2

“Feminist Sexual Liberationists, Rootless Cosmopolitan Jews”

The New York City Movement

For Rosalyn Baxandall, the women’s liberation movement was “love at first sight.” Baxandall joined New York Radical Women (NYRW), the first women’s liberation group in the city, the minute she heard about it. She began going to activities three times a week: consciousness-raising sessions, a study group, and guerrilla street theater. Baxandall said, “Feminism solved my life’s puzzle: It showed me I wasn’t a weirdo. I felt we activists had all sprung from Medusa’s head and were truly sisters.” For four years, Baxandall enjoyed the heady days of participating in a social movement with other rebellious women; she was a member of NYRW in its heyday, from 1967 to 1969, and then joined NYRW’s most prominent offshoot, Redstockings. By the time Baxandall left Redstockings in 1971, she was burned out, tired of the “splits and backbiting,” and concerned that liberal feminists had appropriated and muted radical women’s social change activism.1 But, despite the disappointments, Baxandall knew that she had participated in a historic moment.

The New York movement differed from many important women’s liberation hubs, with more artists, more single and working-class women, and more women who had not been to college. Its greater heterodoxy in regard to age, class, and educational, marital, and work backgrounds created an exciting, often volatile mix. Ti-Grace Atkinson explained the appeal of the city for radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone and herself: “You come to New York, and you’re a weirdo, and you’re so happy to be with all the other weirdos who don’t think you’re weird. . . . It’s surprising, it’s thrilling, it’s like you’ve discovered your twin.”2 In New York, Jewish women were part of this varied, exciting group, open to experiments in ideas and practices and hoping to inaugurate, in Ruth Rosen’s words, “a truly democratic, egalitarian, and participatory movement.”3

Numerous Jewish women played major roles in developing radical feminism in the city. All worked alongside many other colleagues who emphasized universal goals, and most did not identify Jewishly. Nonetheless, their motivations and the ethical vision they brought to the movement were inflected by Jewish influences. In the exciting mix of ideas and actions that became women’s liberation, Jewish values and perspectives played a significant role.

Jews’ long association with subversive movements and their comfort with adversarial cultures made the Jewish presence within New York radical feminism of a piece with earlier intellectual and radical American movements. As had been the case for previous generations, social protest flourished in New York, providing safety for daring ideas and intellectual spaces in which experimenters could come together to formulate and disseminate them. Tolerant of diversity and with a secure and successful Jewish population, the city offered a perfect environment in which theories about a free womanhood percolated. As the communications hub of the nation, New York provided ready access to media, which were quick to recognize the news potential of the unfolding movement. The publishing industry’s interest in new ideas further encouraged risk-taking. As Jeffrey Gurock argues in Jews in Gotham, New Yorkers “believed and acted on the faith that their city could be the incubator of great ideas and the center for transformative movements.”4

The New York movement was distinctive among the nation’s proliferating women’s liberation groups because of the pioneering contributions of its radical feminist contingent. Probably the most important innovation was consciousness-raising, the process of sharing personal experience in a small group, which became the primary mode of understanding and theorizing about women’s condition. Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings, who had learned the practice during her time in the civil rights movement in the South, coined the phrase.5 The theoretical contributions of the New York women shaped emerging women’s liberation dialogues. In 1970 alone, they published a series of groundbreaking books: Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex.

While Chicago’s feminists were unable to escape the influence of New Left men, in Jo Freeman’s view, New York’s women’s liberationists, many of them civil rights veterans, were “freer to experiment.” Shulamith Firestone, who started three New York City women’s liberation groups and who had participated in CORE in St. Louis, represented “radical feminism uncontaminated by left-wing rhetoric, something one didn’t encounter much in those days,” according to Freeman.6 Baxandall describes the difference between Chicago and New York women’s liberation as the difference between Heather Booth, who had been closely involved with SDS and was married to Paul Booth, its former vice president and national secretary, and Ellen Willis, who had no close ties to the New Left. While Baxandall exaggerated the extent of these differences, given that Booth and her Chicago friends created a feminist space apart from their male partners, she expressed the perspective of New York women’s liberationists who believed that their comrades elsewhere, particularly in Chicago, were “practically speaking for their husbands’ factions.”7 In turn, Chicago feminists criticized the New York comrades as “elitist intellectuals” who focused too much on theory. “They were in a bubble.”8 Chicago’s strong labor and activist bent, contrasting with New York’s writers and intellectuals, also shaped emerging women’s liberation patterns.

Yet differences between “politicos” and “radical feminists” also roiled the New York movement. Divisions were so sharp, according to Susan Brownmiller, a member of New York Radical Women, that feminists outside the city came to describe the New York women’s liberation movement as a “sea of barracudas.” Socialist feminists and women-centered radical feminists clashed over whether capitalism alone or male supremacy in tandem with the class system should be the main target of attack. Even those who espoused the pro-woman line disagreed over structural, strategic, and ideological questions. Conflicts over the relative weight to be given to consciousness-raising versus action projects, elitism versus egalitarianism, and issues involving marriage, families, sexuality, and lesbian separatism all led to heated charges and countercharges. The intensity of feelings challenged the city’s radical feminists to hone their arguments and sharpened their theoretical contributions to the movement. In Brownmiller’s words, New York radical women “up[ped] the ante.”9

Jewish Radical Feminists of New York

Combative and feisty, a “prima donna” who never liked to do any of the menial work involved in movement life, the brilliant, articulate Shulamith Firestone was a leader in the three New York City groups that she initiated: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. Firestone had been barely twenty-two when she was told to “cool down” and prevented from bringing the women’s resolution to the floor of the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in 1967. After founding the New York groups, Firestone’s influence on women’s liberation became national in scope. She was “the firebrand,” “the fireball,” says writer Susan Faludi in her New Yorker profile of Firestone. To her friends, she was the “prime minister” of women’s liberation.10

Firestone’s writing helped to ground the early movement and articulate its place in feminist history. She was the author of several important essays—“Women and the Radical Movement,” “The Jeannette Rankin Brigade: Woman Power?,” and “The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.: A New View”—and the founder and editor of the movement’s unofficial newsletter, Notes from the First Year (1968), Notes from the Second Year (1970), and (with Anne Koedt) Notes from the Third Year (1971). These anthologies played a crucial role in transmitting new ideas to women’s liberation groups throughout the country. At a time when scholarship on the historical roles of women in the U.S. was in its infancy, Firestone boldly reassessed the first-wave feminist movement led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and their peers as a radical, rather than reformist, struggle, identifying second-wave women’s liberationists as its heirs. Her best-selling 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex gave the movement one of its earliest treatises based on radical feminist gender theory. Her book was not an academic study but a “manifesto,” a “fierce, funny, and outrageous exhortation to political change.”11

Within a few years, however, Firestone retreated into a more private life as an artist and poet and turned her back on the movement. Feminists later learned that she suffered from crippling mental illness, probably schizophrenia, and had endured decades of difficult treatments that further isolated her from family and friends. “For a long time, our movement was haunted by the terrible absence of Shulamith Firestone,” recounts Phyllis Chesler, comparing the demise of such a “shining and brilliant star” to that of Sylvia Plath a decade earlier—except that Firestone was very much alive. Historian Alice Echols asked how the trajectory of the women’s liberation movement might have changed “had Firestone stuck around.”12 After Firestone died, alone and undetected for several days, in the summer of 2012, a grieving community of friends asked the same question. And they asked another: might Firestone’s Jewishness have been an ingredient in her unique contribution to radical feminism? Firestone never explained the connection of her Jewish background to her feminist work. What was the nature of her connection to Judaism and to Jewishness? No one seemed to know.

The matter of Jewish identity also looms large in the case of Firestone’s Redstockings collaborator Ellen Willis, who came from a nonobservant Jewish background. In her almost forty years as a cultural critic for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, and other periodicals, Willis wrote bold, passionate, cutting-edge essays on popular culture, feminism, sexuality, psychoanalysis, politics, war and peace, religion and Judaism. While Firestone remained silent on Jewish issues, Willis explicitly referenced her Jewish identity. Willis saw “identity politics”—in her words, the “collective rubric for the liberation movements of women, blacks, gays and other subordinate or marginal groups”—as leading to fragmentation, “comparative victimhood,” and moral superiority. Yet she rejected its claims from the logic of her “own particular standpoint in the world” as a woman and Jew: “that is,” she said, “I speak as a woman who does not represent ‘women’—and as a Jew convinced that the fundamental bond among Jews is neither Zionism nor the 613 commandments but our historic commitment to the ever-unpopular position that the Messiah is yet to come.” Her positive identity as both feminist and Jew was rooted in her stance as a radical, utopian universalist, attempting to “recreate a politics that emphasizes our common humanity.”13

This chapter highlights two other prominent members of New York radical feminist groups: Redstockings member Alix Kates Shulman, author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), the best-selling “first” second-wave feminist novel; and Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will (1975), the landmark “discovery” of rape as a social, sexual, and feminist issue, who was associated with New York Radical Women. Along with Firestone and Willis, Shulman and Brownmiller etched out major principles of radical feminist theory in their groundbreaking works. The four women’s powerful indictment of patriarchy ranged over women’s life course: exploitative sexual double standards, rape and domestic violence, unequal relationships in love and marriage, the constraints of motherhood. Firestone’s, Brownmiller’s, and Shulman’s books and Willis’s New Yorker and Village Voice articles helped to put radical feminism on the national stage.

Shulman, a midwesterner like Firestone, and Brownmiller, from one of New York City’s outer boroughs, did not consider their Jewish backgrounds important at the time of their participation in women’s liberation, but later, in conversations with me, each reassessed her Jewishness as a factor in her feminist awakening. In a place where it seemed that “everyone was Jewish,” transplants such as Shulman and Firestone felt free to develop their creative and political passions, unfettered by the strictures of Orthodoxy or Jewish tradition or by the marginality or anti-Semitism with which they had grown up. Willis, raised in the Bronx and Queens, and Brownmiller, from Brooklyn, were secular atheists who nonetheless carried with them a deep connection to Jewishness that helped frame their ideas. The four women’s stories suggest that in New York’s women’s liberation community, as in Chicago, there was no single model for how Jewish-born radical feminists shaped their multiple identities. A brief account of the paradoxical Jewish background of Rosalyn Baxandall, a friend and associate of all of the women in the chapter, further complicates these heterodox patterns.

