The cover of the first issue featured our artist’s version of the Jewish superwoman, who managed to amalgamate almost all possible roles: doctor, server of chicken soup, scholar, tightrope walker, challah baker, incipient mother, Zionist stalwart. We decided that the mix would set the pattern for what we wanted to include in the issues that followed: challenging how Jewish law shapes women’s lives; touching on the ways popular culture articulates images of Jewish women; truth-telling about individual women’s lives, inflected by the idea that if we only spoke out loud our deepest realities, all wrongs would be righted.
My vision is now more complex, glee replaced by fascination. I’m tempted to say, in the passive mood, that Lilith’s content has become more nuanced – as if such a change happens by magic. Truth is, I see the world of Jewish women (and my own life) in more shades and colors that I did then – the unquestionably good and the uncomfortably ambiguous; the inherited past and the uncertain, collectively shaped future; the gatekeepers and the change agents all part of the background for the woman on the tightrope. She’s more grounded now, no tightrope. She’s making choices, not trying to live out all those expectations of others. And there’s both background and foreground to her portrait.
[From the Jewish Women's Archive, www.jwa.org/feminism/]
Suggested Discussion Questions:
1. How do you respond to the complex "Jewish superwoman" depicted on the cover of the first issue of [Jewish feminist magazine] Lilith? What do each of those components represent and how were they integrated with each other?
2. What does the author mean by, "glee replaced by fascination?" How does that dynamic play out?
3. What are examples of the various "shades and colors" that Weidman Schneider now sees Jewish feminism through?
Time Period: Contemporary (The Yom Kippur War until the present-day)