Author: Marvel Roth

On Tuesday, September 29, the Supreme Court temporarily ruled that the Trump administration can deport immigrants to third-countries, or a country other than the one they consider their homeland. This ruling comes as an extension of a continued string of court cases targeting the due process protections for immigrants and asylum seekers in the United States. 

Previously this year, the Trump administration won an appeal in a federal court that re-granted them the right to expeditiously deport migrants throughout the nation, not only along the southern border. In the Justice Department’s court filing for the case, they described this mechanism of speedy deportations, which can bypass due process protections, as an “essential tool to combat the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration over the past few years” and to deport their aimed goal of millions of migrants. This new Supreme Court ruling, allowing for third country deportations including to unsafe nations, comes as an expansion of these attacks on due process protections for migrants within the United States.

Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Policy explains in a written statement that “detainees have made a powerful case that their process rights are being violated.” She expands that “the Court’s approach effectively allows the policy [of third country deportations] to continue longer” and “to affect a greater number of people.” She maintains that even if the Court ultimately reverses its temporary decision, it will be “practically extremely difficult for any of those deported under it ever to find a meaningful remedy.” Pearlstein elaborates that the interim ruling by the court on third country deportations, as on “birthright citizenship, the destruction of government agencies, and more…effectively allow even blatantly illegal executive actions to continue indefinitely, causing some harms (like this one) often very hard to correct after the fact.”

Pearlstein’s points are echoed by Douglas S. Massey, an Emeritus professor of Sociology at Princeton University, who holds that third country deportations have crossed the line into an unconstitutional mass relocation program, now temporarily allowed for by the Court. In a written statement, he shared how “the Trump administration’s immigration, detention, and removal policies are unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional.” 

Throughout Trump’s campaign, he shared in rallies his intention to “begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” As means to accomplish this goal, the administration has resorted to means of removing migrants, bypassing their due process, changing the legal system through executive orders, and deporting migrants to nations they may not consider their homeland or to nations they may have never been to. 

Massey associates the third country deportation policy as reflecting Trump’s “desire to accumulate and exercise power.” He references “the current deportation regime” which”plays favorably with his racist base…who hate immigrants and resent their presence” in the country.

An American pro se legal coach, Amelia, who preferred to only be identified by her first name for the protection of those she supports in the system, works to help those who can’t afford lawyers to understand the constantly shifting legal grapevine of immigration cases. 

“In immigration court, you are not appointed a lawyer. You have to find one,” Amelia explains. She is severely concerned by the third country deportation policy on the grounds that many of her clients do not have access to proper technology, are not literate, and do not understand the legal structures changing around them. She describes a “cycle of deportation” that migrants face within the American system: “people get deported, and they have to leave [where they are deported to] against as they originally left because they feared something in their home country.” She details how some of the migrants she supports have been deported multiple times. 

Another pro se legal coach at Amelia’s clinic who preferred to speak anonymously shared that, “by adding this third country option for deportation, when talking about people getting removed to third countries, the United States government is not stupid. They are trying to make it impossible for these people to return.” She describes the policy as a “fear tactic. If you are scared of being tortured or dying, and you hear by entering the U.S. that you could be sent to be tortured or die somewhere else, now you are faced with an impossible situation of what you can do.”

Another concern as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision two weeks ago is potential violation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), one of the hallmarks of the United Nation’s human rights work. Some of the nations the Trump administration is deporting migrants to are widely considered unsafe, torturous, are in active conflict zones, or are unsanitary prison facilities. Deportation to these nations, especially of third country deportees, may cross the line into violating the UNCAT, despite potential diplomatic assurances that deportees will not be subjugated to torture. However, as Massey states, “diplomatic assurances have no legal and standing and little moral weight…but for the Trump administration, that is the point.” There have already been reports of sexual violence, torture, and solitary towards asylum seekers deported under the third country deportation program.

This week, watching Green Border was hard. There is something so symbolic to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers to be found in those forests between Poland and Belarus. The forest feels inescapable, meandering back and forth. Barren. Border patrol from both nations using asylum seekers as pawns in a geopolitical border war, constantly pushed over, under, and through barbed wire fences. The forest, its leaves fallen, branches stabbing the cold feet of those seeking a better life, only succeeds at providing ambiguous cover for the racist atrocities committed onto refugee families.

