Spring 2020

The Social Context of Hair: Hairstyles, Race and Status

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HAIR IS PERSONAL. Hair is political. To make sense of the social context of hair for Jews of color today, SARAH SELTZER talked to CHAVA SHERVINGTON, a longtime diversity activist in the Jewish community, as well as an attorney and mom, who by her own admission has become “obsessed with hair issues” as she helps her kids navigate the complex politics of their Black hair.

Taking Off My Wedding Ring

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I wanted to take off my ring, but I needed a ritual to acknowledge that Divinity was present, even at this moment of loss.

Head Covering: The Evolving Choices

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My mother’s hair is colorful ropes of cotton, carefully and methodically wrapped in a rainbow of layers growing in width as the ends disappear into hidden corners below her hairline. As a girl, I often sat in my mother’s room, watching her in this morning ritual as she added the last detail of her dressing.... Read more »

Power in Naming Names

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I wondered: was I really a part of my Jewish family? Because my parents divorced when I was three, this question has followed me my entire life. It always brings me back to my name, with some mixed answers. Am I even Jewish?

Gender & Ritual

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What happens when girls are given the option to wear tefillin?

Let My People Sing

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How Singing (Yes, Singing!) Can Create Radical Jewish Accessibility

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“Here it’s just small human beings against such an unbelievable giant.” GRETA BEER, who battled Swiss banks for assets stolen in the Holocaust. NY Times obituary, January 2020.

Pop Music

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Life lessons from the mythological Lilith. Betty Friedan on her feminine mystique & being Jewish. Those thorny Jewish women's organizations.

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“It took six women on the stand painfully recounting their rapes, 100 other women with the same story, thousands of pages of news coverage, books written, and Pulitzers won, to get [Harvey Weinstein] convicted on two lesser counts of the least bad rapes within a system that says there are degrees of rape. And we... Read more »

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“Why go this extra mile in support of patients? Because I’m not only pro-choice, but I am pro-abortion and pro-access. That means going beyond supporting someone’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy but fighting to remove the barriers that may prevent them from doing so.” STEPH BLACK, “Becoming an Abortion Doula,” the Lilith Blog.

The Finzi-Continis at 50

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The beautiful scenes are still beautiful—all those young blonde Christians at play in their elegant tennis whites on the Finzi-Contini tennis court, riding in on their bicycles when the young Finzi-Continis have been barred from the Ferrara tennis club.

“Queering the Torah”

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A Torah of Tears: Reflecting on Torah Informed by the Lens of Queer Experience

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ARCHIE GOTTESMAN, co-founder of the welcoming-to-all nonprofit JewBelong, has coined a new term: JewBarrassment: “The feeling you get (may include sweating, shortness of breath or mild panic) when you think you should know something Jewish, but you don’t. Also occurs when you’ve said or done something Jewish ‘wrong’. We’ve all been there. At JewBelong, we’re... Read more »

Language and Impact

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Dear Lilith: Change Your Language Around Religious Practice! I want to ask you to consider adopting a different phrase than the one deployed in your 5th paragraph [of a recent Letter from the Editor]: “level of observance.” This implies a hierarchy, which either goes from less to more or more to less. Either way, the... Read more »

When Your Family Is Someone’s Boss

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Rabbi Mary L. Zamore on being an ethical family employer.

Poetry: Burnt Offering

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Poetry by Alisha Kaplan

Writing Outside the Frame

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Polina Kroik reviews The Girl with the Leica.

A Journey of Mourning, and Exploration

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All My Mother’s Lovers, by Ilana Masaad

Israel’s Women on the Margins

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Three books on Israel’s marginalized women

A Trans Boy and His Remarkable Parents

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Nechama Liss-Levinson on Mimi Lemay’s What We Will Become

Big Mouth, Big Ideas

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Amelia Dornbush reviews the new Abzug bio, Battling Bella

LGBTQ Jewish Hero of Color Poster

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Rabbi Sandra Lawson is a veteran, a vegan, a weightlifter, one of the first queer women
rabbis of color, and Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at Elon University in North
Carolina.

More Holocaust Materials

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Zane Buzby, director of The Survivor Mitzvah Project develops a new Holocaust education program.

happening

On average, women working full time in the U.S. are paid just 80% of what men in comparable positions are paid. Sadly, this gender pay gap also exists within Jewish institutions, and at similar rates. The leadership of the Reform movement has created the Reform Pay Equity Initiative to correct this injustice. You can access their information for... Read more »

Prayer, Your Way

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JOFA makes space for Orthodox women in Purim celebrations.

Displacement, Migration, Personal and Geopolitical

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In her solo show “Strangeness,” multi-media artist and actress Raida Adon explores human migration via a 33-minute video of the same name presenting simultaneous narratives of a group’s progress on foot interspersed with scenes of the artist herself in surreal situations. Exploring the emotions within the struggle to find a home, she restructures polarized stories reflecting her... Read more »

Women Make History

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“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” contended historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1976, and feminist discourse enthusiastically adopted this statement. From its beginnings, feminism sought to liberate itself from silence and compliance and eplace this with speech and protest. A new exhibition in Israel, “Women Make History: Feminism in the Age of Transnationalism,” centers on this... Read more »

Generation 1.5

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Russian-Jewish-Americans—“Generation 1.5”—have their own particular identity issues. A unique adult Jewish learning program wants to empower them to explore this multilayered identity, and become leaders, volunteers, and philanthropists. Founded in 2015 by seven Russian-speaking Jews, the Jewish Parent Academy aims to build a Russian-Jewish-American community educated about its Jewish and Russian heritage, taking responsibility for its needs, giving back to the broader Jewish... Read more »

