Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was a mass movement that brought together thousands of feminist activists from diverse ethno-racial and class backgrounds. These women faced unique historical circumstances shared by men of their generation whom they joined in protest movements challenging racial and social discrimination, the horrific Vietnam War, and establishment values. There is much research to explain why college-age Jewish youth were highly represented in the ranks of these protesters. Among the most often cited reasons were the family values that shaped political identities and the process of educational clustering that brought highly motivated youth in touch with like-minded comrades.1 These synchronic influences gave members of the 1960s and 1970s generation a vocabulary of discontent that they utilized to fight political and social injustices.
Jewish women flocked to the social movements of these decades in particularly high numbers. The same factors that drove them to enlist in the battles of the New Left led them to revolt against the sexism they found there, often leading the charge. Angry at the neglect of their ideas and contributions and intolerant of bullying, they were determined to fight second-class citizenship even when it meant breaking with men in their communities or from other women in the movement. As we have seen, the multiple types of Jewish stimuli helped them to become such fierce warriors. These were not the sole influences on them. For example, many black women exemplified how to be feminist activists and grassroots leaders in the broader movement. But Jewish backgrounds, ethical imperatives, and networks and associations played a major part in shaping the contributions of Jewish women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists.
Concerned with inequalities arising from the linked oppressions of gender, sexuality, class, and race, Jewish women in the women’s liberation movement played leading roles in launching a largely successful challenge to sexism. In their fight against the strictures of patriarchy, they were gender universalists who did not prioritize, or even recognize, their ethnic origins as a claim on the most inclusive concerns of sisterhood. Only in later decades did some of them begin deliberately to associate themselves with the Jewish influences that had contributed to their activism. For other women’s liberationists, it was the belated awareness of what they perceived as the neglect or threat of anti-Semitism in the feminist movement that led them to acknowledge their Jewishness and seek ties with other Jewish women. But even by the end of the 1980s, when this book concludes, some women’s liberationists did not participate in the era’s “ethnic revival.”2 For a number of them, it was the conference I convened at NYU and the probing interviews I conducted with them that belatedly summoned up these associations or, as Vivian Rothstein put it, “instigated” these connections.3 And in a few cases in this book, Jewish identity remained a matter of private admission, hidden from public scrutiny, or denied completely.
As distinct from what might be called the “feminism-primary” Jewish women featured in part 1 of Jewish Radical Feminists, the Jewish-identified feminists who appear in part 2 believed that the liberation of Jewish women required the overthrow of patriarchal institutions within Jewish culture. Attempting to align the Jewish aspects of their identities with their feminist commitments, in many ways they were “hyphenated” feminists, seeking the feminist transformation of Jewish institutions.
The first Jewish feminist groups, religious and secular, came to awareness shortly after the founding of the early women’s liberation groups in the late 1960s. They fought against sexism within Jewish religious practices and the Jewish community, including their marginalization by male colleagues in the Jewish Renewal and student movements. Schooled in feminist activism by their associations with women’s liberation leaders and texts and women’s study groups, Jewish-identified feminists came from homes with high Jewish content and practice but also those with little Jewish background. As they sought to eradicate the religious, social, and sexual inequities of American Jewish life, they created new models of Jewish feminism that drew on disparate elements of the traditions that they had encountered in their formal and informal education.
The transformations that both groups of women did much to initiate unfolded largely through community, the matrix of change common to women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists. Drawn to the collectives in this book and other organizations, these feminist pioneers discovered that in listening to each other they could hear their own voices. Their joint discourses provided the seeds for strategies and actions that empowered their generation. As Linda Gordon reminds us, “collective” was a sacred word for the women’s movement.4 How well that framework fit with the communal thrust of Jewish political tradition. While the movement exhibited the inevitable tensions between communitarianism and individualism that befell other utopian experiments, the stories in this book reveal that women’s liberation and Jewish feminism were inherently collective dramas infused by the energies of unique persons. The synergies produced by strong, assertive feminists when they came together enabled the movement to flourish, diversify, and transform.