A boy drowns. Mothers are beaten as they pay their last dollars for water, their way to their final asylum destination already paid for previously. Activists are jailed.

This film, although a dramatic and fiction, closely resembles and creates images akin to real experiences along the Poland Belarusian board during the refugee crisis. 

One part of the film, though, I found myself struggling with was the postscript at the very end. The film states that during the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, that Poland welcomed almost two million Ukrainian refugees. This contrasts the refugee crisis dating back to 2014 that the postscript explains has lead to the untimely death of “about 30,000 people…crossing various European borders, at sea, on land, in forests.” 

There are some implications I find myself struggling with in this created dichotomy. There is no doubt that the Polish Belarusian border war, which uses and abuses asylum seekers, is horrific and spurred by conflict between Poland, a member of the EU, and Belarus, an effective satellite nation for the Russians through the supranational union established by the Belarusian-Russian Union State. The film explores the racism of the Polish border patrol, referring to the refugees as “darkies.” The Ukrainian refugee crisis, though, appears to be minimized by the film makers as a war “in Ukraine” as opposed to an invasion of Ukraine with the goal of establishing increased sentimentality for refugees stuck in the “Green Border” without expedited treatment by the Polish. However, especially because of Poland’s geopolitical tensions with Russia, their accepting of millions of Ukrainian refugees has an element of geopolitical tactic to it beyond a racial construct: it is symbolic. There is a strategy by the Polish government, and by the European Union, to welcome Ukrainians. For one, Poland shares a border with Ukraine and is in the EU. The other European Union border nations with Hungary also accepted a large number of Ukrainian refugees: around 140,000 Ukrainians went to Hungary within two weeks of the invasion and within three months of the invasion, over 442,000 Ukrainians fled to Slovakia and 961,270 fled to Romania, the other two EU border nations. While Poland took the most Ukrainians by number, in proportion to the country’s population, Slovakia took in the second most with Czechia taking in the most.

Here, I view it important to contextualize that geopolitical relation, and quantitative data, can demonstrate a narrative. Two contrasting immigration stories out of the same nation do not make one more or less important, or grueling. 

What is critical is to examine, with care, the brutality that all refugees are escaping; there is space for criticizing a government like Poland’s for not treating all asylum seekers equally, but the context of geopolitical conflicts should be referenced for context.

On Tuesday, September 29, the Supreme Court temporarily ruled that the Trump administration can deport immigrants to third-countries, or a country other than the one they consider their homeland. The ruling comes as a win for the Trump administration amidst a slew of cases set to be heard by the Supreme Court relating to migrants and immigrants. The emergency ruling went unsigned, as is normal for these one-page rulings. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the three liberal justices on the court, noted they would not have voted in favor of resuming third country deportations.

Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy, notes in a written statement notes how, as this case is an “‘interim’ decision on [the Court’s] ‘emergency’ or ‘shadow’ docket…the Court hasn’t actually yet decided the important Due Process issue in the case – it has just said the administration can continue its existing policy while the case challenging its legality is making its way through the Courts.”

Douglas S. Massey, an Emeritus professor of Sociology at Princeton University, shared in a written statement “I would think the policy [of third country deportations] violates both the 5th and 14th Amendments. It’s part of a process known as ‘crimmigration’: treating what had been civil infractions of immigration law as criminal offices.” 

He continues that “the Trump administration has cut the funding and personnel for immigration courts, compelling judges to resort to short cuts such as collective trials and hearings that effectively deny immigrants a chance to defend themselves.” The second Trump administration fired around 25 percent of immigration judges while around 3 million cases are in the Immigration court backlog and 2.3 million immigrants await asylum hearings. While this year, around 750 thousand immigrants have been ordered to be deported, only 24 percent of those immigrants served a removal order had an attorney in Immigration court. 

As of early September, the Trump administration sent at least 25,000 immigrants to a minimum of 29 third-countries. Many of these countries are undergoing active armed conflicts and are widely considered unsafe, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, and South Sudan. According to United States law, the government may not deport persons to any country where they shall be persecuted, tortured, or sent into harm.

