5

“We Are Well Educated Jewishly . . . and We Are Going to Press You”

Jewish Feminists Challenge Religious Patriarchy

In February 1973, nearly five hundred excited Jewish women packed the ballroom of the Hotel McAlpin on the corner of Broadway and Thirty-Fourth Street in New York’s Herald Square. Built in 1912, the once-glorious McAlpin, the largest hotel in the world at the time, had even boasted two gender-specific floors, where women could reserve a room on the women-only floor and bypass the lobby, checking in directly at their own floor. In 1973, however, when women need not conduct their business fearing for their safety and modesty, the hundreds of delegates to the first National Conference of Jewish Women proudly proclaimed their presence at the hotel for three days of women-only meetings. Within a few years, the McAlpin, still dignified if significantly down at the heels, was converted to rental apartments. The 1973 Jewish women’s conference, along with a follow-up conference the next year, to which Jewish men were invited (but only to select sessions), marked one of the last but among the most historic events it ever hosted.

For many of the feminists who attended and who had not been particularly Jewish identified, the 1973 conference became a major “portal into Judaism,” recalled Blu Greenberg, who gave the keynote address. For more Jewishly identified women, it deepened a resolve to bring together the Jewish and feminist aspects of their lives. For Greenberg herself, an observant, Orthodox Jew, the conference was a pivotal experience that changed the course of her life.1 In addition to other milestones of the early 1970s, it served as a trigger for events throughout the decade and into the next that transformed the lives of the Jewish and feminist communities.

In addition to Greenberg’s well-received address, a talk given by Judith Plaskow (Goldenberg), a young woman who was finishing her doctorate in theology at Yale, electrified the delegates at the McAlpin with a statement that articulated the core beliefs of the new Jewish feminist movement. “The identity of the Jewish woman,” Plaskow began, “lies somewhere in the conflict between being a woman and being a Jew and in the necessity of combining the two in as yet unknown ways. . . . We are here because a secular movement for the liberation of women has made it imperative that we raise certain Jewish issues now, because we will not let ourselves be defined as Jewish women in ways in which we cannot allow ourselves to be defined as women.”2

So did Plaskow publicly mark the moment by which Jewish women declared, inspired by secular feminism’s powerful attack against patriarchy, that Jewish women had now to recognize themselves explicitly as Jews and carry on the fight against sexism within Jewish religion and community life. That struggle had begun a few years earlier and was already dividing newly declared “Jewish feminists” into secular feminist and religious feminist camps, although for the moment, at the 1973 and 1974 conferences, the split between the two groups did not seem irresoluble. The momentum was toward building a collective entity that could unify Jewish women, supporting their efforts to come out as Jews within the feminist movement and creating a new activist force within the Jewish community.

Jewish women’s liberationists had been reluctant to assert a Jewish dimension to their feminism or to bring the issue of gender equality to the Jewish community, because in the women’s movement, “gender trumped all other aspects of identity.”3 But a growing feminist consciousness led some of them to become painfully aware of the inequities that women experienced in Jewish law, culture, and religion. Before they could reconcile issues of Jewish identity with their feminism, however, those with strong links to Jewish tradition would have to confront the problems of women’s position within religious life, an issue largely ignored by secular Jewish feminists.

The first group to publicly challenge sexism within Jewish religion was Ezrat Nashim, a women’s study group founded in New York City in September 1971. The group was part of the independent youth-organized New York Havurah, organized two years earlier in an effort to create alternative, lay-led Judaic practices. Literally meaning “help for women,” “Ezrat Nashim” also referred to an area of the ancient temple in Jerusalem that was reserved for women. While the name thus connoted separation of the sexes, the collective saw its mission as promoting women’s religious equality through integration and equal access. Ezrat Nashim’s ten members made headline news six months later when they interrupted the annual convention of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly to demand full equality for women.

Ezrat Nashim provided the flame that ignited the movement for gender equality within Jewish religious life. Historian Paula Hyman, then a graduate student in Columbia University’s history department, where she had organized a women’s caucus, was a key member, as was Martha Ackelsberg, who with Dina Rosenfeld had organized the group. Deeply influenced by the wider women’s movement, each found ways to channel the impulses of radical feminism into Judaism. Judith Plaskow, who joined Ezra Nashim a few years later, became the first Jewish feminist theologian, helping to guide the religious direction of the Jewish feminist movement. For Plaskow, “becoming a self in the feminist community” extended organically to feminist theology, “the process of becoming selves in religious communities.”4 Other women broke barriers to full religious participation by becoming rabbis and cantors.

In addition to Martha Ackelsberg, Judith Plaskow, and Blu Greenberg, this chapter profiles Arlene Agus, an Orthodox member of Ezrat Nashim, and feminist rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alpert, from the Reform and Reconstructionist communities, respectively. The stories of these women, all of whom were present at the 1973 conference, point to the varied paths that feminist Jews pioneered in the Jewish women’s movement. Several of the women became part of the Jewish feminist group B’not Esh (Daughters of Fire), founded in 1981. Although B’not Esh meets only once a year, it has played a distinctive role in the creation of a meaningful feminist Judaism, broadening beliefs and building community.

Although there was never a strict divide between religious and secular Jewish feminists, those who were dedicated to communal and political change faced different challenges than did women whose primary identities were based in religion. Seeking to find a place for themselves within the radical feminist movement and the male-dominated Jewish Left, the women whom I call secularists rejected the gendered inequities of mainstream Jewish life. But they did not address religion per se, which many Christians and Jews considered to be a primary—and irredeemable—source of oppression.

The work of self-described “post-Christian” radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, author of the 1968 volume The Church and the Second Sex, convinced many Christian women’s liberationists that they needed to separate from a hopelessly patriarchal church and create their own religious practices. Daly’s 1973 Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation further influenced feminist spiritual seekers.5 Others found spiritual alternatives in Goddess religions or turned to Eastern religions such as Buddhism.

But religiously inclined Jewish feminists did not wish to follow radical feminist spiritual practices or secular mandates. As Hyman observed, they felt that they could not turn their backs on the Jewish past. “Jewishness was a fundamental aspect of their identity,” transcending the constraints that traditional Judaism placed on them because of their gender. “They could not define themselves solely through their feminist ideology and affiliations.”6

The efforts of these women to meld feminist ideas with their Jewish identities entailed considerable struggle, involving conflicts with the Jewish community, families, friends, feminist colleagues, or their own inherited beliefs about gender and Judaism. On the basis of interviews conducted in the late 1970s with a dozen women from Ezrat Nashim and other early Jewish feminist groups, sociologist Steven Cohen discerned numerous tensions between Jewish feminists’ religious and gender identities. Although all the women were committed to dual belief systems, Cohen found few in the group who navigated between them without difficulty. Without consciously doing so, they created strategies to deal with potential discord. Cohen named these measures “conflict denial,” holding that the two belief systems were compatible; “withdrawal,” participating in only one of the communities; “moderation,” muting criticism of both ideologies and communities; and “avoidance,” refusing to act on irreconcilable differences. He suggests that by using such strategies, religious Jewish feminists avoided an otherwise-inevitable collision between dissonant beliefs.7 In my own interviews with several of these women decades later, I found similar, varying approaches to conflicts between Judaism and feminism. For most of the women, the struggle to integrate the multiple aspects of their identities has been a lifelong effort.

The stories of Martha Ackelsberg, Arlene Agus, Judith Plaskow, Laura Geller, Rebecca Alpert, and Blu Greenberg suggest the formative effect of feminist beliefs on Jewish women’s religious liberation and the struggle to meld feminism with Jewish tradition. All participated in Jewish women’s religious groups that helped channel the desire for greater gender equality in new directions, facilitating the coming to consciousness of wide numbers of Jewish women. These pioneers helped to stimulate the Jewish feminist movement that began in the 1970s and continues today. Their stories stand in for dozens of other pioneering Jewish religious feminists, representing a spectrum of religious pathways.

The connection between these women’s religious awakenings and their nascent feminism was organic and powerful. From childhood on, they were knowledgeable about Judaism though often sensitive to its gender-based exclusions. As young adults, experiences with the sexism of male colleagues and the realization that they had adjusted their own expectations to those of male partners triggered realizations of their own subordinate status. Several joined feminist consciousness-raising and action groups that provided fuel for knowledge and rebellion. Personal encounters with women’s liberationists encouraged them to identify as feminists and to develop their own protests against patriarchy. Questioning Jewish texts and traditions, they began to apply feminist principles to Jewish laws and observances.

The women’s struggles to come to terms with the feminist and Jewish aspects of their identities may have differed from those of women’s liberationists and secular Jewish feminists, but they were no less intense and fraught. Many lived their lives as social activists and offered deep critiques of their own tradition, despite their own attachment to Jewish religion and community. Although some in this group might describe themselves as liberal feminists, they were radicals in their religious dissent and innovations.