Of the group, only Willis seemed especially aware of the “out-of-proportion” involvement of Jewish women in women’s liberation. But she observed that their numbers were not enough to dominate leadership positions in the movement throughout the country. Furthermore, she speculated that outside New York, there were probably fewer Jewish women participants. New York City, she well knew, was a very special case.

For Willis, New York was a “real and imagined city where feminist/sexual liberationists, rootless cosmopolitan Jews, not-nice girls/boys/others, loudmouth exiles of all colors are an integral and conspicuous part of the landscape.” She believed that coming together in this “pariah community,” they would create a feminist revolution inflected by the Jewish cosmopolitan-exile experience.14 In eastern Europe and Russia, Jewish “cosmopolitanism” had been associated with urbanity, tolerance, and universalism, but it was a mind-set that had put Jews in jeopardy. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, anticosmopolitan propaganda had been a major component of anti-Jewish campaigns. Even in small towns and cities of the U.S., Jewish cosmopolitanism was sometimes associated with a dangerous libertinism and elitism. In America’s greatest city, however, Jewish radicals and feminists embraced the designation. Here they could call themselves citizens of the world.

The cultural-political perspectives of Jewish feminists interacted with the ideas of many other pioneering women’s liberationists in the city, Jewish and non-Jewish, including Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Irene Peslikis, Peggy Dobbins, Anne Koedt, Pat Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Ann Snitow, and Vivian Gornick. Acting within a communal context, innovative theory and practice emerged from group interaction.

Gornick did not participate in radical feminist organizations but is the author of an important Village Voice essay on the women’s liberation movement and co-editor of an early and influential anthology, Women in Sexist Society. She has had a distinguished career as a memoirist and nonfiction writer and has written about Jewish literature. Morgan, founding member of New York Radical Women and key organizer of its protest against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, was one of thirteen “politico” cofounders of the short-lived WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), an activist group known for its anticapitalist, antisexist street-theater protests, but then devoted most of her energies to writing and speaking as a radical feminist. Her anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful became an early manifesto of the movement. Morgan is the author of twenty books, including Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (1989), which incorporates interviews with Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza. Ann Snitow, a founding member of New York Radical Feminists and co-editor of the 1998 anthology The Feminist Memoir Project, became a professor of gender studies. None of these women identified as a “Jewish” feminist activist or writer. Although they are not subjects of this chapter, each contributed through her writings to innovative feminist literature, helping to provide a broad understanding of the movement in which they were active participants and further understandings of Jewish women’s contributions to radical feminism.15 The list of New York’s Jewish radical feminists could be expanded a great deal further.

Despite frictions among individuals and groups, the women highlighted in this chapter and other radical feminists in New York seized on the many opportunities for innovation that the city offered. Their movement was a revolutionary endeavor.

Shulamith Firestone: The “Prime Minister” of Women’s Liberation

Historians and sociologists who have studied the rebirth of feminism in the 1960s posit complex motivations, including changing social expectations, limited opportunities, and an increasingly frustrated constituency of young, educated women. Carol Hanisch, a major participant in New York Radical Feminists, said, “The question of what made any of us a feminist is a rather silly one. All we had/have to do was look around, our own lives included. What leads us to activism is the real question, and that has to do with seeing/finding a way to fight back.”16 For Shulamith Firestone, who had attended a Jewish girls’ seminary and become an art student and then a New Left activist in the late 1960s, the patriarchy in her family, her education, and male-dominated leftist politics brought her long-simmering anger to fever pitch and inspired her to find a way to fight back.

Firestone and Pam Allen (Chude Pamela Parker Allen), a former SNCC worker from San Francisco, started New York Radical Women in October 1967 shortly after Firestone left Chicago, having co-founded the West Side Group there. Allen heard about women’s liberation from Sue Munaker, a member of West Side.17 “That women would get together to talk about their lives without any males present was radical,” says Allen. “It freaked people out.”18 New York Radical Women, whose membership included Kathie Sarachild, Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, Anne Koedt, Pat Mainardi, and Kate Millet, performed several major actions. The most famous, the 1968 demonstration against the Miss America Pageant, when several dozen feminists placed high-heeled shoes, bras and girdles, Playboy magazines, brooms, and curlers into a Freedom Trash Can on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, attracted enormous publicity with its theatrical protest against patriarchy. Barely two years later, Firestone left NYRW and in February 1969, with Ellen Willis, formed Redstockings, an autonomous women’s liberation group not associated with the broader Left. The immediate catalyst for their action had been the shocking contempt shown by New Left men for radical women at the D.C. counter-inaugural, yet the split between “politicos” and radical feminists within NYRW had been brewing for some time. Radical feminism “alone succeeds in pulling into focus the many troubled areas of the leftist analysis, providing for the first time a comprehensive revolutionary solution,” Firestone wrote.19 In contrast to NYRW and the nascent Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Redstockings was unabashedly in the radical feminist camp.20 Coined by Firestone and Willis, the group’s name was a combination of two traditions: the “bluestocking” label disparagingly pinned on first-wave feminists and “red” for revolution.

Although Redstockings continued for a few years before officially disbanding as a result of burnout and political conflict, within six months, Firestone became disaffected with the group’s consciousness-raising focus. For Firestone, this was a missed opportunity to build a mass movement based on action. In February 1969, she started New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) with Ann Koedt. The first group it organized, West Village One, included writers Susan Brownmiller and (later) Alix Kates Shulman, both of whom had been involved in earlier radical women’s groups.21 But Firestone quit NYRF in spring 1970, after the group repudiated the “brigade”-based structure she had created.22 For Firestone, who felt that “mob rule” was responsible for the debacle, the break coincided with the beginnings of a steep psychological decline that soon isolated her from the movement. Nonetheless, she had initiated three feminist groups in New York that might not have existed without her.23 Each played a significant role in reorienting the national conversation about sexism.

Born in 1945, Shulamith Firestone was the eldest daughter of six siblings—three boys and three girls—and the only one born with the surname Feuerstein, which had been Anglicized by her paternal grandfather, then changed back, briefly, at the time of Shulamith’s birth in Ottawa, Canada, the home of her maternal grandparents. Raised in Kansas City and St. Louis, Shulie (the name everyone knew her by) studied at the Yavneh Teachers Seminary for women, which was affiliated with the all-male Telshe Yeshiva near Cleveland. She spent two years at Washington University and, an aspiring artist, became a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with a BFA in June 1967, shortly before her involvement in the women’s movement began.

The fate of her eldest brother, Daniel, the firstborn, weighed heavily on Firestone.24 Just a week under one year apart, they had grown up “almost like twins,” celebrating their bar and bat mitzvahs the same week; in the Orthodox tradition, girls come of age at twelve and boys at thirteen. Danny had been sent to yeshiva but shocked his family by leaving it to study philosophy, later teaching at a college and eventually finding his way to a Zen Buddhist monastery in Rochester, New York. Their father, Sol Firestone, an assimilated Jew from Brooklyn who became Orthodox as a young adult, warned his son about leaving the faith, as he did all his children, telling daughter Tirzah that “leaving the Torah life is like a fish leaving water.” Their mother, Kate Weiss Firestone, a Holocaust refugee, agreed: “You cannot leave your roots and expect to get away with it.”25 Her own brothers had been ordained as rabbis in eastern Europe, although they also had secular PhDs. The Firestone parents cut Danny off, giving him the “ostrich treatment.”26 They also cut off contact with Tirzah, when she took a non-Jewish husband.

In May 1974, Danny committed suicide by a gunshot wound to his heart; his body was found in a meadow in New Mexico, in front of a statue of Buddha. Although he had not spoken to Shulamith since high school, when she broke the Sabbath while their parents were away, the death of her brother shook her to the core. Danny’s death contributed to her “own growing madness,” she later revealed.27

How much Shulamith’s declining mental health had been exacerbated by family events or the disappointments she experienced within the movement, her own particular psychology and genetic inheritance, or a combination of these factors is difficult to determine. But it is useful to turn to Tirzah Firestone’s account of growing up in the Firestone household, as published in her memoir, With Roots in Heaven, as well as the reflections of sister Laya, who shared many movement experiences with Shulamith. Tirzah became a Renewal rabbi; Laya is a psychotherapist.

“Our parents raised us with an iron hand, rigid not only in religious doctrine but in methodology,” Tirzah recalled. “This meant that, quite aside from living ritually observant lives, any personal choices outside of my parents’ prescribed menu were minimal. My siblings and I grew up with an ever-present tension, an almost fanatical injunction to live ‘correctly’ as dictated by our parents and their dogmatic religious approach. In the end, the Jewish heritage we received was, sadly, not enriched by the intensity with which it was transmitted, but rather drained of its intrinsic joy and goodness.”28 The regimentation of this upbringing was not easy on the children. With Shulamith’s intensity and quickness to anger, it left her as rebellious as Tirzah, who (like their elder brother) often thought of suicide. For Tirzah, the only recourse was to travel “as far away from Judaism and anything representing [her] parents’ values as possible.” The Firestone siblings, who lived within the Orthodox community, never had any non-Jewish friends. Tirzah was excited to leave it to “discover the world beyond Jewish walls, and to become part of it.” So were Shulamith and Laya, who was two years younger. Tirzah, nine years Shulamith’s junior, explored an alternative spiritual path in Israel, New Mexico, and Boulder, Colorado. “Can’t you see how you are killing your mother?” her father asked Tirzah when she went off to explore a “higher consciousness.”29

According to Laya, Shulamith had always been “much more than [her] parents knew how to handle.” As a child, she asked endless questions about subjects that adults spoke about only in whispers, such as the Nazis and concentration camps. She brought home stray dogs, begging her parents to keep them. Once she organized a student visit to the Jewish Home for the Aged. Hearing a woman moaning in Yiddish, she tried to interview her. Had she been in the war? What did she see? What did she remember?30 Shulamith gravitated to people in underdog situations, Laya remembers. “She felt she wanted to raise them up. She was seeing real things because she had blinders pulled off. . . . She perceived suffering in a way that few people did. She would walk right into the fire.”31

Shulamith was always questioning, particularly about God and Jewishness. The rabbis at yeshiva could not handle her. “She had such vibrancy,” says Laya. “She was so animated, and she had such a great sense of self-reflection.” She was extreme, brilliant, fierce. “No one else had that fire.” She was driven to find out all the secrets that were covered up—for example, why family members refused to talk about her uncle Ernest, her mother’s brother, who defied his father’s wishes and became a doctor instead of following him into the rabbinate. Years later, he took his own life, nearly a decade before his nephew, Shulamith’s brother, also suffering the psychological costs of rebellion, committed suicide. The Holocaust was another secret that Shulamith probed relentlessly. She devoured everything she could about it, Laya remembers. At the age of twelve, she wrote to Etta Shiber, author of Paris Underground, a book about Shiber’s work in the Resistance, and was delighted when the author wrote back. Unflinching in her examination of what lay beyond the world her parents had circumscribed, Shulamith became Laya’s “portal to the rest of the world.”32

