3 “Conscious Radicals”

The Jewish Story of Boston’s Bread and Roses

On Mother’s Day, May 11, 1969, after several months of preliminary meetings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, six hundred women gathered at Emmanuel College, a small Catholic women’s college across the river in Boston, to discuss forming a new kind of women’s liberation organization. With workshops on dozens of political topics, karate demonstrations, movies, and more, the conference was “electric,” as Meredith Tax wrote, but there was no clear mandate of how to proceed to organize a citywide women’s group to fight against male supremacy, incorporating socialist principles but focusing squarely on the liberation of women.1

Cell 16, a radical feminist group led by Roxanne Dunbar, co-organizer of the Emmanuel conference, had organized the previous year in Boston, its program calling for “radical women to dissociate themselves from male-oriented, male-dominated radical organizations and join together in Women’s Liberation groups.”2 The group considered itself part of a “female liberation” movement, aiming not only for the “equality of women in society but the liberation of the female principle in order to change the very structure of society.”3 Socialist feminists questioned Cell 16’s separatist program, which Tax thought encouraged feminists to “leave their husbands and children and live celibate lives in feminist collectives.” “We were interested in building a mass movement, not joining a cell,” Tax elaborated.4 Dunbar herself was extremely charismatic. “It was meeting her that turned me into a feminist instantly,” Linda Gordon recalled. Unlike Cell 16 adherents, Tax and Gordon retained their connections to the New Left and began to imagine a different kind of women’s liberation organization.5

Tax wanted a structure that could become the kernel of a “radical, mass, autonomous women’s liberation movement.” For Gordon, with whom Tax had worked in a draft-resistance organization in London, the “key word was ‘autonomous,’ not independent or separate,” a description that marked a distinctive feminist mission but also the organization’s initial formation within the larger New Left.6

Tax and Gordon formed a small political collective of socialist feminists in Boston, with Jean Tepperman and Fran Ansley, who had been involved in local SDS groups and the draft resistance movement. The group placed a notice for an open meeting in the Old Mole, the local New Left paper, and the weekly countercultural paper the Boston Phoenix. The women hoped such a meeting would spin off additional collectives to study the oppression of women and develop action responses.7

The gathering took place in June and was followed by regular Friday meetings of fifty to seventy women throughout the summer. By September, the group coalesced into a citywide organization, Bread and Roses, named after a women’s labor song from a strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912: “Hearts starve as well as bodies / Give us bread but give us roses!” The name reflected the founders’ belief that liberation required material improvements but also a more holistic quality of life, as well as the turn to women’s past to provide models for current action.8

By early 1970, two dozen collectives had been formed, usually on the basis of friendships and neighborhoods.9 Tax and Gordon’s initial group stayed together and included nine women in addition to themselves: Fran Ansley, Jean Tepperman, Trude Bennett, Michele Clark, Marya Levenson, Grey Osterud, Sara Syer Eisenstein, Marsha Buttman, and Judy Ullman. They became Collective #1. Collective #2 was formed at about the same time, largely by close friends of members of #1. The women wanted to keep the collectives small enough to give everyone a turn to speak.10

Bread and Roses became one of the most influential women’s liberation groups in the country. It was the first declared socialist women’s liberation organization, preceding the organization of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union by one month.11 With upward of two hundred to three hundred regular members, Bread and Roses established an organizational structure based on biweekly mass meetings in combination with weekly meetings of the smaller collectives. The mass meetings and small groups informed each other, actualizing the theory that “the personal is political” by working out the political meanings of private experience through consciousness-raising, studying women’s historical experiences, and political organizing. Bread and Roses also developed “project” or “work” groups, based on particular interests. Members participated in demonstrations and protests around a variety of issues, such as reproductive rights, workers’ rights, equal employment, racism, sexism in family roles, and violence against women.12

The organization viewed its purpose as bringing together “socialism and feminism, women and the revolution,” in theory and practice. Its main tenets were the “fight again male supremacy as it exists in all institutions, and in its structural basis, the bourgeois family,” and the overthrow of capitalism to create a socialist society—“one free of all forms of exploitation, racism, imperialism, and male supremacy.”13 Anti-imperialist and antiracist as well as feminist, Bread and Roses had the goal of working for the liberation of all oppressed groups, not only women. The group was also “anti-reformist,” refusing to ally with “institutions of power.” The focus was on direct action—protests, demonstrations, making demands from “outside.”14

Unlike Marxist discussion groups, Bread and Roses groups did not begin by reading. Through consciousness-raising—the exploration of private experience as a lever to understand such oppressive social institutions as families, schools, mass media, politics, and sex and gender roles—they believed that they would find their way to enlightenment and action. The groups “started with the evidence at hand of women’s lives in the 1950s and 1960s,” as Gordon points out. “Encounters that once seemed routine or idiosyncratic were reinterpreted as socially constructed patterns.” While African Americans always understood their own oppression, women needed to unlearn the “false consciousness” they experienced as a consequence of their femaleness.15

The organization was particularly concerned with outreach to poor, working-class, and minority women, aiming to correct the “white” focus of education and population policies. Tax articulated these beliefs in an early pamphlet: “We cannot talk of sisterhood without realizing that the objective position in society of most of us is different from that of welfare mothers, or the black maids of our white others and of women in 3rd world countries. Sisterhood means not saying that their fight is our fight, but making it our fight.”16

While Bread and Roses prided itself on the breadth of its politics—liberal and progressive, “communist, feminist, anarchist, in lots of varieties and combinations”—it recognized the disadvantages of diverse goals and loose structure. One problem involved translating the energy and trust developed in the small groups to the larger whole. How to navigate New Left politics, while developing a philosophy and strategies as a radical women’s movement, posed another challenge. Bread and Roses had been inspired by New Left ideas, including those about women’s workplace oppression under capitalism, but most members did not believe that forming caucuses within existing male institutions was a viable strategy. In Marya Levenson’s words, it was not just a “similar-but-worse condition shared by men.”17

The organization attempted to dodge the split between “politicos” and “radical feminists” in the new women’s liberation movement in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. As an autonomous organization, it hoped to work on its own as part of the overall New Left in Boston.18 But autonomy did not come easily. In a memo a few months after the group formed, Jean Tepperman of Collective #1 warned about following the lead of male comrades and turning Bread and Roses “into the lady’s auxiliary of SDS.” The organization needed to build a strong and “organic” women’s liberation movement that incorporated socialism and internationalism, she reiterated, but on its own terms. They would need to be “conscious radicals,” Tax asserted.19

As in other women’s liberation groups, the personal grounded the political, as the excitement of building a women’s movement launched passionate friendships. “Much of the energy that had heretofore gone into sexual relationships and especially couples was now being directed towards women friends and the women’s community in general,” Bread and Roses member Ann Hunter Popkin put it. “Even women who remained in traditional heterosexual couples report ‘getting high’ from the energy level.” Popkin observed that in talking about themselves as “sisters,” members borrowed a family metaphor from the black movement, which used the terms “sister” and “brother” to show solidarity. Even as Bread and Roses members focused on how to eradicate oppressions of the nuclear family, they sought the “intensity, the closeness, the permanence and reliability” of an ideal family form. “Thinking of other women as sisters in the family sense carried with it the desire for an unbreakable bond, ‘forever.’”20

Yet within two years, Bread and Roses had collapsed, in part because of the difficulties of establishing a strategic vision, organizational structure, and leadership capacity that could move its goals forward. “Bread and Roses never wrote down what it stood for; consequently it attracted many women who weren’t socialists,” said Tax. “All we came up with was a laundry list of demands coupled with a utopian vision.”21 There was no formal communications system or regular newsletter (though Bread and Roses irregularly published a xeroxed one, called Hysteria) and no elected or appointed leaders. As elsewhere in the new movement, the women feared elitism.22 “We were terrified of power,” Tax said. “Power meant oppression, . . . acting like bosses or fathers and being hated.”23 Rejecting “star-tripping,” Bread and Roses chose a different model: when the organizers of an antiwar march asked for a speaker, it sent three women, all wearing masks.24

In a memo written to movement colleagues, Tax offered another reason for Bread and Roses’ collapse: its “non-struggle politics.” With conflicts turned into “personal differences” or “glossed over with a phoney frosting of sisterhood,” she charged the group with “failure to struggle for ideological leadership” of the women’s movement. She believed the lack of political clarity crippled the organization’s ability to create a mass movement.25