Whatever the tensions Jewish religious feminists felt, they received considerably less opprobrium than feminists such as Shulamith Firestone or even Betty Friedan, whose work many in the Jewish community found threatening. The religious feminists, strongly attached to Judaism despite their critiques of it, were treated as “the loyal opposition,” as Susan Dworkin wrote in an article in Moment in 1975.8 But they found that despite their strong links to the community and its general tolerance of their rebellion, changes in social attitudes and religious practices were not easy to effect.

Notwithstanding the staying power of tradition and the forceful opposition to gender equality, religious Jewish feminists have achieved many of their goals. In the past four decades, they have been responsible for new rituals, liturgies, texts, art, and music that have revitalized religious practice. They have brought egalitarian language into prayer books and liturgy and introduced new notions of God and Torah based on feminist perspectives. As rabbis, cantors, religious scholars, and community leaders, they participate in all aspects of Jewish life. They have constructed new models of education for girls and women, while challenging the typical hierarchical base of rabbinical service and relationships.

Though gaps in the agenda of religious Jewish feminists remain, the changes of the past decades have been remarkable.9 These transformations have affected secular women and their male colleagues as well, providing a basis for a fuller identity.

Martha Ackelsberg: “The Spiritual Is Also Political”

Martha Ackelsberg graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. Although she followed the traditional scenario laid out for even the nation’s most brilliant young women, marrying immediately, within two years, Ackelsberg was involved in the feminist movement and simultaneously with a new havurah in New York, a combination that upended any semblance of domestic traditionalism and thrust her into the leadership of the embryonic Jewish religious feminist movement.

Ackelsberg grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, the daughter of Jewish parents who were deeply involved in synagogue life. Politically aware progressives, Oscar and Sylvia Ackelsberg never fit into their suburban community. They had been Zionists in college (he at City, she at Hunter) who intended to make aliyah to Israel; Martha’s mother majored in psychology in order to develop the expertise to run a kibbutz children’s home in Israel. But the outbreak of World War II foiled the couple’s plans. When the Ackelsbergs married and became parents, they moved out of New York to raise their children, not to the land of Zion but across the river in New Jersey. Yet the political ideals of Zionism continued to shape their worldview. Martha and her sister were raised with a Zionist affirmation of Jewish peoplehood, and she believes that both her sister’s and her own lifelong romance with collective life springs from this inheritance.

More important than the suburban Judaism of Ackelsberg’s synagogue were the many summers she spent at Camp Ramah in the Poconos, affiliated with the Conservative movement, where she was inspired by innovative programs and vibrant religious practices. She was an excellent Hebrew-school student, although aware that boys and girls were treated differently there. Her bat mitzvah took place on a Friday night, while the boys she had been schooled with were called to Torah on Saturday morning for the more “authentic” service. While boys could go on to study and practice Judaism, for most purposes, the girls’ religious lives were over. Ackelsberg recognized the inequalities but did not start to think seriously about them until college.

Ackelsberg’s feelings about gender inequalities remained inchoate. When in the June following her college graduation, she married a Harvard graduate who was in medical school in New York, she admits to being confused. When a friend asked her, “How are you spending the summer?” she had no answer. “I felt like I had become my mother. I was reading magazines; I wasn’t even reading books. . . . It was my two months of being a 1950s housewife. It was awful.”10

The situation improved when Ackelsberg started graduate school in political science at Princeton and joined a women’s consciousness-raising group composed of the girlfriends and young wives of medical students. But the women were still doing the cooking and housework and spent a lot of their time waiting for their “husbands to come home.” Never knowing exactly what plans they could make, they began to come to a realization: “We didn’t need to . . . continue just sitting here talking about our lives. We need to do something. . . . Enough!”11

Ironically, it was through the women’s husbands that they found a purpose. A few of the men were involved with the Health Policy Advisory Center, or Health/PAC, a group trying to reform health-care bureaucracies to establish greater equity in the health-care system. Ackelsberg and several women from her consciousness-raising group began to meet with women working with Health/PAC, and in 1970, at about the same that the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective formed, they started the New York Women’s Health Collective (also known as the New York Women’s Health and Abortion Project).12 Ackelsberg was a passionate participant in the collective, engaging with key issues of the new women’s liberation movement and honing her skills as activist and change agent.

Like the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the New York women’s group offered classes on women and their bodies. Taught in a dorm at New York University and in a housing project on the Upper West Side, the classes drew on the growing knowledge of self-taught collective members. Ackelsberg gave lectures on the anatomy and physiology of women’s bodies, especially menstruation and reproduction, using as resources the pamphlets she got from Kotex and Modess boxes and an obstetric text that her husband gave her. “I didn’t know from nothing,” she recalled.13 The New York Women’s Health Collective also held teach-ins on women’s health and picketed meetings of obstetrics-gynecology physicians, demanding that they speak up in favor of abortion.14 Because of impending abortion legislation in New York State, women’s liberationists devoted great attention to this issue. The bold stance of the group and its grassroots tactics left its mark on Ackelsberg’s ideas about social justice and feminism.

With Ackelsberg’s graduate cohort at Princeton, she was involved in a community that also “raised hell,” trying to eradicate rules that had little purpose. “Things were changing all over the place. Nobody was willing to accept the idea that because this is the way we’ve always done it, this is the way we should do it.” Rather, they looked at the situation in its context, asking, “Does this make sense? If it doesn’t, let’s change it.”15

Ackelsberg was getting inspiration from the new women’s liberation anthologies, such as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful and Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran’s Women in Sexist Society. “Everybody was devouring these things as they came out,” Ackelsberg remembered; “it was just beginning, it was amazing.”16 But there was a disconnect between what she was learning in graduate school and the messages she received from feminist writers and antiwar agitations she participated in. Though her dissertation work focused on anarchist collectivism in Spain, it took her a long while to see the connections between her scholarship and the radical communities of which she was a part.

In 1970, Ackelsberg joined the New York Havurah, founded the previous year, which engaged in similar rethinking and direct action as her other two communities did; each reinforced and cross-fertilized the others. A small, informal, lay-led prayer and study group, the New York Havurah stood between the spiritually oriented Havurat Shalom (Fellowship of peace) in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the politically minded Fabrangen (Bringing together in joy) in Washington, D.C. New York members wanted to create a community where “the people you prayed with were the people you studied with, were the people you did politics with.” They shared dinners, held study sessions, went on monthly retreats, and participated in antiwar demonstrations. A “do-it-yourself” cooperative mentality was in the air. “You saw things that weren’t working, and so you made something that would,” Ackelsberg noted.17 According to anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell, the Havurah movement was a way in which young Jews articulated a new form of Judaism by refashioning “the nature of Jewish organizations in light of the aesthetics of the American counterculture.”18

Within a year, Ackelsberg and a few friends added a study group on women and Judaism to the group’s informal classes, which were held in addition to the regular Thursday-night meetings, Saturday-morning prayer sessions, and monthly retreats. The impetus for the new study group had been a feminist “click” moment for Dina Rosenfeld and Ackelsberg, who had been present at Shabbat morning services when, in a discussion of the meaning of prayer, a male member of the havurah attempted to explain the emotional content of an uplifting spiritual experience as comparable to ejaculation—a spiritual climax compared to a physical one. The analogy shocked Ackelsberg: where was she in his description?19 Gathering a group of eight women, most from outside the havurah, Ackelsberg and Rosenfeld organized a weekly text study class to find the answer. Among those who came to share their wisdom with the group, and who subsequently became members, were Judith Hauptman, then a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Judith Plaskow, studying feminist theology at Yale, who joined the group in 1974.

A second “click” moment for Ackelsberg came after the women’s study group had been meeting for about a year. In the fall of 1971, men of Havurat Shalom and the New York group met in Boston to discuss the future of the Havurah movement. Since this was a meeting of friends, they explained, no women were invited. Feeling the sting of exclusion again, members of the New York women’s study group journeyed to Boston to meet with the women at Havurat Shalom to consider women’s place within Judaism and the problem of sexism in the Havurah movement.