Shulamith’s intensity and stubbornness pitted her directly against her father, who “threw his rage at Shulie.” Their younger brother Ezra, who with brother Nechemia remained strictly Orthodox, felt that “he wouldn’t bend, and she wouldn’t bend. They were both very brilliant and very, very opinionated.” Kate Firestone provided little support for her daughters, holding a “completely passive view of femininity,” according to Tirzah. Yet, despite the fact that Shulie and her father were often at loggerheads, it was Sol’s death in 1981 that sent her into psychosis, in Tirzah’s view. “She lost that ballast he somehow provided.”33

When The Dialectic of Sex came out, Firestone’s parents faced a challenge from their eldest daughter far greater than her childhood bluntness, for the book embraced a truly radical idea: the annihilation of the nuclear family. Kate Firestone (who may never have read the book) boasted to her community that her daughter’s work was being read around the world and had been adopted for use in college classrooms. Her husband was not pleased by her notoriety. Tirzah remarked, “My father publicly howled in laughter at Shulamith’s outrageous views, declaring her manifesto to be the joke book of the century. I don’t think he ever realized just how much his own rigid, patriarchal style had served to shape his daughter’s politics.”34

Firestone had written The Dialectic of Sex in a white heat, finishing it in six months. Baxandall recognizes that some of its ideas grew out of the consciousness-raising discussions and readings that took place in New York Radical Women.35 Firestone was then only twenty-five and, with the help of Ellen Willis, who introduced her to a publisher, on her way to national fame, although the polarizing book also led to vilification, which took a heavy toll on her. The book boldly takes on Marx and Freud for their neglect of gender as a system based on unequal power relations. For Firestone, the theorist closest to the truth was Simone de Beauvoir, but she believed that even her existentialist heroine missed the mark by failing to see that women’s “Otherness” was founded in biology—from sex itself—women’s childbearing and child-rearing roles.36

Reviewing the book in the New York Times, John Leonard complimented its author for her “sharp and often brilliant mind” but took umbrage at some of Firestone’s “preposterous” assertions about gender and masculinity.37 Her call to free women from the “tyranny of their biology” through technologically managed reproduction and to replace the nuclear family with nontraditional households attracted widespread condemnation.38 Even Firestone’s radical friends were shocked by some of her beliefs. The Dialectic of Sex became what Ann Snitow called feminism’s most famous “demon text,” “demonized, apologized for, endlessly quoted out of context.” Snitow explained that it was patriarchy that Firestone wanted to smash, not mothers.39 In the decades since The Dialectic of Sex appeared, several of Firestone’s proposals have come to pass, including technologically assisted reproduction, but at the time, people many considered Firestone an outrageous provocateur, a destroyer of the family. Susan Brownmiller suggests that the mixed reviews were a “crushing defeat” for Firestone, leading her to lose her “emotional equilibrium and her sense of herself in the world.”40

Firestone’s treatise called for “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”41 In her utopian society, procreative sex would be abolished along with the biological family and heterosexual love relationships, which she saw as a “holocaust” for women because they were founded on “unequal power.” Firestone urged the overthrow of marriage and monogamy, which she saw as chains on women’s autonomy. Freedom would arise only after women seized control of reproduction, including their own fertility and “all the social institutions of childbearing and childrearing.”42

Firestone was among the few radical feminists who saw a path to revolutionary gender and social relations in “cybernetic socialism,” including such advances as in vitro fertilization and surrogate mothering, then barely on the horizon.43 While her ideas seemed like science fiction to many people, Firestone believed they could eradicate the power imbalances that subordinated women. A successful revolution “against all aspects of the biological family” would bring on nothing less than a “Messianic Age.” The alternative was “our own suicide, . . . the creation of a hell on earth.”44

Firestone underscored the suffering of children under patriarchy as well. Drawing on her own experience, she presented childhood as a time of economic dependence, shame, and restraint. Children were “repressed at every waking minute”; “childhood is hell.” As an alternative, Firestone proposed ten-person nonrelated households composed of children and adults, with limited ten-year contracts. Children would no longer be minors under the control of parents but would have full rights of their own. If the child did not like the household into which she had arbitrarily been born, she would be helped to transfer out. “Down with childhood,” Firestone declared, and down with “oppressive “femininity,” “power psychology, sexual repression, . . . family chauvinism.”45

Firestone’s polemic encompassed the history of feminism, art, culture, ecology, and more; there was little in the history of civilization she left untouched. Her chapter on race was one of her most controversial, attracting the ire of critics who saw it as reductive to assert that racism was rooted in patriarchy and the family while ignoring the historical conditions of slavery, race-specific oppression, and poverty. “Racism is a sexual phenomenon, . . . sexism extended,” Firestone declared. Her focus was on the strategic parallels between black people and women: “If racism was expungeable, why not sexism?”46

Firestone drew on the lessons of the civil rights movement to advocate radical changes in gender relations.47 For later black feminist critics, her grand assertions misfired. They believed that, in her intense desire to illuminate the pitfalls of the nuclear family, Firestone had turned a blind eye to the centrality of familial support to black women and ignored black women’s own resistance to the worst aspects of machismo.48 While Firestone’s rambling account of racism had its defenders, its reception presaged later conflicts among feminists.49

Firestone was disappointed that the book did not propel her into the front ranks of American thinkers; she had wanted to become the American Beauvoir. According to Kate Millet, whose influential treatise Sexual Politics came out a few months prior to The Dialectic of Sex, it was “the malice of the critics, the ‘talk show’ hosts, anti-Semitism, the residual mess of anticommunism” that “destroyed” and “overwhelmed” Firestone—“burned her alive, consumed her.”50 Other friends surmised that the shy young woman deliberately stepped back before the avalanche of publicity to focus on her art and poetry.

Firestone was equally devastated by her expulsion from New York Radical Feminists; “it was like she’d been rejected by her family,” commented a friend.51 Firestone virtually disappeared from the women’s movement. A few years later, Brownmiller encountered a “pathetic little waif” near the New York Public Library. “Shulie?” asked Brownmiller, “not altogether believing” what she was seeing. “Shulie, is that you? It’s Susan.” Firestone responded, “Look at me—this is what you did to me.”52 Firestone wrote only one other book, Airless Spaces, a fictionalized account of her psychiatric hospitalizations and psychotropic treatments, illuminating both mental illness and poverty.53

Because of Firestone’s writing and the women’s liberation groups she initiated, her legacy endured, but as her sister Laya put it, she left behind a “mystery as her essence.”54 Only after her death did the issue of her Judaism emerge as potentially vital to understanding her. Heather Booth raised the question in an email to Shulie’s List, a listserv created to share thoughts about Firestone and the movement after the shock of Firestone’s passing in 2012. Booth told the three dozen women on the list that she had been alerted to the significance of Jewish identity to the movement by the NYU conference and my own work, commenting that no one had addressed Firestone’s Jewishness as a factor in her life.55

Anne Forer Pyne, a friend of Firestone in the early years of women’s liberation, recalled a dozen or so remarks that led her to believe that Jewishness was indeed a fundamental influence on Firestone. In Pyne’s view, “first last and always, Judaism was central to Shulie, . . . the main part of her identity.”56

Some friends wondered whether growing up in an unsparingly rigid and “fundamentalist” Orthodox Jewish background might have pushed Firestone to rebellious activism. Several recalled Shulie’s views about the Orthodox prayer “Thank God for not making me a woman.” Peggy Dobbins remembered Shulie saying that her brother repeated these words three times, striking his chest each time.57 Pyne thought that the prayer made Shulie believe that Judaism was a religion “that had no use for women at all, and that men were everything, only men counted.”58 The prayer offended Firestone tremendously, recalled Marilyn Webb, and was likely to have been “a strong starting point for her feminism.”59

Firestone had gone to Israel in the summer of 1968, staying for several months. This trip and her experience visiting Israeli kibbutzim played a large part in her thinking about gender. In The Dialectic of Sex, she talks about the limited success of the kibbutz: it was “no radical experiment” in socialist equality, yet it had achieved a “spectacular” weakening of the “division of labor, the nuclear family, sex repression, etc.”60 Rosalyn Baxandall recalled that she asked Firestone if she had gotten “more religious” after her trip to Israel, as some people believed, but Firestone denied it, cutting off further discussion. And there was “nothing religious” around her apartment, Baxandall observed.61 The only specific comment Firestone made about her trip to Israel, Pyne recalled, was that she got a suntan there and turned “tangerine.” “She was very happy about it.”62

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz recalled sharing a table with Firestone at the Socialist Scholars Conference in 2002, during the Second Intifada. Firestone brought up the Israeli occupation and pronounced herself “pro-Palestinian”; she did not share her family’s Zionist, anti-Palestinian views.63 Dunbar-Ortiz believes Firestone separated “her strong and positive Jewish identity and the state of Israel’s politics.” But when Pyne told Firestone that she had not been raised to identify with Israel, Firestone was “shocked” and quoted Hillel to the effect that if she were “not for the Jews, who will be?” In Firestone’s eyes, Pyne was not a “good Jew.” Pyne felt that Shulie’s outlook was clear: “For her being Jewish and Israel were one and the same.”64 Firestone’s reported identification with Israel and her belief in the humanity of Palestinians were not necessarily contradictory, reflecting a stance taken by many women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists.

Whatever Firestone’s views on Israel, growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home was clearly formative to her ideas about sex roles and family life. She incorporated both positive and negative aspects of her religious background into her relentless critique of patriarchy. Alix Kates Shulman believes that it was the religious discrimination against Firestone that presaged her feminism. In Shulman’s view, Firestone’s not being able to attend “real” yeshiva because she was a girl was the “heartbreak” of her life.”65

Of course, other influences were also in play, including the rampart sexism that Firestone experienced at the National Conference for New Politics and the Nixon counter-inaugural rally and the antifemale attitude of the Art Institute of Chicago, which put her through a grueling examination, recorded in a notorious 1967 film, remade in later years by Elizabeth Subrin. The collective anger of young women at the “limits of liberalism,” which Firestone expressed elegantly in her “new view” of the “Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.,” became the seeds of the revolt she helped lead.66 “She was energized by righteous rage,” comments Shulman. “More than anyone I’ve known, she was able to harness negative emotions . . . and turn them into the kind of rage needed to fuel a revolutionary movement.”67

Firestone’s Judaism was much less public than her feminism was. Although it escaped the scrutiny of friends because Firestone held her Jewish identity privately, her colleagues did recognize her unusual background. “She was the first Orthodox Jew I ever met in the radical movement,” Amy Kesselman told me.68 Firestone herself was shocked when she learned that there was another Orthodox Jew among the New York radical feminists. Of course, while Firestone had been raised in that tradition, she had left Orthodoxy far behind at the time of women’s liberation.

