Fall 2007

Jobnik!

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A true-life comic about a young and lonely American in the Israeli army.

Happening

happening

Making Trouble, a documentary film about Jewish women comedians, showcases Sophie Tucker, Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, and Wendy Wasserstein, all of whom defied cultural expectations, changed the rules, and made us laugh. Look for contemporary Jewish women in comedy Judy Gold, Cory Kahaney, Jackie Hoffman and Jessica Kirson gabbing, over pickles... Read more »

At The Four Seasons

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Rifke: An Improbable Life by Rosalie Wise Sharp (ECW Press, $19.95) may belong to the rags-to-riches genre, but this engaging memoir would be more accurately described as shtetl-to-Four Seasons. The 70-year old Toronto author begins her account with an anecdote about an actual journey, in 1998, — an “around the world trip in eight days”... Read more »

Emma Goldman Comix

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Pioneer underground cartoonist Sharon Rudahl left comics early, putting her work on the back burner while raising and home-schooling a family. But her simmering pot has cooked to perfection and chef Rudahl has produced a chef d’oeuvre with her first graphic novel about Emma Goldman, everyone’s favorite Jewish anarchist. Meticulously researched and lovingly drawn, Dangerous... Read more »

French Kisses

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French Seduction: An American’s Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust (Carroll & Graf, $23.95) is feminist art historian Eunice Lipton’s passionate attempt to reconcile opposing characteristics in French culture and society. An amalgam of history and personal narrative (as was the author’s wonderful study of Manet’s model in Alias Olympia), French Seduction scrutinizes... Read more »

What a Jew Looks Like

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There is much talk these days about the loss of Jewish identity or the re-imagining thereof. Two new books — Melanie Kaye/ Kantrowitz’s The Colors of Jews (Indiana University Press, $24.95) and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora by Carolyn Aviv and David Schneer (NYU Press, $20) both lean towards optimism and possibility... Read more »

Our Jewish Feminist Gumshoe: The Author Behind V. I. Warshawski

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Sara Paretsky, author of 14 mysteries featuring V.I. Warshawski, is credited for transforming the genre of hardboiled detective fiction with her feminist heroine. In her fiction, Paretsky has tackled such topics as Holocaust reparations payments, domestic violence, turmoil in the lives of blue-collar Chicagoans, the government’s abuse of power. “The questions of who gets to... Read more »

Save the Planet

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For most of us, tikkun olam, repairing the world, is only a small part of our busy, complicated lives. Not so for Marisa Handler. Her memoir, Loyal to the Sky — Notes from an Activist (Berrett-Koehler, $24.95), is a lively and revealing behind-the-scenes look at the global justice movement and Handler’s personal journey toward living... Read more »

She Has Seen It All

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In his introduction to Ruth Gruber’s Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells her Story (Schocken Books, $27.50), former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke describes Gruber’s life as rich and fulfilling. “Ruth became the chronicler of every major Jewish emigration to Israel — from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Romania, Russia and Ukraine,... Read more »

Art After Atrocity

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Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Indiana University Press, $24.95) is something of a departure for Susan Gubar, best known as a pioneering feminist critic whose notable works include The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination (co-written with Sandra M. Gilbert, 1979). In her remarkable new study,... Read more »

Black Russian

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Anya Ulinich’s debut novel, Petropolis (Viking, $24.95) takes its title from an Osip Mandelstam poem mourning the fall of Petrograd: “O, if you are a star, Petropolis, your city… is dying.” Sasha Goldberg, an awkward teenager with two major strikes against her in pre- Perestroika Russian society — she is both black and Jewish —... Read more »

Jews In Zoos

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In The Zookeeper’s Wife (W.W. Norton, $23.95), Diane Ackerman reveals the savage world created by Nazi Germany — a world that promoted conservation and animal rights while justifying the murder of 11 million people. Under the Third Reich’s pseudoscientific ideology, purebred animals were exalted as “noble, mythic, almost angelic.” Those humans deemed genetically impure, however... Read more »

The Fast

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Hunger makes me an old woman.It is so much workstanding, sitting. This prayer book is too heavy.I don’t look up from it. The jointspalsy, they are becoming spirit. My sins belong to the plural, to the all. We have acted brazenly, deceitfully. We have shrugged off conscience,tormented our own hearts. The weight of we —... Read more »

First Rosh Hashanah

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The words told me nothingI could understand.The melody tugged into paths I could losemy way on. I fingeredthe deep blue of my father’s jacket.High on a stage a manstood alone, floated his song, lush and green,into the slowevening air. His singing turnedto sobbing. I swiveledfrom my mother’s face to my father’s, watchedmy aunt, uncle, cousins.The... Read more »

Divided Loyalty

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Why a Brooklyn girl of the 60's jubilantly smuggles Herman Hesse into her parents' Orthodox home.

And Don’t Miss Blogmeister: Leah Koenig, 25

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Editor of “The Jew and the Carrot” (www.jcarrot.org), the “ front page and voice of the emerging Jewish food movement,” a project of Hazon (www.hazon.org).

