6 “Jewish Women Have Their Noses Shortened”

Secular Feminists Fight Assimilation

Secular Jewish feminists participated in several organizations that joined feminism and Jewish life in the late 1960s and 1970s. Among the most noteworthy of these were Brooklyn Bridge, Chutzpah, and the Jewish Feminist Organization, the latter of which was created after the first two Jewish feminist conferences held in New York in the early 1970s. The Jewish feminist magazine Lilith was launched in 1976. Secular feminists targeted sexism within the mixed-gender organizations of the Jewish Left and the Jewish establishment, attempting to create new amalgams of identity that erased hierarchical gender distinctions.

Some of these women had not been Jewish identified, but as they became increasingly uncomfortable as Jews in New Left organizations and women’s liberation groups, they sought Jewish affiliations. Along with the process of consciousness-raising inspired by the women’s movement, the 1967 Six-Day War, eliciting both strong praise and denunciations of Israel, was a precipitating factor in triggering Jewish identification.

At a time when the American student movement was coalescing against the U.S. war in Vietnam, the 1967 war in the Middle East polarized young Jewish radicals. Israel, the David against the Goliath forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria surprised the world with its swift and decisive victory. Young American Jews, both veterans of Zionist youth movements and those who had not felt any previous connection to the Jewish community or to Israel, found themselves identifying with Israel. “Weeping with joy” at the liberation of the Western Wall, they were surprised to discover “how deeply touched they were by Israel’s prewar trauma and its swift reprieve from destruction.” Few had imagined that they had strong feelings about Israel. “There was practically audible cheering in the neighborhood,” added Cheryl Moch, one of the founders of the Jewish radical collective Brooklyn Bridge. “I was raised to believe that Jewish men went like sheep to the slaughter, that they weren’t manly. There was a shame factor being Jewish growing up in the fifties and sixties. But all it took [to change it] was the Six-Day War.”1

But other young radicals believed that Israel emerged from the war as an “oppressor,” a “tool of American imperialism.”2 These men and women considered pro-Zionist views “chauvinistic” and counterrevolutionary.3 At the 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in late summer, a majority of participants supported the anti-Zionist resolution that condemned Israel as an “imperialist aggressor.”4 The same conference that had shaken Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman with its disregard for women’s issues became a defining moment for Jewish radicals who acquiesced in anti-Israel denunciations and those who were stunned by them.

Some Jewish radicals, trying to find explanations for the hostile attitudes to Jews and Israel and to align their own “feelings with their politics,” began to meet in small groups to discuss Jewish issues.5 The events of June 1967 put a halt to their “ethnic amnesia”; they could no longer ignore the fact of their Jewish difference. “We were still radicals, Socialists, opposed to the war, exploitation and racism, committed to building a new society. But we were also, we now perceived, Jews. What did that mean? What was the significance of this new consciousness?”6 “What identity should American Jews develop?”7

As a result of this self-questioning, a new radical Jewish Left came into being. “It happened all over the country,” reported Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, a leader in the new movement. “We had a lot of refugees from SDS; people with an intense Jewish background but involved in New Left activities; people with little Jewish background who didn’t even know what Chanukah was—but then, all of a sudden, something happened, something turned.”8 In the post-1967 period, thousands of New Left “refugees” drifted in and out of dozens of groups created spontaneously as a consequence of the Left’s condemnation of Israel. So many groups formed on and off campus that in 1970 the London-based World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) created the North American Jewish Students Network, informally called Network, a loose association of several hundred groups in a left-to-right spectrum of what they called “the Jewish movement.” By 1972, Network anchored the Jewish Student Press Service, which provided news and information to at least fifty movement newspapers. It became the sponsoring organization for the 1973 and 1974 Jewish feminist conferences in New York.

Network saw itself as a resource “across the entire political spectrum,” in Cantor’s words, its goal to stimulate the building of a Jewish student movement by providing resources that could lead to cross-fertilization. Though open to all points of view, Network leaders shared a leftist perspective that acknowledged the centrality of concerns about Israel to Jewish identity. What they had most in common was their “separation struggle with the New Left . . . and with the Jewish community.”9

Network and its associated groups adopted a varied agenda, defending Israel and Zionism but criticizing Israeli occupation policies; publishing underground newspapers; and calling for the establishment of Jewish Studies programs, freedom for Soviet Jewry, and a more open, democratic, and pluralistic Jewish community. By 1973, many politically oriented Jewish leftist groups had folded or moved on to other issues, sometimes aligning with religious-oriented Jewish radicals. The demarcation between the Jewish Left and religious Jewish radicals was not firm, but havurah and countercultural religious organizations were generally less focused on Israel than was the Jewish Left.10

However innovative the Jewish student movement’s vision for Jewish youth leadership, it recapitulated the male-dominated organizational structure of the Jewish establishment. There had been more than three men for every woman present at the North American Jewish Students Network convention in the fall of 1970, with gender ratios even more disproportionate on its governing boards and steering committees. “Sitting at a board meeting, we are addressed as ‘gentleman,’” Vivian Silver Salowitz wrote of the new movement. “We are expected to record the minutes of a meeting.”11

To Cantor, the creation of a new kind of Jewish feminism was the Jewish Left’s most important legacy. Many women in its organizations came to identify as Jewish feminists, although they did not necessarily designate themselves as “secular.”12 I use this term to distinguish these activists from those of Ezrat Nashim and other religious Jewish rebels.

A five-day conference at a meeting-camp facility in Zieglerville, Pennsylvania, in September 1971 served as one of Jewish feminism’s most important “click” moments. Organized by the World Union of Jewish Students, the conference brought together over 250 Jewish student activists from around the world, half of them from the U.S. and representing diverse political and religious views, with the express purpose of exploring cultural forms and lifestyles emerging in the Jewish student community.13 It was the first time that women from the new North American Jewish Student Network and those from the countercultural havurot encountered one another. Exhilarated by their common interests and eager to reconcile their differences, the women met together for a few days to discuss their concerns.

The men, however, were “annoyed that the women had ‘separated themselves,’” as Cantor told the story. To “mollify” them, the women agreed to present the issues they had discussed in caucus to the whole group. “There the men, from left to right on the movement’s political spectrum, shouted them down, hurled verbal insults, and loudly and angrily charged that the changes the women wanted were ‘bad for the Jews.’”14 Resembling events at the National Conference for New Politics and the Nixon counter-inaugural when New Left men insulted women participants, triggering their desire to organize independently, women at Zieglerville had their consciousness raised.

Six months after the Zieglerville gathering, one hundred women from a variety of groups under the umbrella of Network came together to explore sexism in Jewish life. Network women, supported by Ezrat Nashim and members of the radical Jewish collective Brooklyn Bridge, began to plan the first National Conference of Jewish Women at the Hotel McAlpin in 1973, which Blu Greenberg keynoted.

The women and their allies organized a second gathering—this one a National Conference on Jewish Women and Men—that took place in New York City in April 1974, titled “Changing Sex Roles in Jewish Life: Past Expectations, Future Implications.” The conference included a wide variety of participants, from “radical lesbian vegetarians to ultra-orthodox women,” as one newspaper put it, and men as well as women, in the hope that if men attended the conference, they “would see the injustice of the many restrictions placed on Jewish women” and join the women in their work. The event led to the establishment of the Jewish Feminist Organization (JFO), dedicated to the “full, direct and equal participation of women at all levels of Jewish life—communal, religious, educational, and political.”15 Its governing board consisted of a representative from each of four regions: Cheryl Moch from the East, Maralee Gordon from the Midwest, Diane Gelon from the West, and Brona Brown from Canada. At its launch, the JFO attracted one thousand paid members.16

The approach to working for greater women’s rights within the Jewish community took two forms. While religiously identified Jewish feminists targeted inequality in synagogues and seminaries, secular Jewish feminists focused on what Cantor called “the assimilation game,” seeing danger in the fact that “Jewish women have their noses shortened and bleach their hair to conform to the Anglo-Saxon ideal of beauty, or at least, minimize their Jewish differences.” Cantor wondered “why so many Jews were so anti-Israel, why they were deserting the community, why they assimilate.” Assimilation meant a loss of positive Jewish connection, an often-internalized sense of oppression that weakened identity. “Feminism was the missing piece of the puzzle,” said Cantor, “because you can’t understand the experience of Jewish exile without understanding the status of women.”17

Like black women, Latinas, and other feminists giving voice to their collective identities, secular Jewish feminists linked their struggle as Jewish women fighting patriarchal institutions to larger campaigns against racism, sexism, and capitalism. To be fully aware of themselves as Jewish women was a first step toward engaging the multiple causes of oppression. As Jewish women, they could fight broad feminist and social justice struggles while addressing issues of primary concern to them as Jews. They saw no sharp divide between particularist and universalist interests.

