In a feat of journalistic longevity, Lilith: The Jewish Women’s Magazine, has been around for 35 years now. Along the way, the quarterly has sought to merge the wider women’s movement with the world of Jewish feminism. On the occasion of its 35 anniversary, The Jewish Week asked Lilith founding editor Susan Weidman Schneider to reflect on the issues that have animated the magazine’s coverage.
Less centrally, but equally importantly, it’s also a play about Palestinian life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, demonstrating its challenges and difficulties in theatrical moments that are, in turn, quiet and shocking, hilarious and bitter, and moving.
It was that moment—planning the next hospital visit as I cleaned the bathroom, waiting for the oven to pre-heat, that I understood that maybe there’s some feminist implication to my complicity in this whole Chabad joke. For that manic weekend, I would have dared anyone to say I didn’t have equal value, didn’t play an equal role. I am woman, and I can goddamn well do anything that needs doing.
Let me start by saying this: the whole Lesbian Chabad thing began as a joke.
By Shavuos, I was reeling from a major transition in my life, and decided to no longer pretend to be observant of halakha, traditional Jewish law.
Two days before Obama made his announcement, a crowd of more than 100 piled into the offices of JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) for the book tour of the anthology Keep Your Wives Away from Them – Orthodox Women Unorthodox Desires.
I conceded to myself that feminism or LGBTQ inclusion within the movement really is an oxymoron, a fantasy. It was time for me to finally break up with Orthodox Judaism.
I pored over the want ads in the Village Voice. Telemarketer? Nurse’s aide? Nothing clicked until I read this one:
STAFF WRITER
ADULT FICTION
Alix Kates Shulman has been a passionate feminist voice for over 40 years, bringing to light questions of marital parity and other front-line issues of women's rights in her memoirs and other nonfiction.
Paula Hyman was at the forefront of the religious and intellectual struggles that generated these changes. Her influence extended both into the academy and far beyond it, affecting the lives of Jewish females in schools and congregations in ways of which many are still unaware.
