Uncovering the Darker Stories

Sometimes we worried, at Lilith, that too many of our stories were “bail news”—addictions in Jewish Families, painful Holocaust stories, domestic violence in Jewish homes, genetic diseases. AIDS among Jewish women —and not enough of our stories were “good news.” But we value female Holocaust survivors’ narratives as a precious legacy. And the Jewish community’s characteristic “silence” around many problems and pathologies in our culture senes only Judaism’s collective sense of shame; it doesn’t serve the individually disempowered among us: the female, the young, the old, the poor, the mentally’ or physically ill, the hidden.

For many reasons, perhaps —anti-Semitism, concern over the marriage ability of offspring, Jews’ defensive sense of being culturally superior— Jews have been, as a people, allergic to our own “dirty laundry.” Lilith, though, has been staunchly committed to uncovering painful truths in our midsts, and we’ve occasionally taken hard knocks for doing so. “Speaking our truths” is a core piece of Lilith’s feminist, ethical mission; with our readers’ help, we intend to speak more of them.