In this regard, secular Jewish women were among the early groups of feminists who embraced identity politics, asserting themselves as a distinctive social group based on shared ethnic and/or class and gender background and interests. They considered themselves Jewish women as well as feminists, emphasizing dual components of a hybrid identity, neither of which could remain dormant or neglected. Such a declaration was a departure for secular feminists who had come to political consciousness on the left, where identifications with Jewishness had been rare.

The secular feminists insisted that Jewish women’s sexuality and economic circumstances be taken seriously. The 1973 NJWC had been disrupted by a demonstration by working-class and gay women, angry that there were no lesbian speakers on the program and that the cost of the conference prevented poorer Jewish women from attending.18 According to conference coordinator Sheryl Baron Nestel, the turn to “respectability” at the cost of “inclusivity” had been an unintended consequence of the difficulty of raising funds for the NJWC. “So convinced were we that what we were doing was revolutionary that we were unable to see the ways in which the conference, despite being an important and empowering event, also reinforced the normative boundaries of American Jewish life.”19

The lesson of inclusion demanded by the protesters was not lost on participants, with the result that the platform of the Jewish Feminist Organization that sprang from the 1974 conference incorporated a demand for the full participation of gay women and men in Jewish religious and secular communities.20 As the Jewish feminist movement evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian women played a significant role, especially in fighting anti-Semitism in the women’s movement.

Often newly radicalized as Jews, the secular feminists had an immense task before them and, in these early years of raised consciousness, few identifiable resources. Like women’s liberationists and religious Jewish feminists, they formed consciousness-raising groups, raising uncomfortable issues and spawning new interventions. In some cases, their feminism developed in gender-mixed groups such as the Chicago collective Chutzpah or New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.

According to Tamara Cohen, the secular Jewish feminists were an “overlooked bridge,” bringing feminism to the Jewish mainstream and Jewish feminism to the Left. Cohen emphasizes the structural disadvantages that many of these women faced as middle- and lower-class women, often with little Jewish education and in conflict with men and sometimes with women empowered by their class, educational status, and Jewish knowledge. In comparison to Ezrat Nashim’s battle against religious hierarchies, these women’s war against assimilation and cultural stereotypes appeared less media worthy and urgent.21

But secular Jewish feminists can claim considerable success. Facing confrontations and even vilification, they showed great courage. They brought focus to the twin problems of assimilation and stereotyping as special trials for Jewish women, not only for Jews more broadly. Their challenges to the established order encouraged change, even if it occurred slowly and partially. In marking gender inequality and ethnic neglect as Jewish feminist issues, they opened a pathway to equity that complemented the efforts of religious feminists. Rebelling against the limits of their roles as good Jewish daughters, wives, sisters, and friends, secular Jewish feminists joined at the frontlines of social change.

Aviva Cantor: “Oppression of Amerika’s Jews”

Aviva Cantor did not start out as a radical, she told a Boston journalist who interviewed her after the publication of her 1995 book Jewish Women / Jewish Men: The Legacy of Patriarchy in Jewish Life, a sweeping feminist analysis of Jewish history, culture, and psychology.22 But she became one. Born in the Bronx in 1940, Cantor grew up as the only child of a fervently Zionist father, Joseph Cantor, an immigrant from what is now Belarus, and Naomi Friedman Cantor, born and orphaned in Russian Poland and raised in Toronto.23 Joseph studied at the Volozhin Yeshiva, described by his daughter as the “Harvard of the yeshiva world,” but was thwarted in his desire to immigrate to Palestine when he could not obtain an entry permit from the British Mandatory government there. He went to the United States instead, attended the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, and bought a corner drugstore in the Bronx, where his wife served as salesclerk.

Cantor’s parents were traditional, though not strictly observant Jews, and they sent Aviva to Ramaz, a modern Orthodox day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she received an excellent Jewish elementary and secondary education. Although going from a “middle-middle-class” family in the East Bronx to the mostly upper-middle-class school proved to be socially difficult, Cantor felt lucky to be grounded in Jewish texts and traditions; she graduated valedictorian of her class.24

Cantor went on to Barnard College, taking two middle years of study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Graduating from Barnard in 1961, she received a master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism two years later and launched her career as a reporter working for the U.S. bureau of the London Jewish Chronicle. That journalistic work connected her to the incipient Jewish student movement and the world of Radical Zionist politics and journalism. In 1966, she married Murray Zuckoff, a socialist writer born on the Lower East Side. Three years later, Zuckoff became the editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a post he held for some twenty years, covering Israel, black-Jewish relations, the American Jewish community, and other issues concerning Jews.25

By the late 1960s, Cantor had become deeply involved with a politically active group of student and young-adult Zionists. She was one of the founders of Young Americans for Progressive Israel (YAPI), an offshoot of Americans for Progressive Israel (API), which was part of the World Union of Mapam (left-wing Zionists), a group that included and supported the left-wing Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. Created in 1965, YAPI became part of the growing student antiwar movement. After the Six-Day War, Jewish radical refugees from the New Left found their way to the YAPI offices, where they joined Zionist activists to create the ideological infrastructure for what they called “Radical Zionism.”26 They renamed their organization the Jewish Liberation Project (JLP) and in 1969 began publishing the Jewish Liberation Journal, with Cantor as editor. Cantor was also the only woman elected to the steering committee of the newly launched North American Students Network.

Cantor strikingly articulated the ideology of the new Radical Zionist youth movement in her Journal pieces. In an article titled “Oppression of Amerika’s Jews” in the periodical’s second year, Cantor outlined the case against assimilation, targeting the comfort zone of many nonidentified Jewish radicals, including radical feminists. Her attack was couched in terms that drew on standard New Left anticapitalist rhetoric, as well as the ethnic and gender pride of the Black Power and feminist movements. Cantor repeatedly referred to women’s liberation as she made the case that Jews needed to embrace their distinctiveness in order to fight invisibility, marginality, and oppression.

For Cantor, assimilation was one of the greatest problems of the Jewish Diaspora, a signpost of intentional amnesia about Jewish roots that derived from Jews’ adaptation of the dominant culture and the ruling elite’s anti-Semitism. Negative attitudes about Jewish identity caused Jews to attempt to “‘pass’ as ‘whites,’ . . . clinging helplessly to the status quo, rejecting the ethics of Jewish life.” Uninformed about the causes of discrimination, many Jews blamed themselves for their oppression, internalizing the attitude that being different—being Jewish—was “bad,” “regressive,” “reactionary.” Internalized oppression made Jews feel guilty about being together; the “most terrible of all terrible accusations” was that Jews were “clannish.” Consequently, “any prideful Jewish identification or action” was interpreted as Jewish chauvinism. “Keeping people powerless by keeping them apart” went hand in hand with “cultural deprivation”—the absence of anything “positively Jewish” in young Jews’ education and experiences, similar to how women had been denied their authentic histories.27

Negative views of behavior that was excessively Jewish targeted Jewish women: the worst insult was to tell a young Jewish woman that she was “talking like a Jewish fishwife” when she was expressing her feelings. The derision extended to Jewish feminists. “When women get together to discuss their oppression,” Cantor claimed, “those opposing women’s liberation try to intimidate them by saying they’re all a bunch of dykes.”28

Cantor zeroed in on how the Jews of the radical Left, “when criticizing Amerikan Jews, always mention the mink coats.” What they did not see was the “spiritual nakedness” underneath, the spiritual and cultural poverty that drove many Jewish youth to embrace “Zen, astrology, drugs, left sectarianism, encounter groups, scientology, psychoanalysis,” which is “as oppressive and dehumanizing in its own way as is physical poverty.” The process of liberation had to begin with an understanding of assimilationist pressures and losing authentic identity.29

Cantor and her comrades also blamed the Jewish establishment (dubbed WASHs, for White Anglo-Saxon Hebrews) and the non-Jewish power elite for these problems. This “plutocracy of wealthy men” dispensed Jewish people’s money on projects that “appealed to the big givers, without finding out what the rest of the Jews need and want.”30 To protest such policies and to transform the Jewish public into a democratic community, the radicals moved beyond writing articles to direct action. Influenced by New Left confrontation tactics, a group called Concerned Jewish Students interrupted the annual meeting of the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations in Boston, in November 1969. Hillel Levine, a young rabbi then studying for his Ph.D. at Yale, took the podium to speak for the protesters, criticizing the elders for their belief in melting-pot ideals.31 The protest resulted in the council’s forming a funding body to address the students’ concerns.