The joint meeting clarified the need for gender equality within the movement and established priorities for change. While Ackelsberg and some others urged further study, a larger group wanted to add activism to consciousness-raising. Their arguments convinced the New York women. With the intention of going public, they named themselves Ezrat Nashim—literally “help for women” but also an area of the ancient Jerusalem temple reserved for women. In addition to Ackelsberg and Rosenfeld, the group included Paula Hyman, Arlene Agus, Leora Fishman, Elizabeth Koltun, Maureen McLeod, Deborah Weissman, and Betty Braun.20

Hoping to attend the annual conference of Conservative rabbis, which met every March in the Catskills, Ezrat Nashim sent a letter to Rabbinical Assembly leaders requesting a spot on the program, but they were told that the agenda had been set. “This being the sixties,” Ackelsberg recalled, “we said the hell with that,” and the group decided to go anyway. Photocopying articles on women in Judaism and typing up a one-page “Jewish Women Call for Change,” they contacted the New York newspapers to tell them of their upcoming protest. Then the “ten schlemiels” of Ezrat Nashim got in two cars and drove upstate to the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake with their packets of materials.21

The “storming” of the Rabbinical Assembly took place the next day. Although the women had no formal place on the agenda, the assembly gave them a room, and they were able to meet with over one hundred rabbis. Ezrat Nashim held a countersession on the morning of March 1, 1972, to publicly air their demands. Along with a few curious men, some 130 women attended, most of them rabbis’ wives. “What took you so long?” asked one rebbetzin. Among the demands that Ezrat Nashim made were that women should be granted membership in synagogues, be counted in the minyan and considered as bound to fulfill all mitzvoth equally with men, be allowed full participation in religious observances, be recognized as witnesses before the law, be allowed to initiate divorce, and be permitted and encouraged to attend rabbinical and cantorial schools.22

Ezrat Nashim did not anticipate that its well-mannered protest would unleash a torrent of media interest and public enthusiasm. The New York Post covered the Concord event, and the New York Times ran a feature story about the young feminists. Requests for speakers poured in. Eager young women who wanted to join the collective besieged the group. Ezrat Nashim women helped to start similar groups, but after the fall of 1972, when they admitted a few new affiliates, they closed the collective to new members. Hoping to maintain the intimacy that had spawned their initial understandings, they returned to study and discussion, modifying their activist path but continuing to meet through the 1970s. While text study played a major role, group meetings increasingly focused on consciousness-raising involving the vexed issues that challenged women’s liberationists as well: relationships, images and representations, gender-based authority and power.23

The seeds of a new direction for Jewish feminism had been planted. Secular and religious women would work together on the first national Jewish women’s conferences and the founding of the Jewish Feminist Organization in 1974, but the clarity of the religious women’s goals enabled them to prioritize their issues. The Reform movement ordained its first woman rabbi, Sally Priesand, in 1972; two years later, the Reconstructionists ordained Sandy Eisenberg Sasso. Although the Conservative movement debated female ordination for over a decade before ordaining Amy Eilberg as its first woman rabbi in 1985, within a few years after the Ezrat Nashim protest, its Rabbinical Assembly voted to permit women to be counted in a minyan. Many congregations throughout the country allowed women nearly equal participation in other rituals. As Ackelsberg wrote in the 1976 anthology The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, a revised edition of a special 1973 issue of Response magazine, both edited by Ezrat Nashim member Elizabeth Koltun, “the Jewish women’s movement seems to have arrived.”24 Ackelsberg voiced the hope that new “rituals, myths, halachot [laws], or other educational materials” encouraged by the work of these new religious feminists would create a “position of true equality for women in Jewish life.”25

Figure 5.1. Ordination of Amy Eilberg, first female Conservative rabbi, 1985. Courtesy Jewish Theological Seminary. Photo by Joyce Culver.

Within a few years, Ackelsberg, along with Judith Plaskow and several other Jewish feminist pioneers, began to reconsider equal access as the major objective of religious change. The right to participate in religious life as fully as Jewish men remained important, but they believed that the next stage of Jewish feminism should focus on “what a Judaism that takes women’s experience seriously would look like,” in Ackelsberg’s words.26 Reconfiguring Judaism from a feminist perspective—that is, creating new liturgies, rituals, and other texts and practices that could express women’s special beliefs and experiences—became central to Jewish feminists’ attempt to define and shape a women-centered spirituality.

Ackelsberg left New York in 1972, when she moved to western Massachusetts to take a job teaching political science at Smith College. She continued to promote community building among Jewish feminists, and in 1981, with Plaskow and a dozen other women, she established B’not Esh, a collective of religiously committed Jewish feminists who come together annually at a retreat center in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, to focus on consciousness-raising and activism among religious Jewish feminists. Individually, B’not Esh members “felt the pain of being feminist and Jewish in a Jewish community which does not fully recognize or appreciate the experience of modern women,” in Ackelsberg’s words. Together they hoped to meld “the personal and the communal, the emotional and the intellectual, spirituality, politics, and community,” creating safe spaces for religious experimentation and social activism. The women recognized that it was necessary to develop new modes of religious expression but also to confront social and structural issues that impeded gender equality, such as inequalities in Jewish education and issues of family life and child care. “The spiritual is also political,” Ackelsberg wrote in 1986. “Politics is the work we do to make the world safe for our spirituality,” she told me several decades later.27

Despite resistance from traditionalists who feared that the changes advocated by Jewish feminists would destroy Jewish religion and even the Jewish family, the movement begun by Ezrat Nashim proceeded remarkably well. A great part of its success can be attributed to the fact that Jewish feminist leaders were deeply rooted in the Jewish world. Rather than break away from it, they sought equal access to its institutions and practices, resembling the moderate approach of liberal feminists, although in fact they upended these institutions, reshaping their content and approach.

The focus on the community rather than the individual was a factor in the ability of religious Jewish feminists to accomplish their goals. The collective nature of their undertakings fit well with the structure of Jewish prayer: the minyan, the religious community formed by any ten male adults.28 Jewish women pushed to alter this exclusive preserve to include women, while also creating all-female forms of worship—including Rosh Chodesh and tefillah (prayer) groups—that drew strength and identity from women’s collective experiences. Feminists pressed for change at the grassroots level as well as the institutional and national levels.29

Today Ackelsberg is concerned that the Jewish feminist agenda move beyond the concerns of the Jewish community, as traditionally defined, to include broader social issues such as sexual harassment and racial and class inequality, which have expanded from local and national women’s liberation issues into the global arena. Just as the women’s liberation movement guided Ackelsberg as she took its insights to her havurah and Ezrat Nashim, she calls on this heritage to help her and colleagues shape the next stage of Jewish feminism.

Arlene Agus: “I Think We Created a Revolution”

Arlene Agus was one of three Brooklyn College graduates to join Ezrat Nashim. Although historians usually identify Ezrat Nashim women as coming from a Conservative Jewish background, Agus is proudly Orthodox and asserts that close to half of group members had also grown up Orthodox. One of the first group came from a Reform background.30

Born in Brooklyn into a family that traced its lineage to the tenth and eleventh centuries as direct descendants of Rashi, the notable Talmudic scholar, Agus attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, thanks to her father’s liberal attitude about girls’ education. Like most Ezrat Nashim members, she was knowledgeable about Judaism but chafed under the limitations imposed on religious study for women.

Agus had an epiphany about Judaism’s patriarchal attitudes early in her life. She was only six when she took her first feminist action, walking up to the bimah (synagogue platform) during the Shabbat service to confront the rabbi at her Borough Park synagogue for choosing her male cousin, who could not carry a tune, rather than her, to lead the congregation in the closing song.31 Her second protest came when she led a rebellion at her yeshiva against the withdrawal of Talmud study from the girls. Although she did not win that battle, like Martha Ackelsberg, she had learned that the promise of equality for Jewish boys and girls was a chimera.

Agus loved Judaism from the very beginning and, because of her family history, felt a personal duty to become a part of the transmission of knowledge and tradition. Yet despite her day-school education, she felt ignorant about the role of women in Jewish history and in its guiding texts. “I didn’t know whether a woman was obligated to bensch [bless] or to pray. . . . These things should have been obvious in a yeshiva,” and it was “astonishing” that they were not.32 When she joined Ezrat Nashim, it was with the passionate conviction that women needed access to all aspects of Judaic education and practice. “When we first started realizing that we could trust our intuition,” she said, “we started allowing our rage to be legitimate, because we felt that it came from legitimate Jewish guts and was grounded in all the right Jewish values.”33

Despite Agus’s devotion to Jewish religious life, she was uneasy about limiting her world to its confines. Many of the teachers at her yeshiva were Holocaust survivors, and that, too, imposed a sense of limits that she found oppressive. As a college student, she sought a wider canvas, choosing Celtic studies as her major: “I needed to breathe the air of the rest of the world.”34 Celtic studies took her to Wales and Ireland, whose music she loved. Agus went on to do graduate work in music therapy and began her professional life in the field of special education.