Linda Gordon identified different issues. She considered Bread and Roses’ meetings to be orderly, “following Robert’s Rules to a fault.” However, this resulted in overly long gatherings, difficult for working women with jobs and/or children. And while “radical egalitarianism” worked well for the small groups, “letting everyone have a turn” and other antihierarchical principles diminished the large organization’s effectiveness. Gordon also cited the fact that highly educated, confident women spoke a lot (“maybe too much”), with their contributions carrying disproportionate weight. The result was a growing resentment of these “heavies” and a failure to focus on internal development of leaders.26 But overall, Gordon evaluated Bread and Roses’ pluralistic approach positively. With individual groups free to start and operate their own projects without having to get approval from the larger organization or meet any ideological test, it “let a thousand flowers bloom,” an orientation that brought in new members and spawned innovative and often long-lasting social action projects.27

Bread and Roses’ demise is dated either as January 1971, after an informal set of meetings (dubbed “crumbs and petals”) could not reconcile differences, or early March, when 150 activists from local women’s groups, led by Bread and Roses members, took over a Harvard building at 888 Memorial Drive to demand the creation of a women’s center and low-cost housing for area residents. After the women held the building for ten days, Harvard capitulated, buying a house for the movement, an important recognition of the “power of militant collective action,” in Gordon’s view. The following year, the women’s coalition opened what became the longest running women’s center in the U.S. at the site, offering resources relating to sexuality, lesbian lives, violence toward women, employment and education, and other issues.28 Some Bread and Roses projects developed into independent organizations, including the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and 9 to 5, a grassroots women’s office workers’ collective. In 1972, women from Bread and Roses established the Women’s School, offering classes on such subjects as writing, art, auto mechanics, self-defense, lesbianism, capitalism, black history, and Native American women. Members worked for abortion reform, did draft counseling, and supported the Black Panthers. They also pioneered one of the first battered women’s shelters in the U.S.29

Many of these projects had lasting influence, as did the basic process of consciousness-raising that lay at the core of the group’s mission. Several collectives lasted longer than did the larger organization. In these ways, Bread and Roses served as a model for other women’s liberation groups. The conference at Emmanuel College that spawned the organization had another major consequence: the formation of a women’s health collective that created the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves. Several of the collective’s founders were members of the first Bread and Roses groups; the work of the health collective is ongoing.

Although none of the works that discuss Bread and Roses or the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective mention the Jewish background of members, Jewishness is a significant part of the history of both groups. This omission is not surprising since Jewish issues were never a central focus—and usually were no focus at all—of either organization. Yet my evaluation of the extensive survey of Bread and Roses members done by Ann Popkin, who wrote a 1978 dissertation on the organization, suggests that perhaps half or more of her seventy-five interviewees were Jewish, though most grew up in secular homes and did not practice any religion.30

Numbers alone do not reveal the full story. As in Chicago and New York, Jewish radical feminists in Boston’s Bread and Roses did not identify themselves as Jews, nor did its collectives examine issues regarding Jewishness, or ethnicity and religion specifically, focusing instead on more universal problems of sexism and patriarchy, particularly as they related to race and class. They sought ways to repair sharp divisions among gays and straights, “politicos” and radical feminists, and the failure to attract many women of color or working-class women disappointed them. Sociologist Winifred Breines, a former Bread and Roses member, writes that members’ “theory was more interracial and racially sensitive than was their practice.”31 Neither Jewish identity nor Judaism as a religion made the cut of important issues.

But there may be differences between Bread and Roses members and radical liberationists in Chicago and New York. Consciousness-raising in some Bread and Roses collectives included mentions of Jewish parents or other aspects of ethnic and religious backgrounds, even though these remarks did not become focal points of discussions. Yiddish backgrounds, seders, the Holocaust, Anne Frank, and parents’ radical affiliations were brought up as collective members shared ideas in consciousness-raising discussions. More unusual were public mentions, such as Jean Tepperman’s feminist poem “Witch,” circulated in movement literature, which included a line about “frizzy” hair that “looks Jewish.”32 Members did not take special note of these conversations or readings. In discussions with me, several registered their surprise at the numbers of Jewish women among them.

Yet my interviews with approximately two dozen members of Bread and Roses Collective #1 and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, as well as other Bread and Roses members, reveal that at the time of their involvement in radical feminism, Jewishness was a relevant factor in individual women’s lives.33 In their childhoods and young adulthood, these women had encountered a variety of experiences and associations with Jewishness that shaped their identities. These factors included Jewish religion or spirituality, Jewish ethics, the influence of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the experience of marginality, radical Jewish politics, family backgrounds of immigration, and cultural or “lifestyle” Judaism. While the women saw themselves as part of a broader movement on the left devoted to fighting sexism and creating new models of change, links to a Jewish past helped frame their adaptation to the possibilities of the moment. As elsewhere in the women’s movement, Jewishness may have been more of a latent rather than explicit factor, but it was present. Despite the women’s universalist goals, Jewishness was an important lever for feminist activism.

In ensuing years, a number of Bread and Roses women developed deeper Jewish connections. Several became leaders in Jewish peace organizations; others chose religious or spiritual paths, attending services and becoming involved in synagogue life. Some women remained secular but Jewish identified; a few had always been religious minded. Most of the women struggled with issues regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject that was deeply emotional as well as political for them. Later in life as before, the spectrum of Jewish identifications ranged widely.

A Profile of Bread and Roses

The women of Bread and Roses were white, middle class, college educated, usually in their twenties, and mostly single and childless. Studies of Bread and Roses by doctoral candidates Kristine Rosenthal and Ann Popkin in 1972 and 1978, respectively, provide a demographic portrait of the group. From direct interviews and questionnaires, Rosenthal and Popkin ascertained the women’s high level of educational achievement and their considerable political engagement. Of the 150 women polled by Rosenthal, 83 percent had college degrees, and half had done graduate work; 27 percent had received master’s degrees, and one-fourth were currently enrolled as students. Almost 80 percent came from large East Coast urban areas, predominantly New York City and its suburbs. Popkin notes that 80 percent of members came from middle- or upper-middle-class families. Over three-quarters had at least one parent working as a professional, compared to less than one-third in the general population. The proportion of Bread and Roses women with mothers who worked as professionals or in the technical sector was more than four times that of women in the general population.34

According to Popkin, the women’s class and educational backgrounds prepared them with verbal and analytic skills, while their activism prior to involvement in the women’s movement helped to shape their expectations and behavioral styles. Most of the women surveyed were in college during the 1960s. Thus, they came of age in a period of emerging social protest involving civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and student activism. Fifty-two percent had been politically involved in high school in these causes. In college, they showed a preference for politics over any other kind of student activity. A sense of “the movement” and a developing “new left” culture provided a social context for their political associations. These findings correlate with those of social scientists who found that Jews (and Catholics) were more likely to become involved in 1960s activism than were youth from other backgrounds.35

Popkin suggested another reason for these women’s attraction to the social protest movements of the 1960s: the liberal or progressive political orientation of their parents engendered expectations of social equality that clashed with the realities of the world they encountered as they came of age, including both the harshness of poverty and racism within the U.S. and the bitterly fought Vietnam War. Parents’ political attitudes were relevant to daughters’ activism. While there were very few red-diaper babies (7 percent were children of communists, and another 11 percent were offspring of socialists), Popkin finds a “strikingly high” number of parents had “left of center” political attitudes: about one-third were left-liberal/progressives or liberal Democrats, and another 15 percent were described as Democrats. While these attitudes may have seeded their daughters’ political views, in college and after, as they drifted to the left of their parents’ values, their views often led to family dissention and personal frustration.36

Prior to creating or joining Bread and Roses, then, these aspiring feminists had been engaged in a wide variety of political experiences. They had the skills to engage in political debate and the motivations to search for meaningful political involvement and modes of personal and social change. Their education, class, and family backgrounds encouraged them to “think politically,” as Rebecca Klatch says of the young rebels of both the Left and Right whom she interviewed for her book on 1960s youth politics.37 The characteristics noted by Popkin, Rosenthal, and Klatch apply especially well to the Jewish women of Bread and Roses. Their experiences help us understand how the historical moment intersected with personal lives, including Jewish influences, so as to create a new and dynamic women’s liberation organization.

According to Popkin, although all Bread and Roses collectives were theoretically equal, the collectives that formed early usually had the most prominence, because they contained a disproportionate number of leaders. The numbering of the collectives reflected their prestige, “with collective number one being the most prestigious.”38 This collective, the focus of this chapter, included some of Bread and Roses’ founders and recognized leaders (Meredith Tax, Linda Gordon, and Marya Levenson were frequently named by survey respondents as movement “heavies”). It also included a high proportion of Jewish women: eight out of eleven collective members were Jewish, a fact unremarked by most of them. For this analysis, I construct the Jewish themes in the life stories of five members of the collective. A final Jewish story in the chapter belongs to Diane Balser, Bread and Roses’ sole staff member and member of Collective #2, who worked closely with all the collectives. In these stories, Jewish roots and background emerge as significant factors in the motivations and styles of radical feminist activism. Narratives relating to the Jewish women of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which developed from Bread and Roses, will be told in chapter 4.