At least one prominent Jewish feminist recalls that Firestone did attend meetings of the then-emerging Jewish counterculture in the early 1970s. Arlene Agus, co-founder in 1971 of Ezrat Nashim, the first American religious Jewish feminist organization, remembers Firestone at several Jewish conferences and counterculture retreats, including those at Weiss’ Farm in Long Branch, New Jersey, beginning in 1973. By then, Firestone had left the radical feminist groups she had launched. She was also connected in some ways to Jewish friends; she had gone to elementary school with at least one of the retreat participants. She did not exactly “fit in,” Agus recalls, but she was brilliant. What Agus remembers most was Firestone’s razor-sharp anger, directed at social inequalities and, on this occasion, at the Jewish establishment.69

Firestone might have given a clue about the significance of Jewishness to her activism when in the late 1980s, after decades of being known to her artist friends and movement colleagues as Shulie, she insisted that henceforth they address her by her more formal, and also more clearly Jewish, name Shulamith, as Heather Booth recalled to the friends.70 Another clue involved a talk at a university that Firestone had been invited to give in the 1980s about her days in the feminist movement. Needing the fee, she accepted, but onstage, she realized that the subject “bored her to exasperation,” as a friend to whom she told the story recalled. So she began talking about Jewish mysticism, which then interested her a great deal but which baffled the audience. Firestone was “gently escorted off the stage.”71 Firestone had told Brownmiller in their chance encounter a decade earlier that she was researching Rosicrucian images (related to a late medieval secret mystical sect), which corresponds with an interest in kabbalah, a mystical tradition within Judaism.72

When Laya went to Shulamith’s apartment after her death, she found her sister’s Book of Psalms, the pages very frayed, “taped together multiple times because of overuse and annotated in her handwriting with which to say for which conditions and how many times to say them.” “I’m sure she did a lot of prayer, a lot of saying Psalms,” Laya said, perhaps using the prayers to slip into mystical states. “I think she did not really want to live in this world as it is.” Shulamith had long been drawn to “a very deep strain of Judaism, the messianic,” which, Laya said, “we’re always looking for when the world is finally perfected and balanced. This world that we live in is not.”73 In The Dialectic of Sex, she talked about the ultimate triumph of a gender-free polis as the “Messianic Age.” For this reason, Firestone looked toward the prophetic tradition to call out the wrongs she saw around her. “I think very much that Judaism was extremely deep for her,” said Laya. “It never left her.”74

Ellen Willis: “Next Year in Jerusalem”

Ellen Willis’s struggles with her Jewishness emerge on the record, removing the guesswork that Firestone’s changing beliefs require. Willis was born in 1941, the daughter of a policeman and a housewife. Until she was ten, she lived in a solidly Jewish Bronx neighborhood; then the family moved to a lower-middle-class Irish Catholic community in Queens. “Growing up in the friendly atmosphere of New York City,” she wrote in an article in the Village Voice in 1974, “I always felt—at least on a conscious, day-to-day level—relatively secure in my Jewishness. I regarded it, when I regarded it at all, as a positive part of my identity as an iconoclastic intellectual: it implied a complex and ironic adversary relationship with American society.”75

Willis’s class background and her Jewish identity, embedded in a deeper pluralism and budding intellectualism, became important factors in her developing worldview.76 Also important was the fact that she was a “red-diaper baby,” the daughter of former Communist Party members. “From an early age being a political rebel was something that was in my world and not off the wall,” Willis recalled. “I didn’t have to come to . . . some sudden conversion that maybe there was a reason to criticize the mainstream of society.”77

Willis graduated from Barnard College in 1962 and spent a year doing graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley. Back in New York, she became involved with the Free University of New York, a radical alternative school deeply immersed in the new counterculture. Robert Christgau, whom she met at the school, introduced her to “pop art” and, in her words, “got me started about thinking about rock and roll as a serious cultural issue.”78 Willis’s first music piece, an article about Bob Dylan, appeared in Commentary in 1968 and drew the attention of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who hired her as the magazine’s first pop-music critic. For Willis, rock was a “metaphor for world events, and criticism [was] a way of drawing out its poetic subtexts.”79 She became an “accomplished . . . female rock writer in an era when there were precious few women in the profession at all.” Her articles, praised as “a tour de force of journalism,” also acted as a “barometer of second wave feminism.”80

Just as Willis expressed the “Zeitgeist of her age” in her music criticism, so did her reportage of the women’s liberationists communicate the movement’s message to a large public audience. Willis saw feminism as “the most dynamic cultural radical movement in modern history. . . . In one generation,” she wrote, feminism “transformed the cultural and political landscape; its imprint is everywhere in American life.”81

Willis’s path to radical feminism differed from that of many of her peers. Though she had “all the Jewish-leftist tropisms” and “marched for integration and against the bomb,” she did not feel welcome in the civil rights or leftist movements and was not an active participant. In 1968, after reading Firestone’s Notes from the First Year, she went to her first women’s meeting with the women behind Notes, finding none of the “prickly suspicious aloofness” she experienced at other political meetings. The key activity of consciousness-raising—sharing personal experience, then “generalization, analysis” and ideally action related to the analysis—led Willis to feel “the exhilaration of finding out it’s not just me.”82 She attended the January 1969 counter-inaugural rally in Washington, when radical men heckled Marilyn Webb and Shulamith Firestone. The fiasco caused Willis to rethink her position about women’s role on the left. “A genuine alliance with male radicals will not be possible until sexism sickens them as much as racism,” she concluded, turning away from collaboration toward a “separate movement.” The New York women at the counter-inaugural concurred, deciding to form an “action group based on a militantly independent radical feminist consciousness.”83

Willis and Firestone started Redstockings two months later. Willis was in her late twenties, older than most members, and a New Yorker author. Although later she commented that her status as a writer privileged her within a movement that rejected hierarchy and elitism, she served as a “unique bridge” between two 1960s subcultures, radical feminism and pop culture, shaping and disseminating the ideas of both movements and providing a unique perspective on feminism’s place in the countercultural revolution.84

Willis envisaged Redstockings as a “very militant, very public group” committed to action as well as to consciousness-raising.85 In March 1969, just a month after the group’s founding, Redstockings joined these two modalities to bring attention to an issue then relegated to secrecy and silence: the experience of abortion. Inventing the radical technique of the speak-out, Redstockings staged a public hearing at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where a dozen women told a crowd of several hundred about their own abortions. The effect was electric, sending shock waves through the community and the nation and helping to lead a groundswell of action against illegal abortion, one that culminated a few years later in Roe v. Wade. This first speak-out, organized by Firestone, Irene Peslikis, and others, inspired similar events elsewhere, including in France, where a number of prominent women, including Simone de Beauvoir (Willis’s heroine as well as Firestone’s), risked imprisonment by publicly declaring, “I have had an abortion.”86

In addition to the public speak-out, Redstockings popularized the technique of consciousness-raising, and its writings—confessional essays, poems, and manifestos, including the influential “Redstockings Manifesto”—radicalized many women. Its core slogan, “the personal is political” proved to be a powerful change agent throughout the world.87

Willis’s role as one of the radical feminists’ premier activists and theorists survived the breakup of Redstockings, and she channeled her energies into other feminist arenas, consistently advocating for sexual freedom. For Willis, this meant “access to safe and legal abortions, the right to sexual pleasure, . . . the break between reproduction and motherhood” (here she echoed Firestone), and the encouragement of alternative family forms. Sexual expression and pleasure were the keys.88

In the 1980s, Willis led the so-called pro-sex radical feminists in their heated challenge to the antipornography movement. Countering the arguments of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and others that “sexual liberation is a male supremacist plot,” Willis proclaimed that sexual liberation was the keystone of broader social and cultural change.89 She saw freedom as a broadly cultural goal that included the pleasure principle as a central component. Unlike many feminists but similarly to Firestone, Willis was deeply influenced by Freud; she also appreciated William Reich, who was more positive about all forms of sexuality. In fact, she was writing a book on psychoanalysis and politics at the time of her death in 2006.

Willis brought her sharp analytical skills and her penchant for debate to Jewish issues as well as feminist and broadly political ones. Secular, perennially skeptical, and often directly challenging Jewish practices, Willis nonetheless proclaimed herself a Jew, publicly and often. In a series of powerful writings about Jewish issues over some thirty years, she explored the meaning of Jewish experience to liberals and radical leftists. Like everything else about her, Willis’s Jewish identity was up front, quirky, unique.