Yet Agus’s background and interests pulled her back into the Jewish world. In college, she headed the Brooklyn chapter of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry; as the movement gained headway, she took a job with the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry. For Agus, freeing Soviet Jews was a bridge issue that united Jews not only with one another but also with non-Jews, giving her the sense of working on a Jewish issue that had appeal to a broader community; she stayed for a decade. In later years, she has worked almost exclusively within the Jewish community.35

Agus is credited with the 1971 rediscovery of Rosh Chodesh, the ancient Jewish women’s holiday marking the New Month, and popularizing it as a key aspect of a new women-centered Jewish spirituality. Rosh Chodesh groups developed throughout the United States, connecting women with older female traditions and becoming vehicles for new women-centered, spiritual explorations. A few years later, Agus created the first Jewish women’s kolel (community-funded Talmud study). In 1982, she staged the first successful action to free an agunah (chained wife, whose husband refused to grant her a Jewish divorce). Agus also designed a women’s prayer shawl, or tallit, co-founded the first all-women’s tefillot (prayer quorums), and has composed egalitarian ceremonies for births, bar and bat mitzvahs, and weddings and commitment ceremonies, as well as tkhines (women’s petitionary prayers). With these innovations, Agus helped to carve a pathway to feminist religious life that went beyond Ezrat Nashim’s initial goal of equal access, to innovate gender-specific modes of spirituality that empowered women by expressing their unique perspectives and values.

Agus considers herself a “temperate feminist” committed to “communal unity,” but like other Jewish feminists who challenged traditional religious mores, she was seen as a “radical fanatic” by some family and friends. Agus responded to criticisms by emphasizing the traditional within the radical. She stresses that Jewish feminists have been inspired by the same values that motivated biblical Jewish heroines, “tradition, family, continuity,” and emphasizes that Jewish feminists acted in “deliberately measured” ways in their traditional communities.36

Agus argues that Judaism is inherently feminist but that this aspect could flourish only after the secular Left and women’s liberation provided a context for egalitarianism. Look at the Jewish prayer book, or the Bible, she says, both of which begin with the one and go to the many. She views feminism as starting with the “I,” not the individual person but “I” as “women” or “community,” seeking wholeness and authenticity. Feminism is not one story, Argus observes, but a composite of many. She considers Jewish feminism as a collective, empowered by its communal aspects.37

This philosophy permitted both Agus and Ackelsberg to envision Jewish feminism within a wider context of religious revitalization. Because of the clarity of their goals, their knowledge and strategic flexibility, these and other members of Ezrat Nashim have left an indelible imprint on Jewish life.

Judith Plaskow: “Feminism as a Process of Radical Transformation”

No one has been more important to the feminist reconfiguring of Jewish texts than Judith Plaskow. Her articles and books, especially the groundbreaking 1990 work Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, have been widely influential. Plaskow came to feminism as a theologian, focusing on belief and thought rather than actions and deeds, the emphasis of most of her Jewish feminist colleagues.38 From childhood on, Plaskow had inquired about “the meaning of human existence, whether there was a God, who God was and how there could be evil in the world.”39 Because at that time there was no program in which she could study theology in a Jewish context, she majored in Protestant theology at Yale in the late 1960s and did her first work in that area. But Judaism compelled her, and as Jewish feminism was developing in the 1970s, she began her lifelong encounter with Jewish theology envisioned from a feminist perspective.

Plaskow’s route to Jewish feminism paralleled that of the founders of Ezrat Nashim. She kept abreast of the group’s early actions through Martha Ackelsberg, whom she met at a conference in 1970, and soon joined the collective. The two became partners after both divorced their husbands in the early 1980s, celebrating their commitment ceremony in 1986.40 Sharing a deep commitment to religious Jewish feminism, separately and together they have played major roles in shaping new women-centered Jewish rituals, liturgies, and theology.

Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Plaskow grew up with a positive sense of Jewish identity. When she was young, the family moved to West Hempstead, a Long Island suburb with a substantial Jewish minority. Plaskow felt comfortable in the community, yet she was aware of not being part of the dominant culture.41 Although her parents were not observant Jews, Plaskow was drawn to Judaic study. Her father, Jerome, an accountant, and her mother, Vivian, who became a schoolteacher when Plaskow and her sister were in grade school, joined the local Reform synagogue, as much for social as religious reasons. Plaskow went to Sunday school there, the only student voluntarily continuing through twelfth grade, but found it “a complete waste of time.”42

Yet Plaskow feels that she was “born a theologian.” She wanted to become a rabbi, a more familiar occupation but one reserved for men only. The Holocaust played a formative role in shaping her ideas about Judaism; she became “obsessed” with the Shoah after one of her Sunday-school teachers, who had been an army colonel during the war and was involved with the liberation of the camps, told her about it.43 The victimization of the Jews, the nature of evil, and the moral responsibility to respond to tyranny were seared into her consciousness at a young age. But while the Holocaust and “Jews as victims” were central to her Jewishness, it was “never the whole” of her Jewish identity.44 Judaism for Plaskow also meant Sabbath and holiday observance: “the stories of my ancestors, the words of the prophets calling us to justice and social engagement.”45

The prophetic message that Plaskow took from the Jewish tradition was supplemented by the social concerns demonstrated by her parents. Plaskow’s mother was a progressive who flirted with socialism in college and developed a radical analysis of social problems. Her father was less political than his wife, but his indignation over southern resistance to desegregation, particularly at the time of the Little Rock school crisis, when Plaskow was ten, became a defining moment for her.46 Plaskow began participating in civil rights demonstrations during high school. In 1963, she went with members of her temple to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, hearing Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. As a student at Clark University, where she enrolled the following year, Plaskow was part of the Worcester Student Movement for civil rights, a group that worked with the black community in that city running after-school programs, painting houses, and helping out in other ways.47 Plaskow said that because of her perspective as a Jew, she “was always very aware of being a member of the minority and seeing things that other people didn’t see.”48 This position as outsider/insider stimulated her concerns about racial and religious justice.

A feeling for feminism came more slowly. When Plaskow’s mother, who “went nuts” about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, recommended the book to her teenage daughter, Plaskow would not read it, just because her mother wanted her to. She often thought about how her life would have been different had she listened earlier to her mother. In college, Plaskow was not ready to hear the feminist message, finding the one student who tried to get people to talk about women’s issues “a pain in the ass.”49

After graduating from Clark in 1968, Plaskow began a Ph.D. program at the Yale Divinity School. Yale did not admit women to its undergraduate program until the following year; Plaskow remarked that Yale prepared itself for the education of women “by putting full-length mirrors in the bathroom and hiring a gynecologist for the medical center.”50 This response led women in the graduate school to consider their own situation, calling a meeting to discuss “how it was that [women had] been at Yale for eighty years and no one had noticed.”51 The group named itself the Yale Women’s Alliance, meeting regularly to explore the ways in which they had been socialized as girls, always considered “too smart,” told they were not “properly feminine” and “weren’t going to get husbands.” What had seemed like Plaskow’s individual experience she now understood as part of society’s structural constraints. “We all had the same narrative,” she said. “It was like seeing the world with new eyes.”52 It was at the Women’s Alliance that Plaskow met Carol Christ, a graduate theology student a year above her, beginning a lifelong friendship when they discovered a common interest in applying feminist ideas to theology.53 As for Ackelsberg, who also attended a formerly all-male Ivy League university, a graduate students’ women community became a crucible for new ideas about women’s second-class status. “In the fall of 1969,” said Plaskow, “I became a feminist.”54

The Yale Women’s Alliance combined consciousness-raising with activism. The group took action against Mory’s Tavern, a private club near Yale that was open only to men and where law firms customarily interviewed male students. Another consequence of the group’s activities was that the graduate students joined with law school women to plan a conference to be keynoted by Naomi Weisstein, the pioneer feminist from the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, already well known as an innovative feminist psychologist.

Weisstein’s talk at Yale in February 1970 became another turning point for Plaskow. Speaking about what it was like to be a female graduate student at Harvard, “with the men smoking their pipes in classes and the pretentiousness,” Weisstein enthralled her audience. Plaskow recalled, “every single word she said described our experience at Yale: the condescension with which we were treated” and the preference given to male graduate students. Weisstein addressed how women shut the door on their own expectations: “Women want to be lawyers and doctors and ministers and end up lawyers’ wives and doctors’ wives and ministers’ wives.” For Plaskow, who had married Robert Goldenberg, a graduate of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, eight months earlier, the critique was personal. “I had wanted to be a rabbi as a girl, and I married a rabbi,” she said. Dissatisfied with her own Reform upbringing, especially after a trip to Israel the summer after the Six-Day War, she admired her husband’s greater religiosity. After her marriage, she began keeping kosher and going to Shabbat services with him. “I moved into his world,” she reflected.55

The revelation Plaskow experienced on hearing Weisstein’s words provided a sudden understanding of her choices. This was “the minute of utter conversion,” Plaskow recalled. She began to connect her own history as a girl who was “too smart” with an understanding of women’s socialization.56 Although she had been prepared for Weisstein’s remarks because of the consciousness-raising work that her women’s group had been doing, nonetheless, she was “totally blown away”: “I went home and cried all night that I wasted my life; I was 22.”57

Weisstein’s central theme was not the plight of female graduate students but that women had to come together in community to create change. “You can’t do it alone”—“change in social structure requires a social movement.”58 Plaskow took this insight into her engagement with feminist theology. She had determined to write a feminist dissertation—perhaps the second in religious studies in the U.S.—but on the subject of Protestant theology, since she was in a Christian-dominated institution that paid no attention to Jewish experience. But as she set out to become a feminist academic, she was also undergoing a simultaneous, “more difficult, process of awakening as a feminist Jew.”59

One critical moment involved Shabbat services at Yale, where Plaskow was relegated to the back of the chapel, since the Orthodox service, the only one at Yale, segregated women from men. Plaskow said, “I decided I was never going to go to a service where I wasn’t counted.” Feeling excluded as a participant in Jewish prayer and Jewish life, she chose the topic “Can a Woman Be a Jew?” when the Yale Hillel rabbi asked her to address the group.60 As for Ackelsberg and Agus, the experience of exclusion became a powerful motivator for rebellion against tradition.