Meredith Tax and Linda Gordon: “Smart” Jewish Women, the Left, and Feminist Community

Meredith Tax and Linda Gordon were outliers to the early women’s liberation movement with regard to the geography of their childhoods: Tax was from the Midwest, and Gordon was from the Far West, not the urban meccas of the Northeast or mid-Atlantic states. The women came from different Jewish and class backgrounds. Growing up in an upwardly mobile, nonpolitical Jewish family that enjoyed a suburban lifestyle in Milwaukee, Tax was exposed to organized Jewish life at Reform synagogue, where she absorbed positive ethical messages about Judaism. These contrasted with the contempt for women she discovered within the tradition, along with a sense of anxiety about her Jewishness. As an activist, writer, and lifelong organizer drawn to socialism and feminism, she put this childhood legacy and the influences of the social movements of her adult years to practical purpose, contributing to feminist literature and political life in myriad ways.

Gordon came from a lower-middle-class family of political radicals; her exposure to Jewishness came from the secular, Yiddish traditions of immigrant radicalism. She shared with Tax an upbringing in which the anxiety of being Jewish was prominent, although in Gordon’s case, this was folded mostly into the threats her family experienced as communists in the age of McCarthyism. Early on, both learned that smart girls in bourgeois society faced an unpredictable future. Combining activism and writing, they blazed a path for women’s liberation, with particular attention to the oppressions of racial and ethnic minorities.

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After Meredith Tax had spent four years in London, where she was active in the antiwar movement, she went to Boston in 1967 and helped initiate Bread and Roses. Tax left Boston for Chicago after a few years and participated in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union before eventually going to New York, where she also played a role in women’s liberation. She believes that the Jewish presence in Bread and Roses was the most significant of all the feminist groups she worked with, but aside from occasional references, it was a subject that no one dwelled on. “We were interested in the things that united us,” Tax recalled, and especially “why so much separation,” “why there were no black women.”39

Tax’s Jewishness was central to her identity. Born in 1942, she grew up in Wisconsin, first in a small town and then in Milwaukee, and then she moved to Whitefish Bay, a suburb that had been restricted until shortly before the Taxes moved there. “We weren’t the first Jews on the block,” said Tax, “but there weren’t a lot of them.”40 Jewishness was ever present in her childhood home and among her extended family, but it was ingrained with a fearful and secretive defensiveness. Her immigrant grandparents had come to the U.S. to save the family from “pogroms and starvation.” Her parents, a successful physician father and a homemaker mother, gave their children the benefits of a suburban lifestyle with “good (i.e., white) schools”: “We should be grateful, keep our heads down, and not ask questions.”41

This attitude especially affected Tax’s mother, who had grown up in a small country town where her family members were the only Jews. Her father had served in the Medical Corps during World War II, enlisting twice “because he wanted to defeat Hitler.”42 Although his unit liberated one of the concentration camps in Germany, Tax discovered this experience only after his death, since he refused to discuss it. The Holocaust was a forbidden subject for her mother as well. When, at age ten, Meredith found a box of old photos of a foreign-looking family, including four boys with shaved heads, her mother avoided all her questions as to their identity. On another occasion, she remembers her mother turning off a TV newsreel showing the liberation of Auschwitz, telling her, “I can’t stand to look at those people.”43

Tax connected her mother’s high anxiety level with being Jewish. “She was always afraid people would know. When we kids talked too loud in a public place, she would say, ‘Shh, you sound like Chicago Jews,’ or, if we were really loud, ‘Shh, you sound like [a] New York Jew.’”44 Her mother lived her life in fear, even refusing to let her daughter get her ears pierced “because the Nazis would rip them off.”45 Tax learned quickly that “to be a Jew in the heart of the Midwest is to be part of an obvious and conscious minority, the object of curiosity or attack.”46

Despite the uncommunicativeness of Tax’s parents, she discovered that Hitler had succeeded in “killing Grandma’s whole family.” “How could such a thing happen?” she asked herself. “Could it happen again? Could it happen in Milwaukee?” She was not reassured by the Nazi paraphernalia on display in war-souvenir stores that she passed on her way to the main library in Milwaukee—medals, uniforms, swords, and swastikas—frightening symbols to a young child that remain powerfully etched in her memory.47

Other incidents added to Tax’s sense of Jews as a threatened minority. There was the history teacher who told the class, “Say what you want about Hitler, he built good roads.” In the Bavarian Inn, a suburban retreat where Tax attended Sweet Sixteen parties, there was the sign hung until after World War II that read, “No dogs or Jews allowed.” And there was the social segregation between Jews and non-Jewish youth, which left Tax feeling socially isolated: “You dated Jewish boys or you didn’t date.” By the time she was a junior, her social reference group “was not mainly Jewish but a little group of smart girls and misfits, and whatever boys came with them. Some of us were Jewish, some were not.”48

Yet there was a more positive side of Judaism, which Tax encountered at weekly Shabbat services at the local Reform synagogue, where her father’s sister and brother-in-law were pillars of the congregation and where Tax was later confirmed. It was at this synagogue that she “absorbed the culture of ethical Judaism, based on Hillel’s principle that which is hateful to you do not unto others, and the precept that what God required . . . was to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly”: “I did my best to live by those ideas and still do.”49

But the contradictions between these precepts and some practices of Milwaukee’s Jewish community troubled Tax. In 1955, when she was thirteen, she wondered why congregants in her temple did not organize to support the civil rights movement. When her family moved from Milwaukee to the suburbs that same year, Tax fought bitterly with her parents, accusing them of furthering segregation. She went through a brief religious period in high school but lost interest in religion, never to regain it, finding the intellectual and emotional offerings of Reform Judaism unfulfilling.

Tax was warned repeatedly against being too smart. “At first, I couldn’t understand what they were so worried about,” Tax recalled, “because I thought it was good to be smart. ‘Not for girls,’ they said. I asked my mother, ‘Is it true nobody will want to marry me just because I’m smart?’ ‘Nobody Jewish,’ she said.” Tax’s relatives joined the chorus, saying she was “too smart for a girl”: “Nobody would ever marry me. If only my brother had my brains, and I had his eyelashes.” When later, she began to study Jewish history, Tax learned that “contempt for women runs like a dark thread through Jewish tradition—like the traditions of other religions,” but at the time, she only knew that her ambitions, and her intelligence, were deemed unfeminine and inappropriate.50

For Tax, attitudes toward Jews and women—“especially smart women”—ran together. The “contradictions in [her] life as a Jewish girl” led her to become a feminist “before there was a women’s movement and before [she] even knew the word.” But everyone just laughed at her ideas about gender equality, and so, finishing high school, she chose a college where women and Jews would be more accepted.51 Tax selected Brandeis University over Harvard: “not to explore my Jewishness but to free myself from having it hanging around my neck all the time; was it possible that if Jews were in the majority I would be seen not as Jew but as a person?” She also thought she could be “a smart girl” at Brandeis; her “weirdness” would be tolerated.52

Tax enjoyed Brandeis, especially being immersed in aspects of Jewish culture and having friends “who were sophisticated, secular Jews from New York,” but “being a smart girl was still kind of risky,” given the sexism of the times and the fact that Tax was never appropriately deferential.53 Tax had to grapple with the “commonly held idea that education for women should be regarded as a prelude to marriage. A palpable gloom settled over the smart girls of the senior class, who were going to have to kill the years waiting for Mr. Right either by continuing in school or becoming a secretary for some guy very like their male classmates.” These attitudes became “background to [her] ideas about Jewish identity.”54

On a Fulbright scholarship to London after Brandeis, Tax embarked on graduate work in English literature, but by 1967, a sense of political urgency interrupted her studies. News of the civil war in Nigeria, the Six-Day War in Israel, and the Vietnam War saturated the daily front pages, as did troubling reports of race riots in U.S. cities. Tax quit her thesis work and became a full-time political activist. It would be the end of her “brilliant career.” “I had formed myself in opposition to the suburban world I came from, but as an artsy bohemian, not a political radical. These self-definitions became obsolete overnight.”55

Returning to the U.S. from London, Tax became immersed in the women’s movement in Boston. After it formed, Collective #1 of Bread and Roses met at her house. “What we want is to make politics more human, more in touch with reality, and more responsive to the mass,” she wrote in a letter “to the Boston movement,” reflecting the group’s belief in the overriding political importance of their work. “We must . . . think of ourselves as carriers of ideas which have transformed us and will transform the world.”56

