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April 15, 2005/Nisan 6 5765, Volume 57, No. 33
Teenager publishes magazine for Jewish girls
PENNY SCHWARTZ
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
By day, 14-year-old Emily Larson lives the life of an ordinary teenage American girl.
She goes to school, chats with her friends, adjusts to her new braces, and complains - just a little - about having too much homework.
But as soon as her homework's done, Emily, a pleasant, soft-spoken and intensely focused teenager from Holliston, Mass., who is in the eighth grade at the Maimonides School in nearby Brookline, takes on her Hebrew name and morphs into Leah Larson, the publisher of Yaldah, a magazine for Jewish girls.
The magazine's name means "girl," and its second issue is just off the presses.
"A lot of people said they were very pleased with the first edition," Leah said on a recent weekday evening. "Last night I was on the phone with girls from Crown Heights in Brooklyn who want to help." She's also heard from many parents.
News of the magazine is slowly spreading. People - including the religiously observant girls Leah hopes to reach - hear about it from her Web site, at Jewish day schools and by word of mouth. Copies of Yaldah have been ordered from Florida, St. Louis and even London.
Leah is most excited by the e-mail correspondence she's struck up with readers from around the world, who live in countries as close as Canada and as far away as Uruguay - and even Japan.
Leah may be young, but she's no newcomer to publishing. By the time she became a bat mitzvah, she'd had stories, essays, poems, illustrations and photographs featured in local newspapers and in two magazines for teenage girls, American Girl and New Moon. She won a $300 prize for a story New Moon published.
Though she enjoys some of what American Girl and New Moon have to offer, Leah says these and other magazines are shallow and lack Jewish values.
When her artwork was turned down for an American Girl cover contest in November 2003, Leah started playing around on her computer, turning disappointment into creative invention. That afternoon, she came up with the name and logo for Yaldah, and an outline for a magazine that featured stories and articles by and about Jewish girls.
Ten months later, on a shoestring budget and a prayer, Yaldah made the transition from Leah's computer screen to full-color glossy pages. She raised the money for the first issue herself by selling advertising.
The first 150 copies sold out within two months, and Leah printed another 80 copies. The second issue -Winter 2005
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