The Lilith Blog

January 8, 2021 by Abigail Fisher

Foxes in the Temple of Democracy

When Congress resumed its certification of the electoral votes, I watched senator after senator, Democrat and Republican, use religious language when talking about the violence of the attempted coup earlier that day. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi invoked St. Francis and urged Americans to honor the Feast of Epiphany, which coincidentally fell on that very day, as an opportunity for national healing. Rep. Conor Lamb spoke of “desecration of some of the most sacred ground in the United States.” And many senators referred to the building as a “temple of democracy.” 

The Lilith Blog

October 29, 2020 by Abigail Fisher

A Nana for the Nation

You may remember Sarah Silverman rallying Jewish grandparents to vote blue by raving about Obama’s brisket in 2008. Silverman is far from the only one maximizing the untapped political power of Jewish grandparents. As November 3rd creeps up on us, political organizers have been coming up with new and creative ways to canvass for the Biden-Harris ticket, including the B”H meme and a “Bubbies for Biden” campaign wherein Jewish Bubbies and Zaydes from across the nation record short videos about why they’re voting for Biden. While these campaigns are important, no doubt, they ignore the grandparents who need no persuasion to help get out the vote.

My grandmother is one such example. She’s not a Bubbie for Biden, per se, but rather a Nana for the Nation. In addition to buying each of her grandchildren a Biden-Harris t-shirt, while a patient in the hospital last week she spent her time urging everyone to exercise their civic duty. As she got more than a liter of fluid drained from her lungs, 74-year-old Sylvia Fisher wasted no time spreading the word about why it’s imperative that we vote Trump out of office.

In addition to this kind of canvassing being totally badass, my Nana also felt she needed to prove her mental acuity in order to get the best care possible, a sad reflection of the state of our current healthcare system (another issue on the ballot). “I had CNN and MSNBC on the whole time so that people would know who they were talking to” she said. She didn’t let a single nurse or attending physician leave without confirming they had a voting plan. She encouraged them to check their registration and vote early. She is rumored to have convinced even a nurse from Florida to vote blue and to call three friends from the swing state urging them to do the same. After being discharged, she took every opportunity to emphasize that the surgeons who saved her life were both immigrants.

Usually it’s the grandparents who shep nachas for their children and grandchildren. But I’m awed by the strength and tenacity with which this woman is fighting for the soul of our nation, and in recent months she’s brought me tremendous nachas. If my Nana won’t even rest on a hospital bed, we can’t rest on our laurels — we all must vote.

The Lilith Blog

October 13, 2020 by Abigail Fisher

What Amy Coney Barrett Means for Sex Ed

Middle schoolers are not well known for being comfortable and open when it comes to talking about sex. On my college campus at Wesleyan University, I belong to a group of students working to change this. Adolescent Sexual Health Awareness (ASHA) reinvents sex-ed curricula to go deeper than what most states require. Our mission is, in part, to “empower young people to be active participants in their sexual education and to take charge of their bodies, as well as their emotional and physical health.”

The Lilith Blog

February 6, 2019 by Abigail Fisher

Raised on Intersectionality, What’s a Teen to Do?

‘And’ is the most important word in the English language. It’s the linguistic equivalent of coalition building. It can build on an existing sentence, and more importantly, it can glue opposing truths together in one sentence, allowing messy realities to coexist. I’m Jewish and bisexual and feminist and Zionist, and I support Palestinian human rights, and I believe Black Lives Matter. All of these identities are central to who I am, and no single one undermines the other. 

It makes sense, then, that over the course of my high school career, I fell in love with the concept of intersectionality. I attended Seeds of Peace International Camp where I engaged in raw and emotional dialogue with Palestinian and Israeli teens, and thought critically about my community’s role in oppressing Palestinians. I learned about Zionism with nuance in my “Dual-Narratives of the Middle East” history class. I attend a high school named after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, which celebrates his commitment to Civil Rights and his work alongside Dr. King. I learned and wrote about Jewish Feminist history with the Jewish Women’s Archive. I used my 11th grade research project to explore the role of Black women in the Feminist and Civil Rights Movements.  These combined influences forced me to see the necessity of a theory for social organizing that embraces the plurality, the “and-ness” of an identity.