Activist/ Executive: Barbara Lerman-Golomb, 48

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Lifelong Volunteer, She Brings Eco-Consciousness To Synagogues

Outdoor Educator: Nili Simhai, 35

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Director Of The Teva Learning Center, She Teaches Judaism Through The Lens of Nature.

Veggie Pioneer: Dr. Roberta Kalechofsky, 76

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Writer, Public Speaker, The Brains Behind Micah Publications (www.micahbooks.com.), The Source For Jewish Vegetarian And Animal rights Books

Betsy Teutsch—Modeling Thoughtful Consumption

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Not long ago, my father died — he was a frugal, modest guy — and I came into some money. Woo. I needed to think about what to do with this money, and it struck me, even though our culture encourages constant material acquisition, that I really had everything I needed. I started www.moneychangesthings.blogspot.com to mull... Read more »

Legal Eagle: Tzipi Iser Itzik, 38

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Across The Pond In Israel, She defends Air And Water

Truck Farmer: Esther Mandelheim Elliott, 28

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With husband Pablo, she runs Stoney Lonesome Farm and its “eat local” CSA (Community Supported Agriculture Program) on 91 acres in Gainesville, Virginia.

Bring In The Show

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Celebrating nearly 30 years of charting Jewish women’s lives with exuberance, rigor, clairvoyance, subversion, and tenderness, Lilith has created a stunning exhibition featuring the fresh ideas and germinal writers this magazine has published. You know that Lilith brings new ideas and interpretations of the zeitgeist before they become cover stories in other news magazines: “J.A.P.-baiting”... Read more »

Jewish Women’s Salons

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Lilith magazine, the print “salon” for Jewish women’s conversations for nearly three decades, is now extending the excitement of Lilith into real-time talk. A Lilith salon is more free-flowing than a book club, not as spiritual as a rosh hodesh group nor as democratic as the PTA, and more intimate than a lecture. Lilith salons... Read more »

Snapshots

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The award-winning Israeli novelist re-visions Jerusalem.

With This Wedding, I Leave Myself Behind

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Walk with Lax down the aisle. She recounts how she became a bride: numb to the core, observing in minute detail the joy around her that she cannot reach.

First Frissons of Feminism

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You’ve seen the Frédéric Brenner photograph. Now catch a mother-daughter pair telling how they got into it.

Henrietta Szold In Seneca Falls

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Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) is best known for founding Hadassah, the largest Jewish organization in American history. However, her early accomplishments breaking gender barriers in turn-of-the-century America are equally notable. Her contributions to American and Jewish history are celebrated this October with her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. In an... Read more »

Letter from Straubing, Germany

voices

The click of the lock was audible. I was locked in a synagogue in Germany, and there was no way out. My heart raced. I had come there to pray and to see how these Jews in Germany pray. But I wasn’t there to get hurt. Residents of the town had told me that there... Read more »

Egg Matchmaking

voices

“It turns out that we Jewish women have been the ones to wait the longest to have our babies. According to the 2000 National Jewish Population Survey, more than half of 34-year-old Jewish women are childless, almost double the percentage of women overall. from “A Strange New World” by Michelle Cove, published in 614, the... Read more »

Write Those Op-Eds!

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Catherine Orenstein, an author, activist and occasional op-ed page contributor herself, has been training women at universities, foundations and corporations to write essays and get them published… “Women tend to back away from ‘what we know and why we know it,’ she said. Next she asked the participants why they thought it important to write... Read more »

Nora’s Sisters In Israel

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“While I sense anticipation among the women, I feel a slight — if not apprehension, then perhaps nervousness — among the men,” With these words, seemingly only half in jest, the Norwegian ambassador to Israel Jakken Biorn Lian opened his remarks before an overflow audience at Tel Aviv. One hundred one years after the death... Read more »

Not A Rabbi, But A “Religious Mentor”

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Sara Hurwitz, 30, is the religious mentor at Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York. The paid position was created by the synagogue’s rabbi, Avi Weiss, to empower women in a maledominated structure where prayer is gender-segregated. Though women cannot lead prayers or chant from the Torah, the reader’s platform (bimah) is accessible from the... Read more »

Good Talk Makes Trouble

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“Good Talk Makes Trouble Early on in our Lilith salon in Princeton, we explored social-change activism and what issues we as women might take on. The salon — a group of 25 or so local women who meet for good conversation around each new issue of the magazine — found our first cause while discussing... Read more »

Hard To Top This

voices

Israel has decided to reach out to young male tourists by publishing images of semi-clad female former soldiers in the American men’s magazine, Maxim. The pictures are part of a public relations drive to improve the image of the country within the U.S. “We definitely have public relations problems, and I’m all for creative solutions,”... Read more »

From the Editor

from the editor

In the elevator of Lilith’s office building, news is perpetually flashed at us on a small TV screen, just in case we might be tempted to say hello to our co-passengers. Last week, on the two-minute ride to the 24th floor, I learned that, according to “a recent survey,” 20 percent of North Americans feel... Read more »

Fall 2007

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