In March of 2025, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a video of herself at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a maximum security prison in El Salvador, and one of the confirmed locations for third country deportations. Her message: “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW.  If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” There have been reports of sexual violence, torture, and solitary at the facility towards asylum seekers. Around 300 deportees have been sent to CECOT by the Trump administration. 

Another one of the prisons the United States is using third country deportation processes to send migrants to is a complex in Juba, South Sudan known to have unsafe living conditions. These men were transferred to South Sudan after a lower U.S. federal court had issued a block on third country deportations and prior to the Supreme Court’s temporary reversal on September 29th. South Sudan is one of the poorest nations in the world and is actively fighting a high-casualty civil war. 

The Supreme Court has fast tracked the case and will hear oral arguments in December. The final ruling on the case can be expected in the next year.

CNN describes the AfD’s campaign, Vision 2026, as clearly aimed at challenging long-held European values. I was struck by Vision 2026’s parallels to the American far-right’s Project 2025, an extreme outline for an America-first reinvention being widely implemented through a slew of executive orders by President Trump. This same rhetoric can be found throughout the AfD’s campaign, with a Germany first mentality throughout its messaging. The populist messaging of the MAGA-right within America and the AfD in America are able to capitalize off of economic concerns. 

The AfD’s goal of “shutting down the asylum paradise” for instance, in order to prioritize resources to native-born Germans, may be an increasingly popular option for Germans as they remain in an economic slump mostly driven by rising energy costs and a declining eligible skilled workforce. By minimizing asylum, the AfD argues it can instead offer greater incentives for skilled immigrant laborers. Those rising energy costs, though, for instance, can be directly traced to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine; still, the AfD aligns itself with the asks of the Kremlin as its talking points relating to the on-going war.

The party’s interest in expanding the list of countries that Germany considers safe for migrants to return to does not take into account the destroyed infrastructure many of those countries continue to suffer from, such as Syria after the fall of Assad. This, the AfD hopes, could make housing more affordable for native-born Germans and free up resources to put towards Germans instead of towards supporting refugee migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and the Ukraine. 

Still, the AfD’s demonstrating of wanting to protect its culture, the German language, and reimagine the priorities of its history curriculum away from Holocaust-remembrance and towards German war legends such as Otto van Bismarck highlights how economic prosperity is not at the heart of all of their initiatives. Economic struggles have historically led to scapegoating, including in and famously in Germany (the rise of Hitler and Nazism as a response to the Great Depression). Still, this correlation creates zero convincing causation of scapegoating tactics and nationalist extremism as improving the economic condition of a nation. Brexit, for instance, resulted in British economic collapse as opposed to solving it. That same German isolationist policy summarized by a “Europe of Fatherlands” and a “sovereign Germany” cultivates hatred for refugees that are stuck between an unsafe homeland and a lack of upward mobility opportunities, such as those that the Ukrainian refugees, who have been encouraged to not work, are experiencing. 

Berlin is home to one of the finest, and most renowned orchestras in the world: the Berliner Philharmoniker (Berlin Philharmonic). This orchestra is comprised of members from thirty nations, including from nations at war with each other. The Berliner Philharmoniker and its conductor Kirill Petrenko have been ambassadors for UN refugee aid since 2021, the first organisation to earn such a status. The Philharmoniker has publicly supported UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe, the German partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since 2021.

Petrenko, a Russian-Austrian Jewish conductor, has publicly condemned the Russian invasion of the Ukraine as a violation of international law and as an attack on the arts. The Philharmoniker has been an official patron of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine since 2023. 

In November of 2026, the Philharmoniker will host a family concert in aid of the UN Refugee Agency, as they have consistently since 2021. At the end of the season during the summers, the orchestra also performs an outdoor concert as a fundraiser for the UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe, with the musicians wearing blue ribbons in solidarity with refugees. 

The orchestra, as an orchestra of musicians from dozens of countries, represents an interesting microcosm within Berlin of hope amidst the rise of the AfD: through the arts, musicians from across borders at war with each others can create art together and advocate for refugees across the world. 

With the rise of the AfD, the Philharmoniker’s public messaging in support of refugees appears to have grown smaller. The artist bios of the musicians, which may have previously stated their country of origin are now revised. In Berlin, I hope to profile the symphony’s work in the refugee advocacy space, write an update on their work in support of the Kyiv orchestras (which has not been done since 2023), and interview musicians and arts administrators on their relationship with the UNHCR, UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe, and the relationships between musicians in the orchestra from nations at war with each other. 