Willis’s earliest writing on Judaism, and one of the most extraordinary pieces in her entire body of work, was the three-part, twenty-thousand-word article “Next Year in Jerusalem,” which she wrote for Rolling Stone in 1977, about her struggle with her younger brother’s conversion to Orthodoxy.90 The article had an immediate impact and is read and admired today; writer and former Gawker co-editor Emily Gould calls it “maybe the best personal essay” she has ever read.91 Willis had gone to Jerusalem in October 1976 to meet her brother, Michael, nine years younger, where he was studying at the yeshiva Aish HaTorah, an ultra-Orthodox religious sect that espoused, in Michael’s words, “613 commandments, . . . Puritanism, . . . political conservatism, . . . [a] Jews-first philosophy.” Michael, then twenty-four, had stopped in Israel the year before on his way home from seven months in Asia. Disillusioned with the situation in Cambodia and Vietnam and facing uncertain prospects in the U.S., the highly intellectual, reserved young man became engrossed in his Jewish studies. In a seven-page letter to Ellen, he explained his attraction to the religion. Ellen, who felt an “almost mystical identification” with her brother, considering him what she “might have become” had she been a man, was shocked, filled with “a kind of primal dread” at Michael’s adoption of “Judaism in its most extreme, absolutist form. . . . The Torah’s laws . . . must be obeyed in every detail.” This was the kind of Judaism that the Firestone daughters had tried to escape. “In my universe,” Willis wrote, “intelligent, sensible people who had grown up in secular homes in the second half of the 20th century did not embrace biblical fundamentalism. . . . How could anyone familiar with the work of a certain Viennese Jew possibly believe in God the Father?”92

Michael’s letter in response, debunking evolution and attempting to explain the truth of Torah, impressed Ellen with its logic but faltered on the woman question. In Ellen’s words, “Orthodox Judaism enshrined as divine law a male supremacist ideology I had been struggling against, in one way or another, all my life. It was a patriarchal religion that decreed separate functions of the sexes—man to learn, administer religious law and exercise public authority: woman to sanctify the home. For Mike to accept it would be (face it!) a betrayal.”93

Although her brother conceded that Judaism gave men “the better deal” from a secular viewpoint, he argued that women had religious advantages: “fewer commandments to perform, fewer opportunities to sin, and by having children could approach God more easily.” Ellen was not persuaded: “I couldn’t believe in the Jewish God. He had been invented by men seeking a rationale for their privileges.”94 She had explained her position in an earlier letter to Michael, couching her rejection of religious patriarchy in her own ideas about God: “The idea that one group of people has the right let alone the religious obligation to dominate another, that the sexes’ functions are rigidly separate . . . & above all that God is male—this to me is just such blatant arrogance!” It was “alien” to her “whole feeling of what God is.”95

Mike’s arguments on a trip home at Thanksgiving failed to convince her or her parents. But her parents’ objections differed from Ellen’s intellectual approach. Mrs. Willis considered herself “in some sense religious, she believed in God, even believed that the Torah might be God-given. But she couldn’t see that God required us to observe all those regulations. Wasn’t it enough to be a good person? Characteristically, she focused on practical concerns. Was Mike happy? Would religion give him what he badly needed—something satisfying to do with his life?” Ellen’s father, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, was a rationalist whose hero was Clarence Darrow, the supreme evolutionist; yet he was tolerant of all religions and prepared to understand his son’s conversion. Willis’s parents visited Michael in Jerusalem, relinquishing their objections when they found him happier than he had ever been. Ellen, however, saw Michael’s enthusiasm as a “manic façade.” Nonetheless, Michael asked questions she could not answer. “How did I explain the creation of the world? How did I explain the strange history of the Jews—their unremitting persecution and unlikely survival, their conspicuous role in world affairs? How did I explain the Torah itself?”96

Willis admitted that as a “radical, . . . a leftist and feminist activist,” she had “struggled perpetually with doubts.” But even that tendency was a Jewish one: “I was aware of the link between my skepticism and my Jewishness. It was, after all, the Jew who was the perennial doubter, the archetypal outsider, longing for redemption while dismissing the claims of would-be redeemers as so much snake oil.” Her skepticism made her realize that she could be wrong: “Since I could not prove Judaism was false, I had to admit that it could be true.” This thought threw her into a deepening panic and made her understand that she had to muster the courage to confront Michael’s challenge. Otherwise she would be rejecting Judaism “simply because [she] did not care to accept it,” rather than because of honest intellectual principles; she felt she had no alternative but to imagine herself as observant. Her friends, who thought that Michael’s brand of religion was “eccentric fanaticism,” “found it hard to believe that someone so sensible and intelligent could be wondering if she ought to become an orthodox Jew.”97

There was only one possible resolution for Willis’s doubts; she had to go to Israel: “confront my terror at its source—to put myself in my brother’s place and see if I reached the same conclusions.” While she could not attend Aish HaTorah, a male-only yeshiva for ba’al teshuvas (delinquent Jews who have “returned”), she held close conversations with Michael, his teachers, their wives (rebbetzin), and other women. At the rebbetzin’s classes for women, Ellen encountered Jewish ethics and began to realize “how Jewish [her] feelings were.”98

Although Willis was an outsider, because she was Jewish, she was “also family,” accepted as part of the Orthodox community. The ecstasy that Willis had previously experienced on LSD now came to her as a religious impulse. “Whatever holiness was,” she wrote, “the city breathed it.” Having gleaned from talks with her brother that Judaism was a plausible intellectual possibility, Ellen’s living in Jerusalem conveyed that “Judaism was a plausible way of life”: “And that realization slid relentlessly into the next: that it was plausible even for me.” The study of Torah suddenly seemed “no more inherently compulsive than [her] own search for the precise adjective, or the care with which feminists analyzed the minutiae of sexual relationships.” She began to question her “hyperurban, freelance existence”: “Did I really have my priorities straight?” Questioning her secular life led her to imagine her life as an observant Jew. But she would not be a traditional Jewish mother; she would work outside the home. She convinced herself that the religion permitted these options. “Even within the bounds of Judaism I could be a feminist of sorts, crusading for reforms like equal education, perhaps contesting the biased halachic interpretations of male rabbis. And my experience would put me in a unique position to reach women like me and bring them back.”99

Though it was difficult to accept that Orthodox Jewish women might be content with their female identity, even their sexuality, there it was:

The big lie of male supremacy is that women are less than fully human; the basic task of feminism is to expose that lie and fight it on every level. Yet for all my feminist militance I was, it seemed, secretly afraid that the lie was true—that my humanity was hopelessly at odds with my ineluctably female sexuality—while the rebbetzin, staunch apostle of traditional femininity, did not appear to doubt for a moment that she could be both a woman and a serious person. . . . I was too much the product of Western libertarian values to travel the rebbetzin’s route to self-acceptance, and so far I had not succeeded in finding my own.100

Willis thought that she would capitulate to the belief that was beginning to form: “that it was all true, that I was only resisting because I couldn’t stand the pain of admitting how wrong I was.” If she did not make plans to return to the U.S. right away, she might end up staying in Israel. In the end, she resisted her attraction to Jerusalem and Aish HaTorah, feeling that while “it was one thing to consider the abstract possibility that women’s role in Judaism was not inherently oppressive,” it was “another to live in a culture that made [her] feel oppressed.”101

Willis prepared to leave Israel, knowing that “at least for the present,” she would “not become an Orthodox Jew”: “My decision had involved no epiphany, no cathartic moment of truth; my doubts remained and perhaps always would.” She was leaving based on her intuition that she would be happiest in the secular world, where rock music was readily available and where feminists fought for their liberation. But she was keenly aware that she and her brother were at that moment a study in “contrasting male and female sensibilities”; Michael had reached his decision to become ba’al teshuva on the basis of logic and reason, while she, the most cerebral of her feminist friends, had relied on emotion.102

Beneath Willis’s turmoil lay a characteristic willfulness that she also identified as a factor in her leave-taking. “As I kissed my brother goodbye,” she recounted, “I still did not know whether my refusal to believe was healthy self-assertion or stubborn egotism; the Jews, the Bible tells us, are a stiff-necked people.” However much she fought her attraction to the Orthodox Jewish life, her final “refusal to believe” attached her to Jewish peoplehood even as she rejected a geographical, spiritual connection. She returned home with her skepticism—and her Jewish identity—intact, resuming her secular life. Her brother—her “male mirror image”—became a rabbi; he has served in that capacity for more than forty years, heading Aish HaTorah in South Africa.103

Willis continued to struggle with the issue of Jewish belonging. “What did peoplehood entail, where did it lead?” she asked in “Radical Jews Caught in the Middle,” a piece she wrote for the Village Voice in 1981.104 In articles about anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and Jewish politics, she left earlier doubts behind, but her trademark skepticism emerged as she considered new paths in Jewish politics and age-old questions regarding the Jewish condition. Central to these writings was the sense of “oppression and marginality as defining facts of Jewish existence.”105 While she did not explicitly analogize the connection between her struggles against antidemocratic institutions, including patriarchy, and her framing of the “Jewish question,” the common dimensions of these problems emerged. Alix Kates Shulman, Willis’s longtime friend, explained that while Willis wrote about being a Jew, she found “complete commonality among anti-woman, anti-Jew, anti-black, anti-everybody.” They were all “aspects of the same thing.”106

Willis came to understand anti-Semitism personally as well as intellectually. Although she had grown up as a New Yorker comfortable with her Jewish identity, after the 1967 Six-Day War, she experienced “a loss of innocence,” feeling vulnerable as a Jew for the first time. With most of her leftist friends unconcerned “if Israel went under,” she felt more alone than when she lived in “overwhelmingly WASP environments” in Colorado and upstate New York. “I feel—a word I try not to use lightly these days—oppressed,” she wrote in the Village Voice in 1974.107

Five years later, in the article “The Myth of the Powerful Jew,” Willis sought to provide a psychoanalytic explanation for the “dark impulses” that made anti-Semitism a growing social force but one that her colleagues were reluctant to recognize. For Willis, anti-Semitism was a “systemic and pervasive pathology,” endemic among the American ruling class and with a powerful impact on international politics.108 Now she took on the radical Left, the Jewish Left, and mainstream America for downplaying its continuing existence.

In Willis’s view, anti-Semitism was at its core a “deeply irrational” force, a “chronic social disease that exists mainly under the surface.” “The psychology of anti-Semitism, the way it functions in society, and the nature of the threat to the Jews are in certain respects unique. . . . Jews are simultaneously perceived as insiders and outsiders, capitalists and communists, upholders of high ethical and intellectual standards and shrewd purveyors of poisonous subversive ideas. The common theme of these disparate perceptions is that Jews have enormous power, whether to defend established authority or to undermine it. It is this double-edged myth of Jewish power that has made Jews such a useful all-purpose scapegoat for social discontent.”109 The contradictory combination of success and vulnerability made Jews emotional symbols of strength when they were in fact powerless: “To kill a gnat,” said Willis, “imagining it’s an elephant, is to feel powerful indeed.” The danger was ever present, though often less from “overt anti-Semitic malice than from impersonal, institutional anti-Jewish bias.”110 Yet the accusation persisted that anti-Semitism was “unreal,” simply “paranoia” on the part of Jews. For Willis, this was “gaslighting” at its worst, making the situation even more troubling.111

Willis partly blamed Jews for their predicament. Because “anti-Semitism feeds on human misery, on social inequality” and Jews had persistently served as “the lightning rod for the rage of the oppressed,” if they identified with power and relied on the protection of the powerful, they merely “set themselves up” for harms.112 Even though she saw Jews “as far to the left of non-Jews in comparable economic and social circumstances,” she deplored class bias and racism among them.113 Defending American power—and refusing to confront social ills—would never make American Jews (or Israel) safe; it would only isolate them from minorities and increase the possibility that they would be scapegoated.114

Covering the first national conference of the progressive New Jewish Agenda (NJA) for the Village Voice in 1981, Willis addressed the Left’s anti-Jewish bias, which was based on the “false assumption that anti-Semitism is no longer a threat.” “The left has been as anti-Semitic as the rest of society; therefore we need a self-conscious Jewish left that will fight our oppression instead of perpetuating it.”115 But she was skeptical that a separate organization of progressive Jews was the answer. “Why not just carry a commitment to Tikun Olam into the general left?” she asked. She referred to “an organization that would join forces with the larger left while challenging it to respond to a distinctive Jewish voice.”116

Willis found the NJA conference exciting, with 650 people in attendance and hundreds more turned away, but she was put off by the kosher food, the observance of Shabbat, and a general sense “that Jewish identity must be rooted in the religious tradition and/or some other particularist culture[al] Zionism, Yiddish, Bundism, organized Jewish communal life.”117 Her reservations sprang from her feelings about her own Jewish identity: nonreligious, not even Jewish counterculturalist.