The biographical narratives in the book illuminate the manifold ways of being Jewish and feminist that were enacted and expressed by members of women’s liberation and Jewish feminist collectives. Each model is a disparate amalgam, shaped in varying measures by heritage, personality, and social and historical location. Together they suggest a catalogue of personas and offer new information about the construction of what we now see as intersectional identities. Diversity within the feminist movement was marked within each of the two major divisions described in this book. Even among feminist groups with shared perspectives and common educational and activist pasts, the range, depth, and variety of Jewish backgrounds is striking.
The side-by-side profiles in the book reveal the diverse Jewish lives of this feminist generation. Though vital in their influence, for most (but not all) of the women’s liberationists, the Jewish factors in these lives remained below the surface, not articulated or a matter of conscious awareness at the time of the 1960s–1970s rebellions. This was the case with Chicago’s Gang of Four, who did not discuss their Jewish experiences with each other during their movement activism or in many decades of friendship. Two came from secular Yiddish / Communist Party backgrounds; one came from a Conservative suburban Jewish family; another had refugee parents from Europe. Their Jewish educations included classes at Yiddish shul and Hebrew school, informal education at Labor Zionist camps and Jewish community centers, and synagogue attendance.
The same variety and substantive immersion in Jewish life and heritage characterize members of the Boston groups described in the book. While some of the women had the red-diaper-baby backgrounds that typified Jewish radicals of the New Left, the Jewish credentials that the women exhibited were more wide ranging. The women of Bread and Roses Collective #1 had grown up in Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist congregations; attended Yiddish shul and Hebrew-school classes; and had been traumatized by family Holocaust stories and other Holocaust remembrances. McCarthyism, too, cast its shadow over their childhoods. Some had been inspired by immigrant ancestors, including Socialist and Communist Party members, or by independent-minded activists. Like the Chicago women, they attributed a sense of themselves as outsiders at least in part to their Jewishness, but they had rarely articulated this belief, acknowledging their gender-determined and often class-based experiences of marginality much more fully.
The New York women’s liberationists also exhibited a breadth of Jewish experiences. In this case, the retreat from Orthodoxy, the physical and metaphysical experiences of anti-Semitism, and the frustrations of gender discrimination within Judaism become prominent childhood inheritances. Like the women’s liberationists from Chicago and Boston, these New York second-wave feminist leaders did not often acknowledge their own Jewishness or recognize the Jewishness of other collective members. If it was present, it simply did not matter.
The Jewish story of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective begins in a similar fashion but unfolds differently. Here, too, a plethora of Jewish backgrounds stands in bold relief against a shared feminist milieu. The Jewish configuration of the OBOS collective includes a lifelong observant Jew; a member who had attended an Orthodox Hebrew day school in a working-class community; a child Holocaust survivor influenced by a brief, early exposure to Orthodox religion; two daughters of labor union or Communist Party activists, one of whom later embraced kabbalah and Buddhist mysticism; and one woman who identified no Jewish background, except the threat of anti-Semitism. These diverse factors contributed to the women’s lives as activists in tandem with motivations they shared with non-Jewish feminist collaborators. A “eureka” moment several years into the collective’s life marked a sudden recognition of the disproportionate number of Jewish women among the founders, a matter of surprise at such a prominent though hitherto unremarked kinship. Because the women shared work and family times and because of the very public embrace of Judaism by one of the collective’s leading members, the observant Esther Rome, Jewishness became a glue that cemented the women’s bonds. Like the Jewish members, the non-Jewish founders of OBOS considered the group’s Jewishness a positive factor in maintaining the social fabric of the collective, contributing to its continuity and productivity.
The portraits in part 2 of this book fill in the gallery of Jewish women active in the 1960s–1980s women’s movement. As with the women’s liberationists in part 1, there is no single prototype for these pioneering Jewish feminists, who were among the first in their generation to confront sexism within Jewish religious and communal life. Some religious feminists came from observant homes across the denominational spectrum; others came from homes with little religious content, and their religious inclinations, shaped by feminism, were self-determined. Secular Jewish feminists supported the goals of their religious peers but directed their energies elsewhere. Their backgrounds also exhibit diverse Jewish influences: day schools, Hebrew after-school programs, Jewish camps, travel to Israel, and Holocaust connections including experience as survivors and refugees. The knowledge and networks resulting from these Jewish influences provided a base for Jewish feminists’ explosive decision to challenge the patriarchal foundations of Jewish life and thought. Direct contact with women’s liberation leaders, immersion in the movement’s groups, and contact with its foundational texts and ideas provided momentum that drove the women’s campaigns. Educated and strengthened by the movement, they brought feminism to the Jewish mainstream and Jewish feminism to the Left—efforts that were complementary rather than separate and competing alternatives.
