Susan Weidman Schneider

Susan Patricia Weidman was born into a Jewish-Canadian family that had been active in the Jewish and secular communities for 100 years. She grew up in the ethnically diverse North End of Winnipeg, where she attended Hebrew school and public school. During childhood, she participated in Jewish youth groups and Zionist causes. She attended Brandeis University near Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating, she taught and wrote, moving around often. In 1969, she married Bruce Schneider, a doctor, with whom she had three children. For Dr. Schneider's work, the family lived in Washington, D.C., Eagle Butte (an Indian reservation), New York, and Israel. In Israel in 1970, Susan Weidman Schneider saw a society that expected women to work but paid them less than men. It set her on course to thinking and writing about Jewish and women’s issues.
In 1976, she joined a small group of women to found Lilith, a Jewish women's magazine named for Eve’s predecessor in the Garden of Eden who was expelled for demanding equality. Susan Weidman Schneider has served as the magazine’s primary fundraiser and has mentored the many young women who have worked for her. She has written and published other writers on Jewish women’s leadership, domestic abuse, Orthodoxy and feminism; the development of Jewish women’s rituals; problems for women rabbis; Jewish marriage; fertility; lesbian issues; the treatment of converts to Judaism, and more. She gives public lectures and appears on television, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and others. She has published three acclaimed books, Jewish and Female: Choice and Changes in Our Lives Today (1984), Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living With Differences Between Christians and Jews (1989), and Head and Heart: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Independence, with Arthur B. C. Drache (1991). In addition, Susan Weidman Schneider was a key player in the launch of U.S./Israel Women-to-Women and has participated in the creation of many other Jewish projects and organizations. She and Lilith Magazine have been honored with many awards from Jewish and journalist organizations.