At a meeting of religious women in Grailville, in Loveland, Ohio, Plaskow joined with Christian theologians to explore women’s liberation as a religious experience. Doing so might allow them to capture the significance of feminist community, as Weisstein had urged, but in a religious setting. At Plaskow’s suggestion, the women focused on the story of Eve and Lilith as a paradigm for sisterhood. When Eve and Lilith join together, Plaskow imagined, “theology, the world, and God must change.”61

Plaskow published her first theological essay, “The Coming of Lilith,” about this story. Written as a midrash (interpretative text), it reflected her attempt to use traditional Jewish modes of expression, though she did this in a “semiunconscious” way. The essay provides an important explanation of sisterhood as feminist experience. “I make my decision for self-transformation in the context of a community whose support is ongoing,” Plaskow wrote. “The continuing process of questioning, growth, and change remains collective. Thus, not only is my decision reinforced, but my energies for change are pooled with the group’s energies.” Plaskow found the feminist mode of collaborative questioning and transformative community to parallel religious experience, pointing to commonalities in the use of rituals and symbols, token heretics and infidels, the language of “sisters.”62

For the theologians meeting in their own small women’s group, the myth of Lilith embodied the central theme of sisterhood as community. According to rabbinic legend, Lilith, demon of the night, was Adam’s first wife. Created equal to him, she finds she cannot live with him and flies away. In the women’s version, Eve sees Lilith when she attempts to return and discovers a woman in her own image. Eve swings herself over the wall to encounter Lilith. “‘Who are you?’ they asked each other. ‘What is your story?’ And they sat and spoke together, of the past and then of the future. They talked for many hours, not once, but many times. They taught each other many things, and told each other stories, and laughed together, and cried, over and over, till the bond of sisterhood grew between them. . . . And God and Adam were expectant and afraid the day Even and Lilith returned to the garden, bursting with possibilities, ready to rebuild it together.”63 Plaskow summed up: “Lilith by herself is in exile and can do nothing. The real heroine of our story is sisterhood, and sisterhood is powerful.”64

Powerful as communities of sisters might be, they were not always unitary. A profound division, which Plaskow acknowledged in her address at the Hotel McAlpin conference in 1973, entailed the basic conflict between “being a woman and being a Jew.” Although it was possible to belong to many different communities—as Plaskow herself said, “we identify as Jews, as women, as Americans, as students, as human beings”—at that time, she said, “Only one can be our organizing center. Only one community can be the ‘rosetta stone’ through which we view and interpret and give room to others.”65

Early in Plaskow’s own marriage, her husband had remarked that the couple seemed “intermarried,” since to him, Judaism was primary, while to her, feminism took center stage.66 But later, Plaskow refused the dichotomous choices that had seemed inevitable in her McAlpin speech. Throughout the 1970s, even though she experienced a “conflicted” relationship to Judaism and a disconnection between her academic life and her life as a Jewish feminist, she struggled to create a more integrated feminist Judaism.67

Plaskow found a supportive community of feminist scholars in the American Academy of Religion, which emphasized the ways that women express their own religiosity within patriarchal settings. Plaskow took a different approach, arguing that the “realities of women’s subordination and exclusion” within Judaism were more significant than whether they had carved a niche within the tradition.68 Her contribution was to develop a systematic critique of the tradition, not just to focus on particular texts and laws. In finding a voice for these views, she credited Jewish feminists. “My most important experiences with God have come through this community,” she acknowledged, and it was to this community and its “struggle to create a Judaism that includes all Jews” that she felt most responsible.69

Plaskow’s major work, Standing Again at Sinai, published in 1990, presented a new women-centered perspective on the subjects of Torah, God, and Israel. The book boldly applied the theories and methods of feminist scholarship to Jewish theology. By interweaving the tools of women’s history, midrash, and ritual, Plaskow offered a systematic route to instill women’s experience into the Torah, where there had been only silence. She also provided a critique of the problematic aspects of halacha (Jewish law), proposing a wide-ranging transformation in the legal obligations that rendered women invisible, objects rather than subjects. Plaskow addressed the subject of “Israel” as “Jewish community” as well, arguing that the idea of the Jewish people required openness and the acceptance of diversity, “whether the context is Israel, Diaspora Jewish communities, or the feminist movement.” It was “the sum of all pieces,” rather than one part speaking for the whole—whether “male Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis for all Israelis, elite male Jews for all Jews, middle-class white feminists for women . . .”70

Plaskow’s reconceptualization of metaphors for God was another of the book’s striking contributions. Rather than the image of God as “dominating Other” in a system of “hierarchical dualisms,” Plaskow invoked a “Jewish feminist God-language” in “nonhierarchical relation.” God was thus linked to a “new vision of community” that envisaged “divine power not as something above and over us but in and around.” God was a “lover and friend” rather than commander.71 Affirming multiple images for God, Plaskow’s vision of the deity stressed mutuality and interaction.

Plaskow hoped that a new feminist spirituality could transform the larger society as well as Jewish religion, for God was “present in connection, in the web of relation with a wider world.” Rejecting the standard contrast between faith and politics, she believed that feminist Jews could show about all people that “our religious lives change the way we live, and our political commitments shape our spirituality.” The “egalitarian communities” she envisaged could “draw the circle of community ever wider and wider,” leading to a profound social transformation.72

B’not Esh, the spirituality collective that Plaskow started with Martha Ackelsberg and other Jewish feminists in 1981, helped to enable the feminist synthesis she desired. Even within this group, which Plaskow described as her “lifeline,” conflict could not be avoided. “We were all looking for a group where we could be whole,” Plaskow told me, “not a Jew to the feminists and a feminist to the Jews. We were so excited that we were finally going to be with a group of people who were all like us. And of course, we weren’t. We spent the first Shabbat morning sitting in the hall crying because we couldn’t agree what to do.”73

The profound differences about the nature of feminist Judaism that appeared during the first B’not Esh retreat made the women feel “even more isolated,” but within a few years, they learned that their religious dissimilarities, as well as those regarding “sexuality, class, Jewish ethnic identity and personal history,” might serve as sources of group strength.74 The modality for using differences to empower rather than limit was to allow the members to take turns in groups to create their own liturgy, with others present to “try on things” that might challenge their own boundaries. By not seeking a common denominator, they found ways to innovate feminist liturgies, some of which proved quite “radical,” while still holding onto tradition.75 Plaskow hoped that the “community of vision and struggle” that she discerned at B’not Esh could help effect “the transformation of the wider Jewish community.”76

Plaskow’s project of understanding and expressing the multiple aspects of her identity remains ongoing. The problem of Jewish victimization has been a key element for her, resonating with her thinking about gender-role constraints within Judaism and anti-Judaism within Christian feminism. Coming to awareness of the problem of Christian anti-Judaism in the late 1970s, she reacted to the “deep shock of realizing that the bonds of sisterhood provided no protection against the mindless reiteration and reinforcement of a host of unequal power relations.” For her, this was a “profound failure of the feminist ethic,” a blow to her early conviction that “the women’s revolution had the power to change the fabric of the world in which we live.”77

After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Plaskow turned a more self-reflective eye on issues of power dynamics between oppressors and the oppressed. Seeing herself “from both sides of the marginalized/marginalizer divide,” she sought ways of understanding the “privilege of being an outsider—and being able to see the world in a certain way because you were an outsider.”78 In works such as “Jewish Anti-Paganism” and “Dealing with the Hard Stuff,” she probed how Jews themselves could construct multiple “others.”79 “To be oppressed does not protect one from being an oppressor,” she wrote in “Anti-Semitism: The Unacknowledged Racism.” “To be a Jew and not a Nazi . . . guarantees nothing about who the Jew will be when s/he comes to power.”80

Sexuality within Judaism became a key frame of interest for Plaskow as well, emerging in her theological works in the 1990s as she gave attention to ideas about the place of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons in religious thought and communities. While she viewed the subordination of sexual minorities to be core ingredients in Jewish tradition, she believes that feminist Judaism can refashion these elements in ways that transform oppression and give increasing voice to diversity.

