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October 8, 1999/28 Tishri 5760, Vol. 52, No.6
Writer/editor discusses Jewish women's future
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Lilith magazine editor-in-chief Susan Weidman Schneider continues to guide the feminist journal she co-founded.
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Ask Susan Weidman Schneider to fantasize about the Jewish-feminist future, and what does she envision? A proliferation of kosher restaurants that offer pre-cooked Shabbat dinners for Friday night take-out.
How typically Jewish, predictably feminist, and characteristically Weidman Schneider, who is indisputably a major voice in the Jewish feminist world. Her dream of easy Friday night dinners for busy women epitomizes the ideal coalescence of Judaism and feminism.
A "founding mother" and the editor-in-chief of Lilith, a feminist journal with a circulation of 10,000 and estimated readership of 25,000, Weidman-Schneider also is the author of three books and a popular speaker on contemporary women's issues.
She will speak here next month, at the Nov. 7 Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix Women's Department's "Women's Works" education day.
Weidman Schneider credits her upbringing in the tight-knit Jewish community of Winnipeg, Manitoba, her birthplace, with developing her strong Jewish identity. Her years at Brandeis University, during the social foment of the 1960s, developed her social consciousness and provided an early exposure to the burgeoning feminist movement.
But it was a trip to Israel several years later that Weidman Schneider describes as a "watershed" in her development as a Jewish feminist. She and her husband, Bruce Schneider, a physician, with the couple's almost-2-year-old, lived for six months in Jerusalem, where Schneider was overseeing a hospital laboratory.
Weidman Schneider, then working as a freelance writer, was initially impressed at the acceptance of working mothers in Israel and the easy availability of child care, even on a limited half-day basis.
"I was astonished at the simplicity, quality and uniform availability," she says of Israeli gans (preschools).
Later, though, she says she saw the inherent drawbacks, and inequities, of a system that offered only half-day care and assumed that mothers, not fathers, would truncate their work days to spend their afternoons at home.
The wrenching issues of combining work and family life, and the necessity to advocate for both choice and change, hit home. When she returned to the United States, Weidman Schneider began to write and lecture about women's issues and the inherent tension in realizing meaningful lives as both Jews and women.
"Jewish women are more prone to doing it all," she says.
"There is a pressure to make something of ourselves, and to bear children." In 1973, a group of women with like concerns decided the time was right for founding a Jewish feminist magazine to provide them a platform. As Weidman Schneider tells it, "At that time all the Jewish magazines, including the house organs (such as Hadassah magazine), were edited by men. They were not interested in women's issues."
So she and her cohorts - writers, editors, other media people - created Lilith to fill that void. The first issue was published in the summer of 1976.
The journal is named for the mythological creature Lilith, who according to legend, was Adam's first companion and his equal. When Adam attempted to assert superiority over her, Lilith fled and despite Adam's entreaties, refused to return to the Garden of Eden. So Adam instead found himself a more pleasing, and amenable, companion, Eve.
Lilith, the magazine, has taken the role of independent provocateur from its namesake, infusing Jewish issues with women's perspectives and imparting to feminists' causes a Jewish dimension. Its first issue featured an expose on the old-fashioned stereotypes in Herman Wouk's "Marjorie Morningstar." Later issues took on the Jewish American Princess, sexist humor and Jewish body image.
The Fall 1999 issue of Lilith explores a raft of issues, from Jewish feminism in Israel, to help for victims of domestic violence, to the concerns of teenage girls. Headlined "Clueless," the latter coverage kicks off Lilith's year-long study of what Jewish girls need and want.
A $10,000 grant from the Chicago Jewish Federation provided seed money for a look at issues ranging from the impact of gender on Jewish youth-group leadership, to teen trips to Israel, to eating disorders, inordinately prevalent among Jewish young women. This gender-specific research on Jewish teens has not been done before, says Weidman Schneider.
"For many girls (a summer Israel experience ) is a downer," says Weidman Schneider, noting that females in Israel are excluded from some meaningful religious experiences offered to men. For example, women are prohibited from participating in religious services at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. "Their male buddies have a peak experience, but the girls are left flat."
Also on the front burner are a look at the generation Weidman Schneider calls "the Jews we lose," studying ways to engage Jewish young people in their 20s, and an examination of relationships between Jewish men and women and their families. Lilith's winter issue will ask women to assess how liberated they feel in their home lives.
The magazine and its editor-in-chief have advocated not only transforming Jewish women's social lives, but their religious, spiritual and philanthropic lives as well. Weidman Schneider, who identifies as an observant Conservative Jew with a preference for traditional, egalitarian services, notes with pride the veritable "explosion of scholarship" among women and the ongoing creation of new rituals for life-cycle events and healing, many expressly for women.
Still troubled by the exclusion of women from ritual, practice and study in some quarters of the observant Jewish world, Weidman Schneider delights in the "many more opportunities for women" within Judaism in recent years.
In the areas of philanthropy and institutional Jewish communal life, Weidman Schneider sees both a need and the potential for change.
As women earn more and contribute more, they need to be assured commensurate power and entr‚e into the highest echelons of communal leadership, along with their male colleagues. There is a critical need for role models.
"We need (Jewish) women leaders (now), so they can mirror back to the younger women from the podium and the board room," says Weidman Schneider. If not, she cautions, "we will have a cadre of young women who will not choose to affiliate with the Jewish community."
She has been influenced by the women she has been working with, she notes.
"The magazine coverage," she adds, "has been influenced by our real lives - and our real lives influenced by the magazine."
Weidman Schneider predicts that in the future, the conflicts inherent in being a Jewish woman will ease. A revised edition of her 1984 book, "Jewish and Female," which was the first book to take a comprehensive look at Jewish women's special concerns, will be issued in the year 2000 with new insights.
"I wouldn't describe the tensions in the same way now," she says. The work of the last decade-and-a-half has provided "opportunities for resolving (the conflict) and bringing both into our lives."
Still, she says, "I would have thought we would be farther along."
Weidman Schneider is the mother of three: son Benjamin, 29, a lawyer; daughter Rachel, 26, a social worker; and daughter Yael, 17, a high school student. Besides Shabbat take-out, she says she hopes her children's lives will include more communal support for parents, and another fantasy - child care provided in conjunction with every Jewish event.
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