The following year, Network groups organized primarily by the Jewish Liberation Project took over the offices of the Jewish Federation of New York after the federation refused Network’s demands for funding youth projects and for greater accountability. Forty-five movement activists (the “Federation 45”) were arrested after the one-day sit-in in April, the first such action in the Jewish community.32 It was a moment that Cantor proudly recalls, and she regrets that similar demonstrations faded from the Radical Jewish activist arsenal.

At the New York University “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity” conference, Cantor explained the differences between Radical Zionists and Radical Jews. Radical Zionists held that Zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and that Israel was essential to Jewish survival. They were the first group to champion the two-state solution and supported Israeli comrades struggling to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast, Radical Jews, as non-Zionists, believed “that it would be too bad if Israel were wiped off the map, but it had probably been a mistake to create it. Their position was that Jewish survival didn’t depend on Israel and that the Diaspora was a positive thing.”33

Despite these differences, Cantor believes that Radical Jews and Radical Zionists made common cause in their opposition to the New Left’s anti-Jewish stance. For the New Left, “Jews could not be revolutionary as long as they remained conscious Jews because all Jews were middle-class oppressors. To reject being an oppressor, a Jew had to reject being Jewish.” For Cantor, the fundamental problem was whether young men and women needed to give up their identities as radical activists if they chose “the Jewish cause.” “Could they be revolutionaries and at the same time pro-Israel and committed Jews?”34 Radical Jewish feminists asked another question: could they be committed Jews while protesting gender inequality in the Jewish community?

By the late 1960s, women in both the Radical Jewish and Radical Zionist camps had begun to address issues of sexism and female subordination raised by women’s liberationists. Although the roots of Jewish feminism were multiple, Cantor believes that Jewish feminism primarily “sprang out of the Jewish movement and shared its anti-assimilationist ethos.”35 Joining religious Jewish women with interests in gender equality, they heralded the birth of a new Jewish feminism.

At the NYU conference, Cantor explained that about 30 percent of the individuals in the Jewish movement were women and that Network welcomed women “who were politically assertive.” “But the atmosphere was extremely male oriented.” She recalled that at the Zieglerville conference, “it became shockingly apparent, very shocking, that the men . . . would not support feminism. Influenced by the women’s liberation movement, groups of Jewish women started to meet.” Soon the feminists in the Jewish movement “began to see Jewish life through feminist eyes.”36

Cantor recalls her own feminist “click” moment. While wandering through a bookstore, she picked up a copy of Beverly Jones and Judith Brown’s 1968 pamphlet Toward a Female Liberation Movement. Reading it, she experienced “a flash of recognition and identification and promptly became a feminist.”37 Jones and Brown were white civil rights activists and women’s liberationists in Gainesville, Florida, whose “Florida Paper,” an early statement of the pro-woman, radical feminist position, had a transformative effect on the emerging women’s movement.38 After reading their pamphlet, Cantor undertook the study that resulted in the publication of her bibliography of Jewish women in 1979 (the first in the field) and, later, her comprehensive study of male-dominated Jewish life, Jewish Women / Jewish Men. She also co-founded a Jewish women’s consciousness-raising group, which met for several years to explore what it meant to be a Jewish woman and, as Cantor put it, “how our Jewish background made us what we are.”39

Cantor identified an important difference between the Jewish feminists’ response to their male comrades’ derisive behavior and that of some women’s liberation activists to sexism within the New Left. “The shock—and the sexism in the movement generally—did not propel the [Jewish] women to drop out, regroup, and create a separate women’s movement as women in the New Left had done,” she noted. “Deeply influenced by the women’s liberation movement, they already defined themselves as feminists and could discuss their situation in feminist terms.”40 They could combat sexism within the Jewish movement without divorcing themselves entirely from it.

But confronting the secular Jewish community posed significant difficulties. Cantor saw the Jewish establishment as deeply suspicious of Jewish feminists, regarding the 1973 National Conference of Jewish Women as “horrible”: “It was just after the Six-Day War and you had the Black Power movement, hippies, and other leftists spouting anti-Zionism. I think people saw us and thought it’s like the 10 plagues . . . sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, the new left, now us.”41 Ending Jewish women’s powerlessness would have required challenging the male-dominated and “totally undemocratic” Jewish establishment power structure, a difficult effort since in the post-1967 “circle the wagons” mood, Jewish feminists were “already being condemned as enemies of the Jewish people for voicing any kind of criticism.” They had few allies. The large Jewish women’s volunteer organizations seemed hostile to feminism, and the “general women’s movement was not interested in Jewish feminism, nor did it extend any assistance to its advocates,” failing to challenge anti-Semitism when it “shamefully” spewed forth at the UN World Conferences on Women that started in 1975.42

Cantor’s furious response in December 1971 to the women’s liberation paper RAT: Subterranean News, which had published an anti-Israel editorial, contrasted with her more tempered reaction to what she called the “hysterical anti-Semitism” of male movement Jews at Zieglerville a few months earlier.43 Begun in 1968, RAT, a New York–based, male-run underground newspaper, had been popular for its coverage of far-left politics and culture. In January 1970, it was taken over by a radical feminist collective, an action that was regarded as a breakthrough in relations between radical women and men.44 Soon after, the collective published a now-classic essay by Robin Morgan titled “Goodbye to All That,” one of the first radical feminist pieces to call for an absolute break with the male Left: “Goodbye, goodbye forever . . . counterfeit Left, counterfeit, male-dominated, cracked-glass-mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real left.”45

Cantor met with the RAT collective when they asked about reprinting one of her articles, and she had persuaded them to retain her paragraphs on Zionism, which they had wanted to eliminate. Thus, she was shocked by the group’s subsequent editorial calling for the destruction of Israel on the grounds it would be best for “the revolution.”46 While Cantor had not expected the RAT women to take a pro-Israel position, “opposing the existence of Israel” was another story. “To deny to the Jews what is acceptable for every other nation” was anti-Semitic and “racist,” running counter to RAT’s democratic, pluralist goals. The “Jewish sisters” in the collective who had signed the editorial (or probably were “pushed” into it, Cantor suggested, “so bad is our oppression”) were no doubt “terrified of confronting the meaning of Israel for them as Jews.” RAT had “not said ‘goodby [sic]’ to all that,” Cantor charged, but lusted for a “last desperate grab for male approval.” The collective had “betrayed the women’s movement and all it stands for.” Cantor ended with a stark pronouncement that revealed the significant distance between Radical Zionist women and radical feminists at this time. “Your editorial calling for the destruction of my homeland, my instrumentality of national liberation, declares you to be my enemy. You have joined the ranks of my oppressors and I cannot call you sisters anymore.”

