Letters
I enjoy LILITH tremendously and have given numerous gift subscriptions to friends. I find it to be fun, exciting, at times spiritually uplifting and certainly informative. I was especially moved by Hedy Markowitz’s piece in your last issue [Summer ’92]. and by Blu Greenberg on the feminist changes in Orthodoxy.
One thing troubles me: the ad for Good Vibrations [Summer ’92]. Tell me. are we so impoverished that we are forced to accept advertising for sex toys in a publication aimed at raising the intellectual and spiritual consciousness of Jewish women? I have no quarrel with sex toys, as such, or their users, either male or female. But I felt that the ad was inappropriate for LILITH and in poor taste.
by SONIA LEVITIN, Beverly Hills, CA
LILITH has received several responses to this ad. It struck us in reading them that, as women, we seem always willing to discuss pain, self-deprivation and negative body image. Are pleasure and entitlement the last taboo? Readers, please respond.
— Leslie Margules Advertising Manager
I was delighted with “Guarding the Garden” [Spring ’92|, the new play about Adam, Lilith, and Eve. I was surprised, however, by your statement “women of Eden have their own God. . .who is different from the men’s version.” As I understood the play, women and men have one and the same God. This God is none other than The God we meet in the Torah. But this God has more than one way of speaking to people.
by RABBI NANCY FUCHS-KREIMER, Wyncote, PA
I enjoyed “The Cult of Miriam” [Spring “92]. There are other briefly named biblical women to pique our interest: Sheerah, who founded cities [1 Chronicles 7:24], and, among the “chiefs” of Edom, several chieftainesses. The gender of these “chiefs” is for the main part assiduously avoided in the Hebrew, but Timnah and Oholibamah are certainly female [Genesis 36:40-41].
by JESSICA AMANDA SOLOMON, Seattle, WA
To clarify your article “Beauty is the Mother of Death” [Spring ’92]: Ethical wills are not necessarily “writings from our deathbeds to those we love.” Many of the authors whose wills appear (including myself!) are very much alive and hope to pass on to our children, while we are still vibrantly alive, our personal ethical beliefs.
by RANDEE ROSENBERG FRIEDMAN, San Diego, CA
Letty Cottin Pogrebin [Kol Ishah, Summer ’92] writes that “we have learned that the win/lose strategy is what keeps Jews and Palestinians in that eternal maze. . .” On the contrary. The current maze is the direct result of the initial Palestinian and pan-Arab refusal to accept the partition of Palestine into two states in 1948. A simplistic statement that both sides must “agree that both peoples deserve a homeland,” underestimates the virulence of Arab hatred against Israel.
Reading “Israeli Bureaucracy Limits Women’s Access to Information on Abortion” [Summer ’92] . . . My own experiences in Israel have not yielded the stereotypical one Rachel Kadish describes.
I hope to see LILITH open its pages to articles written by a broad spectrum of Jewish women. Otherwise, I can’t help worrying that I am reading a one-dimensional, “politically correct” journal disguised as intellectual commentary.
by SHARMAN YOFFIE-SIDMAN, Brooklyn, NY
The name of my co-author, Andrea Boroff Eagan, was misspelled in “RU 486” [Summer ’92]. She writes for the Village Voice, Ms., Lear’s, Vogue, and is the author of Who Am I So Miserable If These Are the Best Years of My Life?, a guide for teen girls, and The Newborn Mother: Stages of Her Growth. She was a founder and first president of the National Writers Union.
by SHARON LIEBERMAN, Evanston, IL
