Creating sacred space at summer camp, in a closet, or in a basement. The shock of finding out that you’re Jewish. Sex or scholarship? Unlike Judaism, medieval Christianity allowed celibate women to use their minds like men.
Cover art is an excerpt from Anna Ruth Hendriques' illustrated manuscript, The Book of Mechtilde.
Table of contents Get the issueArchitects have always known the place can affect our feelings of holiness. Now we have clues about how women’s experiences can create a holy space in the cellar of a shul, under a tree, behind a file cabinet, even (despite the objections of men) at the Western Wall.
Never mind Charles-and-Di mugs. LILITH finds a ceramist--Sandy Goldberg--who commemorates what really matters in life, with plates for your sideboard making the grand occasions of getting a grant or finding a comfortable bra.
Unlike Judaism, medieval Christianity had a loophole that allowed some women to use their minds as if they were men. The loophole? Celibacy.
Before Mary Gordon found out that her father was Jewish, Louise Kehoe had penetrated her dead father’s final legacy—-he was no lapsed Romanoff living in rural England, but a tortured shtetl Jew, in disguise. After suffering both his denial and his cruelties, she emerges as a Jew too.
Slowly, slowly, a young, pregnant and faithful Buffalo wife in the 1950’s falls into a sexual trance over the unbidden attention of a newly widowed man. Then her sister takes over
Secrets leak out of the fissures in a crumbling family system when the nice Jewish doctor son comes out as a homosexual. Trying to repair the damage, an aunt blows the cover on his mother’s Holocaust past.
Dudu left for the Six Day War without saying goodbye. Years later, his sister (with a son who looks just like him) meets up with Dudu again. Bring your hanky.
In 1988, women came to the Kotel [Jerusalem’s Western Wall] with a Torah and were greeted with curses and thrown chairs. Israel’s Supreme Court, in deference to halacha, told them... Read more »
When my father died, I decided I was going to continue saying Kaddish once a day for the traditional eleven months and one day. By chance, a “Minha map” appeared... Read more »
In the summer of 1961 my mother drove me to Camp Ramah in the Poconos. While I unpacked in my new bunk, she explored the grounds—the beautiful lake, several leafy... Read more »
I am searching for that primordial Torah, the one the mystics speak of, the one written with black fire on white fire that rested on God’s knee. I imagine God consulting... Read more »
