by Susan Weidman Schneider
Eavesdrop on What They Said to Us
Dear Lilith Reader,
You know the feeling of whiplash. We do, too.
On the one hand, we’re delighted to open for readers like you a window on Jewish women’s lives you see nowhere else. The magazine’s perspective is feminist, its filter is Jewish, and you tell us again and again that Lilith’s award-winning content is unique and memorable.
On the other hand, this is no time to rest on these or any other laurels, dear reader.
The progress Lilith has helped spur in 40 years of fearless writing, and the changes the magazine has witnessed and helped bring about—both in Jewish life and the world at large — has got to keep on keeping on. A toxic blend of misogyny and anti-Semitism is on the rise. More than ever, we need to nurture the next generation of women to engage actively in feminist reporting and nuanced writing on the women’s issues — those human issues — that matter most to us.
Help Lilith continue to publish stories about everything from rabbinic sexual misconduct to radical Jewish women from the 1880s, from genderfluid teens to why Jews have a special stake in reproductive rights.
We appreciate the enthusiastic voices you’re hearing in this letter, from Lilith readers like you who state frankly: We Need More of This! More voices, more unusual perspectives, more good writing and thinking to help us all make sense of what’s coming next. Your support is needed now more than ever as women face dragons we couldn’t have predicted would again need confronting 40 years after Lilith’s launch.
That’s why Lilith invites you to help fund a feminist future. I trust you will be part of insuring that future by contributing to Lilith today. Women like us—you and me—need Lilith’s inclusive, big-tent Judaism and feminism now more urgently than ever.
Your support will sustain Lilith’s work and women’s rights. Rights like respect for women’s aspirations and our bodies, access to safe and legal abortion care and the freedom to worship where and how we choose.
You’re hearing from a wide spectrum of women in this letter telling their friends online about Lilith and why they support this magazine’s crucial work. I hope you’ll do as they did, and give as generously as you can right now.
Because in addition to publishing the award-winning writing and cutting-edge thinking in the print magazine, Lilith is a matrix for emerging writers and thinkers on the Lilith blog, and face-to-face in intergenerational Lilith “salon” groups meeting around the world. Lilith has proudly crafted — some say invented — the banner of Jewish feminism. In Lilith, you see women’s issues through a Jewish lens and Jewish concerns through our unique feminist filter. Lilith inspires action and—importantly—empathetic understanding of lives like and unlike your own.
Your support helps make possible groundbreaking reporting, like these recent pieces:
The paradoxical experiences of a volunteer who returned to her father’s Vienna (from which he was expelled by the Nazis) to help feed and clothe its Syrian refugees.
Feminist therapists on what keeps Israeli women less fulfilled in bed, in a cover story on “Sex in the Promised Land.”
The challenges a lesbian couple face as they search out a welcoming Jewish school for their two sons; “we don’t want them to be tokens.”
Stepmothers! Throwing back the cape to reveal the misogyny behind the sinister stereo- type! Add to the mix religious differences, just to spice up the blended family.
“Why the Jewish Community Should Fund Fertility,” a poignant call for IVF and adoption support; this may be better for the Jews than sending students on free trips to Israel, argues the author.
How a Moroccan Jew merges her identities — and her words — in “Choosing Which Language to Live In.”
Read the first-hand struggle against the prejudices that a twenty-something Jewish woman who uses a scooter and an oxygen tank faces as she confronts barriers both social and physical in her Jewish world
How will Lilith continue to nurture new voices as well as writers like these? The support you give now will help Lilith to discover, teach and nurture a new generation of trouble- makers, nasty women, strident women—all of them terrific writers and incisive reporters. And you’ll be able to read more of their work at Lilith in print and online.
Many, many thanks for helping Lilith create a viable feminist future.
Susan Weidman Schneider
P.S. Please give generously now, so that Lilith can recruit the next generation of iconoclasts.