Racism and sexism meet in South Africa. Aviva Cantor interviews Vitke Kempner, WWII partisan. Laughing at Joan Rivers. How Jewish comediennes use humor to fight stereotypes. Campaigning to free Soviet prisoner Ida Nudel.
Table of contents Get the issueI live in the vibrant, integrated community of Boro Park, Brooklyn. Yet, I am different; I have several disabilities which keep me from mainstreaming into the larger society. I have been blind for four years, I have multiple sclerosis and asthma, and use a wheelchair. I was divorced after I went blind (my husband left... Read more »
Thousands of women came to Jerusalem in December to express their views on how the Jewish legal system oppresses them, and to call for action. But were the male rabbis, who have the power to change things, really listening?
“Partisans of Vilna” is the first documentary on the Holocaust to focus on Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Produced by Aviva Kempner (no relation to Vitke Kempner) and directed by Josh Waletzky (“Image Before My Eyes”), the 130-minute film premiered in New York City in September 1986. The film is a sensitive and powerful interweaving... Read more »
Two Jewish comediennes use humor to fight stereotypes—and still get laughs.
Can thinking women find anything to identify with in the persona of the abrasive late-night comic with the misogynist barbs?
Lilith launches a Women's Appeal to Raissa Gorbachev for the release of longtime refusenik and human rights activist Ida Nudel, isolated in the town of Bendery, Moldavia after four brutal years of Siberian exile.
Maternity Ward–1936* When I first came to New York everything was brown, no trees. I saw the concrete courtyards of the Bronx. Still, I found another village here,friends who spoke my language,joined the same struggle.I led rent strikes, brought my students,marched with the Councilof the Unemployed. The poverty... Read more »
Years before my grandmother died I’d ask her gentlyto stop with the stories of who went swimming,who was at the latest Hadassah meeting, who ate what.Tell me about Aunt Lizzie, her aunt who was marriedwithout children, who took care of all related others,the sons and daughters of working mothersas if they were her own. Aunt... Read more »
Researching her film "Maids and Madams," a study of black women and their white employers in South Africa, a Holocaust survivor has a personal encounter with apartheid, and tells here how its racism is inextricably linked with an equally corrosive but less frequently documented sexism. The cruelties of both are jarringly familiar to Hamermesh, resonating with her childhood memories of Nazi persecution.
Rape Findings Skewed?Dear LILITH:I found myself feeling very uncomfortable with the conclusions in the article on “Why Jewish Women Get Raped” (Interview with Pauline Bart, #15). Here was yet another suggestion that a woman is a victim and a Jew is a victim as a result of an ethnically determined inability to react physically to... Read more »