While we will be in Berlin, the Philharmoniker will be on their South American tour. However, next week, they will be in New York City performing at Carnegie Hall. I am currently working to see if I can set up interviews with members of the orchestra will they will be here, and also with members and administrators who are not on tour with the orchestra currently to meet with them in Berlin. I also want to speak with affiliates at the UNHCR and with Ukrainian refugee musicians in Berlin. 

Being a musician is a skilled trade, and also one that often doesn’t require a shared spoken language at the highest levels. The Berliner Philharmoniker, like most premiere orchestras, conducts blind auditions to fill open chairs, or vacancies in the symphony, and does not require German proficiency, unlike many jobs within Berlin. This can result in an orchestra of the finest musicians, and also musicians who may, should they not have earned a permanent position in the orchestra, would be unable to work in Berlin. 

In contrast to the Berliner Philharmoniker, as they will be in South America while we are in Berlin, I hope to interview local musicians, especially migrant or refugee musicians. These are often musicians who “busk” on streets, perform in refugee cafés, nightclubs, lounges, or other smaller musical venues within the city. Therefore, a secondary question guiding my reporting is: does the Berliner Philharmoniker, as an organization that explicitly aims to combat refugee crises, do enough to support refugees within its own city?

Azmat Khan’s reporting in the New York Times on the miscalculations, confirmation biases, and failures by the American Military in its airstrike campaigns in the Middle East reveals a horrifying reality of American zealousness and disregard for excessive collateral damage. 

Khan explains how the military operates on the protocol that expected civilian casualty must be ‘proportional’ to military advantage gained. Considering American weapons are incredibly precise and accurate, it should be anticipated that civilian casualties would be extraordinarily low in aerial strikes. Yet, recklessness from the military can result in civilians going unidentified (for reasons such as Ramadan fasts), falsely identified as threats, being seen in footage yet not noted in communications directly prior to strikes, or for being, for redacted reasoning, hit in rogue strikes. The images portrayed and revealed by Khan demonstrate the military at what I would hope is its most careless, though I fear that may be optimistic. 

Some figures are staggering. When coming to accountability, in only one out of 1311 assessments did the Pentagon have investigators visit a strike site and in only two did investigators interview survivors. While safety risks should be considered, the overreliance on video footage, which at times has too much brevity, only frame the parts of footage the Pentagon wants to acknowledge (and keeping ‘bad targets’ out of the frame), or not capturing video footage to have reviewed. 

In Afghanistan specifically, Khan notes that “on average, each household lost five civilian family members,” largely as the result of airstrikes or American soldiers misinterpreting Afghan civilian men for Taliban. This rings particularly salient at the same time as, in many of the other articles such as those in EuroNews, Politico, Reuters, focused on Germany’s new policy under Chancellor Merz of deporting Afghans and attempting to minimize asylum application numbers. Not only is Afghanistan unstable and unsafe for many who have attempted to leave, such as the Christian converts described in The Times who were murdered by the Taliban after being deported back to Afghanistan, but it is also unsafe for civilians due to the carelessness of the American military. I wonder how the AfD or other right-leaning conservatives in Germany view the American military’s actions in the Middle East. Would the AfD fault the US for part of why asylum is sought while the Trump Administration is in power?

It is important to note that Khan’s reporting would not be necessary had the Pentagon revealed their own missteps through appropriate paper trails and accountability measures. Instead, such a burden falls on American journalists to carry out to the extent possible, often through incredibly dangerous measures, including those that could result in boots-on-the-ground civilian journalist casualties through the very practices Khan is investigating. This is one of the many reasons why the media scares militaristic regimes and autocrats.

I was taken aback by the Guardian article detailing the rise of attacks on refugees in Berlin. The sharp increase attacks on refugees and asylum seekers by 133% from 2023 to 2024 and the introduction of deliberate residential damage to the homes of refugees, including 34 refugee hospitalizations, demonstrates in stark ways how the Berliners are quickly growing impatient with refugees living in their city (Guardian).

The coinciding rise of German rightwing extremist crime rising by 17% and the growing popularity of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party are worrying.

