July 30th, 2010
I attended religious school, called Hebrew School back then, at a time when girls didn’t see much bema action.
Yes, I had a Friday night bat mitzvah and chanted a haftorah. And I had the privilege of being the first girl in my synagogue to say Kiddush during her bat mitzvah service. My sister had celebrated her bat mitzvah seven years earlier and chanted the Kiddush during her bat mitzvah when we lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and my parents, who wanted no less for me, took months to persuade our rabbi in Trenton, New Jersey to allow my chance.
But come Shabbat mornings, the mechanics of the Torah service eluded me, as I wasn’t taught to chant from the Torah or to dress it after the reader finished chanting from the scroll. Yet somehow I was taught the prayers for an aliyah, to sing along with my whole Hebrew School class.
So flashforward forty-some years when I find myself a member of an egalitarian congregation with ushers who one Shabbat morning offer me the sixth aliyah. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Bonnie Beth Chernin | 2 Comments »
July 29th, 2010
Chelsea Clinton’s looming nuptial festivities have the gossip blogs in a tizzy: what’ll she wear to walk down the aisle? Can mixed-faith marriages work? Who’ll she invite to the ceremony? And, is she really going to convert? Angela Himsel has a few insights into what that might be like, from her frank Lilith article 10 years ago on “What Converts Talk About (When Jews Aren’t Around).” Can’t wait to hear what Chelsea has to say!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
July 23rd, 2010
Racism, sexism, and the real-life political power of modern media played out with a vengeance this week in the total horror-show of Shirley Sherrod’s firing from her position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Over twenty years ago, this woman of color publicly struggled to come to terms with the personal implications of the systemic racism that defined her childhood and later civil rights work. Then, this week, Fox News repeatedly aired a decontextualized and heavily edited clip, purporting to prove Sherrod’s anti-white racism, based on a lecture she had given at the NAACP. Sherrod was then summarily hung out to dry by the conservative media machine, the federal government, and the NAACP. Later retractions aside, these initial reactions mark a gut-wrenching willingness to willfully ignore the past and present role of race and racism, and gender and sexism, in American society. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Sonia Isard | No Comments »
July 21st, 2010
There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker magazine a couple of weeks ago; it pictures a mother driving with her three kids in the back seat. The kids were hollering, fighting, and, one could safely assume, had very sticky fingers. The mother’s eyes were narrow slits in the rear-view mirror. The bumper sticker or the back of the car reads: I’d rather be working.
Over the past six weeks, during which I have been home with my newborn and two young children, one of whom is being toilet trained, I admit to hatching numerous plans to escape to my quiet office and its spacious rooms, far from the unquenchable, insatiable mouths of babes. But now, as the midpoint of my maternity leave is incomprehensibly already behind me, I contemplate returning to work with apprehension. Is it possible that this period of time is almost over? That to these days which fold over each other and melt together, clouded in the haze of interrupted sleep, will be added the extra responsibility of functioning in the work world? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Maya Bernstein | 1 Comment »
July 21st, 2010
“Get yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend.” – Pirkei Avot 1:6
Blessed are You, God, who clothes the naked. My mother’s closet is full of clothing from various eras of her life. Suits hang in every jewel-tone from decades of shul-going. She has even saved her Bat Mitzvah dress, yellowed lace with patches of pastel. When I was younger, I used to love playing dress-up in her closet, awaiting the day I would grow into her clothes.
Among the diverse discussion topics when a group of women rabbinical students gathered in Jerusalem living rooms this past year was the contents of our own closets: how we see ourselves and how we are seen; the ways we choose to cover and uncover; the garments we have inherited and those we have taken upon ourselves. My hevruta (study partner), Kerrith Solomon, and I convened this group of women from the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Ziegler school so we could talk with our peers about things we have not yet had safe space to explore within our schooling, reclaiming and exploring our identities as women on our paths toward the rabbinate in the Conservative Movement. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Annie Lewis | 1 Comment »
July 19th, 2010
“I don’t like to think about the future. It freaks me out,” my nine-year-old daughter Rachel announces from the back of the car. She stopped using a booster seat a month ago, her height finally sufficient to require a simple seat belt.
Her announcement is in response to a Scholastic News article. Her third-grade class had read that morning about water found on the moon and the possibility of people making their homes there one day.
I ask Rachel if she would like that and receive her vehement reply. I am driving us home after her after-school program and my trying day at work. The day has also brought the news my mother’s blood pressure had shot up, and multiple phone calls with the insurance company about a biopsy I needed a month ago. Thankfully it turned out benign but left me with a claim mix-up I could use Columbo to unravel.
I brake for a red light. “Are you concerned about growing up or the future of the world?” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Bonnie Beth Chernin | No Comments »
July 13th, 2010
New podcast from the Jewish Women’s Roundtable, a collaboration between Lilith and the Forward’s Sisterhood blog.
Here, the Forward’s web editor Gabrielle Birkner talks with Lilith editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider, Lilith assistant editor Sonia Isard, and the Forward’s editor, Jane Eisner. Listen in on our conversation on everything from Jewish anti-choice organizations, to a new pitch for a reality television show, to our own “click” moments.
Enjoy! And join in the conversation in the comments section below.
Posted in Podcasts, The Sisterhood blog | 2 Comments »
July 13th, 2010
Hi again, and welcome back to The Spin Cycle, Lilith’s online forum for media analysis. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Say you’re a man. Say you’re an Israeli man. Say you’re an Israeli man writing a novel in Hebrew. Say the novel’s about a woman. Say you’d like some people to buy your book. Who writes your blurb?
I was taken aback over the weekend when I read on the Guardian’s book blog about some recent writing from Nicole Krauss. Not about her new novel, or a rehash of her “Twenty Under Forty” short for the New Yorker, but about a blurb she wrote for David Grossman’s new novel. A blurb! Slow news day, much?
Hmmm… what’s all this about? The Guardian, a massive British news outlet, found Krauss’s blurb “strikingly effusive,” and, apparently, pretty hilarious. “Our challenge for you today is to outdo Krauss,” the moderator urges, inspiring almost 50 comments parodying Krauss.
I’d expect this kind of gleeful snark from the gossip blogs, where mockery is the money-maker. But here we have the intersection of the old media Guardian meeting its new media offspring, meeting serious literature, meeting a publishing industry that is literally dying to sell its books in print. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Sonia Isard, The Spin Cycle | 1 Comment »
July 8th, 2010
Hello, friends of the Lilith blog, and welcome to The Spin Cycle! This is Sonia, your friendly neighborhood moderator. I’ll be posting regularly about my thoughts on the media and (post-?)modernity from a Jewish feminist perspective. Can’t wait to hear your feedback!
The blogosphere lit up this week in a small flurry of virtual feminist theorizing, when blogger and Brooklynite Emily Gould denounced (though not for the first time) a subsidiary of Gawker Media, the (debatably) feminist website, Jezebel.
In a vaguely Ouroborosian twist (I thought my Google-Reader might implode from an overload of self-referentiality), Gould writes provocatively about “How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up page views by exploiting women’s worst tendencies:” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Sonia Isard, The Spin Cycle | No Comments »
July 7th, 2010
What Lilith publishes really has legs! Just look! Check out this item from today’s news, and then read what Lilith said earlier on this very subject.
“Men eat meat, women eat chocolate”—at least, that’s what Riddhi Shah writes at salon.com this week. But what happens when the already complex relationship between food and gender is complicated even further by romance—and religion? Find out what Lilith contributor Cynthia Graber thinks, in her 2009 feature, “When Food and Love Collide.”
Posted in Nothing New Under the Sun | No Comments »
