From the Editor

Let’s start with the last page first.

I pass the storied Russian Tea Room as I walk to the Lilith office along the Manhattan block we share. One of these places is a busy small clubhouse full of books, laptops, charging cords and the remains of take-out lunches, the other is plushly decorated and archly advertised as “slightly to the left of Carnegie Hall.” No prizes for guessing which is which.

In my teens I had a memorable dinner at RTR with my parents and then-renowned cantor and opera star Sidor Belarsky, along with Sidor’s Argentinian friend who wore a large jeweled ring. I had never seen a jewel on a man’s hand before. Our cluster of Jews “of Russian extraction” was seated in an elegant and rather tarted-up setting of luxurious banquettes and fancy lighting, with delectable items exquisitely served—little pelmeni dumplings, hot broth, cold borscht.

What I remember most was not the food, though, but the mix at the table. The mood of that evening felt to me (even as a kid) both assonant and dissonant. My Canadian-born parents both had deep roots in this alien-but-familiar enemy culture from which their families had escaped. Sidor, my mother’s friend (she always referred to him by his first name), had made it out of danger, coming to the United States in 1930s with his wife and young daughter. I never found out more about his Argentinian Jewish guest, nor was I poised enough to ask any questions, but that evening’s memories surfaced for me when our back page memoir from Sue Wiliam Silverman brought the feeling forward—a clash I hadn’t quite been able to name as a teenager.

It’s not that the glamour was alien—my mother had been pretty glamorous—but rather the taken-for-granted Jewishness at our table in the context of a culture from which our families had fled. My father’s father and grandparents arrived in Winnipeg in 1882, plucked from pogroms by the benevolence of Baron de Hirsch, who also helped settle Jews in Colorado, and in Argentina. My mother’s father came in 1904 from what is now Ukraine, escaping partway through his 25-year servitude in the Tzar’s army. (“Too bad you’re a Jew.” his commander had told him, scorn masquerading as reluctant praise.) Zayde had hidden in a peasant’s cart, had swum across a river, and had somehow managed to make it to safety on the Canadian prairie.

For so many Jews, the immigrant’s experience is never far from consciousness. You’ll see this in its updated version in Rebecca Katz’s comic about keeping her children safe, the not- at-all-funny rendering of this artist’s present-day passport panic.

Unfunny jokes were often a feature of Jewish life in the Old Country. One ugly and memorable one features a grandmother climbing into a tree to hide from rapists. Asked by a young man why an old lady needed to hide, she spits back, “What’s the matter with you! You think there are no old Cossacks?”

That threat of sexual violence as a weapon of war persists. The terror induced even by the threat is a misogynistic weapon waiting to be used against every woman. In Susan Brownmiller’s landmark 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, she named rape as “a conscious process of intimidation” to keep all women in “a state of fear.”

Look at how justice may be newly served in Guatemala, where women raped 40 years ago by “patrollers” seeking to maintain the then-government’s power are just now having their day in court. For 60 years at least, news reports have covered cases of mass rapes in conflict zones—Ethiopia, Ukraine, Congo—with rapes as a way both to terrorize an enemy and, in cases where the rapes were not followed by murder of the rapists’ victims, as a way of diluting the genetic pool of the enemy nation.

The history of rape as a weapon of war has now been horrifically updated by the October 7 sexual assaults, mutilations, murders and devastation perpetrated by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel and the kibbutzim and villages abutting Israel’s border with Gaza. Notable women in Israel—as you will read in the Voices section and on Lilith’s social media posts and online—document and present clear testimony about the sexual violence from surviving eyewitnesses, from captives returned from the tunnels of Gaza, and from what forensic evidence was able to be gathered by responders facing the charred ruins of those attacks. Just released, The Dinah Project, compiled by these impeccably credentialed Israeli women—academics, a retired judge, an Israeli military officer and others—presents the excruciating evidence.

Despite the pleasures we can feel in good bookstores, and in memorabilia unearthed in a relative’s house, and in reading and re-reading wonderful fiction, the world feels much less safe than it did in that upholstered booth at the Russian restaurant.

Susan Weidman Schneider