With the exception of the Israel issue, Cantor in fact had a great deal in common with RAT and other radical feminist groups. Like Robin Morgan, she held capitalist “Amerika” and its oppressive ruling elite responsible for social evils, articulating a relentless critique of “the establishment” and class privilege. Cantor also admired the demonstrations that brought national attention to radical feminist causes, a style that she contrasted with the more conciliatory approach of Jewish feminists “who used words as weapons.”47 In Jewish Women / Jewish Men, she took Jewish feminists to task for the lack of “fire and ire,” which she saw as rooted in the classic Jewish fear of “separation and abandonment.” If Jewish women critiqued the Jewish establishment too strongly, they might be perceived as causing disunity and threatening the community, resulting in their own rejection “from the fold.”48 Cantor understood the reasons for the “lack of righteous anger” that could kindle public action: for Jewish women to take on the Jewish establishment would have constituted “high-octane role breaking.”49 But she nonetheless viewed their hesitancy as a flaw within Jewish feminism. Less confrontational and less political than the Jewish women in women’s liberation, in many respects Jewish feminists were less effective.

Cantor believed that radical feminists could provide Jewish women the tools to overcome their anxieties about not being “nice Jewish girls” if they confronted sexist power structures.50 Cantor had few such anxieties herself, as evidenced in 1976, when as associate editor of Hadassah Magazine, she ran afoul of the male executive editor, who chastised her for embarrassing the magazine by changing such sexist language as “seminal contribution” to “germinal contribution.” The editor threatened to fire her if she continued with such practices, but Cantor stood her ground, arguing that Jewish women should not be “slavishly submissive to a dictionary in a knee-jerk reaction” that made them collaborators in discrimination.51

Yet as Cantor’s strong criticism of the RAT editors reveals, the connection between radical feminism and Jewish feminism remained fraught. There was work to do. Jewish feminists sought to raise consciousness about Jewish issues among women’s liberationists, suggesting, for example, that Women: A Journal of Liberation do a special issue on ethnic and racial differences that would include a piece on Jewish women. The editors agreed that the magazine should reach out to “non-WASP” women different from themselves.52 Jewish women understood the importance of connecting to feminist circles. It would be “hard to get to other Jewish women,” a friend wrote to Cantor, “if we separate ourselves from this mass movement that ‘conscious’ Jewish women have already joined.” She asked Cantor to send an essay on Jewish women to be included in a National Organization of Women anthology.53

But who were these “conscious” Jewish women? Even Cantor did not know for sure, pointing out in one of her essays how little was known about the Jewishness of such notable feminist leaders as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug. She emphasized that, beyond these spokeswomen chosen by the media, the movement could claim many other important leaders, including such “non-Jews” as Kate Millet, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, and Shirley Chisholm, seemingly ignorant of the fact that both Morgan and Brownmiller were Jewish.54 As Cantor’s mistake reveals, the presence and activism of Jewish women in second-wave feminism was little recognized at the time.

An indicator that Jewish feminism was becoming known to at least some radical feminists is seen in an invitation from Ann Snitow and Rachel Blau DuPlessis to Cantor in the early 1990s to contribute to an anthology they were editing about the experiences of second-wave feminist leaders. Busy with other commitments, Cantor was unable to contribute to their volume, The Feminist Memoir Project, but it is noteworthy that she was one of the feminist activists whose story the editors hoped to include.55

Susan Weidman Schneider: Lilith—Beyond Superwoman, “Doctor, . . . Tightrope Walker, Challah Baker, . . . Zionist Stalwart”

“How would you like to be involved with a Jewish feminist magazine?” Aviva Cantor asked Susan Weidman Schneider, then a young mother who was writing freelance for Hadassah Magazine and other magazines. “I sort of ran with it,” Schneider recalls.56 An English major who had graduated from Brandeis a decade earlier, Schneider had spent her academic career looking at English literature written by men. Cantor and Schneider, with editor-writers Batya Bauman, Susan Dworkin, Amy Stone, Ethel Fenig, Eleanor Faust-Levy, and the late Elenore Lester, met at the second National Conference on Jewish Women at the McAlpin to plan a publication that would give voice to Jewish women. Schneider credits Cantor with the original idea but believes that the “conversation of a collective” has sustained Lilith, the magazine they created, for over forty years. Schneider and Cantor jointly served as Lilith’s editors for a decade, but when differences between them could not be resolved, Cantor left the magazine and Schneider continued as executive editor. Schneider says that even when people tell her “you are Lilith,” the magazine still seems to her to be a collective.57

At the time of Lilith’s launch in 1976, the Jewish press, almost entirely led by men, rejected or belittled the nascent feminist movement. Equally distressing to Schneider was the fact that the mainstream feminist press “scorned Jewish women’s issues as parochial or, worse, antifeminist, because they sprang from [Jewish women’s] attachment to a patriarchal religion.” Either Jewish women were considered “people of privilege” who had bought into the establishment or who “had not suffered enough” if they identified as Jews. “If this is a religion that treats women like second-class citizens, vote with your feet. Why stay connected to a religion that does not appreciate women?”58 This “parallel marginalization” spurred Lilith’s founding group to challenge the negative aspects of Jewish law and popular culture that circumscribed women’s lives.59

While Schneider believes that her coming to the founding and editorship of Lilith was accidental, she acknowledges that her family background shaped her positive Jewish identity and the belief in possibilities for women that put her on the path to Jewish feminism. Schneider was born into a tightly knit Jewish community in Winnipeg, Ontario, in 1944. While well assimilated, Jews made up only 10 percent of the prairie city’s population and possessed a significant “rootednesss” in their own culture. On both sides of Schneider’s family, there was a sense of “being plugged into the important issues of Jewish life.”60

Schneider’s great-grandparents, who settled the family in Saskatchewan Province and farmed there for several years, were Zionists who made aliyah to Israel in 1904. Her mother, born in Winnipeg, grew up speaking Yiddish and acting in the Yiddish theater. Her mother’s involvement with Jewish culture passed on to Susan, who grew up “with a tremendous comfort level” with Jewishness and an affirmation of women’s capabilities, passions, and interests. Schneider studied at Hebrew school in her Conservative synagogue and had a Friday-night bat mitzvah, not reading from the Torah as boys did, but she felt no difference in the education afforded to girls and boys. Opportunities for girls to participate in youth-group activities laid the groundwork for her later involvements in collective life.

At Brandeis University in the early 1960s, Schneider found a number of additional female role models, including Socialist Zionist author Marie Syrkin of the English department, one of the university’s first woman professors. The faculty as a whole respected female students: “there were so many smart women that the professors would have been ridiculous to disparage them.” But despite the university’s Jewish background, Brandeis was “a very easy place not to be Jewish.”61 Schneider’s Jewish identity went underground; she spent time tutoring African American children and becoming involved in early antiwar protests.

Schneider married in 1969, four years after her college graduation, spending a year on a Native American reservation with her husband, Bruce, then a medical student, and another year in Israel. On her return, she wrote about the work-life balance in Israel, which she contrasted favorably to the situation in the U.S. Her articles brought her to the attention of Aviva Cantor, then editing Hadassah Magazine, and she got in on the ground floor—or, rather, as she calls it, “the subbasement” floor—of the emerging Jewish feminist magazine project.62

Schneider recognized that it was a propitious time to launch a journal reflecting the emergence of Jewish feminism. “As the women’s liberation movement has had an increasing appeal for women of all ages and all walks of life,” she explained in 1974, “many Jewish women firm in their Jewish identity felt a growing need to apply their new consciousness of themselves as women to their lives as Jews.”63 In addition, changes in traditional attitudes toward women in Judaism were drawing secular women, alienated from Jewish tradition, back to Jewish concerns. They had to confront problematic issues within Judaism but also the double messages and stereotypes they had received throughout their lives relating to education, family life, gender norms, and achievement. Lilith emerged two years later as the first publication “exploring the changing roles and expectations of women in the full spectrum of Jewish life.”64 In Schneider’s view, “so much energy was emanating from Jewish women’s films and music and conferences and liturgies and task forces that we felt we were discovering—or encountering or uncovering—a whole new continent that had been submerged in our collective unconscious.”65 But this material had not been chronicled or transmitted to a wider public.

