When We Have Something to Say, We Make a Magazine
During my final year of college at the University of Michigan, two things happened simultaneously that I will never forget. The first was that I got my own weekly column in The Michigan Daily, a Friday feminist issues and opinions corner called “Weil Can Do It.” The second was that I took Deborah Dash Moore’s course on American Jewish History — and it was in this class that I first encountered a magazine called The American Jewess.
The American Jewess was a nineteenth-century periodical published in Chicago, and was the first-ever American magazine written by and for Jewish women. Like other women’s papers of the time, it published a mixture of news, fashion and gossip, interviews with notable figures, and fiction — but all from a Jewish point of view. The paper did not last long, rocked by internal divisions, but while it was in circulation, it served as both a mouthpiece and a window for well-educated, well-heeled Jewish women, airing their opinions and showing them glimpses of the world, including correspondent’s pieces from as far from the paper’s native Chicago as Istanbul and the Caucasus. It was, in short, the most remarkable periodical my nineteen-year-old self had ever seen.
You see, I had held a fascination with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century since I was given a Samantha doll as a child. I thought the clothes were beautiful, and the social and technological innovations were fascinating. But I’d never thought that people like me — educated, liberal-minded American Jewish women writers — existed back then. The American Jewess proved me wrong. Its founder, Rosa Sonnenschein of Chicago, was opinionated, passionate, and highly driven –in addition to founding and editing the magazine, she’d been a press correspondent at the 1893 World’s Fair, and was a close friend of Hannah Solomon, who headed the Fair’s Jewish Women’s Congress, and was a frequent contributor to The American Jewess. Sonnenschein and Solomon had lived over a century before me, and as I learned about them I saw that I had maybe been wrong — perhaps there had been women like me back then, too.
It was only later that I realized how much I’d missed in my initial ignorance. The American Jewess may have been the United States’ first Jewish women’s magazine, but it wasn’t an isolated incident so much as the spark that would ignite a blaze of periodical writing by and for Jewish women.
While only a few of the magazines that would be birthed in the ensuing centuries would be explicitly Jewish, with Hadassah, founded in 1914, and Lilith, founded in 1976, being notable examples, Jewish women and periodicals would be entwined in sometimes surprising ways. While Jewish women around the world, not just in the United States, had been writing “letters to the editor” and conducting interviews for magazines and newspapers before The American Jewess, and would do so after, Jewish women would be at the forefront of the founding of women’s magazines through the twentieth century and beyond.
In 1945, Helene Gordon-Lazareff had been an immigrant twice over, born in Russia to Jewish parents who fled to France after the Revolution, and having spent the years of World War Two in New York before returning to Paris. She had been an ethnologist, and participated in the 1935 Sahara-Sudan ethnographic expedition. She had lost interest in academic journals, but still wanted to write. And so, utilizing her Parisian style contacts, her fascination with human-interest stories nursed by years of ethnology studies, and the new photographic techniques she’d seen in New York, she founded a new women’s magazine, with a French name — Elle.
While Elle quickly became a byword for chic, and beloved among style-conscious women, Jewish and gentile alike, by the early 1970s, there was a hunger for writing on a different side of womanhood — and Jewish women were once again there with something to say. The second wave of the feminist movement was underway, and at the helm of its most influential publication, Ms Magazine, was none other than Gloria Steinem, with a founding editorial team that included Jewish women, African American women, and women of diverse backgrounds and sexual orientations.
In the 1990s, independent underground magazines, zines, and periodicals were on the rise. In 1996, Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler started a ten-page feminist zine in Oakland, California, that would become a provocatively-titled alt magazine that lasted, in print and online, for over twenty years — Bitch. Debbie Stoller and Marcelle Karp would start another small paper in 1993, that lives on as one of the standard-bearers of feminism’s third wave in BUST.
Today, Jewish women’s legacies at women’s magazines live on — and Jewish women’s publications are also enjoying something of an internet renaissance, with publications like Hey Alma and Unorthoboxed bringing a marriage of different types of Jewish religious observance with lifestyle content to the web.
Women’s writing, and publications for women, have often been dismissed as frivolous. I have heard the jokes about Cosmo’s outlandish dating advice, or the improbably luxurious fashion that is literally in Vogue. But when Rosa Sonnenschein started The American Jewess, she brought her readers information about how women were living around the world, and disseminated updates on Jewish women’s political organizing and how to get involved. When Ms published its early pieces on reproductive freedom, they were one of the first magazines in the country to do so. And flipping through the glossy pages of Elle, women who might have otherwise been locked out of the “dress code” of high society could see and learn the rules of another world.
I started writing for The Michigan Daily because I had something to say. In that, I do not think I was alone. I was following centuries of tradition, of Jewish women who had faith in their own voices, whether they were talking about world events, or what beauty meant to them. We have always had things to say — long may our determination to say them flourish.
