on the medium size.  The waiter brought a huge pie to our table. Clearly, we should have chosen the small.

“It’s okay,” I assured my husband. “We’ll take the leftovers with us and eat it for dinner tomorrow.”

At the end of the meal, the waiter kindly provided a plate and bag, instead of a cumbersome box, and off we went toward Forty-Second and Fifth for the library.

The security guard gave my purse a cursory look and accepted my comment that we had pizza in the bag but wouldn’t eat in the building. We walked over to the Gottesman Exhibition Hall where another guard stopped us to look in our bag.

“You can’t bring food into the exhibit,” she said.  (more…)

The Lilith Blog

January 5, 2011 by Tara Bognar

Mediterranean Family Size Religious Israeli Jewish Women Win (Lose?)

A great article from our friends at the Berman Jewish Policy Archive!

Women and Demography in the Mediterranean States (2009), by Ariela Keysar, compiles and analyzes demographic data from Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Greece, Spain, and France.

The general results were unsurprising – lower fertility is associated with women’s greater participation in the workplace and educational, civil and social equality. More surprising, however, is that family size has decreased across the board, even in the most religious countries (based on questions about the importance of God and religion in people’s lives).

For example, Morocco has the lowest rate of female literacy and education, and also relatively low female workplace participation, nevertheless saw the average number of children per woman decrease from 6.9 at the beginning of the ’70s to 2.4 in the last couple of years. The highest current fertility rate is in Syria, which is only 3.1.  (more…)

The Lilith Blog

January 3, 2011 by Liz Lawler

No, This Isn’t PMS: You Are Just Really Annoying

I did an about face this month. I decided to stop believing in PMS.

It’s kind of pathetic, but I hadn’t even considered the culturally fabricated origins of this bio-myth until stumbling across this debate, in a blog that I sometimes read. It was kind of like finding out that the Tooth Fairy doesn’t exist—obvious in hindsight, but earth shattering in the moment.

Because let me be clear: I have blamed my hormones for a LOT.

Allow me to back up and clarify: hormones matter.  In the months after weaning my son and moving from hormonal birth control to a barrier method, there was an, ahem, “adjustment period.” It was palpably related to my cycle, though my frustrations with early parenthood and the NY real estate market were also clear contributors (I mean really, who hasn’t wanted to kill their partner over a condo purchase?). The depression and anger came in waves that I could just glimpse before they engulfed me. But the dust has settled. I am also prone to, when surrounded by breastfeeding women, spring a leak, so to speak. The physical responses to hormonal changes are undeniable–cramps, bloating, fatigue, etc. (and might reasonably induce crankiness). But a dip in estrogen cannot be certifiably, medically equated with a loss of common sense, emotional balance, composure. Seriously, look it up. (more…)

The Lilith Blog

January 3, 2011 by Maya Bernstein

Puppy Love

I’ve fallen for a dog named Duncan. He is the new love of my life. He has long black hair, and is the size of a large boot. He’s not a smiley dog – he’s quite serious, but can you expect anything else from a working dog? He makes good money, too. And he seems to have a strange habit of not walking upstairs, but being carried, while caressed, sweet nothings (in the form of the word “seek”) being whispered in his ear. I think I can handle that.

But – I get ahead of myself.  Let us begin at the beginning.

My daughter woke up one day last week with a number of suspicious red dots on her legs. She complained that they itched. When, after three days, they seemed to increase in number, we took her to the doctor. Here’s where it gets exciting – ready? The doctor said that it didn’t look like spider-bites (spiders, I learned a couple of days later, are wonderful critters to have in your house); it didn’t look like scabies; and – here’s the clincher – it’s possible they could be bed bug bites. (more…)