The first issue of Lilith in fall 1976 showcased the multiple angles the magazine would adopt to present Jewish women’s achievements and the issues facing them. Schneider described the magazine’s first cover as an “artist’s version of the Jewish superwoman, who managed to amalgamate almost all possible roles: doctor, server of chicken soup, scholar, tightrope walker, challah baker, incipient mother, Zionist stalwart.” The mix prescribed the pattern that the magazine hoped to follow: “challenging how Jewish law shapes women’s lives; touching on the ways popular culture articulates images of Jewish women; truth-telling about individual women’s lives, inflected by the idea that if we only spoke out loud our deepest realities, all wrongs would be righted.” Over time, she believes the magazine came to present not just the superwoman on a tightrope but more nuanced, grounded, and “uncomfortably ambiguous” portraits of the complex lives of Jewish women.66 The editors put a premium on “midwifing” emerging authors’ viewpoints, exerting “horizontal” rather than hierarchical power to encourage a variety of perspectives, including those of Jewish women who had been most marginalized.67

Over the magazine’s long history, Lilith has explored issues of concern to Jewish women and Jewish feminists in both the secular and religious spheres. With a dual mission of engaging feminists in issues of Jewish interest and heightening the feminist consciousness of Jewish women, it has produced hard-hitting examinations of sexism in the Jewish community and offered stories on such diverse topics as feminist Jewish rituals, lesbianism, Ethiopian women in Israel, “Jewish hair,” Jewish mothers, Jewish philanthropy, reproductive rights, and much more. Lilith also presents fiction, art, and other cultural work by Jewish women, as well as features on political and community events.

Schneider explored the diverse issues of Jewish feminism in her 1984 volume Jewish and Female, a comprehensive sourcebook; she has also written on intermarriage and Jewish women’s philanthropy.68 But her primary work has been as executive editor of Lilith. She believes that over the four decades of the magazine’s existence, despite differences among branches of the Jewish feminist movement—liberal and radical, secular and religious—there has been a “connective tissue,” a kind of “elastic band which holds [Jewish women] more loosely or more tightly,” depending on the issue or circumstance.69

The Women of Brooklyn Bridge and Chutzpah

The two most important secular Jewish collectives to spawn Jewish feminist groups were New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, founded in 1970 and disbanded two years later, and Chutzpah, a Chicago collective that lasted from 1972 to 1981. The women who joined these groups were often less consciously identified as Jews than were Radical Zionist women such as Cantor and some Lilith founders. Not knowing where the path would lead, they came to Brooklyn Bridge and Chutzpah to band with others interested in exploring often-inchoate Jewish identities.

Like the Jewish Liberation Project, Brooklyn Bridge and Chutzpah saw themselves as “bringing Left concerns to the Jewish community and Jewish concerns to the Left community.” Their views were rooted in a socialist critique of capitalism and political empire building as well as a ruthless critique of the Jewish establishment. Denouncing militarism, imperialism, racism, and sexism within the broader society, they hoped that their focus on the Jewish community would involve “revitalizing and transforming what it meant to be a Jew in America.”70

Members of both groups recognized that their coming out as Jews had been deeply influenced by the struggles against race and gender oppression of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chutzpah members Miriam Socoloff and Henry Balser described what they had learned “from the women’s, gay, and black liberation movements”: “if we do not demand our right to self-determination the Left is not going to acknowledge our right to exist as a Jewish people.”71 The commitment to make themselves into Jewish-identified leftists carried a responsibility to fight against the entwined roots of sexism, elitism, and privilege within Jewish communal and religious institutions. In “Who We Are,” written for the magazine Chutzpah in the summer of 1973, group members declared, “we oppose reactionary aspects of organized religion; the delegation of women to second class roles; the cult of worship for the checkbook, superficial commitment to civil rights and social action that mask a real racism within the community.”72

According to Michael Staub’s study of post–Cold War Jewish liberalism, Jewish groups such as Brooklyn Bridge and Chutzpah differed from Radical Zionist groups such as the Jewish Liberation Project in the way they combined a traditional version of prophetic Judaism with New Left concerns about diversity. “As Jews we carry a vision rising out of our tradition of a radical and inclusive social justice,” ran an editorial in the inaugural issue of the Brooklyn Bridge. The statement articulated strong Jewish pride but at the same time made common cause with racial and other minorities.”73

Opposition to the New Left’s attitudes toward Israel and the Jewish establishment helped to bring radicals together. They had grown furious “at expressions of total support for Arab states and Palestinian guerillas in their call for Israel’s destruction.” “Reluctantly, we realized that many leftists we had worked with closely showed no awareness of Jewish oppression and no concern for Jewish survival. We realized that this was anti-semitism and decided to fight it. We would oppose persecution of Jews and work for the survival, self-determination, and cultural flowering of our people. We would maintain the best values and skills of the Left and the counter-culture. Now that was Chutzpah!”74

These views motivated Chutzpah members to create a new politics of engagement around Jewish issues and to establish a community where they enjoyed the support of like-minded Jewish radicals. In an unusual step, the entire collective started group therapy together in 1973, seeking to reject artificial dichotomies such as “therapy and politics” as well as “Jewish/leftist, gay/Jewish, pro-Israel/anti-imperialist” splits.75 A few years later, six couples moved into a communal house, where they raised their growing families together for nine years. Though the collective officially disbanded in 1981, participants met informally for another three decades.76

Despite shared values of group members, women in Brooklyn Bridge and Chutzpah found it challenging to navigate a place for themselves as Jewish feminists. Cheryl Moch of Brooklyn Bridge, Susan Schechter and Maralee Gordon of Chutzpah, and Ruth Balser of Boston, who also published in its newspaper, illuminated the problems of being Jewish and female on the radical Left in the 1970s.

Cheryl Moch: “We Are Coming Home”

The New York Jewish Women’s Group, formed in 1970 out of the gender-mixed Brooklyn Bridge collective, was the first Jewish women’s consciousness-raising group on record. A few of the initial dozen members had participated in the emerging women’s liberation movement and began to see a link between the internalized oppressions they experienced as Jews and as women. Their group examined the ways the women had masked or denied their identities as Jews, embarrassed by what they viewed as Jewish privilege, the politics of the Jewish establishment, or the low status of Jews within their social worlds. In an article called “Self-Hate” in the first issue of Brooklyn Bridge, New Yorker Cheryl Moch described her identity confusions: “I knew . . . that being a Jewish girl from Flatbush was not the hippest, most right-on thing to be. I tortured myself . . . trying to create a false identity.”77

Moch had been a founder of the Brooklyn Bridge collective, along with her husband and Lee Weiner, the so-called quiet member of the notorious Chicago Seven. When Moch, then twenty, heard about Weiner’s idea for a Jewish collective, she was intrigued. For Moch, who had a secular upbringing in Brooklyn, such a group would provide the opportunity to explore her Jewish roots while still participating in “overthrowing the government.”78

Moch was born in 1950 in East Flatbush. Her parents were neither synagogue members nor Zionists; being Jewish meant enjoying the ubiquitous delicatessens, not being religious. “My mother didn’t receive any religious education whatsoever,” Moch told me, “so she had nothing to pass on. We didn’t learn anything.” Her father’s family had come to the U.S. as Reform Jews in the 1860s; he knew no Yiddish and had little cultural heritage. His uncles had married Catholics and raised their children in that faith. While her maternal grandfather was religious, he held his faith privately and did not draw his grandchildren in.

Despite the family’s assimilation, Cheryl’s older and younger sister became interested in Judaism. Although Cheryl’s mother found synagogue “boring,” she sent all three girls to Hebrew school; only the youngest sister stayed, until she was “turned off” by the gender inequalities of the liturgy and social events.79 Moch’s older sister went to Israel after the Six-Day War, intending to make aliyah. Already a leftist, a “major hippie,” and married by the age of nineteen, Moch, then traveling through Europe with her husband, went to Israel to say good-bye to her sister and wound up staying for six months on a kibbutz in the Negev. It was a formative experience. “You can’t go to Israel in 1969 and not fall in love with it,” Moch recalled.80 She began to ask herself questions about Israel and the Jewish past. When she returned to the U.S. to complete her last two years at City College in New York, she started taking courses in a program in Jewish studies that had just begun under the direction of Rabbi Israel (Yitz) Greenberg and the noted Holocaust survivor, author, and educator Elie Wiesel.

