Jewish Funds for Justice is proud to have teamed up with Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR for something truly new, and creative, and inspiring, an antidote to the fear-mongering so prevalent these days. It’s a call for empathy. Radical empathy at that.
Everyday, we come across interesting articles and wonderful resources for Jewish feminists. Now we are bringing them directly to you in a new feature of the Lilith blog, our weekly Link Roundup. Each week we’ll post highlights from around the web.
We are so excited to announce the launch of something new, special, and unique to Lilith online: our new feature column on the Lilith blog, Feminists In Focus: Film News and Reviews. In this series, we’ll be bringing you incisive film commentary and context from fabulous (and feminist!) film critics. You’ll get a fresh perspective on films playing right in your area, and leads to movies so rare–or so new–that they haven’t even been screened yet at your local indie film festival.
Yosef and I just got married in August, the day after Chelsea Clinton, in the Jersey synagogue where I grew up. Now, we’re both back in rabbinical school at JTS.
I chose the “easy” way in, so to speak. Faced with the multiple schools of Judaism, I panicked and went with the one that seemed the least dogmatic. I chose a Reform rabbi to initiate me. But while it was non-threatening in many ways, it also left me with the anguish of choice and agency. It gave me the responsibility of co-creating my own sense of Jewishness.
Abraham’s Daughters, written by Elissa Lerner and directed by Niccolo Aeed, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival this year along with over 200 other talent-filled plays.
The dust is starting to settle after the annual flurry surrounding the awarding of Nobel Prizes. From the Medicine award for IVF (we’ve written about that!), to noting the blatant absence of women among the winners, this year gave us lots to think about. The literature prize, especially, put us in mind to re-visit Evelyn Torton Beck’s sharp-as-a-tack 1979 review of I. B. Singer’s Misogyny.
I chose my mid 20s to make a wildly un-feminist choice. I converted to Judaism. For a man.
I’d like to pretend that I “always felt Jewish” or that discovering Judaism felt like coming home. But no such luck.
The much-discussed disintegration of the boundary between the public and private spheres on the internet has real-life implications. As much as DADT is on the radar, as often as gay marriage reaches the senate floor, the transition to high-tech media increasingly brings personal (not policy) stories to the very public fore. These personal stories can end with victory or tragedy.
Listen in on the latest conversation with Lilith’s editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider and assistant editor Sonia Isard. This time, we’re chatting with Gabrielle Birkner and Jane Eisner of… Read more »
"When I started this work in 2018, I was a new single mother by choice and had recently experienced the incredible beauty and challenges of this immense rite of passage. Simultaneously I was struck by the isolation, emotional labour and societal devaluing of this role. As a way of documenting this first stage of my experience I set up a camera in my living room to capture raw, vulnerable and spontaneous moments with my newborn child. As both exploration and visual journal, I was curious to see what I would uncover from the process. This process has lead me to wanting to create a new portrait series with other cis/trans people who identify with the role of mothering"--Artist @ellacoopercreates on her project "mother body erasure identity" 🌱
Find the full photo set, linked in bio 🤍
Originally published in Lilith’s Spring 2020 Issue.
"When I started this work in 2018, I was a new single mother by choice and had recently experienced the incredible beauty and challenges of this immense rite of passage. Simultaneously I was struck by the isolation, emotional labour and societal devaluing of this role. As a way of documenting this first stage of my experience I set up a camera in my living room to capture raw, vulnerable and spontaneous moments with my newborn child. As both exploration and visual journal, I was curious to see what I would uncover from the process. This process has lead me to wanting to create a new portrait series with other cis/trans people who identify with the role of mothering"--Artist @ellacoopercreates on her project "mother body erasure identity" 🌱
Find the full photo set, linked in bio 🤍
Originally published in Lilith’s Spring 2020 Issue.
This Mother’s Day feels even more dissonant than usual. There’s a nightmarish distance between the treacly sentiments in ads for flowers and brunch menus and the awful reality for mothers in Gaza unable to ensure their children`s safety or for mothers in Israel like Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh is still held captive in Gaza. We say it every year––but especially this year: mothers don’t want a card or teddy bear, or breakfast in bed. Mothers want to keep their children safe and fed. Mothers want autonomy over their bodies and affordable, accessible health care.
This Mother’s Day feels even more dissonant than usual. There’s a nightmarish distance between the treacly sentiments in ads for flowers and brunch menus and the awful reality for mothers in Gaza unable to ensure their children`s safety or for mothers in Israel like Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh is still held captive in Gaza. We say it every year––but especially this year: mothers don’t want a card or teddy bear, or breakfast in bed. Mothers want to keep their children safe and fed. Mothers want autonomy over their bodies and affordable, accessible health care.
This Yom Hashoah, read the experience of a Jewish teen in Vilna in her own words.
In early 2017, almost 180,000 pages of lost Yiddish documents were discovered, mothballed and hidden in a Lithuanian church. Poignantly, these were pieces from a @yivoinstitute writing contest for Jewish teens in Europe, written and submitted before the Nazi incursion started. These young people, documenting their lives, had no idea of what was to come.
In the summer of 2018, @krinsteincartoons traveled to Vilnius/Vilna to bring six anonymous pre-WWII teenage autobiographies to life— using their words and his pictures. Here’s a snapshot of one of them, a middle-school Vilna girl he dubbed “The Rule Breaker.”
This Yom Hashoah, read the experience of a Jewish teen in Vilna in her own words.
In early 2017, almost 180,000 pages of lost Yiddish documents were discovered, mothballed and hidden in a Lithuanian church. Poignantly, these were pieces from a @yivoinstitute writing contest for Jewish teens in Europe, written and submitted before the Nazi incursion started. These young people, documenting their lives, had no idea of what was to come.
In the summer of 2018, @krinsteincartoons traveled to Vilnius/Vilna to bring six anonymous pre-WWII teenage autobiographies to life— using their words and his pictures. Here’s a snapshot of one of them, a middle-school Vilna girl he dubbed “The Rule Breaker.”
Our inner fears spoken out loud.
From the Lilith archives, Rachel Hall on passing down her mother`s stories, but not her nightmares.
Read it now at Lilith.org.
Our inner fears spoken out loud.
From the Lilith archives, Rachel Hall on passing down her mother`s stories, but not her nightmares.
Read it now at Lilith.org.
"What My Mother`s Ashes Revealed ," by Julia Silverberg Németh. A must-read, linked in our bio. ❤️
"What My Mother`s Ashes Revealed ," by Julia Silverberg Németh. A must-read, linked in our bio. ❤️
