Amplifying Unheard Voices

When no one else was paying attention, Lilith was listening as women told stories—in their own poignant words—about the ways they are. The magazine is a megaphone for women living Jewish lives in unexpected diasporas: feminist teens, Jews by choice, the elderly. And in Lilith, people in crisis—men as well as women—write about passions and turning points in their lives, and about their feelings of disenfranchisement from Judaism.

A journalist once asked us, a little irritated, “Why so many memoires So much in the first person?” The answer? For an authentic chronicle of the experiences of Jewish women, we need the diverse parts. The Iraqi girl in California whose Hebrew school tells her that her family’s traditions are wrong. The executive whose colleagues in the Jewish world never knew she was a lesbian. The converso admitting to Jewish practices her grandmother taught her to hide. The octogenarian whose kids confiscate her autonomy. The grown woman remaking the doll the Nazis tore from her four-year-old arms. We have to hear them all.