Moch framed her puzzlement about her own Jewish identity within courses taught by charismatic teachers and enthusiastically joined Weiner and other radicals in starting Brooklyn Bridge. The name was a “metaphor, a symbol,” she said. “We wanted to organize a Jewish community” in ways that imitated the Black Panthers or communities organized by Puerto Ricans. “Jews would have the Brooklyn Bridge. . . . Jews had left Brooklyn, and now they were coming back to their roots.” The collective announced in the first issue of its newsletter, “We have been running away too long, cutting ourselves off from our roots too long, and that has stunted us. We are coming home to Brooklyn . . . to begin building a new world, and to be Jewish.”81

Despite the camaraderie that Moch and the women of Brooklyn Bridge shared with their male friends, they recoiled from the sexism on the Jewish Left and sought to discover themselves as Jewish women. They describe the difficulties of the process in Brooklyn Bridge: “We sat in a circle, forced smiles on our faces. Twelve women with histories of struggling to be free, to be whole—in the movement, in women’s liberation.” But it seemed “outlandish” to get together to talk about what it meant to be a Jewish woman: “it hurt us, it scared us to talk about it; we lapsed into silence again and again.” As women—“white, middle-class, neurotics”—they were “anything but Jewish.” The “Jewish woman went to Hadassah meetings,” which they themselves were trying to escape, along with the “hypocrisy, the lifestyle, the ineffectual pain”: “Why were we walking back into it now?”82

But gradually the women began to talk about the issues that brought them together: “anti-semitic slurs, . . . emotional turmoil, the need to be someplace that belonged to you, the recognition of the oppression our mothers and fathers took out on us and tried to warn us about. We felt Jewish, we just weren’t sure what that meant.” Puzzling especially about the female dimension of their Jewish identities, they rejected Philip Roth’s stereotypical “Sophie Portnoy” and “New York-intellectual-radical-hip” in equal parts. Then, they said, “we unembarrassed each other of our experiences as Jewess—olive-skinned, dark-haired, temptress, bitch. And of Miami Beach Jews with too much jewelry and too loud voices. Those were the stereotypes that had scared us all our lives, that made us all quake when we told others we were in a Jewish women’s group.” Eventually, after a “minor class war” that occurred when the “oppression of a doctor’s daughter sounded trivial to that of the taxicab driver’s daughter,” the women began to understand what divided them. “Discovering our oppression as Jewish women and of finding some way to free ourselves. Warmth and joy grew between us.” They were ready to combat the “male chauvinism of Jewish men” but also to affirm who they were as Jewish women. Although they knew they would remain in the U.S. and fight for Jewish women here, they even talked about “going to Jerusalem.”83

Founding the New York Jewish Women’s Group, these radical feminists began to explore the “ethnic . . . Jewish issues” that had not been touched in the regular women’s movement, despite its strong representation of Jewish women: the “self-hatred, . . . hair, . . . the women having nose jobs.” The group created pamphlets on these issues, and its members, eleven of whom had come out as lesbians before the group disbanded in 1972, penned articles for Brooklyn Bridge and the women’s liberation paper RAT, the first signs within the women’s movement of a new Jewish-identified radical feminism.84 Some may have contributed to the commentary in RAT that so enraged Aviva Cantor.

Employed at the American Jewish Congress at the time as a youth organizer, Cheryl Moch played a significant role in organizing the National Feminist Jewish Conferences of 1973 and 1974, and she became a founding board member of the short-lived Jewish Feminist Organization. But she was disappointed in the religious direction that Jewish feminism took after the conferences and discouraged because it seemed that the Jewish organizational structure was not about to be radicalized. Moving on to work in the arts as photographer and playwright, she “left the community.”85

Ruth Balser: “Liberation of a Jewish Radical”

Ruth Balser became active in civil rights and peace groups starting in high school and continuing when she went off to college at the University of Rochester in 1965, where she helped to form an SDS chapter that opposed the war in Vietnam and supported the rights of African Americans. After college, Balser moved to Boston, where she joined Bread and Roses, living in a women’s commune with her sister, Diane. At the suggestion of her brother, Henry, she wrote an article for the Chutzpah paper about being a Jewish radical in the early 1970s, which appeared later in Chutzpah’s anthology.

Balser’s piece strikingly articulated the difficulties of reconciling feminist and Jewish sensibilities. “Being Jewish was one of the major reasons for becoming active” in the civil rights and antiwar movements, Balser wrote. Whether waged against American Indians, blacks, or the Vietnamese, “genocide is genocide,” and as a Jew, she felt “personally threatened by it.” Yet in college, she was teased for occasionally going to services with relatives; as a good Marxist, she should have known that religion was the “opiate of the masses.” She learned “to repress a part of [her] identity that had always been so important.”86

Balser determined to “no longer devote so much energy to a movement dedicated to the liberation of everyone but” her. So she became active in women’s liberation. But “sadly and painfully,” Balser learned, “while so much else about me was supported by the women’s movement, my Jewishness was still unacceptable. There was a lot of talk about the high percentage of Jews in the movement but that statement was always presented either accusingly or jokingly. It was never dealt with in a way that might have helped us to understand it or that might have helped us to feel good.” Balser wrote of other women’s condemnation of an “aggressive, outspoken, and at least superficially self-assured” style of behavior that they considered “oppressive and elitist.” Commonly associated with Jewish women, this style seemed an outcome of Jewish women’s need to survive. But the women’s group members rejected it in favor of more middle-class, WASP-like values: “be quiet, be polite, be restrained. I, as a loudmouth, Jewish woman, began to feel there was no place for me.”87

Balser was also concerned with some feminists’ celebration of Palestinian militant Leila Khaled, who hijacked a passenger jet in 1969. Like Diane, who had protested when her women’s commune hung up posters of Khaled, Ruth believed that supporting anti-Zionism and the violent methods of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) could stir up anti-Semitism. As the worldwide campaign to support Soviet refuseniks in their struggle to emigrate from the USSR unfolded, the issue of Soviet Jewry became another difficult topic for her. At a women’s meeting, when Ruth pointed out that the group “supported every oppressed group in the world” except Soviet Jewry, one of her “so-called sisters” told her that the struggle for Soviet Jewry was “reactionary.”88

Balser recalled a major struggle at one large women’s meeting when some members of a Jewish study group, enthusiastic about exploring their individual and collective pasts, were called out by other women’s liberationists on the ground that “Jewish activity made the women’s movement appear ‘Zionist,’ despite the fact that [the women] knew nothing of [the study group’s] positions on the Middle East.” The study group was told that any focus on Jewishness made it “appear that the women’s movement supported the existence of a radical Jewish movement—and they personally couldn’t support this since any such movement was potentially, if not already, racist and reactionary.”89

Balser’s concerns about the problems of Jewish identity within the women’s liberation movement were colored by her views about anti-Semitism, which she saw as quite prevalent; “anyone Jewish” could recount painful experiences. When her campus SDS group performed antiwar actions, for example, it received anti-Semitic phone calls. Once, when she was marching down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge protesting the U.S. blockade of North Vietnam, “an MIT student opened up his window and unfurled a ten-foot banner with a swastika, apparently in protest against their demonstration.” In “academic” discussions, she was told it was the Jews’ fault for being persecuted: “we set it up by insisting on being different!”90

Like Cantor and Moch, Balser regarded assimilation as a significant problem for Jewish women radicals. “In the United States, being different is a crime. Therefore we get nose jobs, we straighten our hair, we change our names, we forget the language of our grandparents. In short, we hate ourselves. We hate ourselves to fulfill the American Dream, but that kind of a dream is a nightmare.” Because fighting assimilation meant declaring Jewish women’s difference as Jews, an unwelcome act within the radical Left and the women’s movement, Balser considered a separate Jewish movement. A “humane democratic movement which is also self-consciously Jewish” could make the Jewish world more open while providing a countervailing force to the Left’s apparent rejection of Jewish-identified issues and values. Above all, such a movement could help Jewish radicals “feel proud and loving” of themselves and each other.91