Although the integration of feminism and Jewishness was far from seamless, feminism served as a “portal” into Judaism for many Jewish women, as Blu Greenberg suggested, encouraging them to probe their own religious tradition and confront its oppressive elements.5 Feminism also encouraged secular women to uncover aspects of Jewish life that could empower them to respect their heritage and name themselves as Jewish feminists, as it did for Adrienne Rich, who wrote of the ways in which the movement allowed her to find the “starved Jew” in herself.6 Their assault on the assimilatory mode of American Judaism challenged both the Jewish establishment and women’s liberationists who espoused a politics of universalism. While established Jewish community leaders often considered these Jewish-identified feminists to be a “loyal opposition,” their demands to remedy injustices created unavoidable tensions.7 Conflicts between women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists could become severe as well.
Yet connections between women in these groups inspired creative thinking and actions. Encountering Naomi Weisstein at a Yale University graduate lecture became a turning point for theology student Judith Plaskow, instigating her feminism. Courses on socialist feminist theory at the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union School motivated the pioneering domestic-abuse work of Susan Schechter of the Chutzpah collective. Maralee Gordon taught courses on Jewish women at the CWLU School in the early 1970s, as did Ruth Balser at the Cambridge Women’s Center, enabling cross-fertilization.
For many, however, the journey to claim a Jewish feminist identity was fraught with uncertainty. Some feared reactions from friends, family, feminist colleagues, and the Jewish community. Quite a number described their naming of themselves as Jewish feminists as a “coming out,” parallel to declaring forbidden sexual identities. In the face of such anxieties, the support offered by feminist and Jewish groups was enormous, providing opportunities for growth and the courage to explore difficult questions.
To varying extents, Jewish feminists pushed up against negative attitudes toward their identification as religious women, radical Jews, or Zionists. Within much of the women’s movement and the radical Left more generally, Israel was treated with suspicion, not as an ally of Third World liberation movements with which feminists increasingly sought to align their politics. The question of whether feminists could be Zionists that would roil the feminist movement in the 2000s first emerged in the global feminist movement during the 1970s and 1980s, making the alliance between Jewish radicalism and feminism increasingly difficult.
As Jewish feminists encountered identity politics within the movement, some became aware of their difference and isolation from other feminists. For the women of Di Vilde Chayes and other secular feminists, the confluence of concerns around anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and racism took center stage, making it difficult to reconcile Jewish identities with feminist sisterhood. While coalition building remained a desired goal, the complexities of identity politics impeded collaboration and connection.
Jewish women did not share uniform attitudes toward Israel, Zionism, or anti-Semitism. Differences existed among Jewish-identified feminists, as well as between them and women’s liberationists. Views could shift even within a particular group, seen when several members of Di Vilde Chayes began to question their previous views about Israel. Much as Jewish feminists exhibited a wide variety of Jewish backgrounds, so they also demonstrated many shades of opinion regarding Zionism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism.
Yet, despite this spectrum of opinions and experiences, the women featured in this book recognized characteristics that they shared with other Jewish women in their collectives and the movement, even though, in the case of the women’s liberationists, many did not acknowledge these connections publicly or even to themselves. A sense of themselves as outsiders—or, more precisely, the dual experience of being outsiders and insiders—was a critical factor shared by many groups. While acknowledging the class and racial advantages accruing to many Jews in the postwar period, the women nonetheless perceived themselves as different from other Americans. Being Jewish accentuated the sense of marginality they felt as women in a masculinist, Christian-dominated society. Yet within leftist movements and multicultural communities, Jewish roots did not confer status as an oppressed or marginalized group, nor was Jewish difference recognized among those who might ally with women of color. Declaring themselves feminists committed to the radical restructuring of Jewish life could threaten the women’s standing within both Jewish and feminist circles. The simultaneous experience of Jews as insiders and outsiders, as “both victims of and members of a privileged class,” as Cheryl Greenberg has put it, highlights the complex, shifting, and voluntary nature of identity and contributes to the broad project of multicultural understanding.8
Women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists saw another common trait in their own assertiveness and candor. Often described as pushy, loud, aggressive, and unfeminine, the women in this book recast the negative terms that others applied to their behavioral style as appropriate responses to demeaning and inequitable treatment. The double marginality that they experienced as women and as Jews called forth their willingness to forcefully fight for equality. In this respect, some Jewish feminists found the example of women of color particularly inspiring.
