In this issue: Emerging from the matrushka doll stereotype, young American-Jewish women from Russia dish about their mothers, their Jewish identity and other American Jews. Clean water, clean sex, clean undies: three female activists set to work. A new Jewish mother enters the Mommy Wars, struggles for safe passage between burnout and opt out. New “illness memoirs.”

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Readers Respond

To articles on young teens and oral sex, Betty Boop, and body obsession at a women's seder.

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Career Shock

by Sarah Blustain

Ambitious, talented, and educated to be believe she’s any man’s equal, a thirtysomething writer takes a stunning hit—to her career, her marriage and her psyche. Why? She has a child. For anyone who’s ever been a mother, your guts will churn as you watch her struggle for safe passage between burnout and opt out.

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We Need a Playground Revolution

by Miriam Peskowitz

Working? Mother? Conflicted? It’s everywhere. Just in case you have been living on another planet and think our writers are the only ones worrying…here are pungent outtakes from the latest reports on mid-career motherhood.

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Glass

fiction by Diana Spechler

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Klara

poetry by Marina Rubin

American Jewish Women from Russia are Emerging from Inside the Matrushka Doll

by Rachel Kranson

Remember those bat mitzvah twinnings with deprived Soviet Jews? Now our twins are here in their 20s and 30s. Listen in on them in the LILITH office as they talk to Rachel Kranson--and eachother--and hear first hand what young American Jewish women from Russia really think about their mothers' careers, their Jewish identity, and other American Jews.

I Am an American

by Bessie Teicher

From 1917, an intimate narrative, part of LILITH's celebration of Jewish women's lives in America, marking the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in the U.S.

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