My first post! I am Anna Schnur-Fishman, a student in Providence, RI, at Brown U.

A bit about me: my Jewish influences include ten months of Modern Orthodox dayschool, Labor Zionist summer camp, summers of intensive Yiddish study, having a rabbi mom, being queer-in-residence of Brown’s Hillel and former Jew-in-residence of my high school. (I’m taking a statistics class and I can’t help wondering how I would plot those on a Jewish Background graph.) I learned about feminism in each of these places, but primarily from my father, my mother, and the hyphen that they gave me.

And what will I be writing about? Look out for my recurring-est topics – this past summer spent working at an orphanage in China; the domestic nannying gig that prepared me for that; being queer in and out of the Jewish world; and the idiosyncratic blends of Judaism lived by us youths of today – how we keep kosher, what we think about our Holocaust education, whether or not we like our Hebrew names.

Since my stint in China this summer, my approach to language has been rather pragmatic. (I refused to learn any words that could be mimed.) My philosophy on writing, of late, has been similarly informed: everyone knows some things that some other people need to know. What’s great, especially in the Internet age, is that all we need is honesty to achieve that grand communication. For example: X blogs about these bizarre baby dreams she has incessantly, and Y is relieved she isn’t alone. Y has a way of looking at death that she puts into a poem that helps Z. Z writes an article about how to get ivy to grow up your house’s wall for that A – a romantic when it comes to ivy – is eternally grateful. (By the way, X is me; Y is someone I hope exists.)

So! Up next week: Body image, staging a shower-in, and the book about Jewish concepts of modesty that my baal-tshuva [returned-to-the-faith] cousin gave me (and I finally read).

–Anna Schnur-Fishman

Source: Introducing: Youth Today