Special to WJW

The hottest new salon in town could be just around the corner, except that it might be the setting for coffee and conversation, not haircuts and highlights.

Women's salons ‹ the literary kind ‹ have sprung up in the D.C. area thanks to a partnership between Women of Reform Judaism, the movement's national sisterhood organization, and Lilith magazine, the 30-year-old quarterly publication that calls itself "independent, Jewish, and frankly feminist."

The sisterhoods at two local congregations, Temple Emanuel in Kensington and Washington Hebrew Congregation in D.C., have started hosting WRJ/Lilith salons that meet quarterly to discuss articles in the most recent Lilith issue. WRJ launched the program as a pilot trial in 2006 and rolled it out nationally earlier this year. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive according to WRJ executive director, Shelley Lindauer, who reports that 70 Reform sisterhoods and between 1,500 and 1,800 members are participating in Lilith salons nationwide.

The salon concept is popular with WRJ members of all ages, according to Lindauer. "We have salons that include women who are 16 along with women who are 80," she says. "Surveys show our members have different needs and interests, but share a desire for respite in their hectic, busy lives. They don't want to take on time-consuming volunteer responsibilities, but they do want time away from home for spiritual, relaxing contemplative activities. WRJ/Lilith salons fulfill this."

Lilith editor-in-chief and one of its founders, Susan Weidman Schneider says the publication first became interested in organizing reader salons several years ago. "We began to revisit how salons have been a fascinating aspect of Jewish women's intellectual history going back to 18th-century Germany and Vienna," the District resident explains.

Lilith's interest in salons came about around the same time that The Jewish Museum in New York had opened an exhibit on Jewish women's salons called "The Power of Conversation."

Initially, the magazine helped organize a handful of independent reader salons in several cities. Not long afterwards, the partnership with WRJ came about. As Schneider explains, "The idea of launching nationwide Lilith salons with WRJ emerged organically, after their leadership invited me to speak to a plenary at their biennial assembly. It was a very good pairing, since they are a large group of women in the largest stream of Judaism. And their members are wildly enthusiastic."

WRJ's participation in the program creates an opportunity to introduce the salon format to the organization's 75,000 members nationwide.

Like Gertrude Stein's legendary Paris salon of the 1920s, WRJ/Lilith get-togethers generally take place in a home, with eight to 12 women in attendance. The sisterhood recruits participants and appoints a discussion leader who assigns articles to read in advance.

Although Lilith and WRJ provide "trigger questions" and supplementary readings, the signature feature of a salon, according to Schneider, is that the discussion has a spontaneous flow.

"The joy of these salons is that they are peer-led. There is no outside facilitator who drops in from the heavens," she says. "You're in the room with smart women, and the conversation will take its own course. The magazine is the take-off point."

Between the two local congregations, approximately 70 local women already have signed up for WRJ/Lilith salons. Temple Emanuel WRJ members gathered recently for their first meeting in the Rockville home of Amy Hertz. Temple Emanuel sisterhood co-president Cheryll Trefzger, 45, a software engineer from Rockville, opened the discussion by asking participants to introduce themselves and share their thoughts on feminism.

Two hours later, the group had talked about three articles from the fall issue of Lilith: a mother-daughter story about wearing tallit and tefillin, a memoir about growing up in the 1960s and profiles of seven Jewish eco-revolutionaries. The conversation also had meandered onto the topic of women's Passover sedarim, differences in generational attitudes toward feminism, unequal treatment in the workplace, religious intolerance and tradeoffs between work and parenting.

Participants seemed to enjoy their first salon experience. Hertz, 53, a public health program manager for the Veterans Administration, joined the salon looking for "something new and different, more on the intellectual side ‹ and a chance to get to know each other differently."

Zelda McBride of Silver Spring, 56, a federal information technology specialist, didn't have strong expectations about Judaic or feminist topics, but said she was "looking for a discussion group that would generate ideas" where she could "talk on a different plane, not just about the kids."

Potomac's Judi Sprei, 57, appreciated the manageable reading assignment. "There was very little pressure," the psychologist says. "At 4 this afternoon, I was able to read the articles and come to the meeting informed."

The lighter reading requirement is one difference between a salon and a book club. Another difference is that salon discussions tend to focus on real-world issues, in some cases even motivating participants to undertake social change.

Schneider points to a Princeton, N.J., salon whose members became so inspired by an article on Asian adoption within the Jewish community that they decided to launch a Jewish diversity awareness project at their synagogue.

This kind of example is precisely what makes the WRJ/Lilith salon program so valuable, says Lindauer. "It's a win-win experience all around: for Lilith to increase its readership, for WRJ to initiate a program that appeals to so many of our members, and for women to see what sisterhood is all about ‹ a coming together to discuss current and relevant issues that are spiritual and meaningful, and the possibility to move on to a role of advocacy and change."

In the meantime, enthusiastic response to the WRJ/Lilith salon program has inspired Lilith to consider forging other partnerships. "We're certainly happy to create Lilith salon collaborations with other Jewish women's groups," Schneider notes.

"We have been approached by representatives of other groups to use this model. In particular, we're excited about bringing Lilith salons to college campuses as a very direct and positive way of engaging young, Jewish women in conversation about Judaism and feminism ‹ an idea we're working on right now."