Meanwhile, more specifically towards Ukrainians, their exemption from German asylum requirements make them a specific scapegoat for German targeting. Germany took in over 1 million Ukrainian refugees since the onset of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, and has spent tens of billions of euros on the integration of Ukrainian refugees.

In hosting the refugees, there are special exhibits that are touching. These include the air-raid bunker exhibition in Berlin and the ‘Unity Hub’ offered for Ukrainian refugees. Still, I can’t help but think whether or not these offerings to Ukrainians are ultimately resulting in a feedback loop of violence against them.

The Unity Hub, for instance, comes with it a sense of normalcy with educational and career opportunities (Kyiv Independent). For a people who has sought refuge in masses in a country frustrated with non-native-borns coexisting with them, I fear that offering those sorts of educational opportunities within Berlin may result in greater distasteful feelings of resources going towards refugees.

That said, the Ukrainians have survived worse than the German far-right when in Ukraine under invasion. Descriptions of Ukrainians no longer scared of the bomb sirens, and playing a twisted game of “Russian” roulette with bomb locations, potentially sacrificing their lives for the sake of a few more hours of ‘rest’ demonstrate the pain and fear the Ukrainian people have become accustomed to (Deb’s Substack). Therefore, I imagine Ukrainians, like many refugees, are willing to take that ‘risk’ of growing far right extremism within Berlin, to avoid the death and mass casualty that comes with remaining in their homes. Joy, remembrance, and opportunity become even more sacred in diaspora, even if carrying risk of antagonizing the AfD.

It’s darkly humorous to want to keep only certain types of refugees. The German health care system being reliant on Syrian doctors staying, while pushing legislation to make Syrians leave Germany is reminiscent of my experiences in America. In conservative politics: there are the minorities that are ‘good’ or ‘serve an economic purpose’ and there are those that are demonized. In the New Arab article, I was struck by the descriptions of those who were able to successfully integrate into German society as “cordially welcome” while those who haven’t should be returned to Syria. 

The profile on four of the 6,000 Syrian doctors working in Germany was striking in their similarities: those with profound pride in their Syrian identity, making homemade flags and hoping to help rebuild his broken county in the post-Assad era, while continuing to serve the German healthcare system. Still, even in a post-Assad Syria, infrastructure remains bleak. The healthcare system is not as advanced as the German one, incentivizing Syrian doctors to continue to work in Germany, even in its less desirable and rural hospitals. 

The German government has been attempting to encourage voluntary return of Syrian asylum seekers and refugees to Syria, though despite Assad’s fall, 91% of a returnees to Syria arrived in community lacking essential services (New Arab). German society allows for this scale of hatred to be stated.

I was struck by the Washington Post’s feature of Rania Kadib Alban, a Syrian ENT who has integrated into German society. She describes that the quality of her German is now strong enough that a patient at her practice thought she was a “native-born local” before going on a rant against foreigners. Alban’s summary of this interaction as “‘funny, sad, racist’’ is accurate but chilling (Washington Post). Growing up in America, I am used to these “funny, sad, racist” interactions, though they are often less overt. I am shocked by the blatancy during in-person conversations in which Germans feel comfortable to voice their prejudices, especially considering their history. I am curious what this comfort stems from, and particularly, if it stems from the differences in German freedom of expression than the American freedom of expression allowances. I find this interesting largely because hate speech and insults are explicitly outlawed in Germany, whereas they are not in the US while German anti-immigrant sentiment appears incredibly vocal during in-person interactions such as this one with Alban.

There is also some level of saviorism amongst Europeans and the US that Mrie explores in Defiance despite those same anti-immigrant sentiments explored. One of those examples is the civil society workshop Mrie attended hosted by an Egyptian activist acting as though the an Alawite and a Kurd would be unable to split an orange equally or create a YouTube account (Mrie). Those moments reminded me of social justice fundraising initiatives that often go not directly to survivors or refugees, but towards broken systems or these sorts of westernizing workshops, in solving problems in ways that feel comfortable. Meanwhile, Syria still doesn’t have the proper infrastructure for refugees to repatriate, despite efforts of nations like Germany and Austria (InfoMigrants). 

