The silence of the single-issue organization
Social justice entails many issues
I remember driving past a synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood that had a large banner out front proclaiming its support for reproductive rights, claiming these rights are a Jewish issue.
So I had to pause when I saw the headline for Renee Sherman’s article, “Repro funders must end the ‘wall of resistance’ on Palestine,” in Prism.[1] On the one hand, it’s understandable that reproductive rights organizations should want to focus on their raison d'être.
But I also remember that these organizations’ support for Hillary Clinton, an avowed neoliberal, in the 2016 presidential election led me to cut off all contact. Neoliberalism, with its circumscription of ‘value’ to quantitative value, especially monetary value, contributes in no small measure to the difficulties I face in a job search that has gone on, in one form or another, since the dot-com crash.
I could not support Clinton in 2016 because I see neoliberalism as antithetical to my own interests. I could not support Kamala Harris in 2024 because of the genocide in Gaza. And in each of these cases, I have been accused by multiple people of being a ‘single issue’ voter, willing to throw women’s rights under the bus. One antagonist even noted that she only saw men making the argument I made.
Sherman—I encourage you to read her article in full at https://prismreports.org/2025/05/28/reproductive-rights-funders-palestine/—correctly points out that feminism (since the third wave) has come to understand itself as intertwined with other social justice movements: Poverty is an attack on reproductive rights. And so is genocide. Both impair mothers’ abilities to raise their children in healthy and safe environments[2] just as surely as the denial of abortions to women who aren’t ready for children or who need them to save their own lives.
My objection to neoliberalism lies in the profound economic inequality it positively celebrates. My objection to genocide lies in human and nonhuman animal rights. I despair at the poverty I am forced to endure, even with a Ph.D. (earned in 2016). I despair at the poverty that others endure for whatever reasons. I have little hope that the slaughter of billions of nonhuman animals every year in the U.S. animal agriculture industry alone[3] will end any time soon. And I remember, that following the Holocaust in World War II, we said, “Never Again,” and that we said it like we meant it.
I despair at the cruelty our authoritarian system of social organization and so many of its participants revel in. And the reproductive rights organizations and advocates who fail to speak up against genocide fail to speak against a cruelty that stems from the same origin as the cruelty against women.
And so, now that I’m well away from Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, I wonder what that synagogue has to say about the genocide in Gaza. Is it silent too?
[1] Renee Bracey Sherman, “Repro funders must end the ‘wall of resistance’ on Palestine,” Prism, May 28, 2025, https://prismreports.org/2025/05/28/reproductive-rights-funders-palestine/
[2] Renee Bracey Sherman, “Repro funders must end the ‘wall of resistance’ on Palestine,” Prism, May 28, 2025, https://prismreports.org/2025/05/28/reproductive-rights-funders-palestine/
[3] Humane Ventures, “2025 U.S. Animal Kill Clock,” n.d., https://animalclock.org/