Plaskow appreciates the tremendous changes that religious Jewish feminists have wrought in her lifetime, allowing women to gain access to leadership roles across all denominations but also developing a women-centered spirituality, a fuller Torah that reflects feminism and egalitarianism. She alternates between believing that “everything has changed and [that] nothing has changed,” noting the lack of “historical” and “communal memory” as feminist issues important to her generation wax and wane. Looking back on her own work and that of her Jewish feminist community, she also worries that perhaps too much of Jewish feminist work has been “navel gazing,” set apart from concrete concerns such as those addressed by such secular groups s Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Like Ackelsberg and Agus, she feels that communities of Jewish women must address broad social and political issues such as sexual abuse and poverty. “It’s almost like we haven’t figured out how our work as Jewish feminists illuminates that other world,” she admitted.81

Figure 5.2. The first meeting of B’not Esh, 1981. Courtesy of Martha Ackelsberg.

As Plaskow has helped to create a transformative feminist Judaism, she has constantly transformed her own life. Central to her development, and that of the new directions in feminist Judaism that has accompanied it, has been the framework provided by women’s liberationists such as Naomi Weisstein and others, the “outsider/insider” perspective inherited from her youth, and her continually evolving, intersectional stance as a white woman, Jew, feminist scholar, and feminist theologian. A vital element, too, has been the force of community in her life, which she has both written about and lived through her involvement in several academic groups and especially with B’not Esh. She and Martha Ackelsberg are fond of quoting Margaret Mead’s words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”82

Rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alpert: “Spiritual Daughters” of Feminism

Women who broke the barriers to full participation as rabbinical leaders took a different path to religious change. But not all the early women rabbis adopted a feminist agenda. Laura Geller, the third woman to be ordained in the Reform movement, and Rebecca Alpert, the third woman ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi, publicly identified as feminists. A central dimension of their rabbinates was the transformation of gender inequalities in Jewish tradition. They became a vital part of the revolution against sexism that stirred the women of Ezrat Nashim and so many other women in their generation.

***

For Laura Geller, the convergence between feminism and Judaism was clear. She taught feminist pioneer Betty Friedan that “the essence of Judaism . . . was not just holy words, . . . but it is action, deeds in society,” a lesson Friedan acknowledged publicly. In 1979, three years after Geller’s ordination, she called Friedan for advice about whether women rabbis ought to attend the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Phoenix, since Arizona had refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The conference leaders did not see the ERA as “a matter of Jewish ‘survival,’” despite their support of women’s rights. Should the women rabbis join feminists who were boycotting Arizona or their fellow rabbis planning to attend the convention? “Go to the conference,” Friedan told Geller, “but invite me to speak.” Friedan went, using her visit to Phoenix to join the women rabbis’ “outraged protest.”83 In her speech, Friedan thanked her “spiritual daughters (some of whom are in the room),” for teaching her that it is “profoundly Jewish” to take “actions, not words, to break through barriers that keep [women] from participating.”84

Born in 1950, Geller grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, moving to New York as a teenager. Influenced by her Reform synagogue in Massachusetts and her studies of Christian ethics at Brown University, Geller became fascinated by questions of Jewish identity and ethics. How was theology connected to morality? From where did the Jewish sense of justice emanate? While at Brown, she participated in civil rights work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Martin Luther King, Jr.. On one occasion, she drove to Memphis with a group of mostly male SCLC workers. Geller was overwhelmed, feeling that she did not belong. When a young African American colleague noticed her discomfort and elicited the reason why, he told her, “go back and do your organizing in your own community.”85 To move forward, she would first have to define that community.

During a lengthy sit-in in Providence during the Passover holiday over fair housing, Geller came to understand how Jewish ethics could be the source of an authentic activism that sprang from her heritage. Because she could not eat chametz (leavened products), Geller had to give up the food shared by her group. She had an epiphany: both the sit-in and her abstinence were ways of being spiritually Jewish. She recalled a discussion she had heard at temple as a girl, in which members spoke of strategies to sell houses to African Americans and avoid redlining. This was what it meant to be Jewish—to be an activist concerned with the rights of others. Geller never forgot that the first message regarding social justice came at a synagogue.

Later, describing “the Torah of our lives,” she explained that the Torah portion on Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holiday, “begins with us standing together in community, a community that includes each one of us. . . . Our personal stories become the story of community, of responsibility to other people who need our help. Our stories are linked to the larger Jewish story of tikkun olam, the challenge to repair what is broken in the world.”86 Incorporating her social values and religious faith, her community would be that of the Jewish people.

Geller applied to rabbinical school after graduating from Brown in 1971 and was accepted by the Reform movement. The sole woman in her class of fifty men at Hebrew Union College, she felt merely a “symbolic” presence to her teachers, especially during her first year of classes in Jerusalem. But the women’s study group that Geller formed with the wives of male students became a community that helped her glean insights from Jewish teachings relevant to women. The group created a Shabbat service for themselves, experiencing a “stunning” moment at the end of the year when each of them was able to hold the Torah for the first time. Another defining occasion came during Geller’s second year of rabbinic study in New York, when her instructor told her class that there were no times in a Jew’s life without a special blessing. Thinking of the many moments of women’s life cycle unmarked by blessings, she recognized the incompleteness of Jewish tradition. “How to make women’s experiences Jewish experiences” became a guiding objective of her rabbinical career. The ordination of women had brought Judaism “to the edge of an important religious revolution,” she wrote in an essay for Susannah Heschel’s 1983 anthology On Being a Jewish Feminist. “I pray we have the faith to push it over the edge.”87

Ordained in 1976, Geller served for fourteen years as Hillel director at the University of Southern California, founding a Jewish women’s faculty group and a Jewish women’s research group, where both men and women presented new work in Jewish women’s studies. One semester, Betty Friedan, in residence at USC as a university professor, offered thoughts about Jewish women and feminism as part of a Hillel-initiated interdisciplinary think tank.88 In 1982, Hillel sponsored an influential national feminist conference, “Illuminating the Unwritten Scroll: Women’s Spirituality and Jewish Tradition.” From 1990 to 1994, Geller served as executive director of the Pacific Southwest Region of the American Jewish Congress, where she created the AJCongress Feminist Center, which became a model for Jewish feminist projects throughout the country.89

“I’m grateful I wasn’t the first [ordained rabbi],” Geller said. “I came into the rabbinate already a strong feminist, and it might have been more difficult for somebody as outspoken and engaged [as I was] to have been the first. It was easier that someone else had opened the door.”90

In 1994, Geller’s integration of her feminist and Jewish passions took on new dimensions when she was appointed senior rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, the first woman congregational rabbi on the West Coast and one of the first to become senior rabbi at a major metropolitan synagogue. At Temple Emanuel, where Geller served for twenty-two years, and in positions of national rabbinic leadership, she became a spokesperson for the greater inclusion of women into Jewish liturgy and practice, fulfilling the mission she set for herself decades before. She said, “When women became rabbis, everything changed because we brought the Torah of our experience to our rabbinates. So liturgy changed, prayer changed, theology changed, scholarship changed, everything changed—including the structures of institutions.”91

***

In the late 1970s, Laura Geller teamed with another pioneering feminist rabbi, Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert, whom she met at the 1973 McAlpin conference, to form the Women’s Rabbinic Alliance. The alliance met in New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey through 1983, with fifteen to twenty rotating members, about the number of women who had been ordained by that time.92 Like Geller, Alpert was born in Brooklyn in 1950, and she was ordained the same year as Geller. Although the two women took different paths as rabbis, each pioneered new ways of integrating Jewish spiritual life and feminist practice.

Like Geller, Alpert grew up in the Reform tradition, but her parents were not synagogue goers or connected with Judaism in any way. Her father believed that religion was mere superstition, and her mother saw it as too expensive, feeling that working-class people such as the Trachtenbergs were not welcome in synagogues. As a child in Brooklyn, however, where Jews were everywhere, Alpert felt that she absorbed the “essence of Judaism,” a basic, profound Jewishness.93 Her comfort with this core identity formed the basis of her personalized spirituality.

Even as a child, Alpert felt that she could talk to God. Surprisingly, it was a religious-minded fifth-grade African American teacher who reinforced her Jewish identity: “You should be religious,” the teacher told her, inspiring Alpert to ask her parents to send her to Hebrew school, where she excelled.94 Although Alpert later became alienated from Reform observance, she participated in the Reform youth movement through high school and enjoyed services, which she considered “holy.”95 Alpert knew even then that she wanted to be a rabbi. What she did not understand was “what most people knew for a fact: there had never been a woman ordained to the rabbinate.”96

Second-wave feminism helped tear down the barriers and made this possible. In Alpert’s junior year of Barnard College, which she spent in Jerusalem, news of the explosive excitement of the new women’s liberation movement encouraged her to apply to rabbinical school. “I heard from friends back home about their sit-ins at the Ladies’ Home Journal and protests in the street for sexual liberation as the women’s movement hit our campus with a vengeance. I read an article in Newsweek about rabbinical student Sally Priesand, in which she said she knew she had to be better than all her male colleagues to attain her goal if she were to be ordained. It was obvious to me then that the only reason she . . . would be ordained was because of the publicity the women’s movement created.”97

The New York Times noted Alpert’s unusual career choice in a story about Barnard’s 1971 graduating class. “The cherub-faced daughter of a furrier” was planning to “take on one of the most male-dominated fields of them all: She wants to be a rabbi.”98 Alpert chose Reconstructionism, attracted to its focus on Jewish peoplehood and culture. She and a classmate became the second and third women to matriculate at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Philadelphia, where she met and married fellow student Joel Alpert, with whom she had two children. She completed a doctorate in American Jewish religious history at Temple University while at the RRC.

