From the Editor
This issue is the fourth of LILITH’s twentieth anniversary quartet. Note the fresh new design we’ve created to mark this milestone, and share our delight in welcoming our new advertisers, among them The Body Shop, whose founder Anita Roddick telephoned from England to say how much she enjoys LILITH.
But subscriptions and advertising cover only about a third of LILITH’s costs, and since LILITH stands alone, independent of sponsorship from any organization or institution (an independence which has served us well for over 20 years), we depend on the generous tax-deductible contributions of our readers to enable us to publish. When you read the names featured on pages 46 and 47, you’ll recognize the women and men, foundations and corporations, whose generous financial support has enabled LILITH to reach this day. These people deserve notice and thanks from every LILITH reader, because no non-profit intellectual periodical can survive without such backing.
Please help toast the magazine’s 21st year by making your own tax deductible contribution to keep LILITH alive on into the 21st century. We need your support to keep publishing the remarkable articles you find only in LILITH. You can make contributions by check or by credit card, by mail or fax (see the info at the bottom of the Table of Contents page), or by calling our new toll-free number: 1-888-2- LILITH.
Because so many of LILITH’s back issues are constantly in demand, LILITH is developing several collections of reprints on specific subjects: new ceremonies and rituals, Jewish wedding ideas, women’s Holocaust memoirs and more. For example, board member Frances Brandt has facilitated the reprinting of our “Health and Healing” reprints.
Since LILITH’s inception in 1976 we have showcased the diversity of Jewish women’s lives. Lesbian and gay Jews, for example, have been invisible in the pages of most other Jewish periodicals. When we publish an article on, say, a woman’s coming out to her Jewish family as a lesbian, we are not only making it more comfortable for Jewish lesbians to identify as Jews, but we are also presenting, to a largely heterosexual audience, life experiences of Jews they might not otherwise have understood.
In light of this history, we were happy to receive recent support for reprints of LILITH articles on gay and lesbian Jews. A collective grant, coordinated by longtime LILITH reader Jill Vexler, will help make possible these reprints (available for $10 from LILITH). The funds came from more than a dozen people, including members of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in Manhattan, the mothers of two CBST members, a rabbi from Texas, and others who care about making available past articles to readers who may have missed them when they were first published.
We would like to send you order forms for all these packets—of which there are now about 10—so that you can circulate them at conferences, meetings or congregational events. Just let us know when, where, and how big an audience you expect. And if you are a program planner, teaching a course or organizing adult-education programs, please tell us what kind of reprints you’d find most helpful. Some examples: Jewish organizations have ordered “Jewish Women and Work” reprints for staffers and visiting girls on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Ma’yan, the Jewish Women’s Project at the JCC on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has purchased copies of our “Meet the Matriarchs” packet on Bible women— made possible by the Charles H. Revson Foundation—as take-home reading for a Shavuot event. Please remember that, while we plan a glorious future for LILITH, we’re also circulating landmark articles from our past, and you can help us create and distribute these specialized resource materials on Jewish women.