Tax found her calling in the movement. “I never knew who I was until the women’s movement,” she said. “Without it, I had no community, no place I felt at home.”57 She began to write, penning a four-part essay, “Women and Her Mind: The Story of Daily Life,” which was published as a pamphlet by the New England Press in 1970. Notes from the Second Year published the first two sections in 1970, and the 1972 anthology Female Liberation included the other two sections. Examining the loss of ego and the stifling of intelligence due to women’s socialization and objectification, “Women and Her Mind” sold 150,000 copies and is considered to be a founding document of women’s liberation.58 Shortly after writing this piece, Tax began researching the story of union women, hoping to find a more usable past for women radicals than the suffrage movement, which seemed to her too compromised by its class dimensions and politics.59

Tax married Jon Schwartz in 1968. In 1972, the couple moved to Chicago to become part of a Maoist group and start a new revolutionary party; Tax dropped her aspirations for an academic career. She worked in two factories, went to China during the Cultural Revolution, and spent a year and a half as a nurse’s aide. In constant struggle with the leadership of the Maoist group, she was kicked out of it in 1975 for being a feminist and criticizing leadership. When her daughter was one year old, her husband left. She moved to New York a year later to start over.60

In New York, she finished The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917, a historical account of cross-class alliances between American working-class and middle-class women.61 Tax went on to write two acclaimed historical novels about working-class Jewish radical women, Rivington Street (1982) and Union Square (1988).62 Tax never specifically looked for Jewish women in these works—“they were just there,” she said—but as her research deepened, she recognized that the connection of her personal history to these stories was more complicated. “I was constructing an alternative family for myself where the people wouldn’t be afraid.”63

In addition to writing, Tax continued her political activism on behalf of women. She was the founding co-chair of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), formed in 1977, which helped start the Reproductive Rights National Network.64 In 1986, Tax and Grace Paley initiated and became co-chairs of the PEN American Center Women’s Committee. Later, Tax became founding chair of International PEN’s Women Writers’ Committee. From 1994 to 2004, she was founding president of Women’s WORLD, a global free-speech and mutual-aid network for women writers that fought gender-based censorship.

Tax has also been involved in Jewish issues. At Women’s WORLD, she began a project to draw attention to the work of Israeli and Palestinian feminist peacemakers. As the “president of a global feminist organization and as an American Jew,” she spoke out against Israel’s occupation policies, especially involving Palestinian women. Tax served on the advisory committee of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom / Jewish Alliance for Peace and Justice, which advocated for a two-state solution.65

Through Tax’s participation in the free expression, women’s, and human rights movements, she developed a concern about women and Islam, writing about threats to women because of Muslim fundamentalism and other ideologies that fuse religious dogma and politics. She is the chair of the international advisory group of the Centre for Secular Space, which sees its mission as strengthening secular voices, opposing fundamentalism, and promoting universality in human rights, and has written Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights and, most recently, A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.66 Tax makes it clear that her enemy is all fundamentalisms, whether Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or Muslim. She hopes to bring attention to the plight of women subject to abuse anywhere around the globe.

Although Tax carries on her battles from a theoretical space that she calls secular, she continues to be guided by the ethical principles she learned at Temple Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” She quotes Rabbi Hillel, “That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”67 She brings her Jewish values and her concern for peace in the Middle East together with her stance as a global feminist, organizing and writing to protest injustices and to create change. As a Jew, she identifies as a “proud citizen of the Diaspora”: “comfortable almost anywhere and able to meet and work with all different kinds of people without hiding my Jewishness.” She believes that there is no solution to the problem of Jews “except as part of the solution to the problems of everyone else.”68 Nor does she think it possible to isolate the problems of women from those of the rest of society. The struggles that she engaged with in the heady days of Bread and Roses continue.

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Linda Gordon grew up in a “very Jewish home” in a geographic location where Jews were a distinct minority and where her family’s class and political radicalism further isolated her, and she experienced some of the same issues of alienation that troubled Tax.

Gordon was born in Chicago, where she spent the first five years of her life; her family lived above her grandparents in a tenement. Both her parents were immigrants whose first language was Yiddish, which Gordon’s mother spoke to her own parents. Gordon studied Yiddish for a year at an Arbeiterring shul (her grandfather was an Arbeiterring member), managing it well enough to be able to converse with her grandmother, who cared for her while her mother, a nursery school teacher, worked.

Gordon’s maternal grandfather in Chicago was a leader in his synagogue, which he attended every day. He liked to conduct theological discussions at large dinners and seders, and Gordon remembers him provoking discussion by saying, “Let’s suppose there is no God, then what?” For Gordon, “intense Jewishness combined with agnosticism” characterized both sides of her family: “the two were never contradictory to me.”69

Gordon’s father conveyed other aspects of a Jewish worldview. Raised in a shtetl part of the time by a widowed mother, he vividly remembered non-Jews’ view of Jews as effeminized, but this was an identity that he honored: he became very antiwar and disliked the macho male style, viewing gender equality as a Jewish value. Gordon’s father and his older brother left Europe to come to the United States before the Nazis took power, but another brother was sent to Dachau. All of her father’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust. The experience left Gordon’s father deeply committed to antiracism and antinationalism, which he understood as core Jewish values.

After Chicago, the family moved south, where Gordon’s father worked for the United Service Organizations (USO). Trained as a social worker, he became a political radical and Communist Party member. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), he was an unfriendly witness, with the repercussion that he was unemployed for a year and half, during which time the Gordons lived with relatives. The family then moved to Portland, Oregon, where Gordon’s father found work at a Jewish community center. Gordon remembers FBI agents knocking on their door more than once; her father rehearsed her on how to respond if they came when she was home alone. Out in the backyard barbecue, he burned radical leaflets. How “wonderfully ironic,” Gordon said, “burning dissident material in the iconic symbol of American life, the barbecue.” Experiencing McCarthyism intensified the insecurities that Jewish communities such as Portland felt in the wake of the Holocaust. For Gordon, it created “intense, if possibly subconscious feelings of vulnerability.”70 But it also accustomed her to being a dissenter.

Portland had very few Jews, and Gordon’s status as a religious minority influenced her development as well. She was usually “the only black-haired” girl in her class, the one with olive skin, and the only student whose home had no Christmas tree. Her father drove across town twice a week to the only bakery in town that sold rye bread. As one of the only Jews in her working-class neighborhood and in her high school, where many of the poorer students called themselves “greasers,” Gordon stood apart from her peers, as much for her smartness and ambitiousness as for her ethnicity.

At Swarthmore, the elite liberal school where Gordon went to college, she continued to feel different, more because of class reasons than Jewishness. Her family’s lower-middle-class circumstances contrasted with those of many students who came from wealthier homes. In freshman year, she was placed with a roommate who was also Jewish and who had had a nose job. This was the first time Gordon had learned of such a procedure, which to her signified upper-class status. While there were many other Jews at Swarthmore, almost all came from upper-middle-class backgrounds and were better prepared. After college, Gordon went on to study for a Ph.D. in history at Yale; her dissertation was on the origins of the Ukrainian Cossacks. In London, where she was completing her studies, she became involved in New Left antiwar activities, which she continued when she moved to Boston and became involved in the new women’s movement.

Gordon suggests that by varying degrees, Jews may have been different from other New Left participants because of their history of insecurity and their sense of being marginal to American self-identity. Other relevant factors may have been their propensity to challenge authority, their familiarity with left-wing ideas, and perhaps a sense of “superiority, at least intellectually” (the other side of “insecurity”).71 She believes that Jewish women’s background on the left contributed to feminists’ analytical categories—for example, the notion of structural as well as attitudinal sexism. Further, the Jewish experience of marginality provided insights that enabled radical feminists to pierce “taken-for-granted” truisms. And Jewish women challenged authority, which helped promote the movement, although this stance was never unique to Jewish women. In Gordon’s mistaken impression, Collective #1 had few Jews in relation to non-Jews, speaking to the fact that Jewishness, even if casually mentioned by collective members, was not a significant marker of identity.

Two other factors deserve attention. First, Gordon suggests that the influences in her own background may have made her immune to the kinds of guilt, “even self-flagellation,” that became widespread in the women’s movement, particularly in regard to racism. “I just didn’t think I had much to feel guilty about.”72 She remains uncertain about whether this might have been a reaction related to Jewishness or to class factors, but the possibility bears reflection.