Balser sought opportunities to come together with Jewish women, participating in teaching a course on Jewish women at the Cambridge women’s center and attending the first National Conference on Jewish Women at the McAlpin in 1973. She went on to receive a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from NYU and to a career as mental health professional. Balser has been a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature since 1999, working to advance human rights, women’s rights, and other progressive causes. She helped create a women’s empowerment project for the Boston-Haifa Exchange and has found other ways to bring together her lifelong interests in feminist and Jewish issues.92

Susan Schechter: “The Most Joyous Gathering”

Even among other women’s liberationists with uncertain Jewish identities, Susan Schechter’s ambivalence was striking. A feminist psychotherapist in Chicago who became part of the Chutzpah collective in 1975, Schechter grew up in St. Louis and went to Washington University. The mentoring she received from friends, relatives, and a particular rabbi became a source of strength and fostered a commitment to social activism.93 Yet from the time she was a child in Sunday school, the knowledge of Jewish persecution had left her feeling “terrorized”; she pretended to be anything else—Greek, Italian, Spanish—until she came to terms with the “psychic complications” of being Jewish.94

Schechter, in her twenties, still believed that Jews were an “oppressed group,” but now she considered that a major threat to her identity came from the American Left, which she saw as increasingly anti-Semitic. On a Fourth of July march to protest U.S. imperialism and racism in the early 1970s, she was afraid she would be “thrown out” because of her pro-Israel views. “Why do so few of you say that Jews, like Palestinians, have a right to self-determination?” she queried movement colleagues.95

On Fourth of July weekend in 1975, Schechter and Maralee Gordon of Chutzpah attended the National Conference on Socialist Feminism at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where close to two thousand women came together to turn women’s liberation analysis “into action” by building a broad-based movement. Concerned about the problems they encountered in defining themselves as socialist feminists and as Jews, Schechter and Gordon convened a Jewish women’s caucus. When the workshop notice did not appear on the listings of small group meetings, Schechter suspected the omission was deliberate and might have been “anti-semitic.” Some women thought that a meeting for Jewish women was “ridiculous.” “I’ll go to the caucus just to get a good laugh,” said one. But twenty women showed up; more said they would have come if they had known about the meeting. An “enormous sense of solidarity” and common themes emerged: “the fear that affirming a Jewish identity tainted our credibility with the Left; our concern for Israel and a sense that pro-Israeli sentiment would be attacked as racist-Zionist-imperialist; our disappointments with the organized Jewish community and with the Left.”96 Previously intimidated and isolated, several of the women “came out Jewish” for the first time.

Schechter believed that it was essential for the movement as a whole, and not just Jewish women, “to recognize the particular oppression of Jews.”97 The caucus distributed to the conference a “beginning statement” focused on the women’s feelings of discomfort within the movement, citing the difficulty of declaring their positive identities as Jews in the context of the women’s and socialist movements, as well as their determination to fight anti-Semitism “and all forms of racist domination.” The statement mentioned the class position of Jews as an issue that needed to be clarified and revised, as did ideas about Zionism. The caucus had discussed the fact that while stereotypes of wealthy Jews abounded, few socialist feminists knew much about working-class Jews.98

Despite the exhilaration of being together, Schechter “sensed that everyone was scared. Thoughts of being hissed at for affirming Israel’s right to exist or laughed at for ‘making a big deal over being Jewish’” made her “tremendously uncomfortable.” But Jews’ and non-Jews’ response to the statement was generally positive and respectful. Schechter felt excited to have taken a stance as a Jew and viewed the Jewish women’s caucus as “the most joyous gathering” in which she had participated. However brief its existence, the caucus enabled her to become more self-assured in talking about Jewish issues within the women’s movement, though she still felt “defensive and fearful.” But now, she said, “instead of withdrawing, I keep talking.”99

Schechter went home determined to follow up on this positive moment. With Maralee Gordon, she started a study group to explore issues raised by the Jewish women’s caucus: anti-Semitism, Zionism, and class differences in the women’s movement. She also put together a mailing list that included Chicago-area Jewish feminists and other emerging leaders in the Jewish feminist movement. Strikingly, it contains the names of two Jewish leaders of the women’s liberation movement who had not been publicly identified with Jewish feminism: Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis. Schechter may have believed that the two women would be interested in the issues raised by the Jewish women who attended the caucus they organized at the socialist feminist conference, suspecting an affinity between these leaders of the broader women’s liberation movement and those moving toward a Jewish feminist identification.

Yet Schechter found it difficult to bring her Jewish and leftist identities into harmony. At the end of the year, she wrote an article for Chutzpah in which she acknowledged the “double binds”—the “paradoxical and maddening, i.e., mutually contradictory sets of messages”—that she experienced as a Jewish leftist feminist. Her enemies were both “real and imagined”; external oppression had “merged into the internal.” Anti-Semitism existed, and it was necessary to confront the real enemies of the Jewish people; but how much of the problem could be attributed to her own shame, self-consciousness, and confusion about who she was? Despite the closeness she felt with other Jews as they explored their identities and culture, Schechter confessed that “it still does not make up for the grief”: “Sometimes I say to myself, ‘Who needs all this pain and suffering? Who wants to identify with all of this’? . . . Enough of sadness, rage, and terror.” Just as she did not want to admit her Jewish identity as a child and pretended to be something else, even now, she acknowledged, “sometimes I still don’t.”100

Schechter’s struggles to come to terms with her Jewish identity are especially interesting in light of her professional work with victims of domestic abuse. At the time of her involvement with Chutzpah, Schechter served as the director of women’s services at the Chicago Loop YWCA, working with rape victims and battered women, and was responsible for creating the first shelter for abused women in the city. In 1982, she published her groundbreaking book Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement, a history and analysis of early efforts against domestic violence.101

Schechter’s work on this issue in fact derived from her association with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union School—the pioneering organization started by the “Gang of Four” and their associates. Reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in her first class at the school was one of many revelatory moments in CWLU courses “on everything from literature to car repair to socialist feminist theory,” Schechter recalled. Because of the CWLU, she went to work with the Chicago Abused Women’s Coalition, organizing the first shelter in Chicago and giving speeches and writing about violence against women. “Without the Women’’s Liberation Union and the larger feminist movement surrounding it,” she wrote, “Women and Male Violence would not exist.”102

A decade after Women and Male Violence, Schechter and journalist Ann Jones wrote When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can’t Do Anything Right, a self-help guide for battered women.103 When Schechter and her husband, Allen Steinberg, moved to Boston in the late 1990s, she started AWAKE (Advocacy for Women and Children in Emergencies), the first domestic-violence program in a children’s hospital and the first fruit of her attempts to link child-protective and domestic-violence systems. Before her death from cancer in 2004, she had done much to accomplish that goal.

Schechter’s leadership in the movement revolutionized institutional practices while empowering abused women by strengthening grassroots activism; she put a premium on women speaking and acting for themselves, rather than through professionals, and worked to enable them to develop the courage they would need to fight tough battles against their abusers and the system that perpetuated their victimhood. Her strategies shaped the early battered women’s movement, and colleagues credit her vision for many of its significant achievements over several decades.104 It is hard to imagine Susan Schechter, who had been my neighbor and friend in Boston, as afraid, “terribly alone and unprotected,” even “terrorized,” as she had once felt about her own Jewish identity. (Later in her life, when she moved with her family to Iowa, she felt much less conflicted about her Jewish identity and became an activist in the local Jewish community.)105 Perhaps the struggle to overcome her own doubts and fears helped her to empathize with the terrors of abused women and to assist them in overcoming them.

Schechter was acutely aware that shelters were places where the “intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and language” came together, as one scholar wrote about her contributions.106 She worked hard to help residents, staff, and other providers overcome the stereotypes that accompanied this diversity of background, an ongoing struggle that was particularly important to her. This, too, may have been a legacy of her struggle to understand and express her Jewishness in an environment that was often hostile. Women who suffered the indignities of rape and abuse had far more challenging circumstances to confront than she did, but recognizing the inherent importance of multiple heritages and backgrounds was one way to provide them with the dignity and the strength they needed to fight their enemies on the outside as well as their own demons.