Concomitant to the women’s outspokenness, the willingness to challenge authority characterized generations of Jewish women before them as well as Jewish female activists of their cohort. Paula Doress-Worters found role models in Jewish women in Bread and Roses who “weren’t self-conscious about being perceived as too aggressive, or too loud,” their confidence giving them a platform to effect social change.9 Blu Greenberg was influenced by her Orthodox mother’s “need for truth and justice” and her demand for tough criticism, which became models for her own difficult challenges to tradition.10 While not unique to Jewish women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists, such qualities appeared widely among them and were cited by many narrators in this book as group descriptors.
Many feminists drew attention to Jewish women’s affinity for critical thinking as a key aspect of their movement participation. While not exclusive to Jewish women in women’s liberation, where exploration of life experiences became the primary mode for raising consciousness, critical thinking was an aspect of Jewish culture that had been passed on through many generations. Judaism’s valorization of intellectual questioning and creativity, its propensity for argument and debate, and its openness to multiple interpretations stemmed from ancient rabbinical tradition. While some critics thought that “excessive intellectualization” might have been problematic for Jews, the emphasis on teaching and learning—the idea that Jews were “People of the Book”—remained a highly regarded component of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Jewish culture.11
For radical feminist Ellen Willis, critical skepticism was the essence of Jewishness, a by-product of the Diaspora Jew’s living between two worlds. As the “perennial doubter, the archetypal outsider,” this feminist Jew used her experience of betweenness to probe and challenge not only inherited ways of thinking but also the canards of comrades and leftist associates.12 Norma Swenson, a non-Jewish founder of OBOS, recognized the trait as a paramount feature of her Jewish co-founders’ approach to problematic issues of women’s health. Encouraging analysis both of Judaism itself and of the world, Judaism’s engagement with critical thinking helped to stimulate feminists to rethink problematic aspects of their lives and invent creative solutions.
A final correspondence among women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists in this work is the role played by Jewish values. This category is quite amorphous, reflecting ethical tenets gleaned from the varied backgrounds and experiences that activists recalled as they reinterpreted their motivations years later. Social justice ideals—humane and compassionate treatment for every person, empathy for and identification with the oppressed, the duty to act righteously—were the most frequently cited values, but they emerged from different starting points.
For both women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists, religious sources provided a strong foundation for social justice activism. Heather Booth’s confirmation text, the Book of Amos (“let justice flow like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream”), framed her lifelong allegiance to the prophetic tradition. Meredith Tax, confirmed in a Reform synagogue, absorbed what she saw as “ethical Judaism” there. Hillel’s principle—“that which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”—and the prophetic injunction to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly” became lifelong commitments.13 Similar “words of the prophets calling us to justice and social engagement” motivated theologian Judith Plaskow, although she thought her Reform-synagogue education otherwise uninspiring.14 Rabbi Laura Geller, who also grew up Reform, became fascinated by the connection of justice to morality, and later, she too studied Christian and then Jewish ethics in her search for answers. Orthodox yeshiva student Arlene Agus located encouragement for her activism in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish prayer book, in which she found evidence of “communal unity” and a rationale for struggling for greater spiritual equality for women.15 The Torah also gave Blu Greenberg her faith and encouragement for eventually challenging women’s religious inequalities.