Second, looking back from a perspective of some forty years, Gordon wonders whether the attack on the “heavies” of Bread and Roses, a variant of the assault on leadership throughout the women’s liberation movement, may have had something to do with Jewishness, since the “heavies” were disproportionately Jewish. “It was a group of exceptionally articulate women . . . who loved talking and always had something to say, . . . who frequently sounded very sure of themselves, often quite unjustifiably so.” Gordon believes that the “confident articulateness” of these women made it more difficult for others to speak up at large meetings and acknowledges that she and others were insensitive to the need to encourage their participation. But resentment against the “heavies” squelched leadership and weakened the movement. “Was there anti-Semitism in that agenda?” Gordon asked. “Was there a Jewish style . . . that offended others, a non-upper-middle-class style?” In raising these questions, Gordon thought back to her non-college-educated, nonprofessional mother, a “pushy, articulate, and dominating” woman, frustrated that she had no opportunity to use her innate talents.73

Whatever the challenges of the women’s movement, it provided nurturance, knowledge, and the opportunity for profound emotional and intellectual growth. “It seems impossible that adults have ever learned so much as in fact we did then,” Gordon said. “We taught each other sexual politics, emotional politics, the politics of the family, the politics of the SDS meeting.”74 “It’s different for women,” said Gordon, echoing Tax, “because the women’s movement gave us such a sense of community.”75

For Gordon’s younger brother, Lee, like the brothers of several other women’s liberation pioneers, Jewishness directly served as a fulcrum for community, identity, and politics. Gordon’s parents sent Lee to Israel for his junior year in high school in the early 1970s. Lee came back a Zionist, but his politics turned leftward when he returned to Israel to volunteer during the 1973 war and was placed in a socialist kibbutz. After college and graduate school in the U.S., Lee and a Palestinian co-founder started Hand in Hand, a network of bilingual and bicultural schools in Israel, serving both Arab and Israeli children. In creating these integrated schools, Lee hoped to build cooperating communities around them, bringing together peoples long in conflict and providing models of coexistence and equality. Lee remained in Israel for twenty years, even after his wife, a therapist, was murdered in her clinic by a deranged former patient. Today he continues his pioneering work with Hand to Hand from the United States; the schools and the communities of support that have grown up around them continue to prosper. Linda Gordon journeyed to Israel frequently to visit her brother and his family, both before and after his wife’s tragic murder. She shares his politics and understands the depth of his feelings about Israel. She remarked, “We Jews do feel differently [about the Israel question]. We do feel that what Israel does is of particular concern to us. We cannot completely separate ourselves from it. We are connected to Israel, and we cannot deny that. We cannot honestly say, ‘Well, Jews are one thing, and Israel is another.’ It’s a very painful, difficult situation.”76

Gordon went through a period in which her Jewish identity did not seem very important, but it later became more significant. The women’s movement and her teaching and scholarship about women of diverse backgrounds have remained vital to her. She taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and, since 1998, has been at New York University, where she is a professor of the humanities and professor of history. Her books have won many awards. Her first book was Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976). In 1988, she published Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence, a study of how the U.S. has dealt with family violence. Gordon then wrote Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994), focusing on black and white women on welfare. Changing direction, Gordon turned to narrative as a way of bringing large-scale historical developments to life, authoring The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, the story of a vigilante action against Mexican Americans, in 1999; a biography of photographer Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (2009); and, with Gary Okihiro, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Japanese Americans in World War II (2006). She also co-authored a book about the history of U.S. women’s movements.Her most recent book is a study of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.77 Gordon’s focus on African American, Mexican American, and working-class subjects points to a framework based on a broad multiculturalism that is sensitive to the experience of minorities, women, and gender. In this way, her childhood experiences and her early understandings of social class, ethnicity, race, and religion have had significant input into the bold work of her mature years.

Marya Levenson, Michele Clark, Grey Osterud: Culturally Jewish, with Religious Overtones

The religious traditions of Judaism experienced by Marya Levenson, Michele Clark, and Grey Osterud of Collective #1 reflect a broad spectrum, from the wealthy, alienating Reform congregation of Levenson’s childhood to the more traditional Conservatism in which Clark was raised to the ideals of Reconstructionist Judaism that inspired Osterud. Secular and cultural Jewish life, including Jewish camp, schools, and youth groups, and encounters with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism also left their mark on the women’s development. Each woman came to the social movements of the 1960s and then to feminism driven by different motives, encouraged by their friendships and networks. But the religious, cultural, and secular dimensions of Jewishness and Judaism played a role in stimulating their political energies and ideas.

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Marya Levenson grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, where her maternal grandparents founded a Conservative synagogue. Her mother, Ann Heilpern Randall, moved away from Judaism and started a school for the arts in Hartford. Her father, Wilbur Rosenberg, an advertising executive, changed his name to Randall because of anti-Semitism in that business. Later in his life, he followed Marya’s brother, who had become Orthodox, and her sister in reclaiming the family surname.

In the eighth grade, Levenson attended school at a West Hartford Reform synagogue; with the curriculum focused on comparative religion, she learned about Mormonism and Christianity as well as her own tradition. When Levenson said she did not think she believed in God, the senior rabbi did not reassure her, nor did his habit of gifting his confirmation students with a framed eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch photograph of himself. Neither was she happy with the congregation, which seemed to care more about what people wore and how well-off they were than the sermons and prayers. She quit the synagogue and did not go further in her Jewish education. A more positive connection to Judaism came through the Jewish summer camp she attended in the Catskills, run by her aunt and uncle.

Levenson began Bennington College, in Vermont, and for her junior and senior years transferred to Brandeis, where she became deeply involved in politics, including the incipient antiwar movement. Unlike Meredith Tax, who also graduated from Brandeis in 1964, Levenson had little interest in secular Jewish culture at Brandeis or elsewhere. She married upon graduation and had a child soon after. During this time, she began organizing welfare mothers in Boston, helping to create Mothers for Adequate Welfare, or MAW, which connected with SDS’s work on ERAP (Economic and Research Action Project). She also became involved with SDS’s antiwar and civil rights activities.

In 1967, Levenson attended the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago with Nancy Hawley, an event that left them both wanting to spread the word about women’s liberation. Hawley and Levenson joined in organizing the first meetings of Boston and Cambridge women, which was to become Bread and Roses. Within a few months, they co-authored a memo urging Bread and Roses, “act on our own complex rage against our own forms of oppression as women” rather than as “white and middle-class women,” urging poor and minority women to organize and take action. “None of us got turned on to the women’s movement through a leaflet,” Hawley and Levenson wrote. Before they could make demands on other women to join the revolution, they had to model risk-taking behavior on their own.78

While in Bread and Roses, Levenson began studying education at Boston University. She remained an activist outside the classroom, helping to found the Boston Teachers Center and Madison Park High School, and became one of the first women elected to the Executive Committee of the Boston Teachers Union. Levenson encountered several negative comments about Jews from some members of the Irish-dominated teachers union. Especially disturbing was the time her son came home from kindergarten and told her an anti-Semitic “joke” he had heard at school. The incident led her to recall her mother’s comment to her when she was in high school, which had made no sense at the time. When she told her mother, “I’m not Jewish because I don’t believe in the Jewish religion,” her mother replied, “You may not think you’re Jewish, but as long as people perceive you as Jewish, you will be.” Living and working in Boston in the 1970s, Levenson acknowledged her mother’s perceptiveness but determined to affirm her Jewish identity in a positive way. She now felt, “we could interact with Judaism in a way that could reflect our values.”79 Along with friends in the commune in which she lived who celebrated Passover as a holiday of freedom, she began to have seders and wrote her own Haggadah. Although she divorced her first husband, she kept his name because, unlike her father, who had changed his, she felt that a Jewish last name was a helpful marker of Jewish identity.

Levenson became principal of Newton North High School in Massachusetts, then superintendent of schools in North Colonie in upstate New York and a member of the Executive Council of the New York State Council of School Superintendents. For a number of years, she participated in a women’s group in the Albany area whose members (all Jewish) talked about what it meant to them to be Jewish women. So different from the invisibility of Jewishness in Bread and Roses twenty years earlier, these sessions were a further turning point, helping Levenson to integrate Judaism into her life. Today, she often lights candles on Shabbat, but she sees herself as “culturally Jewish,” by which she means a focus on inquiry and the social justice values she learned growing up that she believes are central to Jewish tradition. When she returned to Brandeis in 2003 to chair its Education Program, Levenson imagined that her grandmother and mother would take pride in knowing that she had found a unique way to integrate her passion for education with the values of Jewish life.

Like the other members of Collective #1, Levenson viewed the women’s movement as universal, dedicated to the goal of a promoting an inclusive sisterhood. “Religion was particularist, and it was going to fade away.”80 In retrospect, Levenson acknowledges that her Jewish identity played a role in motivating her to question injustice and become a leader in Bread and Roses—and, subsequently, in her work in educational policy and practice.