Maralee Gordon: “How Do We Break Out of This Situation of Inequality?”

After attending the National Conference on Socialist Feminism with Schechter, Maralee Gordon turned her attention as a radical Jew to breaking down Jewish patriarchy rather than fighting sexism, in its most violent forms, in the broader society. But she shared Schechter’s concerns with anti-Semitism in the women’s liberation movement.

Gordon, a founding member of Chutzpah, had been active in the Chicago radical movement before she recognized a need to affiliate with Jewish peers. She grew up in the suburban community of Glencoe, Illinois, across the street from a synagogue, where the family went to Friday-night services. Gordon found them dry and boring compared to the active Judaism she came to know during her years at a Jewish camp as camper and counselor. This experience framed her vision of Jewish community and became a driving force in her life choices. Born in the late 1940s, she said, “the Jewish came first because there was no ‘feminist’ when I was growing up.”107 But as she matured, her discovery of Judaism’s patriarchal attitudes toward women threatened this primary identity.

Gordon went to Brandeis, where she took courses in Jewish education. Graduating in 1970, her time there overlapped with the intense days of the student and antiwar protest movements. Gordon organized the Jewish Activists League, a campus group that picketed the national convention of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare in Boston to protest its funding priorities.108

Disillusioned with the Jewish establishment, Gordon gravitated toward leftist activism. After college, she worked on the Chicago Seed, an underground newspaper, and lived in a women’s commune. Wanting a Jewish community, she was also drawn to a new radical Jewish group in Chicago, Am Chai, but after a year of meetings, she found herself uncomfortable in the male-dominated group, where she was not taken as seriously as her male counterparts. The situation was different at the Chicago Seed, where the men seemed more willingly to listen to women. In December 1971, Gordon and the women of Am Chai began to meet to raise their own consciousness, and although they came from different backgrounds (some Jewishly knowledgeable, some not) and proposed different strategies (study or activism), they found common ground in identifying the subordination of women as a key element in Jewish tradition, impacting Jews “who never set foot inside a synagogue” as well as the most religious ones. At the beginning, they were essentially a consciousness-raising “rap group,” talking about “Jewish mothers, monogamy, how one can be Jewish without following the traditional oppressive roles, and having children—single or married.”109 The group included both gay and straight women.

Despite Gordon’s need for Jewish community, Judaism’s sexist message threatened her Jewish identity. “If a choice were necessary between “second-class Jew or full-fledged human being,” Gordon wrote in Chutzpah in 1973, she would not hesitate: “I would not hesitate to preserve and maintain my strength and dignity as a woman, even if it meant sacrificing my identity as a Jew.”110 At the same time, she acknowledged that it was Judaism and Jewish culture, especially its heritage of “social justice and messianism,” which inspired her radical politics. As a Jewish feminist who wanted to give equal weight to both parts of her identity, Gordon, like Schechter, felt trapped in a double bind. “How do we break out of this situation of inequality, this situation of women’s lives being controlled by men’s culture, without abandoning the very culture itself?” she asked.111

In the aftermath of the Ohio Socialist Feminist Conference, Gordon co-founded the Jewish feminist caucus and study group with Susan Schechter. But she did not find serious conflict between women’s movement ideology and her Jewish ties in Chicago. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union accepted her courses on women in the Bible and women in Judaism at its Women’s Liberation School. Chicago-area Jewish feminists held one of the first women’s seders in 1972. Gordon and other Chicago Jewish feminists edited Lilith’s Rib, an offprint newsletter that circulated from 1973 to 1975, its purpose to put Jewish feminists in touch with each other. Its very first issue contained Aviva Cantor’s “Jewish Women’s Haggada.”

The CWLU, the Jewish women’s study group, the Chutzpah collective, and Lilith’s Rib made a great deal of difference as Gordon continued to struggle to reconcile the varied aspects of her identity. “Chutzpah was looking at the Jewish world and at the world from a leftist perspective, looking at anti-Semitism in the world, looking at anti-Semitism on the left, looking at strong Jewish identity, . . . looking at class consciousness in terms of the Jewish community.” Chutzpah’s women were examining the subordinate place of women within Jewish culture and religion. With these communities helping her to find her way, Gordon could proclaim, “I have finally come to terms with my identity. . . . I feel positive about being a Jewish woman within a historical and cultural perspective. It’s where I focus my political energy in terms of socialist politics and feminist organizing.”112

But it was a different story when it came to religion and the Jewish “way of life”; there Gordon felt “bog[ged] down.” She continued her childhood habit of synagogue worship, but it took all her self-control not to run out in “feminist frustration.” Though drawn to the idea of becoming a rabbi, starting a havurah, or taking a role in the world of Jewish education, she felt that “anything enmeshed with religious Judaism is so enmeshed with patriarchy” that she could go no further. Here, too, women working with each other to create a “female-affirming” space within Judaism would be necessary in order to work for equality within the tradition and to develop “quality and substance.”113 Reforms in language, liturgy, and ritual were essential to make Judaism into a tradition that women could embrace. Jewish women needed “to tell each other what it means to be self-determined Jewish women, to give each other support, . . . and to celebrate together [their] Jewish womanhood.”114

Just as Gordon did not want to choose between her feminism and Judaism, neither did she see a strict dividing line between the secular and religious. In the next few decades, as a wife and mother of three, she became involved in Jewish education, trying to reform and democratize local synagogues and to eliminate patriarchal elements. By the end of the 1990s, she acknowledged that her passion lay on the other side of the pulpit, and she entered a nontraditional rabbinical seminary, benefiting from the numerous reforms made by groups of Jewish women who had done what she hoped for—create a feminist revolution within Judaism. In 2001, some forty years after the founding of the Chutzpah collective and just about an equal time since the ordination of the first female rabbi in 1972, Gordon became a rabbi.

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Gordon’s path differed from some of the other women discussed in this chapter, who did not veer from the secular course around which they united as Jewish feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. For others, secular or religious motivations could be paramount at different times in their lives. All of the women found common cause in their beliefs in gender equality and women’s freedom and their attempt to express their feminism as part of Jewish life. For some, the journey from Jewish activist to identified Jewish feminist came relatively smoothly after their awakenings within the women’s movement. For those who had little background as Jews or who had deliberately rejected the Jewish establishment, the journey to Jewish feminism was more uneven. They had to get to know themselves as Jews as well as feminist activists, confronting negative images about Jews and Israel that were then rampant on the left. They also needed to address the internalized prejudice that had led many of them to distance themselves from the distasteful stereotypes about Jewish girls and women with which they had grown up.

As opposed to the women’s liberationists who dedicated themselves to the attainment of universal women’s and human rights, the secular Jewish feminists concentrated their efforts on the particularities of Jewish experience, fighting assimilation as well as patriarchy. On occasion, this led them to face off with women’s liberationists with whom they had much in common as well as male comrades. Aviva Cantor’s denunciation of the anti-Zionist position of the RAT editors and the painful, revealing Chutzpah writings of Susan Schechter, Ruth Balser, and Maralee Gordon expose the bumpy course of what later in the decade was expressed as identity politics: the coming together around aspects of group identity that could divide women from each other. The stories in this chapter record the sorrow and anger Jewish feminists experienced during the initial phases of the politics of difference within the women’s movement.

To declare oneself as a Jewish feminist within the folds of the radical feminist movement in the 1970s was not easy. It often meant grappling with negative associations about Jewish women and all Jews and speaking out against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The secular Jewish feminists were among the first feminists to do so. Even though the Jewish Feminist Organization ended quickly, the common denominator that joined feminist and Jewish identities was realized in Lilith magazine and other writings by Jewish feminists, as well as some of the collectives that began in this period. Over time, the perspectives shaped in these new organizations and writings inaugurated significant changes in the Jewish community. Their entanglement with the radical feminist movement is another aspect of the interesting but little-known history of late twentieth-century Jewish feminist activism.