My sense of Jewishness has less to do with any form of cultural separatism than with the Diaspora Jew’s historical role as critical outsider, living on the margins of dominant cultures, thus in a position to combine familiarity with skepticism. For me the question of what Judaism (or Jewish tradition) says about how we should behave politically is important not as a direct guide to action, but as a clue to what the Jewish condition is about. When I think about formulating a Jewish politics I think about questions like, what does the messianic vision of liberation mean, in secular terms? Why have the Jews been hated for 3000 years—and yet survived? Why have the Jews—a tiny minority, after all—played such a central role in social crises? What is the relation between anti-Semitism and oppression in general?118

Although Willis wanted to find some way to work with NJA, she was disheartened that the unity statement that the conference produced implicitly dismissed her own definition of the Jewish problem as oppression and marginality for being too “negative,” too focused on “enemies,” rather than “ethics.” This was a “false duality.” “Every Jew faces the question of how to respond to our enemies: we can try (futilely) to fit in, make ourselves invisible, placate the powerful, or we can embrace the opportunity our outsider status offers and become radical social critics. What was the commitment to transform one’s oppression into a weapon against oppressors if not a positive ethical stance?”119 Willis believed that the refusal to take anti-Semitism seriously skewed the Left’s perception of the Israeli crisis.120 In 1974, she wrote that she considered the “hardline anti-Zionist position that the Jewish state is illegitimate and should be abolished” to be “objectively anti-Semitic” because the demise of Israel would “result in the death or dispersal of a great many Jews and encourage an active resurgence of anti-Semitism.”121

Years later, writing as a “quintessential Diaspora Jew,” she maintained that Israel was a haven for Jews against the threat of anti-Semitism. While Israel’s misuses of power had to be condemned, she denounced the Left’s “villainization of Israel.” She continued to champion the Jewish state as a bulwark against anti-Semitism, although she criticized its policies and supported Palestinian rights. In “Why I’m Not for Peace” (2002), Willis ridiculed the idea that “getting tough and imposing an Israeli-Palestinian settlement” was a “route to safety” in the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalists did not want a settlement, she noted, but only to have Israel “go away.” Their ideology would wreak havoc not only for Israel but for Palestinians as well.122 In an influential article the next year, “Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist,” she wrote that the “runaway inflation of Israel’s villainy aligns with ingrained cultural fantasies about the iniquity and power of Jews.” The “traditional pariah status of Jews” had been replicated by a “Jewish pariah state,” and “the anti-Jewish temperature [was] rising.” The Left’s anti-Zionism made it complicit in the fact that Israel had become the “wild card of world politics and the lightning rod of political crisis.”123 Willis published “Why I’m Not for Peace” in Radical Society and her piece about her “anti-anti-Zionism” in Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon’s collection Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. She published similar articles in left-wing journals such as the Nation. Though always a progressive voice, on this hot-button issue, she was a dissenting one.

Willis’s engagement with Jewish issues reflected her strong Jewish identity coupled with her “Sagittarian compulsion to aim straight at the cosmic bull’s-eye,” as she described her spiritual crisis over her brother’s Orthodoxy. “The blessing and curse of being a Jew,” she said, quoting Rabbi Noach, was the “misplaced searching for God. Every Jew is a neurotic.”124 Yet her Jewishness was only one of several identities she inhabited over her lifetime, existing alongside her vibrant feminism. Sometimes these parts of her identity came close to merger, as when she told friends that perhaps she would join a Jewish feminist consciousness-raising group. There is no evidence that she did that, but she remarked to Letty Cottin Pogrebin in 1981 that her “group had just finished doing C-R [consciousness-raising] on anti-Semitism.”125 Years earlier, she had written to her brother that she had been reading “all kinds of stuff about Zionism and anti-Zionism” and was again feeling that she would “like to start a Jewish consciousness-raising group”: “I think it would fill in a lot of gaps in my personal political analysis.”126

While Willis did not foreground Judaism in her lifestyle or affiliations, like Firestone, she had a sibling who did. Both Michael Willis and Firestone’s younger brothers embraced ultra-Orthodoxy. Although Laya Firestone Seghi did not affiliate with any denomination, she remained deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, while Rabbi Tirzah Firestone founded Congregation Nevei Kodesh, a Jewish Renewal community in Boulder, Colorado. Willis, from a red-diaper background, and Firestone, from a deeply Orthodox one, both struggled with yet maintained ties to Jewishness. Willis did so as a secular Jew, explicit in her public affiliations; Firestone, while not openly proclaiming her spirituality, was unable to completely shake off her heritage. Willis fought anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism along with patriarchal repression in its multiple forms; Firestone championed a complete break with authoritarian, sexist behavior but did not speak out on anti-Jewish prejudice. Yet each was influenced by a drive for personal freedom that sprang at least in part from a connection to their Jewish heritage. While there was no common core to their Jewish beliefs, the rebel from an Orthodox background and the woman who resisted the attraction to the Orthodox life that she encountered in Jerusalem shared an impulse toward open expression and unfettered individuality that motivated their theories and actions.

Alix Kates Shulman: “Radical Feminism . . . Wasn’t about Religion”

Although significant to Firestone’s and Willis’s personal identities, Jewishness did not matter at all to the collective identity of the feminist organizations they started. This point is brought home by a story told to me by writer Alix Kates Shulman, Redstockings collaborator and friend to both women. Shulman was an early member of Redstockings; after the group collapsed in 1971, she joined New York Radical Feminists’ West Village Brigade Number One, and after leaving that organization, she became a founding member of first one and later a second group, both unnamed, that had the ambitious hope of reviving women’s liberation. The first, founded in about 1975 (“Redstockings Plus,” Shulman jokingly calls it, since it included four early Redstockings members), met for years at Rosalyn Baxandall’s apartment. The membership changed, but the final group into which it eventually morphed was stable, meeting weekly until the mid-1980s and then less frequently for another decade. “I was intimate with many of these women,” said Shulman. “They were like my family.” Yet she was uncertain of their religious backgrounds. They talked about everything related to their lives as women, but not until the late 1970s or early 1980s did her group get around to talking about religion. Except for Ellen Willis, who was “outspokenly Jewish,” said Shulman, “I didn’t know who in the group was Jewish, who was Catholic, who was Protestant until we did that consciousness-raising on religion. I was ignorant about it until then.”127

Figure 2.1. Alix Kates Shulman at the 1968 Miss America protest, Atlantic City. Courtesy Alix Kates Shulman.

Back in Redstockings, everyone knew that Firestone and Willis were Jewish, but Shulman did not know about the other members and sometimes guessed wrong. In her later groups, Shulman learned that Ann Snitow, among others, was Jewish; she thought (incorrectly) that Rosalyn Baxandall was “one-quarter” Jewish; and Karen Durbin, whom she had assumed was Jewish, was actually raised Catholic, as was Brett Harvey. “This came as a complete surprise to me,” said Shulman. The point was that religion “wasn’t a big deal to [the women] at all. It wasn’t important. . . . Radical feminism was about relations between the sexes, it wasn’t about religion.”128 Shulman acknowledged that the representation of Jews in women’s liberation was “disproportionate in terms of the general population.” But class had more currency than religion, and friendships “crossed” backgrounds. At my Women’s Liberation/Jewish Identity conference, Shulman speculated that this differed from the Chicago Gang of Four, each of whom knew the others were Jewish but did not talk about it. “We didn’t know or care.”129

Rosalyn Baxandall offered another explanation for the women’s lack of Jewish self-consciousness and group awareness. Baxandall feels that while they knew about the Catholic backgrounds of some members because they had rebelled against Catholicism and talked about it, Jewish members were not rebelling against Judaism since it had been less important in their upbringings, and consequently they did not discuss it.130

The nonessential, and subjective, nature of Jewish identity among radical New York feminists is suggested by Baxandall’s own life story. Her sister Julie verifies that Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall was the daughter of a father and a mother who were both “100% Jewish.” Both parents were militant atheists and communists. Her father, a distinguished pediatrician who taught and practiced at Albert Einstein Hospital, came to appreciate the Jewish legacy to politics and culture. He told Rosalyn that the family should never deny its Jewish identity for fear of “Nazism.” Pride in militant activism, and its association with Jewishness, became “almost like a badge of solidarity” to the Fraads.131

Despite these views and the family’s atheism, which Rosalyn Baxandall shared, she would intermittently say that she was Jewish. Her son, Phineas, told me that he thought he was Jewish until he was twelve years old, wondering whether he was supposed to have a bar mitzvah. His mother told him that they “weren’t really Jewish”: “just half-jokingly that we lived in New York City and most of our friends were Jewish.” He believes that his mother’s refusal to give him a “straight answer” about being Jewish was not about disliking Judaism or Jews, since she believed that “Judaism was probably one of the least bad religions—because Jews had been oppressed for so long.” Yet she could never satisfactorily explain to Phineas “why she wasn’t Jewish.” His mother embraced Judaism to a greater extent later in life, “if only because so many of her Jewish friends drifted toward greater religious identity,” but she also mobilized against “Israeli Zionism” regarding the Palestinian situation.132

At the time of Baxandall’s death in 2015, she was writing a book about her maternal great-uncle, Meyer London, a socialist, who had been the first Russian Jewish immigrant in Congress and of whom she was quite proud.133 But most of her feminist friends did not consider Baxandall Jewish or recognize her occasional Jewish self-identification. For Baxandall, as for many other radical feminists, Jewish New Yorkers who identified as nonreligious or antireligious, Jewish identity seemed irrelevant in general and sometimes oppositional to their politics, yet it could exert cultural or philosophical appeal. In light of the fact that her two sisters identified positively and consistently as Jews and that Baxandall did not “come out” as Jewish even to her son, her ambivalence and inconsistency may have been extreme, but the voluntary association she placed on her identity characterized a large number of urban radicals such as herself.

