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“Not On Speaking Terms.” Estrangement Inside Jewish Families

After a family member cuts off contact, the ripples travel far. Kramer talks to initiators, those left behind, and some experts trying to unravel the mysteries of family fragmentation.

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What Is Left

I will never know. I can’t fit all the pieces of my mother’s life together like a jigsaw puzzle.

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Disability as Beloved by G-d

I know deeply what it is to feel like I have to make a choice between my spiritual life and my sense of dignity as a disabled person.

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My Weekend Working for Peace at Woodstock

When I want to position myself in the world I need only one fact: I went to Woodstock.

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COVID, Body Image, and Tisha B’Av: How I Watched the Olympics with Exercise Intolerance

It felt different to watch The Olympics this year. It’s not only a reminder of the incredible variety of the human body, but of its fragility.

Lilith Online

A Tisha b’Av Warning from the “Other” Israel Film Festival

Films depict the unequal treatment of Mizrahi Israelis, Ethiopian Israelis and Arab/Palestinian Israelis, and the poor treatment of foreign workers. Forget the early Zionist ideal of the nobility of Jewish labor in the Promised Land. Discrimination against women, a frequent subject of this festival, was problematic even in the early kibbutz days.

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Summer 2024

Art, sexuality and disability. Who gave Anorexia its name? Summer books, fresh fiction. Freud's famous patient. Intergenerational trauma. Living apart together.

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Like so many of you this week, we are returning—to school, to work, to preparing for the new year. We must shrug off the chaotic latitude of summer and resume our now unfamiliar routines—often under a heavy blanket of grief that can be so everpresent, we don’t even realize it’s there. 

In the midst of all this, the Jewish month of Elul began on Tuesday. Traditionally, Elul is a time to reflect on the past year as we fast approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We blow the shofar every day, remember those we have lost and undertake heshbon hanefesh— Hebrew for “an accounting of the soul.” Torn between welcoming and resenting this invitation for introspection, we look to Lilith writers past and present to help us enter Elul. We'll be sharing our favorite Elul piece all this month. 

Shabbat shalom. 

Art: "Be Bound Together," @nirittakele.artist (2018), featured in Lilith's Fall 2020 issue.

Like so many of you this week, we are returning—to school, to work, to preparing for the new year. We must shrug off the chaotic latitude of summer and resume our now unfamiliar routines—often under a heavy blanket of grief that can be so everpresent, we don’t even realize it’s there.

In the midst of all this, the Jewish month of Elul began on Tuesday. Traditionally, Elul is a time to reflect on the past year as we fast approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We blow the shofar every day, remember those we have lost and undertake heshbon hanefesh— Hebrew for “an accounting of the soul.” Torn between welcoming and resenting this invitation for introspection, we look to Lilith writers past and present to help us enter Elul. We`ll be sharing our favorite Elul piece all this month.

Shabbat shalom.

Art: "Be Bound Together," @nirittakele.artist (2018), featured in Lilith`s Fall 2020 issue.
...

Want to know what guidance the stars have to offer you during the Jewish month of Elul? 🌒

Head over to lilith.org now to read your monthly horoscope from Gold Herring (@gold.herring) — link in bio! 🌟

Collage by Rebecca Katz (@katzcomics).

Want to know what guidance the stars have to offer you during the Jewish month of Elul? 🌒

Head over to lilith.org now to read your monthly horoscope from Gold Herring (@gold.herring) — link in bio! 🌟

Collage by Rebecca Katz (@katzcomics).
...

Back to school season is upon us and we are revisiting Abby Fisher’s (@abby.dmf) “Yeshivas, Day Schools, and LGBT Kids” from Lilith’s Fall 2021 issue. 

Fisher, an alumna of two Jewish day schools themselves, interviewed 16 students and found a fairly clear narrative: “a new openness from schools, though welcome, is often undermined by bullying, insensitivity, from teachers, and, in particular, the presentation of Jewish content that ignores and/or erases LGBTQ+ identity.”

Read the rest now at lilith.org — link in bio.

Back to school season is upon us and we are revisiting Abby Fisher’s (@abby.dmf) “Yeshivas, Day Schools, and LGBT Kids” from Lilith’s Fall 2021 issue.

Fisher, an alumna of two Jewish day schools themselves, interviewed 16 students and found a fairly clear narrative: “a new openness from schools, though welcome, is often undermined by bullying, insensitivity, from teachers, and, in particular, the presentation of Jewish content that ignores and/or erases LGBTQ+ identity.”

Read the rest now at lilith.org — link in bio.
...

“What Is Left” by Penny Jackson (@pennyjackso_) is the perfect read to start the Jewish month of Elul.

As Jackson investigates what her late mother left behind — jewelry in a tangled mess, a silk scarf with red poppies, a prayer shawl from her brother’s bar mitzvah — she discovers her mother's teenage diary, writing: “surely my mother didn’t expect anyone to read this journal. But why did she keep it for so many decades? The emotion is so vibrant that the journal seems to almost tremble in my hands.”

Read the rest at lilith.org now — link in bio.

“What Is Left” by Penny Jackson (@pennyjackso_) is the perfect read to start the Jewish month of Elul.

As Jackson investigates what her late mother left behind — jewelry in a tangled mess, a silk scarf with red poppies, a prayer shawl from her brother’s bar mitzvah — she discovers her mother`s teenage diary, writing: “surely my mother didn’t expect anyone to read this journal. But why did she keep it for so many decades? The emotion is so vibrant that the journal seems to almost tremble in my hands.”

Read the rest at lilith.org now — link in bio.
...