Lilith Magazine

Books are my love language. If someone invites me to read with them in a book club, my answer is yes before they’ve even finished the sentence. Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s book “When We See You Again” was different. I wanted to read it. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to support her. And yet I wasn’t sure I could bear to read it. I had followed Rachel’s advocacy after October 7, watching her speak about her son Hersh z”l and the other hostages. The thought of opening up her book felt overwhelming.

In March of 2020, as the world locked down, writer Meryl Branch-McTiernan, 43, found herself alone on the border of Long Island and Queens. Her mother was in Florida; her father had passed away a few years before. The family’s apartment made sense as a pandemic spot—especially since the Manhattan space Meryl had been subletting had no kitchen. But the far-flung “family home” offered little in terms of connection or community.

Evan-Amos, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons “It’s broken! Put it back!” our two year old screams at me from the backseat on our too long commute home. “Fix it,” he yells again. “It is broken,” I gently tell him, gripping the steering wheel, taking deep breaths because I cannot tolerate his anguish. “I’m sorry, honey, it is broken and I don’t have any more.” “Put it back!” He continues to scream. “It’s broken!” This very scene repeats itself most mornings in our home.

When I think of Jews and art–not Jewish art but Jews and art, my mind tends toward recognizable names on gallery walls or ongoing legal disputes about works stolen during the Nazi regime. But I don’t often think of Jews as the subjects of famous works of art–especially pieces where some visible marker of Jewishness is not an intentionally prominent feature.

Nearly three decades ago, Lilith published the first reported article about alleged sexual misconduct by the well-known and loved Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, whose music had changed Jewish worship and whose blending of Orthodoxy with hippie counterculture changed the way Jews — and especially Jewish women — saw themselves in spiritual community. At the time I did that reporting, I was very young, and so were the allegations against Carlebach.

“Feeling like a genderless soul in the body of a woman, Masculine and feminine, dancing chaotically within. I am the embodiment of the past, unbridled. I am a holy contradiction.” This was part of a poem I wrote about what life was like as I became more in tune with my identity for the first time as a nonbinary woman.

Distortion of “Lady Lilith,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti, original image from Wikimedia.org. Of all the figures in Jewish mythology, Lilith is perhaps the most polarizing. Demoness, sex goddess, sexual predator, dark archetype of femininity, devourer of newborn flesh, terror in the night, feminist icon. How do we navigate a spiritual terrain so inconsistent? What if we believe more than one narrative? Can she be both liberator and perpetrator?

1959 Sisters, oil on board, 12 x 13.5 All I knew about the art world I absorbed because my aunt’s idea of babysitting was taking us to a museum and teaching us to recognize a Matisse or Picasso. Auntie Anna—the artist Anna Walinska—came to my fifth-grade class to teach everyone how to make collages, and she saved a folder of thank-you letters the teacher required us to write.

Tirtzah Bassel, Scapegoat, 30″ x 40″, oil on panel, 2026. Photograph by Barry Rosenthal, courtesy of the artist and SLAG&RX, New York. In Tirtzah Bassel’s vibrant and challenging exhibition, I Put A Spell, the viewer is immediately confronted with the question: Can the power of witchcraft—rooted in both ancient wisdom and intuition—serve as a potent metaphor for reclaiming women’s agency in art and beyond?

I whisper in my father’s ear, even though he is asleep, even though he is very deaf. I don’t really want him to hear. “You’re not going to die in the parking lot, right?” He opens one eye and looks at me. His eyes are still startlingly blue. There is war. There are sirens and missiles. We are in the parking lot of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.