Shulman views her own obliviousness to Jewishness within Redstockings as related to her New York identity as an “atheist in a cosmopolitan world” as much as to the group’s universalist orientation and disregard of religion. She described how she felt moving to the city in the early 1950s: “so comfortably lost in my Jewishness that I can take it for granted.” Shulman considered Jewishness as only one of “several self-defining tags, from radical feminist to author of sexually explicit novels to political activist.” Only after a disturbing incident in the small island community in southern Maine where she spent some forty summers as the only Jew did Shulman come to sport Jewish identity there “like a red banner.” “After decades of my Jewish identity being obscured in the blur of Jews around me,” she wrote in 2003, “I suddenly felt as if I were outlined in felt-tipped pen: Jew.” Singled out in Maine by a local missionary as a target for conversion, she seemed to herself “more the Jew than ever,” always to wonder “how I am perceived and never [to] feel as if I quite belong.”134 In this personal way, Shulman came to understand Ellen Willis’s insight about the psychological roots of Jewish oppression and her belief that Jews were doomed to feel “permanently insecure.”135

Shulman had grown up in a comfortable and “completely assimilated” midwestern family. Her parents and their siblings became “proud happy atheists,” who felt they were leaving behind the superstition and irrationality of their own parents, immigrants from eastern Europe who had settled in the Cleveland area in the 1890s. After her grandparents’ death, they never had another seder. “We were completely secular,” Shulman reported. Yet her family never denied its Jewishness. Shulman’s parents were “Roosevelt activists”: her father a lawyer and her mother a “Jewish activist,” three-time president of the Federation of Jewish Women of Greater Cleveland after she left a Works Progress Administration job as designer of history projects. The highlight of Shulman’s youth was attending a convention of Jewish organizations with her mother in Atlantic City. Her mother’s work had more to do with “anti-anti-Semitism” than with Judaism per se, but the dinner-table conversations about “the politics of the thing” were vivid and exciting.136

Both parents had been subject to anti-Semitism, and there was “plenty of anti-Semitism” in Shulman’s midwestern childhood. Her parents wanted her “to know that [she] was a Jew and not to say, no I’m not.”137 The identification became difficult for Shulman when she wound up in a high school that was “half Jewish and half not and everything was segregated,” including the all-important social clubs. Even the high school’s staircases were segregated—“there was the Jewish staircase and there was the Gentile staircase”—and the after-school “milkshake hangouts” were not shared by Jews and Gentiles.138

Despite this background, Judaism did not become meaningful to Shulman until she went to New York in 1953 to study philosophy in graduate school at Columbia University. There she discovered a subculture of Jewish intellectuals, which, although they were all male, led to a “romance with Judaism.” The works she was reading were written by male authors, except for the occasional female; Shulman was particularly excited to encounter Hannah Arendt because she was Jewish.139 “I got really interested in all these different kinds of Jews there were,” especially those who created culture. “If somebody’s Jewish, I may feel a certain commonality.”140

Shulman enjoyed graduate school, but her male colleagues’ disdain for the women students stung. “As soon as we spoke, everything stopped. No one listened to us. They waited until we were done and then they went back to discussing what they had been discussing before we spoke. I wasn’t enraged because that wasn’t an acceptable attitude for a young woman. But I was burning inside. It was a slow burn.”141

Shulman married and had two children. In 1967, she went to her first woman’s meeting. In her graduate classes, she had never heard girls or young women talk “like people of the world.” Immediately she “understood for the first time that things did not have to be the way they were, that they could be changed”: “A lot of us felt that way, and that’s how the movement started. It was a thrilling thing to be alive and to be there at that moment.”142

The women were excited to include the thirty-five-year-old Shulman, for she embodied the challenge they hoped to address: freeing the wife and mother from her chains. She started going to meetings every night, at first surreptitiously. As her relationship with her husband began to change, Shulman drew up a marriage agreement, dividing chores and pleasures down the line, fifty-fifty, which she published in a small feminist magazine in 1970. Shulman had no idea that its main principle, that “a woman and man should share equally the responsibility for their household and children in every way, from the insidiously unacknowledged tasks of daily life to the pleasures of guiding a young human to maturity,” would cause such uproar. Reprinted in the debut issue of Ms., in Redbook (attracting two thousand letters), Life, a Harvard textbook on contract law, and other anthologies, it drew scorn from Norman Mailer, who famously mocked Shulman by declaring that he never would be married to a woman like her—he would never help his wife with the dishes! In 2005, thirty-five years after the still-controversial piece’s first appearance, author Caitlin Flanagan attacked it in the Atlantic and a subsequent book.143

Shulman participated in many of New York radical feminism’s iconic moments: the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest; Redstockings’ 1969 abortion speak-out; a 1970 “Ogle-In” on Wall Street, in which women whistled at and shouted out catcalls to men; and the massive march down Fifth Avenue on August 26 of that year to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage.144 Shulman was also present at the 1969 sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal, when feminist journalists took over the magazine’s editorial offices to demand fair coverage for women.145

In addition to these actions, Shulman’s novels, short stories, memoirs, and essays testified to the growing relevance of second-wave feminism to women’s lives. Her novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972) sold over one million copies in paperback. Though it had some autobiographical elements, Shulman explains that she was not trying to represent herself but rather “a certain white, middle-class, Midwestern suburban girl of that era, subject to all the forces of sexism that had yet to be articulated in fiction.”146 She was more concerned about examining the invisible social forces that molded women’s lives than in portraying individual and family psychologies. Jewish identity is rarely expressed in the novel in an explicit fashion. Shulman admitted that she was “far more interested in middle class white female experience than in a more narrowly ethnic one.”147

Shulman’s second novel, Burning Questions, published in 1978, told the story of Zane IndiAnna, a radical feminist teaching a course in “revolutionary women” at the New School. Shulman considered the book, presented as a first-person memoir, as a historical novel. Echoing one of Shulman’s favorite themes, in the preface of this roman à clef, Shulman’s narrator quotes the real memoir of revolutionary socialist Angelica Balabanoff: “the experience of the individual in relation to historic events does not belong to oneself alone.”148 Like many innovative works of feminist novelists, this novel’s vision of radical social change attracted the ire of mainstream critics. The New York Times reviewer wrote that the novel would “set back the cause of women fifty years,” a disparagement that the newly organized Feminist Writers’ Guild protested.149

Another of Shulman’s successful writing projects, her biography of Emma Goldman, like herself an atheist Jewish feminist intellectual, came just after she joined the women’s movement. Given an opportunity to write a biography for a new Women of America series, Shulman chose Goldman, most of whose works were then out of print. “Emma was my education,” Shulman said; “she connected me with a radical world.”150 Goldman’s conflicts over the problem of individualism, dissent, minority voice, authority, hierarchy, and her great issues—“the relation between the sexes, the organization of society, and most profoundly, the connection between the two”—paralleled Shulman’s own, and Goldman’s life immediately gave Shulman a context in which to understand the unfolding women’s liberation movement. From Goldman, she learned that “an idea, a cause, a movement could give meaning to a life,” a lesson she was beginning to draw from her own life and came to inspire several of her novels.151 Another parallel lay in their attitudes toward Judaism, which each discarded as a formal identity but remained connected to in characteristically Jewish ways. An atheist, Goldman never criticized Judaism as harshly as she did Christianity, and she considered Jews to be “the mainstay” of “every revolutionary endeavor.” Her oratory often contained biblical references, and her radical style was rooted in the prophetic tradition.152

Like Goldman, Shulman never defined herself as a Jewish radical activist, preferring to see herself as a participant in a larger social and cultural struggle. What was a “great joy” to her about Redstockings was that “it was secular” and that the women “were all equal in that movement.” To the question of what the relationship was between the women’s liberation movement and Jewish identity, she responded, “In my experience, the answer was none.”153

Also like Goldman, Shulman’s relationship to Judaism evinces some paradoxes. While believing that Jewishness had little impact on women’s liberation, Shulman disclosed points of significant personal contact with Jewishness: her mother’s work for Jewish groups; the “Jewish and Gentile” staircases in high school; her “romance” with Judaism in graduate school; encounters with anti-Semitism. The explanation may lie in her rejection of the particularism of ethnicity and religion, which Shulman envisions as narrow and confining. These views characterized the early phase of radical feminism. Redstockings declared the unity of all women, dismissing merely situational differences. Its manifesto proclaimed, “Women are an oppressed class. . . . We . . . repudiate all economic, racial, educational, or status privileges that divide us from other women.”154 By not noticing the presence of Jewishness in the movement, Shulman and other Redstockings women avoided addressing ethnic and religious differences that seemed unimportant. With the exception of Ellen Willis, the Jewish women of Redstockings did not reflect on how their Jewish backgrounds might have influenced their feminism.

Yet beneath the surface of the movement’s universalism lay specific forces that helped propel each liberationist into her activism. In years to come, the changing role of race and ethnicity in radical feminism made greater room for acknowledging distinctive heritages, though religion generally remained an outlier. As radical feminists moved on to other stages of their lives, they came to embrace aspects of these identities. “The older I get, the more I feel and celebrate my Jewish identity and aspects of Jewish culture,” Shulman told the Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity Conference.155 She is now co-editing the documentary anthology Writing the Women’s Movement for the Library of America. As a participant in the movement whose writings contributed enormously to its popular appeal, Shulman is well qualified for the task, but she feels a sense of urgency about finishing it. To guide her, she draws on the famous saying of Rabbi Tarfon (from the Pirkei Avot, the “Ethics of the Sages”): “You are not required to complete the task, but neither are you free to abandon it.”156 This ancient Jewish wisdom is her advice to young writers and, by extension, to feminists of the contemporary generation.