Marisa Hirschfield is a musical comedy writer. She can easily make you cry, but would rather make you laugh. She hates self-definitions, still, she describes herself as a ‘character.’ “I hate thinking of who I am…but I love to narrativize my life.”
“She is effortlessly funny, and a great writing partner,” Mira Ho-Chen, Marisa’s co-head writer for the Princeton Triangle Club, a 135-year old musical comedy club at Princeton University, describes her. “She’s good in a room and good at making people feel thoughtful and valued. When she talks to people, it can look like she knows for years, but she had in reality just met them one minute prior.”
India Brown, one of Hirschfield’s closest friends, described Hirschfield endearingly. “She has a lot of intelligence and sophistication, is funny and down to earth, and is stupid in a good way, in an unpretentious way. She’s somebody you’d want to experience things with.”
Hirschfield illustrates her personality through a story about swimming in the ocean with a friend. Despite rough water and red-flag conditions, she was a strong swimmer. A lifeguard checked on her, and she waved him off, signaling she could swim fine. He misinterpreted the gesture, concluding that she was drowning despite her nonchalance.
“Two lifeguards on either arm began to non-consensually rescue me while everyone on the beach was applauding.” She insists she didn’t need the help and the entire time was so confused. The moment was humiliating, but Hirschfield believes it summarizes who she is, or at least how she views herself. “I love describing my life as funny and dramatic, it makes it more manageable and fun.”
Brown laughs when recounting Hirschfield’s unneeded rescue. “Marisa is a character, she is singular and unique and on her own plane of being. But that story with the lifeguards, I just laugh, because there are paradoxes to Marisa. She is very mature, but is also very fresh to the world. I think she’s very self aware of that fact, too. She aims to be so aware of the world, that there’s many things she’s completely unaware of. She’s aware on a cerebral level of so much, but not so much in her actions. With the lifeguards, how does that happen? There’s a certain passivity to her.”
Beyond her verbal wit and humor, Hirschfield brings physical comedy along the lines of a sitcom to daily life, largely through her obliviousness to routine chores. “She is very motivated to pursue her own ambitions and is unconcerned about small things that get in the way of that. She’s actually really terrible at menial tasks.” Brown recalls a dinner party at a friend’s house where they had to clean up afterward “as is was our duty”, and Hirschfield struggled with the basics. She would grab a single knife and placing it on the counter instead of in the sink instead of multiple plates. It stemmed from genuine confusion rather than a lack of willingness. “She excels at so many things, but simple chores…not so much.”
Still, Hirschfield is hardly detached from reality, approaching life and social justice with serious care. Growing up in a Jewish home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and attending a K-12 private school focused on ethical culture in the Bronx, she developed an acute awareness of her sheltered upbringing and a boundless curiosity about people from different backgrounds. “Since I was five years old, I have always believed one should work in the public interest.”
As a comedy writer, she harbors doubts about whether humor is an inherent force for good. “Comedy is helpful for a purpose of levity when the world feels serious. But in comedy, you can also be restricted to preaching to the choir. I don’t want to just tell feminist jokes in a room of feminists,” she explains.
In practice, however, Hirschfield does tell feminist jokes to feminist audiences and beyond since she founded a campus club called ‘Women Aren’t Funny.’ According to Ho-Chen, traditional writers’ rooms, including the Princeton Triangle Club, can sometimes skew male, leading to situations where men decide what is funny on their own. “The bigger comedy organizations skew more normative, so when Marisa pitched a really funny joke about Gloria Steinem, the women loved it, but the guys wouldn’t get it and would shut it down” Ho-Chen explained. “‘Women Aren’t Funny’ helps carve out space for women and other marginalized voices in comedy to produce headlines, stand-up shows, and short films.”
Ho-Chen reflects on her co-writer’s approach: “Jokes just come to her, and she is very dedicated to getting jokes right.” Hirschfield is indeed committed to the craft of comedy and is equally dedicated to creating space for others. She may struggle with washing knives, but Hirschfield is sharp enough to carve out a whole new space for comedy on her own terms.

Interviewer: Marvel

Interviewee: Marisa

Marisa Hirschfield, a musical comedy writer who can easily make you cry and doesn’t understand you unless she can make you laugh, hates self-definitions. Still, she does self-define that she can best be described as a ‘character.’