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Michele Clark distinguishes her background from that of most of her Jewish friends in Collective #1, noting that she came from an observant “Conservadox” home, not the “lefty” homes that she believes characterized the others. Her parents kept kosher, did not go shopping on Saturday, attended synagogue, and observed all the Jewish holidays. Clark was born in 1945 on the Lower East Side, where her grandfather had a kosher butcher store and delicatessen (the now iconic “Shmulke Bernstein’s”), and the family moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, when she was four. She believes that her family’s narrative represented the American dream of success and material progress, though it minimized what was pushed aside: “the old values of the mitzvoth, moderation, and community obligation” that typified the crowded urban neighborhoods they left.81 Her parents were not “socialists or Zionists or Bundists” or politically active at all. They were solid Democrats who were grateful to their country, and their politics consisting of one question only: “Is it good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?”82

Clark went to synagogue as a young girl, and at the age of thirteen had a bat mitzvah (though on Friday night rather than Saturday morning and without reading from the Torah, which girls were still not allowed to do). She continued on to Hebrew high school and participated in United Synagogue Youth, the Conservative movement’s youth group, attending national youth conventions and becoming “very involved in everything Jewish.” At the time, her life goal was to go to Israel. There she would feel at home—less “tormented” in her daily life than in the States.83

Clark’s torment grew out of her concern with the Holocaust. One of her Hebrew teachers, a refugee, told her preteen students about the horrors of the Shoah in vivid detail, “skin made into lampshades and all,” and that there was no safety: “they came for the observant Jew and the Jews who tried to hide in assimilation.” “Whatever her motives,” said Clark, “she passed the torch to me, a top student. I became obsessed with The War. I dreaded and long[ed] to read about it, think about it, hear about it.”84 Clark read about the Holocaust from books in the public library stacks, and at home, she read from the War World II volume in The Jewish Encyclopedia, trying not to be afraid and feeling ashamed when she did. On Friday nights, when her parents went to synagogue, she would look at the book and then close it, repeating the process many times. When she confessed her obsession to her parents, they sent her to an elderly child psychiatrist. When she refused to go back, her parents hid the book; Clark found the hiding place and continued to read about the Holocaust in secret.

By Clark’s teen years, the effect of the Holocaust on her had receded, and she became a self-described “beatnik” and activist, critical of her family’s material aspirations. She wanted to be “part of a community which placed its ethical values first,” much as she thought her grandparents had done; she no longer wanted to attend family seders or cousins’ bar and bat mitzvahs. By the time she began City College, she felt “done with everything Jewish.”85 Though she studied Hebrew because she loved the language and read a lot of I. B. Singer, she had little connection to Judaism. She became more deeply committed to radical politics—civil rights, SDS, and the student and antiwar movements. After the collapse of her marriage to a filmmaker, she found her way to Boston and became involved in the women’s movement, joining friends who formed the consciousness-raising group that eventually became Collective #1. At this time in her life, New Left politics and the women’s movement offered a more visionary outlet for political and even spiritual change than Judaism did.

Clark’s relationship to Jewishness remained complicated. Most fundamental was the fact that because she did not want to be like her parents, she felt that she did not want to be Jewish. Yet she believed that she was more aware of her Jewish identity than most other Jewish members of her collective were, and she shared her feelings about Jewish issues with another collective member who she believed was also Jewish identified. While she was a strong advocate for Bread and Roses’ multiclass, multiracial framework, she implicitly linked her own sense of social justice to Jewish values. As a Jew, she said, “you have to fight for the freedom of others”: “I never understood how anyone could not deduce a progressive message from being Jewish.” But she recognized that Jews on the left were always interested in “every culture in the world” except their own.86

In 1974, Clark joined the Women’s Mental Health Collective, a small group that had spun off from the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.87 Becoming interested in psychology, especially women and psychology, she moved to Vermont with her second husband and developed a career in mental health counseling. For twenty-five years, Clark did nothing to claim her Jewishness. However, she often found herself yearning for Shabbat and the Hebrew language she loved. “My longing to be more Jewish would become acute,” said Clark, but she and her husband—who assumed the couple were united in “agnostic, multicultural humanism”—saw her desire as an “atavism, a family weakness,” “something to get over, something to squash.”88 Eventually Clark started a Jewish women’s study group that supported her as she made her way back to Judaism, and she is a regular member of the small synagogue in her community. Today she writes a blog, Rivington at Essex, about the Lower East Side in the 1940s and 1950s, centered on her grandfather’s kosher butcher store. Writing about her experiences in the Jewish feminist journal Bridges, she said, “I was a Jewish child, and then I became an adult humanist, political activist. . . . Every word of Hebrew brings me intense pleasure. . . . I have stopped running.”89

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Grey (Nancy) Osterud was not born a Jew but has identified as one for most of her life, formally converting to Judaism in 1979. Osterud has been able to imbue her leftist politics with a guiding vision of Jewish radicalism that is “non-Zionist, pacifist, socialist, and feminist.” In contrast to most Collective #1 members, Osterud combined her politics with an active religiosity, from childhood days in her native Seattle to participating in the Havurah / Jewish Renewal movement in the Boston area. Today she is affiliated with both a havurah (informal Jewish fellowship community) and a Conservative synagogue.

Born in 1948, Osterud grew up in the midst of the Jewish Left in Seattle. Her father came from a Norwegian American, Minnesotan family of atheists and socialists. Her mother’s mother, an orphan, was of immigrant stock, and her lineage was unclear, though she may have been Jewish. Osterud’s mother was raised by her father and grandparents and was treated as a perpetual outsider, although by the time she got to college, she identified with her Jewish roommates.

After the marriage of Osterud’s parents, both scientists, they moved to Seattle. Her father’s department at the University of Washington housed a good number of Jewish refugee scientists and others who, like Osterud’s father, had refused to sign a loyalty oath stating that they had never been members of the Communist Party. The families of the thirteen nonsigners at the university, all Jewish except Osterud’s father, were ostracized by everyone else—Grey herself was banned from nursery school and the local Girl Scout troop. They became a tight-knit community and educated their children in the values of an ethical Judaism that welcomed prayer but not the concept of Jews as a “chosen people.” They started what would now be called a havurah for their community; by the time Osterud was in high school, the group affiliated with Reconstructionism, which they thought was a good fit with their beliefs, and founded a Reconstructionist synagogue. The Osteruds participated in both ventures. Nobody worried about whether Grey was halachically Jewish (i.e., according to body of biblical Jewish law), so she grew up identifying as a religious Jew, which is how she saw herself when she went east to go to Radcliffe College (the affiliate of the all-male Harvard) in 1966. But to some college colleagues, she was a “dubious Jew,” not being understood to be Jewish by people who did not know her and not being welcomed by the campus Jewish community.90

Osterud became deeply involved in SDS at Harvard, working on antiwar and anti-imperialist issues and living in SDS’s Northeast regional headquarters with Jean Tepperman and others. At that time, she became very close to her boyfriend’s grandmother Nima Adlerblum, a founder of Hadassah, whose vision of a progressive, feminist Judaism—a Judaism dedicated to the reformation of the world but without the structure of organized religion or “any shred of particularism”—had a lasting influence on her.91

In addition to Bread and Roses, Osterud participated in other women’s movement activities. She spent the summer of 1970 in Seattle, organizing the Anna Louise Strong Brigade (a federation of women’s groups) and a regional women’s conference in Eugene, Oregon. In 1972–1973, she helped establish the Bay Area Women’s Union in Berkeley, California. In 1975, while attending graduate school at Brown University, she was active in the Socialist Feminist Caucus of Women of Brown United.

Osterud’s background growing up in an unconventional leftist Jewish community was important in her women’s movement activism. “I never felt that we had to adopt others’ philosophies, e.g., Maoism,” she said. In both the Jewish alternative world in which she had been raised and in radical feminism, she felt “enriched and validated by historical continuity: [the] sense of being part of an international left and American socialist movement [and the] sense of belonging to a people who have recited these prayers for centuries.” But as “a marginalized woman,” she felt about Judaism much the same as she did about the Left: “it was worth struggling for full and equal participation and, if that seemed impossible to achieve within existing institutional structures, we could create our own alternatives within the tradition that would help facilitate change.”92

After Osterud completed her Ph.D. in American civilization at Brown, her activism took a new turn. Like other women’s liberationists who became academics, she hoped to create institutional structures and historical narratives that could bring about new understandings and real social change. The author of several works about rural women and farming communities, she was a member of the editorial collective of Gender & History and became its North American editor. Today she works as an editor on books dealing with women’s studies, international human rights, and violence and conflict resolution. The sense of continuity she has felt in Judaism helped sustain her professional and community work. “Jewish communal life still nurtures my orientation toward repairing and transforming the world,” Osterud said.93 She has helped her havurah create a prayer book with gender-sensitive language and participates in other reforms designed to give women an equal place in Judaism.

Osterud developed a strong Jewish identity by dint of her upbringing, her adoption of Jewish ethical and religious practices, and her conversion to Judaism. Perhaps because she had to claim her Jewishness, even at the time of her early activities within the women’s movement, it served as a conscious rather than latent guide for her activism.