Susan Brownmiller: “The Heritage Is Still with Me”

Born in 1935, three years after Alix Kates Shulman, Susan Brownmiller (née Warhaftig) grew up in a densely Jewish section of Flatbush, in Brooklyn. Like Shulman’s, her family was “just plain-old Roosevelt Democrats,” her father a Macy’s salesman, her mother a secretary at the Empire State Building. Brownmiller’s childhood Jewishness was strong, tied into the Holocaust and the hopes for a Jewish homeland. She remembers being very happy when the state of Israel was declared.157

Brownmiller went to a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania for several years and also to Hebrew school at the East Midwood Jewish Center, where she studied Hebrew and Jewish history—biblical history, Palestine’s history, eastern European history, and all the holidays—two afternoons a week. “There was a lot to cover,” she recalled, “and it all got sort of mishmashed in my brain except for one thread: a helluva lot of people over the centuries seemed to want to harm the Jewish people.”158 The experience was formative in many ways. Caught up in the fervor of Israel’s formation, teachers and fellow students became enthusiastic Zionists, talking about immigrating to Israel to work the land. “The idea was thrilling,” Brownmiller thought. “I wanted to be part of this brave, new movement. I wanted to help. I went to the Ocean Avenue synagogue on Saturday morning and chanted the prayers.”159

In what Brownmiller calls a typical mocking Jewish manner, one of her aunts took to calling her “the Rebbetzin.”160 “What’s a ‘rebbetzin’?” Brownmiller asked her mother, “thinking it must mean a serious, dedicated, intelligent person.” But her mother only laughed. “A rebbetzin is a rabbi’s wife,” she informed her daughter. “What a deflating blow to my ego and ambitions! A rabbi was a revered personage; a rabbi’s wife served cake and tea and preened in his reflected glory. My instinctive feminism (no lessons needed) could not be reconciled with this severe limitation on my life’s path. The sly mockery had its effect. So much for Judaism, so much for religion—I became an atheist, a secularist, and never looked back.”161 Brownmiller went on to Cornell on scholarship. Her Jewish commitment was muted there, although she did attend some Hillel events, singing the songs she knew from camp and Hebrew school. Seeing the joy on her face, the rabbi encouraged her to join the group. Despite her pronounced atheism, she suspects that her connection to Judaism operated on a subconscious level.

Brownmiller remained at Cornell for two and a half years, then returned to New York to try for a theatrical career and did some off-Broadway roles. Acting, she remembers, was more acceptable than writing or politics (she had majored in government at Cornell), both of which required what was then seen as a masculine type of ambition.162 The transformation in her life came from participating in the civil rights movement—first up north, picketing Woolworth’s in 1960 for its discrimination toward blacks, and then in the South, where she joined SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in Meridian in 1964. Another transformation came when her friend Jan Goodman, who had gone to Mississippi with her, heard from Carol Hanisch, a leader in New York Radical Women, that a group was meeting to talk about women’s liberation. Brownmiller was then a full-time news writer at ABC and a staff writer for the Village Voice. She went to the meeting, and her life changed. “This was always in my heart,” she observed; “I was always a feminist.”163

Figure 2.2. Susan Brownmiller at Women Against Pornography march, New York City, October 1979. Photo by Janie Eisenberg.

In March 1970, while working as a freelance writer, Brownmiller coordinated the sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal, which protested its sexist treatment of women. Women from Redstockings, New York Radical Feminists (including West Village-One, Brownmiller’s consciousness-raising group), and some female journalists participated in the successful occupation.164 The following January, Brownmiller instigated a “speak-out” on rape with New York Radical Feminists, followed in April by the New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape. These events led her to undertake serious research and analysis on the subject, and her breakthrough book Against Our Will was published four years later to critical praise and great public attention. In 1975, Time magazine named Brownmiller one of its twelve “Women of the Year.” The book is credited with stimulating awareness of rape as a pervasive aspect of patriarchal culture by which men dominate women; in Brownmiller’s words, rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” The book was translated into twenty languages, and the New York Public Library considers Against Our Will one of one hundred “Books of the Century.”165

In Brownmiller’s contribution to the Jewish Women’s Archive’s project on feminism, she comments that somewhere in Against Our Will, she mentions “quietly” that she is “Jewish from Brooklyn.” But, she continues, “I have never stressed my Jewish heritage in my writing. Yet the heritage is still with me, and I can argue that my chosen path—to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women—had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and the Holocaust.”166 This remarkable acknowledgment, coming more than thirty years after Brownmiller’s book, echoes the reflections of some of the Chicago Gang of Four and Marilyn Webb’s views, as they retrospectively considered the motivations for their feminist activism. Brownmiller’s assertion is particularly revelatory as it connects two kinds of violent oppression, the rape of women and the killing of Jews, which she had not explicitly discussed in her book.

Brownmiller went on to write other works—Femininity in 1984, the novel Waverly Place in 1987, and Seeing Vietnam: Encounters of the Road and Heart in 1994—before penning the social history of the radical feminist movement in which she had been such a significant participant, as both writer and activist. Her 1999 work In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution was based on interviews with more than two hundred activists, quite a number of whom were Jewish. Yet Brownmiller did not ask any questions about possible connections between their women’s liberation commitments and their Jewish identities, and there is no discussion of this matter in the book. The index has no entry for “Jewish” either. But a quotation from Sheila Cronan, a Catholic member of Redstockings, contains a revealing mention of Jewishness. Cronan remarks, “A lot of the Jewish women had grown up in radical families and had gone to expensive colleges where they’d been involved with radical groups. They were used to speaking out and being listened to at least to some extent. We didn’t have that confidence. We felt that the Jewish women thought the Catholic women were intellectually inferior or kind of stupid because we didn’t speak their political language.”167 Brownmiller describes a “triumvirate of working-class Catholics” in Redstockings. In addition to Cronan, there were Barbara Mehrhof and Pam Kearon, who felt like “outsiders” in the group. Mehrhof believed that Firestone, Willis, and Kathie Sarachild (who may have been perceived as Jewish) formed a leadership clique, disregarding everyone else’s ideas. The Catholic “triumvirate” began to meet separately on another evening, calling themselves the Class Workshop; Linda Feldman, a Jewish Redstockings member, joined them.168 According to Baxandall, there were almost no WASPs in New York’s radical feminist movement at the time.169

Figure 2.3. Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem at Women Against Pornography march, New York City, October 1979. Photo by Bettye Lane. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Although in Shulman’s view, the Jewish women did not acknowledge connections among themselves, to the Catholic women, Jewish women’s family and class backgrounds and leadership styles stood out.

***

Surrounded by so many other Jews in the city, Jewish radical feminists of New York did not experience marginality as Jews, which might have provided common bonds, and they did not share religious upbringings or rebellions against them, as did Catholic women. It was race, not religion or ethnicity, that occupied the foreground of the Jewish feminists’ concerns about difference. Pioneering Jewish-born New York radical feminist Robin Morgan described to me the identity politics of the moment, particularly among those who had participated in the civil rights movement. “It was, ‘Oh, my God, we’re white.’ ‘I’ve looked in the mirror this morning and I was still white. Oh, Christ, what am I going to do?’” These women emphasized doing “good work . . . , political work. . . . Jewishness was . . . second.” Still, Morgan said that a certain aspect of “Jewish culture” might have been present, creating “a warmth in the early CR groups that was very caring, very huggy, . . . potluck dinners . . . in people’s homes.”170 Along with less admired elitist tendencies that some non-Jewish radical feminists noted among Jewish colleagues, this kind of familial connection and intimacy, under the radar as Jewish inflected, may have been characteristic of the pioneering New York radical feminists.

At the time historians of radical feminism wrote their books, the question of a Jewish connection to radical feminism did not seem relevant to them, as it had not to movement participants. But the experiences of Firestone, Willis, Shulman, and Brownmiller demonstrate that the currents of ethnic identity embedded in the experiences of the women’s liberationists ran deep, even when submerged. Unique to each woman, the conundrums of Jewishness suggest a wide range of responses that interacted with feminist consciousness in distinct and varied ways. Despite shared elements, there was no common Jewish core that united their experiences.

Shulamith Firestone needed to break with Orthodoxy. In rebellion against patriarchy, whether the religion of her childhood or the undemocratic attitudes of New Left men, Firestone went on to disrupt normative ideas about gender, waging a vehement battle against sexist institutions. In the early years of radical feminism, she did not openly embrace her Jewish heritage, but the very fierceness of her attack suggests that the inequities she found in the religion signaled to her a painful betrayal of its core values, as did the radical men’s perversion of communal, socialist ideals.

Ellen Willis, who had the most comfortable relationship to her Jewish background, simply extrapolated from her particular, New York–based secular, progressive, red-diaper-baby Jewish milieu. As a “conscious Jew,” Willis recognized the historicity of Jewish identity, both the importance of situational context and the shared consciousness that tied generations of Jews to each other. Despite encountering anti-Jewish bias or occasions when Jews turned their back on their own liberal heritage, Willis was comfortable with the tradition, locating in her own skepticism and sense of herself as “critical outsider” the heritage of all Diaspora Jews. Her continuous, explicit, and deeply felt comments about Jewish life and Israel and her self-identification as a left-wing Jew and feminist were an anomaly among radical feminists.

Alix Kates Shulman had to uncover the meaning of a largely assimilated Jewish experience. She found no congruence between the concerns of radical feminism and the religious/ethnic backgrounds of its leaders. Denying these connections did not mean that she lacked appreciation for their significance in the lives of others. But in New York, where so many intellectuals and radicals were Jewish, a Jewish presence among the “downtown” feminists was hardly remarkable. For Shulman, it was only self-identified Jews such as Willis who stood out.

Susan Brownmiller, who grew up in a liberal Jewish home, belatedly connected her interest in rape and sexual battery to Jews’ devastating historical experience of violence. Brownmiller eschewed Jewish religious customs and practice, but she did not cut herself off from Jewish identification. Only in hindsight did she understand the salience of her Jewish upbringing to her own feminist journey and perhaps those of the many other Jewish radical feminists whose movement activities she chronicled but whose Jewish backgrounds she did not interrogate. In recent years, she has become fiercely pro-Israel.171

Through rebellion, denial, assimilation, or connection, each of these women experienced Jewishness in a radically different way. Each became a major part of radical feminism’s New York Jewish story, finding innovative ways to express and demand freedom—the centerpiece of the Jewish narrative—even if, as in Firestone’s case, it meant breaking with key elements of that tradition, such as the nuclear family. Each hoped to “recreate a politics that emphasizes our common humanity,” as Willis wrote of her own standpoint as a “woman . . . and as a Jew.” Their identities diverged, but together they provide a snapshot of the ways in which ethnic and religious influences, feminist and class consciousness, and immersion in the exciting possibilities of a rapidly changing cultural moment combined to make history. “We were . . . poised on the trembling edge of a transformation,” Baxandall explained.172