the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Nearly 500 custodially embattled mothers and speakers attended, including Ti-Grace Atkinson, E.M. Broner, Paula Caplan, Toi Derricotte, Andrea Dworkin, and Kate Millett. New York State and national legislators and feminist leaders participated. Also in 1986, Chesler co-organized a congressional press briefing in Washington, D.C. on mothers and child custody. It was sponsored by then-Representatives Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Some of the mothers she interviewed for her 1986 book Mothers on Trial spoke at the briefing. In 1987, Chesler worked with Mary Beth Whitehead's lawyer Harold Cassidy in the landmark Baby M case, in which the New Jersey Supreme Court declared that surrogacy contracts violated New Jersey law. Chesler organized demonstrations outside the courthouse, wrote articles, created an alliance of diverse groups, and ultimately documented this struggle and the issues raised by a surrogacy contract custody battle in Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M. In 1989, Chesler began publishing in On the Issues magazine and also functioned as its Editor-at-Large. She did so for fifteen years until the magazine became an online edition. In 1990–1991, Chesler organized expert witnesses in the case of Aileen Wuornos, a female serial killer. Chesler's stated goal was to educate the jury and the country about the lives of women in prostitution and the dangerous conditions they routinely face. The public defender did not call any of these witnesses, which became one of the grounds of the appeal that Wuornos' lawyers launched in the Florida Supreme Court. Chesler wrote about the legal and psychiatric issues raised by the case in The New York Times and St. John's Law Review and the Criminal Practice Law Report. Views of women and Judaism In 1976, the first feminist Passover seder in North America was held in Chesler's New York City apartment and led by Broner, with 13 women attending, including Chesler. Chesler also created and participated in Jewish feminist life cycle rituals. In 1988, Chesler was among the women who prayed with a Torah for the first time in an all-female, multi-denominational, non-minyan group at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In 1989, Chesler co-founded the International Committee for Women of the Wall to promote the religious rights of Jewish women in Jerusalem; she became one of the name plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state of Israel on this issue. In 2002, she and co-author