Now—An Egalitarian Sefaradi Prayerbook

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The world’s first Hebrew-English egalitarian Sefaradi prayerbook, three years in the making, out of England, features in Volume One the entire weekday prayer service with Hebrew text, translation, transliteration and commentary. The Hebrew includes gender-inclusive options as well as uniquely gender-neutral translations. Edited by Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet and Isaac Treuherz with calligraphy by Noam Sienna, the siddur is printed in full... Read more »

Jewish Deli

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American Jews have imported traditions, adapted culture, and built community through the experience of food. The exhibit “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli” reveals how delicatessens became cornerstones of American Jewish food culture during the 20th century, evolving from specialty stores catering to immigrant populations into beloved national institutions. On view are neon signs, menus, advertisements, deli... Read more »

Open Up Your Seder Table

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Regardless of political or cultural background, almost everyone believes in mutual respect and understanding. To play your role in the fight against hate and anti-Semitism, to help heal your corner of the world, here’s an idea. Before next Passover, invite two acquaintances of another faith to a family seder at your home, or bring two acquaintances of another faith to a... Read more »

Digging Up the Rotten Roots

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I woke up and went outside to harvest. I spent the morning digging up roots, rinsing them clean, putting them into containers to store. Then I checked the news. Hasidic Jews in New York attacked with a machete inside their Rabbi’s home on Chanukah. The ninth anti-Semitic attack in New York during this week. Visibly... Read more »

Fiction: Driving Lesson

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And yet, as she looked around at the paintings in their gilded frames, the polished silver candlesticks, the maid scurrying into the room with a china bowl filled with sugar cubes, she thought she might go through with it anyway. She was a milliner, after all. She had the taste for beautiful things. The possibilities tantalized her.

A Networker— Before Networks

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Before LinkedIn, before social networking, before the word “networking” was even coined, there was Salka Viertel.

From the Editor

from the editor

Susan Weidman Schneider on life in a new era.

Making Yiddish Hip, Heymish & Hot

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Channeling her own past, the remarkable diva Eleanor Reissa is singing, directing, writing and performing Yiddish for 21st-century audiences.

A Sample Gender Email

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A sample email to schools and camps

Fiction: Paved With Gold

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So they leave, two more huddled masses sailing from old world to new. The newlyweds carry their tightly bundled life on board: Candlesticks, prayer shawl, brown crusted bread,
hand-stitched lace, a family ring tightly sewn into the band of her thick wool skirt.

I’m Eleven and I’ve Lost My Hair

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For the last five years I have worn my hair long, thick and wavy, half-way down my back. I put it in ponytails, or I wear it down, or I bundle it in a bun. I just turned 11. But, I recently discovered I have liver cancer. Which was a real pain for me, because... Read more »

Waxing Nostalgic

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In 2014, my friend Tess and I went to see a comedy called “The Other Woman,” starring Leslie Mann and Cameron Diaz. Its jokes were dumb and obvious, and although the film was written by a woman and purported to be about the power of female friendship, it was insultingly sexist. Its biggest selling point... Read more »

My Mother’s Unshaved Legs

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There’s an age at which you start noticing the things about your parents that are embarrassing. The fact that your dad will say something and your mom will then burst into song, triggered by a single spoken word; the noise he makes when he clears his throat; or the way she eats a piece of... Read more »

At the Beauty Parlor

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I arrive on time for my 10 AM cut-and-color, but my new hairdresser isn’t there. It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m newly unwed and I want to party, but I look like hell. “She’ll be here,” I’m assured by a redheaded stylist on a headphone call. At 10:20 Barbie strolls in, blonde hair in a tortoiseshell... Read more »

Combing My Mother’s Hair

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An erotic/sensual memory trip through crackles and changing colors of her hair. Heavy frizzy… foamy blonde… long wavy auburn… short Mamie Eisenhower bangs… little girl barrettes…. Still defiantly long and curling past her shoulders. We tried to make her cut it as she reached a certain age (based on advice in women’s magazines). We forced... Read more »

The Books that Taught Me to Love My Body Hair

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When I begged my mother to teach me to shave my legs, I was nine years old. “Your body hair is normal,” she said, “And it’s not healthy to worry so much about it now.” That was easy for her to say. Her pale legs never had visible hair to my eyes, whereas my legs... Read more »

Hair-Pulling

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Before my hair was patchy and thinned out from years of trichotillomania, the body-focused repetitive behavior of hair-pulling, I took unabashed pride in the fact that I was blessed with “good” hair. As a young girl I was acutely aware that my intelligence and confidence both came at a price. I was “gifted” and “an... Read more »

The Weight of Shiva

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Sitting shiva for my father was hard. Our house was filled with people from morning until night, and I was sad. I wore the same clothing every day, with the rip across the front of that damn white button down shirt. We followed the ritual guidelines pretty strictly: the mirrors were covered up; we stayed... Read more »

Hair as a Jewish Art Form: A Parasha Haircut Project

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It was late October. I had been going to a new barber recently. I had seen Billy’s (@Odabu) incredible line work on Instagram and was ready to start doing bolder things with my hair. On this day, I walked in and said: “I’ve been thinking a lot about water and waves lately, waves that roll... Read more »

Fiction: Anniversary

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The longer they sat without stirring, the more concrete and real the other became. As the evening progressed it became a conversation in which they spoke in their own impenetrable, unutterable language, which only they could perceive.

Big-Mouth Bar Mitzvah

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prepping for bar mitzvah with a raunchy Netflix show

Spring 2020

Jewish Hair Now

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