Alpert spent her years at rabbinical college “speaking publicly wherever [she] could about the history of women’s inequalities in Jewish religious life and responding to quips like ‘what should we call your husband’ and ‘I’ve never danced with a rabbi before.’” Her feminism emerged in her academic research on the history of women in the rabbinate, the network of women rabbis that she organized with Geller, and the articles about women in Judaism that she wrote for Lilith, the Reconstructionist, Response, and other periodicals. Alpert thought that “being a rabbi would change the world.” To her, it was a “feminist act,” “defying an entire history.” Yet she discovered that she was an “outlier.” Only Laura Geller and a few other colleagues saw the rabbinate, as she put it, “as a feminist project or made connections to the secular world of Jewish feminists, got involved in the incipient Jewish Feminist Organization . . . or even joined in solidarity with our counterparts in Conservative and Havurah Judaism who were fighting for the rights we had already attained or took for granted—to stand on the bimah, count in a minyan, act as a witness, create new life cycle ceremonies, wear a tallit, lead prayer services in mixed company.” To most women rabbis of her generation, “being a rabbi was all about, well, being a rabbi. ‘Jewish woman’ was not an identity that interested them.”99

There was little help from secular Jewish feminists, since most thought that, as Alpert recalled, “women rabbis had no special role to play in the movement, including the women who invited me to lead one of the famous secular Jewish feminist seders in NY and then not so politely did not allow me to lead it. The anti-hierarchical nature of the movement meant that someone who arrogated to herself the role of ‘leader’ was not going to be welcome.” Alpert had to accept the idea that the secular world of Jewish feminism and the world of the feminist rabbinate “did not neatly come together.”100

After graduating from the RRC, Alpert worked as part-time pulpit rabbi at several synagogues, taught Jewish studies at Rutgers University, and took a staff position at the RRC before becoming associate dean there, serving until 1987. She credits her time in this post and her involvement in Jewish feminist consciousness-raising groups in the early 1980s with her coming out as a lesbian, which she did in 1986, after divorcing her husband, although they remained friendly. It was an important professional decision. “In coming to terms with being a lesbian rabbi, I found my voice.” Of course,” she added, “I also lost my job and would have to take that voice elsewhere for it to be heard.”101

Leaving the “cocoon of progressive Jewish life,” Alpert went on to a career as professor of religion at Temple University and director of Temple’s Women’s Studies Program.102 She writes about Judaism, race, and sport, the subject of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball and Religion and Sports: An Introduction and Case Studies, and about Judaism and sexuality. She is the author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition and, with Rabbis Sue Elwell and Shirley Idelson, editor of the anthology Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation.103

Today Alpert considers herself to be a rabbi “on the side,” counseling and performing life-cycle ceremonies for Jews who choose not to affiliate.104 Her status as a rabbi/teacher gives her a platform from which to speak out about issues in the secular world that matter to her: reproductive choice, marriage equality, immigration rights, racial justice, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I have never regretted for one minute my decision to find my feminist home in the rabbinate,” said Alpert, “and I hope I have used the power I have gained from my position as a good feminist should—with people, and not over them, to construct a more just and peaceful world.” She observed that while she may be a “minimalist rabbi,” she is not a “minimalist Jew.” Rather, she considers herself a committed, lesbian, feminist, “maximalist” Jew, deeply immersed in the dialogues of contemporary Jewish life.105

Blu Greenberg: “Feminism Has Been a Way Into Judaism, and Not Out of It”

The story of Blu Greenberg, creator of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), attests to the varieties of religious experience undergone by feminist activists. At the NYU “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity” conference, Greenberg spoke of the transformative events in her life wrought by the feminist movement and her admiration for the work of women’s liberationists. For Greenberg, attending the conference “felt something . . . akin to the excitement of a person traveling to a rock-star concert.” She was thrilled to hear from her “heroes”—Susan Brownmiller, the women from Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Chicago Gang of Four, and others. At the conference, Greenberg realized how much her “own activism, primarily as an Orthodox Jewish feminist has been influenced by, nurtured by, and connected to the wider feminist movement.” These were the women who changed the world, “building something out of nothing.”106

Blu Greenberg was born in 1936 into the modern Orthodox, Zionist Genauer family in Seattle, Washington. She defines herself as a “maximalist Jew” from an early age. Jews were a minority in Seattle—“a minority of a minority”—but the message she received from her aunts, uncles, and cousins was that to be a minority as a Jew was a “blessing and privilege, not a burden.” Growing up in wartime, near a navy base, she remembers her father going to shul every Friday night and bringing home for Shabbat soldiers who had a furlough. Observing rituals, studying Torah, performing mitzvoth: “the whole package was central to our lives.” Her parents were community leaders—her mother president of the religious Zionist Women’s Organization and her father a rabbi, businessman, and Talmud scholar—who influenced her Jewish education.107

Yet Greenberg also experienced a sense of vulnerability. To be a minority outside her community meant encountering anti-Semitism. She could not ride her bike in certain areas: “I encountered Jesus Christ as [the] one who killed him.” This “duality of pride and of vulnerability” made her both “appreciative and protective.” Later, when feminists attacked the Torah and patriarchal Judaism, she felt discomfort: “Torah was my life, and the rabbis were my heroes.” Even when she began to criticize patriarchy and rabbinic law herself, she felt an “internal tension” born of her love of the religion and her need to defend it against enemies.108

The duality that Greenberg experienced as a feminist Jew also came from her parents’ different worldviews. Her father loved Judaism deeply. Gentle and kind, a peacemaker by nature, he could not stand disapproval. Her mother also loved Judaism, but as part of her passion for truth and social justice, she loved criticism. “Right was right and fair was fair. Tell it like it is and don’t talk on any edges.” Greenberg grew up with a father who would “brook no criticism and a mother who would take no prisoners.” For the rest of her life, she shuttled back and forth between the “critical love for [her] faith and community and the need for truth and justice,” for speaking out.109

The family moved to Long Island when Blu was ten; she attended the Hebrew Institute of Long Island and Central Yeshiva High School for Girls, getting a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and a degree in religious education from Yeshiva University’s Teachers Institute. She received a master’s degree in Jewish history from Yeshiva University and another master’s in clinical psychology from City University. Blu married Irving (Yitz) Greenberg in 1958; they had five children in six years. Her husband, a modern Orthodox rabbi, became the chaplain at Brandeis University, then Harvard, before getting a Ph.D. He taught at Yeshiva University and then founded the Jewish Studies Program at City College of the City University of New York. He also served as president and co-founder of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL).

Blu Greenberg was living in her “Orthodox cocoon, rebbetzin of a large modern Orthodox synagogue, lecturer at a local college, and mother of a young family of five.”110 She saw the obligations of Jewish men to pray three times a day and wear a kippah as “burdens” that she was happy not to deal with.111 Greenberg credits her husband with pushing her to be open to feminism; he became a feminist a decade before she did, encouraging her to read Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. “It was a white-hot idea and very just,” she said. “But it wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about my life and my mother’s life.”112

So it was “from the sidelines” that Greenberg watched feminism in the 1960s, identifying with social justice issues, particularly rape and domestic violence. But she put it “at a distance.”113 She did not declare herself a feminist until the first National Conference of Jewish Women. Arlene Agus and Toby Brandriss, Ezrat Nashim members and conference organizers, asked her to give a keynote speech, seeing her as a potential leader in the quest for Jewish women’s religious rights. Greenberg felt she did not merit the invitation; she had not known about Ezrat Nashim and was satisfied with her own life as a rebbetzin. “Family, children, men, rabbis, these were my loves, my longings, my heroes.” In her community, feminism was not a respectable term. Yet she agreed to give the speech.114