Diane Balser: Neither a “Minimalist” or “Maximalist” Jew, Just “Jewish Identified”

Diane Balser participated in antiwar and civil rights activities before joining Bread and Roses Collective #2; she had been part of the organizing committee for the very first conference at Emmanuel College. As the sole staff member of Bread and Roses, she was deeply involved in its varied activities and represented the organization in antiwar protests and general protests of the Left.

Balser describes herself as one of the few members of Bread and Roses with an overt relationship to religion. Today she is a practicing Jew, working to build a feminist presence at her synagogue, and is deeply committed to Jewish issues, having served as Boston co-chair, national vice president, and CEO / executive director of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom / Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, an organization that was dedicated to achieving a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has been actively involved in women’s politics as well, serving as founder and executive director of the Women’s Statewide Legislative Network of Massachusetts, and is a longtime teacher of women’s studies who codirected the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University.94

Balser’s connections to the religious and secular worlds and to the dual aspects of her own identity have sometimes caused conflict. Born in 1943 in Washington Heights, New York, Balser went to Hebrew school and was the first in her family to have a bat mitzvah, which she considers to have been a radical act at that time. Her parents, schoolteachers with some ties to the Left, were religious, Conservative Jews who kept kosher. That strong, religious-identified background bolstered Balser’s identification with Judaism throughout her life, even as she struggled to bring her Jewish identity in consonance with her work as a secular social justice advocate.

Balser’s neighborhood and family had a large contingent of Holocaust survivors, though many had been lost in the Shoah. What she calls the “grief-stricken” resonance of the Holocaust was a prominent factor in her identity as a Jew. She identified, too, with her Orthodox, eastern European grandparents and the strong Jewish women of her family. To Balser, they were “very oppressed women but extremely powerful women, some of whom saved their families from destruction in Europe.”95 Like her grandmother, who had supported the 1909 garment workers’ strike, several became union and political organizers. Other role models were Emma Goldman, who her mother bragged came from her own home town of Rochester, New York, and Bess Meyerson, the first Jewish Miss America, whom Balser’s mother held up to her as an example of a young woman from a working-class background who used her platform to talk about racism and anti-Semitism. Because of these heroines, Balser knew that “Jewish women held the ‘big picture’ of things” and that her “scope in life was expected to be large and important.” She wrote her first protest letter as a young teen when she felt Meyerson was discriminated against on the TV show I’ve Got a Secret because she was “dark and a much smarter woman” than the blond panelist. Balser’s mother insisted that, given the Holocaust and the family’s Orthodox background, it was imperative that her daughter “stay Jewish.” Balser considered this a “gutsy political act.” Her parents encouraged her to be smart and outspoken, advice that she saw as in definite conflict with the “white Protestant ideals of femininity at the time.”96 Despite her Jewish role models, the disparity between these standards and the feminine norm caused her emotional conflict.

Balser was an activist at an early age, becoming involved in peace activities as an adolescent. She had been sent to a progressive, socially aware summer camp when she was fourteen; Robby and Michael Meeropol, sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were fellow campers. But as much as her experience at camp was a “profound, changing” experience for her, so, too, was going to synagogue. “I did both, and you can do both,” she told the audience at the “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity” conference.

After Balser received her B.A. from the University of Rochester in 1964, she went to Chicago for a master’s degree in teaching and history. She was influenced there by Marilyn Webb and especially Heather Booth and attended the fall 1967 National Conference for New Politics, which stimulated one of the first feminist rebellions against the sexism of male SDS members. When the conference passed a resolution condemning Zionism as racism, Balser worked to help eliminate it. It was the first time that she felt a conflict between her social justice activism and her Jewish identity.

Bread and Roses became pivotal in Balser’s life. The organization was “tension-ridden” but “so damn exciting”; she would not trade “the some five-thousand-odd discussions [they] had, from whether you should cut your hair to whether you should go to jail,” for “anything in the world.” The movement caused an “explosion” everywhere: “We changed our lives, and we changed the lives of women throughout the world.” For Balser, the movement overlapped with her Jewish femaleness and desire for basic social change to such a degree that she said, “sometimes I cannot tell them apart.” Nonetheless, coming into the women’s movement “with a very secular, Jewish face and identity” while maintaining a “religious, Jewish connection” was difficult, although in retrospect, “being in both worlds was also a tremendous strength.”97

Balser recognizes that the movement was initiated and led by “very powerful, outspoken and gutsy women,” many of whom were “very very Jewish,” though at the time, she said, “none of us talked about how many of us were Jewish.” “We didn’t see the intersectionality.” Nor did they even think of themselves as Jewish. Even for someone with as strong a Jewish identity as Balser had, being Jewish did not define “who you were” as a feminist. “The sole place Jewish identity emerged was when babies were named after Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, the only Jewish names we were proud of.”98

For a while, Balser retreated from her Jewishness; her brother, Henry, in contrast, had gone from civil rights activism to becoming a Conservative rabbi. Perhaps the most difficult part of her lapse from Judaism was “calling up and talking to her mother.” On one occasion during the civil rights movement, Balser had gone south with three Jewish women, Carol Cohen McEldowney, Judy Schwartz, and Nancy Miriam Hawley (along with Hawley’s one-year-old daughter), to meet with women’s groups. They had several frightening experiences, including being stopped by state troopers in Mississippi. But the most daunting was going into a telephone booth to call her mother to tell her she “could not come home for seder.” Nancy Hawley had to hold her hand. “It was the first year of my life that I didn’t have a seder with my family.”99

Balser reconnected with her Jewishness later in the 1970s, holding seders in the women’s collective where she lived. A number of incidents involving Israel and Jewish politics caused her to speak out: once when some women in the collective attempted to put up a poster of a Palestinian woman suicide bomber; and again when the Red Bookstore in Cambridge refused to display an anthology published by a Chicago Jewish collective named Chutzpah, which included writing by Balser’s sister, Ruth, and brother, Henry. When Golda Meir’s speech at Brandeis in June 1973 was disrupted by picketers holding signs that said, “Gramma, how many babies did you kill today?” Balser protested. Her family adored Golda Meir—and, further, “this was Brandeis,” where Balser was then enrolled as a Ph.D. student in sociology. Regardless of her disagreement with the Israeli prime minister’s policies, Balser saw the placards as “anti-Semitic and as misogynistic attacks on a Jewish woman.” “I was ready, finally, to formulate a response from my broader identity.”100

By the early 1980s, as growing numbers of feminists began to assert themselves more positively as Jews, sometimes in response to anti-Semitism, Balser found a way to bring together the two parts of her identity. She attended the UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985 on behalf of the New Jewish Agenda and continued working with the Israeli Women’s Network, with which she connected in Nairobi and at the fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing a decade later. “I could be a feminist in the global sense and retain my strong ties to being a Jew,” she said. “At the same time, I could have a place in the Jewish world as a feminist.”101 Balser later became the executive director of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom / Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, pursuing a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Taking a stand that she felt was deeply principled allowed her to “embrace more of [her] Jewishness.” Women struggling with these issues “began to find each other, to feel less alone.”102

In 2003, Balser decided to reaffirm her bat mitzvah, this time reading from the Torah, which she had been prohibited from doing in 1956, surrounded by feminist friends and family. She also began to wear a Jewish star. “It tells the world that I identify as an unassimilated Jew,” she said, “and its visibility links me to yellow stars, to my roots of having been born during the Holocaust. And at shul, until sexism ends, I wear a yarmulke.”103

As Balser works to create a “feminist presence in shul,” teaches about sexism, global feminisms, and intersectionality (“racism, class, homophobia, disability, age, etc.”) at her university, and fights the battle for social justice in Jewish-oriented and other political groups, she finds a merger between the concerns of “particularism and universalism” more possible today than in the first years of radical feminism. But, she said, “how we stand up for ourselves as Jewish women, for all women, and how we use our strength and power to fight for social justice in the present” is a continuing challenge. It is one she hopes to meet neither as “a minimalist or maximalist Jew but, rather, [as] a Jewish-identified Jew.”104

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Even though women’s liberationists in Bread and Roses never explicitly considered Jewishness as one of the factors in their class or gender analysis, the narratives in this chapter reveal that values and experiences associated with Jewish life significantly influenced their activism. First, almost all of the women interviewed came from homes where parents shared leftist views, whether socialist, communist, or other kinds of radicalism, or where forms of liberalism associated with “FDR Democrats” were espoused. The importance of parents’ political views in the socialization of 1960s activist leaders shows that youth leaders were more likely to share the political proclivities of their involved parents than to rebel against them. Having politically active parents is considered “above and beyond other influences” in stimulating children to engage in political protest and movement activities.105 This was clearly the case with most women discussed in this chapter, who felt guided by their parents’ views. Fathers’ and mothers’ political choices, in combination with generational experiences, became formative elements in their own politics.

