Lilith Magazine

Photo Credit: Yochi Rappeport It was my nephew’s bar mitzvah, and my brother had decided we’d split chanting the parshah, the weekly torah portion, with him. I used to read Torah all the time; I grew up in a progressive, egalitarian synagogue and it was a big flex there for teens, especially girls, to come back and keep reading Torah after our b’nei mitzvot. In addition to the usual weekly fare, I knew the melodic trope for Eicha, for Megillat Esther, for the High Holidays.

Photo: Hannah Altman, “Shofar (To Catch One’s Breath)” The first decision I had to make without my husband was whether to call a Jewish funeral home. All I knew was that Robert had wanted to be cremated. I wound up with the same facility we’d used for my Catholic dad, after first calling to confirm that they were non-denominational; my Jewish husband wouldn’t have wanted Catholic anything.

Image credit: Shay Markowitz Warsaw-born artist and architect Natalia Romik’s, Plague Crystals, which just finished its run in Toronto, responded to the idea of the “ten plagues” with unique representations of contemporary plagues. She spoke with Lilith’s Anna Solomon earlier this summer. Lilith: How did the idea for this work develop for you?

First Jewish Women’s Passover Seder in NYC, Phyllis Chesler, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem 1980s, photograph by Joan Roth Picture this: an elementary school rug, in the early 1990s. Gloria Steinem had perched on a chair at a Jewish Day School in Manhattan, explaining feminism 101 to us, noting that the boys are being louder, raising their hands. But it was 1991, the height of anti-feminist backlash. No one was buying it, not even schoolkids. The word “feminazi” got thrown around as soon as she left.

Linda Kass’ fourth novel (following Tasa’s Song, A Ritchie Boy, and Bessie), World News from Waverley High, takes place during one tumultuous year in US history, 1969 to 1970. It was the year of Woodstock; revelations about the My Lai Massacre, a military atrocity that killed between 350 and 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians; and rampant anti-war protests on high school and college campuses throughout the country.

Growing up on the Canadian prairie, I had only one grandparent. My father’s family was murdered in the Holocaust and my mother’s father died well before I was born, so Baba Sarah had to stand in for all four of them. Every Friday, she came to stay with us for the weekend and the house brightened. Sher arrived as though she were fleeing Ukraine all over again, with parcels and packages and a giant soup pot wrapped in a tea towel, knotted to make a handle.

Any writer who works across fiction and non-fiction knows that each genre demands distinct modes—of thought, and of expression. Some writers, though, seem to have an entirely separate brain to devote to a second (or third!) genre; reading them is like opening a door in a dream and discovering not merely more house, but an entirely new universe.

Cabinets stacked like Jenga in the driveway, a refrigerator at the foot of the stairs, a passage of Torah on my phone’s lockscreen, and sawdust clouding our throats: This is our limbo, this time between kitchens as my daughter’s bat mitzvah looms. Our theatre of domestic bliss looks like backstage chaos: Sherwin-Williams cans, plumbing stubs, shop vacs stopping me in my tracks every time I walk in, out of habit. The Harris-Walz magnet on my old fridge greets the contractors each morning.

Fall 1998 I love this piece all over again every time I read it. The fearless, outspoken Big-Mouth Jewish Woman is both iconic and also more than a little paradoxical. Sometimes the change-makers we admire for speaking up, loud and proud, about injustices toward others aren’t always able to speak up about their own needs, or so we later learn from some of their memoirs.

Spring/Summer 1977 I’m shamelessly spotlighting my 1977 cover story, “Gentlemen’s Agreement at the Seminary” (on the cover as “Why is the Jewish Theological Seminary Afraid of This Woman?”). It’s quite the time capsule on arguments against ordaining women as Conservative rabbis. JTS’s stance was key since, unlike Orthodox Judaism, the movement considers itself the bridge between tradition and modernity.