In researching sources for the speech, Greenberg came to grips with the painful reality that the tradition she loved placed women in subordinate roles. Once she began to view Jewish women’s roles in religion from a feminist perspective, the fact of inequality loomed large, especially concerning the agunah. But Greenberg also faulted feminism’s disconnect from the family—as well as “from the class of men in general.” Her talk at the conference emerged as a “critique of both Judaism and feminism, as well as a discussion of how the two could be informed and enriched by each other.”115 She believed that half the audience gave her a standing ovation, while the rest resented her upholding traditional family values and her critique of feminism. She viewed these women as “orthodox” feminists, who saw their movement as a “religion—sacrosanct, untouchable, inviolable.” They were part of the “radical fringe.”116

The morning after giving the speech, Greenberg had a life-changing experience. Sitting alone at the back of the Feminist Torah service, she found it “totally discombobulating” to hear Arlene Agus read from the Torah. “My ears were popping and my eyes were bulging. . . . It was mind-blowing. To see women doing things that I thought women couldn’t do—that was amazing, mind-boggling, exhilarating, frightening, challenging, upsetting.” When two women came to get her to take part in hagbah (lifting of the Torah), she was shocked but went with them to the bimah. “It was the first time I had ever held a Torah. I had studied it practically all my life, . . . but until then I had never actually looked upon an open Torah scroll.”117

The Jewish feminist conference became a “watershed experience” for Greenberg. The “cutting edge, sophisticated” event was Greenberg’s first personal encounter with “women’s initiative and power,” introducing her to “the value of cohorts.”118 Greenberg soon came to embrace feminism, understanding that “all new movements have to be radical at first.”119 The path was not smooth, and sometimes she “switched gears from one moment to the next.” As she became less anxious about feminism, she had to confront many people in the Orthodox community “who were tightening up and closing off.” She recognized that much of the resistance was “political as well as religious,” and she vowed that though she would never abandon tradition, neither would she “yield the new value of women’s equality even though it may conflict with Jewish tradition. To do so, would be to affirm the principle of a hierarchy of male and female,” which she no longer saw as “axiom of Judaism.”120

In contrast to utopian movements such as socialism or communism, in which Jews gave up their roots when they became politicized, Greenberg said that feminism was “a way into Judaism and not out of it.” At the McAlpin conference, she saw women who had never opened a Jewish text sit and study together in preparation for Shabbat.121 Jewish women estranged from or ignorant of Jewish tradition were able to recover and claim their Jewish identities, remarkably as religious women. In the face of the prediction that feminism would erode Judaism, the opposite was true. Women came to their Jewishness “through the portals of feminism.”122

The McAlpin conference remained a powerful motivator for Greenberg, shaping her work over the next decades as she incorporated feminism into her religious practice and writing. Most importantly, she learned that “you could critique the tradition and the earth didn’t swallow you up.”123 In 1975, together with Rabbi Isaac Trainin, she invited Betty Friedan to join a New York Jewish Federation task force, Jewish Women in a Changing Society. The task force held conferences on the agunot, the Jewish family, infertility, and other topics.124 In 1981, Greenberg published On Women and Judaism: The View from Tradition, essays on Jewish women and liturgy, ritual, divorce, and abortion, in which she framed feminist challenges to Jewish tradition and family life, seeking measures of reconciliation.125 The book was controversial among feminists and Orthodox Jews but influenced new ways of thinking.

Later in the 1980s, Greenberg acknowledged that becoming an activist had enriched her life in ways she could never have imagined, strengthening her marriage and family life, extending her community, connecting her “more deeply to the Jewish people than anything [she] might have studied in a text or read in a history book.” She experienced new bonds, those “we feel to each other as we give our time and energy to a cause, the sense of community and of rootedness to the Jewish people.” As a Jewish feminist, she sought transformations “not merely about religious tradition, or rights and responsibilities, or the details of canon law. At it its heart, it is about the overarching matters of justice and ethics.” Feminism strengthens Judaism, she averred, “because feminism is about justice, and incorporating a new measure of justice brings Judaism up to its own best level.126

One direction for Greenberg’s activism became the desire to replicate the feminist collective experience that she had witnessed at the McAlpin conference within the Orthodox community. Eventually, this led her to organize the First and Second International Feminist Conferences on Feminism and Orthodoxy in 1997 and 1998 and to found the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA); Greenberg was its first president. JOFA has become a force for change within Orthodoxy, fulfilling Greenberg’s hope that feminism and Orthodox religion could be mutually reinforcing.127 With chapters across the U.S. and approximately six thousand members, JOFA uses consciousness-raising and study to build community and advance social change around gender issues in the Orthodox world.

Greenberg was the first in the Orthodox community to try to move Jewish feminism outward. But she bemoans the slow pace of these efforts. While Orthodoxy is arguing about divorce, whether women can be ordained, and so on, “Rome is burning,” she told the NYU conference. “Violence against women, lack of peace, especially in the Middle East, the havoc of hate, the ravished environment—these are burning issues. Sometimes I wake up and ask myself, ‘What am I doing in this little, little box?’” She believes that issues of concern to religious women should not be narrowly focused, agreeing with other Jewish feminists in this chapter that the main goal is to connect religious reform to the wider world. She calls this challenge “the next agenda.”128

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Since the founding of Ezrat Nashim, religious Jewish feminists have opened the doors of Judaism to women’s more equal participation and a new female spirituality based on women’s experiences. Directly influenced by the women’s liberation movement, they applied feminist visions of social change to religious life, demonstrating the possibility of radical transformation within a faith tradition.

Like women’s liberationists, these women were compelled to activism because of their awareness of gender oppression, especially regarding their religious heritage. Moments of exclusion and marginality that they experienced served as spark plugs to the later feminist revolution. Participation in social movements of the era—civil rights, welfare and housing rights, freedom for Soviet Jewry—also helped to initiate their interest in protest and activism. By the 1970s, they were able to use the new vocabulary of feminism to channel their rage at sexism into a rebellion against religious patriarchy.

That rebellion took several different directions. Working to ordain women as rabbis, pressing for more egalitarian practices across denominations, and creating new liturgies, rituals, and midrash, these women ushered in innovative forms of religious thought and practice. Because of their contributions, women would no longer be “peripheral Jews,” without their own spiritual identities. In bringing feminism and tradition into dialogue with each other, these women and their colleagues transformed Jewish religious life.

At times, however, these women’s multiple loyalties became difficult to sustain. As the narratives in this chapter reveal, Jewish feminists uncovered myriad forms of gender bias on the part of friends and families, teachers and colleagues, lovers and husbands, against whom they had to take a stand. Institutions of Jewish life generally—synagogues, community centers, schools, seminaries, federations, councils—also came under assault for their patriarchal practices. Although blunted by these feminists’ strong Jewish backgrounds and relationships, conflict was unavoidable. But bolstered by women’s communities that they helped to organize, Jewish feminists succeeded in changing the nature of the conversation.

The difficulties of bridging Jewish and feminist identities were particularly arduous within Orthodoxy, in which feminist individualism had been regarded as a threat to community survival. Yet as Blu Greenberg’s story underscores, “a mild-mannered yeshiva girl” could “find happiness among the feminists,” despite initial ambivalence.129 Even within the more liberal denominations, the compatibility between feminism and Judaism was not automatic. Not all religious pioneers were feminists, as Rebecca Alpert’s story discloses, even when they broke barriers and widened access. The Jewish feminist movement did not have a central address, in Paula Hyman’s formulation; nor were perspectives unitary.130 Martha Ackelsberg and Judith Plaskow encountered such profound differences at B’not Esh that they initially despaired of finding common ground even within their own community. Yet with hard work, the divergences among members became a source of growth rather than dissension.131

Important contrasts existed between religious and secular Jewish feminists as well, reflected in the failure of the jointly founded Jewish Feminist Organization. Another set of differences separated religious feminists from women’s liberationists, who generally considered Judaism as irrelevant or dismissed it as irrevocably patriarchal. These worlds rarely came into contact. The separation lessened discomforts felt by Jewish feminists at anti-Jewish attitudes in the wider women’s movement, but it also cut off occasions for collaboration.

The women discussed in this chapter took unusual steps to create opportunities for cross-fertilization. Martha Ackelsberg’s, Judith Plaskow’s, and Rebecca Alpert’s work with secular feminists and LGBT communities, a Jewish-Arab Dialogue Group in which Greenberg participated, and the coalitions that Laura Geller formed with university feminist centers exemplify such efforts. Religious Jewish feminists rejected the dichotomies that had made women less than male Jews, remaining sensitive to inequalities elsewhere. “The gift of the Jewish feminist movement is noting who is on the outside,” Geller remarked, prodding religious women to use the enhanced spirituality that the movement has created to work toward a fuller humanity for all people.132

“Feminism is the crucible for modern Judaism,” Susannah Heschel observed in the introduction to her 1983 anthology.133 Having put in motion a powerful set of changes that have given women a voice inside the synagogue, pioneering Jewish feminists remain poised to push forward further transformations, inside and outside traditional religious spaces. The agenda remains unfinished, but in Jewish feminism’s powerful confrontation with an ancient tradition that had marginalized women, it has already chalked up many victories.