An influential survey of 1960s youth activists by political scientists Margaret and Richard Braungart ascertained that for some SDS leaders, “a strong Jewish element infused their political backgrounds.” For these interviewees, parents’ political attitudes—whether leftist or liberal—were signifiers of Jewishness, with the youth referring to parents as “Jewish leftists” or “Jewish liberals.” Several interviewees added the qualifier that their parents’ major concern was their “Jewishness, not their politics.”106 Bread and Roses women similarly associated their parents’ political attitudes with Jewishness, tending to regard parents’ politics as informed by Jewish-based ethical and moral values. However, the parents of some of the leading members of the collective, such as Tax and Levenson, were not political at all. Tax’s ethical values and political choices came more in opposition to those of her parents than because of their influence.

Like some of the SDS leaders in the Braungarts’ survey who cited the influence of Jewish grandparents (e.g., Menshevik radicals or Holocaust victims), Bread and Roses women also mentioned the influences of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Levenson’s grandparents founded a synagogue, and a summer camp started by an aunt and uncle initiated her into Jewish traditions. Clark’s grandparents and aunts and uncles, all of whom participated in the family’s Lower East Side kosher butcher shop and their local community, served as beacons of civic action. Balser referenced her grandmother as a role model. The close family friends with whom Osterud grew up in Seattle helped to shape her lifelong political values. This community became Osterud’s Jewish “family” and her moral compass.

For most of the Bread and Roses women whom I interviewed, the Holocaust played a central role in shaping identity. Born during or shortly after World War II, this cohort grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Several had relatives who perished in the tragedy; some had family members, neighbors, or teachers who were survivors; others encountered stories about the Shoah at school and in their reading or in movies. Clark became so obsessed with the Holocaust after hearing terrifying stories from her Hebrew-school teacher that her parents sent her to a psychiatrist. Her negative exposure mirrored the experience of Tax, whose mother hushed up any questions about the Holocaust and whose father, a soldier who liberated the camps, also cast a veil of silence around it. Balser’s family treated the subject more openly, and she grew up hearing stories of women who helped their families and communities survive the Shoah. For Balser, the Holocaust and the strong women she associated with it provided a positive pathway to being Jewish. Even for those who had more adverse experiences, the Holocaust functioned as a signpost of identity that had carried significant meaning.

Direct experience with or awareness of anti-Semitism contributed to these women’s liberationists’ Jewish identity. The sense that Jews were a beleaguered people might have created fear—as it did for Tax, who had to pass store windows with Nazi regalia on sale on her way to the library, but it also gave her a sense of Jews as a people apart, with a unique history and a difficult present. Bread and Roses women spoke of anti-Semitism and its connection to other prejudices. For Gordon, anti-Semitism was linked to political repression—specifically, McCarthyism—which afflicted her family during the 1950s. Osterud grew up amid an alternative community of Jewish family friends who also suffered from McCarthyism. Later, as a college student and SDS activist whose Jewishness was not readily apparent, Osterud became aware of anti-Semitism on the left. Tax experienced McCarthyism indirectly, with her family worrying if the Army-McCarthy hearings—and also the execution of the Rosenbergs—were “bad for the Jews.”107

A distinct sense of marginality contributed to these women’s intellectual development and social activism. Growing up in cities with small Jewish populations intensified feelings of insecurity and exclusion. Grappling with this sense of vulnerability, Gordon compensated by working harder than her classmates, but as Tax acknowledged, being a “smart girl” carried its own fears and penalties and seemed inseparable from Jewishness. Even though these women ought to have been insiders, because of their own achievements or, in some cases, their family’s status, they considered themselves outsiders. Judy Ullman, another member of Collective #1, suggested that Jews’ sense of themselves as outliers may have contributed to their strong motivation to help others: “When you’re fighting for someone else, you don’t have to look at yourself and the ways in which you’ve been marginalized.” In this way, they could escape “some form of shame,” Ullman said, but she noted importantly that Jews could marginalize themselves. She considers herself an “outsider” even among Jews.108

A final factor in the mix of influences that shaped several of these women’s Jewishness was an early, formal connection to the religious aspects of Judaism. Coming from Conservative, synagogue-going families, Balser and Clark were bat mitzvahed, an uncommon practice for girls in the 1950s. Levenson studied briefly at a Reform synagogue, and Tax went to services regularly at her Reform temple. Osterud was affiliated with a Reconstructionist one. Balser and Clark gave up the religious component of their identities in the early years of the women’s movement but later embraced spiritual aspects of Judaism. Like Osterud, they are deeply committed to their synagogues today. Levenson’s religious commitment is more personal. Though always Jewish identified, Tax is a passionate secularist but remains guided by the prophetic teachings of the Torah.

These findings about the religious and cultural influences on Bread and Roses women coincide with the conclusions of scholars who have studied the connections between Judaism and the protest movements of the 1960s. In addition to the Braungarts, Rebecca Klatch explored motivations of New Left and New Right youth protesters in the 1960s. Interviewing thirty-six SDS leaders, including seventeen women, she discovered that about half of the Jewish subjects were raised in Reform synagogues, where they attended services and, if male, were bar mitzvahed; the other half had no religious background—some had parents who were “devout in their renunciation of religion.” Yet despite the religious skepticism of these parents and the fact that many of their activist children also rejected religion (as did others who were raised in religious, even Orthodox, homes), Klatch found that “virtually all identified culturally with Judaism.” Many told Klatch that the values they learned as Jews significantly impacted their politics. Klatch concludes that “religion and religious values were important factors that shaped [activists’] political consciousness, . . . giving them an ethical framework for their developing beliefs.”109

Direct encounters with anti-Semitism were important, too, because they created in these SDSers the experience of being social outcasts, which they could analogize to the role of movement activist, outside the mainstream. Anti-Semitism enhanced Jewish SDSers’ ability to understand racial bigotry; the perception and experience of anti-Semitism correlated with the commitment to fight racism. These factors came into play in the descriptions that Bread and Roses women gave of their childhood and early adulthoods. Klatch emphasizes, however, that the most salient factor in the SDSers’ political development was their parents’ roles in transmitting values. She notes that her respondents came from atypical homes with politically aware parents who were engaged and involved in the world and who encouraged their sons and daughters to be vocal and active.110 While Klatch’s pattern applies to her SDS sample, it is the case for only half the Bread and Roses women interviewed in this chapter; parents of the remaining half were more religious, or if culturally Jewish, they were less politically identified and active.

The narratives of the Jewish women in Boston’s pioneering second-wave women’s liberation group Bread and Roses help us understand the complexity of identity construction among Jewish radical feminist activists not only in the 1960s and 1970s but also over the entire life course. Identity emerges as fluctuating and mutable, although bounded by core elements concerning Jewish culture and religion that collapsed and expanded over time in relation to political and social opportunities and responsibilities, the changing sociohistorical landscape, and significant life events and transition points.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the political task at hand for these Boston feminists was building a radical, socialist-based, autonomous women’s movement, separate from the male-dominated Left with which many of the women had been closely associated. They hoped to devise a groundbreaking theory that would collapse the stranglehold of sexism, capitalism, and imperialism on the lives of women and their families. Though the organization utilized familiar social and political networks to build its core base as it embarked on this task, with the consequence that many of the women came from similar backgrounds, a key goal was to include individuals from other social classes and races.

The particular, middle-class entitlements of the Bread and Roses organizers, including their Jewishness, were obstacles to be overcome as they sought to create a compelling revolutionary strategy and philosophy. Not until much later did the Jewish members of this group recognize the links between the Jewish-based factors in their experiences, such as anti-Semitism and marginality, and some of the other “isms” they wanted to eliminate.

At this historical moment, moreover, there was no Jewish feminist movement to challenge patriarchy within Judaism itself or in Jewish communal life. Even at those times when the Boston Jewish women’s liberationists did acknowledge their Jewishness, they had to confront a sex-and-gender system within Judaism that disturbed them far more than it did their brothers, several of whom, such as those of Balser, Gordon, and Levenson, found a place for themselves within Jewish communities here and abroad. Whether male siblings were constructing alternative models of a more democratic Judaism or establishing themselves within traditional Jewish spaces, they found it easier to connect to Jewish life.

In years to come, in response to events in these women’s own lives and the new possibilities offered by a feminist-based Judaism or by innovative, progressive, secular movements dealing with Jewish issues, some of them, and others from Bread and Roses, found a range of opportunities to engage those Jewish aspects of their identities that had helped to form their political attitudes and propelled them forward in search of women’s liberation.