From the Editor

BABIES ARE MOSTLY a signal for hope, though every pregnancy crafts its own kaleidoscope of worries. The three short stories in this Lilith issue express both joy and the fears that pregnancy and parenthood carry. Life and art run on parallel tracks, and right now every real-life pregnancy can be considered a crisis pregnancy, thanks to the new dangers in accessing every sort of appropriate reproductive and prenatal care in the U.S. and elsewhere. And what happens once the sweet babies emerge? Parental anxieties don’t vanish. The kaleidoscope keeps turning and anxiety takes new shapes. Babies now enter a world where vaccinations against measles or polio are no longer the norm—and hard-won herd immunity is being extinguished. And when those babies grow into adults, even if they live in a country where they are citizens, their vulnerabilities may multiply. Sometimes neither their parents nor worried citizens will be able to protect them from bad outcomes. Just look at the faces of the parents in agony over their children still—even as I write this—chained, starved and tortured in Gaza’s tunnels for more than 18 months, or the mothers unable to nurse their infants because they themselves can’t get food in Gaza’s aboveground rubble, or the parents in Sudan and Ukraine right now who have no way to get their
children out of harm’s way.

Showing up to try to ameliorate excruciating circumstances like these can feel unsafe for many right now. Which is what the fascist playbook prescribes: that otherwise decent people become afraid to risk their own safety, or even their standing, to speak out and step up to mitigate harm to others. Potential helpers many not themselves be courting danger by taking a stand against injustice, but in a climate of threats and retribution, ordinary helpfulness and compassion start to look risky. Even in the United States (land of the free, home of the brave), expressing support for abortion care, or opposing arrests without cause,
can trigger consequences unimaginable just a few months ago.

If you’re lucky enough to feel you’re in stable circumstances right now, imagine yourself otherwise. Here’s a simple, nonpolitical exercise: remember some of your own humble, homely domestic objects. That coffee mug, framed diploma or family photograph is a stand-in for security, continuity and the safety of home. Taste and smell, those reliable olfactory decoders, are triggers too, which is why they’re so powerful in unlocking our flashbacks, especially for people who by choice or necessity have left the places where the memories were laid down.

For refugees, migrants, survivors of wars or assaults, California fires or North Carolina floods, what replaces once familiar objects or sensations? A few pages from here you’ll encounter Gursha, the memoir-cum-cookbook from Beejhy Barhany, creator of the Harlem restaurant Tsion Café. The book’s
title refers to her culture’s practice of feeding others directly with one’s hands, placing food into the mouths of relatives or guests—not just into the mouth of a baby—to express affection or hospitality. Food customs and flavors are inextricable from her history, first in Africa and, after walking by night across the desert from Ethiopia into Sudan, finally in Israel and then America. The recipes, foodways and associations remain, while left behind are the lush pumpkin and pepper fields and her Ethiopian Jewish
family’s millennia-long history on that fertile land.

Other immigrants face harsher fates. Which is why, in these fraught times, you may be seeking ways stand with—and stand up for—people who have lost protections in addition to their possessions. What can you offer beyond empathy? Read carefully in this issue of the steps you might want to take. They might be as direct as accompanying a worried individual on a routine errand so that this person in the place you call home can feel a little safer, a little less vulnerable to being seized on the street or
held without due process in a prison.

Grooved into Jewish historical memory—present in our very cells, some say—is the recollection of what it is to have had zero protection under the law. (See under: Queen Esther’s Persia; Inquisition-era Spain and Portugal; Nazi Germany, et al.). We understand how edicts can be issued and twisted to turn “aliens”—even babies—into outcasts and then into hunted pariahs. Our wearily familiar but nonetheless useful Bible stories instruct us to welcome strangers, offer hospitality, even provide refuge, reminding Jews (as if we needed mnemonic devices) that we ourselves were once strangers in a strange land.

Even our homelands can feel strange these days.

Susan Weidman Schneider