Secular radicalism was another influence on the social justice ideals of feminist Jews. Like other 1960s activists, many of their parents were Yiddishists, trade unionists, socialists, or Communist Party members. Amy Kesselman, schooled in her parents’ progressive Jewish politics, typified this group. The secular community shul that her parents helped to found provided her with “a hatred of dictators and Jew haters, a belief in struggle,” and gave her a “connection with downtrodden people,” a message reinforced by her family, whose holiday seders always included the spiritual “Go Down Moses.” The “rabid anti-clericalism” of Naomi Weisstein’s mother and grandfather and her mother’s anarchist radicalism similarly influenced her political development.16 For Miriam Hawley, “social justice was the family religion,” imparted by her parents, Communist Party members who were active in the Rosenbergs’ defense.17
For several women in this book, Zionism offered a set of values related to social justice, independence, and Jewish liberation. Vivian Rothstein’s immersion in Hashomer Hatzair, the Labor Zionist youth movement, schooled her in the values of feminist equality, commitment to a social movement, and the need to take action “rather than be acted upon.”18 Hashomer Hatzair’s vision of equality and strong women leaders were also pivotal for Evelyn Torton Beck, shaping her sense of purpose. For Martha Ackelsberg, the daughter of Zionists, Zionism meant an engagement with the ideals of Jewish peoplehood and a lifelong commitment to collective life, the subject of much of her scholarship and activism. As a founder of Young Americans for Progressive Israel and a member of other Zionist groups, Aviva Cantor prioritized the goals of Jewish peoplehood, working to expand the reach of Radical Zionism within the U.S. Gloria Greenfield ascertained from her father, a passionate Zionist, that Israel was central to Jewish identity and that all Jews must fight for its survival.
The importance of remembering history as a route to meaning, identity formation, and continuity emerges as another central node in the constellation of Jewish values discussed in this book. For Jews, collective memory is crucial to understanding self and tradition, an essential component of knowledge and of political and social action. The many Holocaust themes that echo through these narratives indicate its significance in forming the women’s earliest views about Judaism as well as their determination to remember and engage with these stories. Becoming activists who actively combatted the evils of prejudice and terror was a response to this early learning. Whether it was the stories that Shulamith Firestone, Michele Clark, and Diane Balser heard from survivors in their families and neighborhoods or read in schoolbooks and encyclopedias, or the freighted silences of parents such as those of Meredith Tax who refused to discuss its horrors, or the actual encounters with Nazism experienced by Vilunya Diskin, Evelyn Torton Beck, and Irena Klepfisz as child refugees, the Holocaust loomed large in the women’s memories. In linking them to Jews’ tragic past, it led them to recognize and attempt to thwart the oppression of others. Writer Susan Brownmiller, author of the landmark treatise Against Our Will, retrospectively acknowledged that her awareness of rape as a systemic violation of women had been profoundly influenced by the murders of Jews in the Shoah.19 Vivian Rothstein, a daughter of refugee parents, believed that growing up in a refugee community positioned her as an outsider, enabling her to become an observer and, often, critic of American culture.
While Jewish heritage shaped feminists’ worldview and helped lead them to activism, they rejected those aspects of the tradition they found oppressive. The rigidity of Firestone’s Orthodox upbringing alienated her from Judaism and led her to imagine a different kind of utopian community. Kesselman disliked what she saw as the tribal exclusiveness of Jews, their “blind loyalty to a group.”20 Marya Levenson and Tax abhorred the materialism of their synagogues and some affluent suburban communities. For these and other reasons, feminists discarded or suppressed their Jewish identities, at least temporarily. Their resentment toward repressive and stultifying aspects of their childhood environments prompted pioneering innovations in feminism.
The patriarchal elements of Jewish tradition also accounted for Jewish women’s disaffection from Judaism. Like non-Jewish feminists, many Jewish women in the movement rejected religion as inherently tainted by sexism and therefore unacceptable and irrelevant to their lives. The association of Jewishness with a religion unsympathetic to women could carry over to Jewish culture more broadly. Ezrat Nashim and other Jewish feminists used the tools of second-wave feminism and the springboards to activism derived from their Jewish experiences to challenge the tenets and practices of Judaism that had consigned women to secondary roles. Their transformative work, as well as secular feminists’ assaults on sexism in the Jewish establishment, made it easier for Jewish women to identify as both Jewish and feminist.
Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, when this book concludes, second-wave feminism had moved from its early focus on universal sisterhood to an orientation toward identity politics, emphasizing strong collective group identities as the basis of political analysis and social action. By 1990, a multiculturalism that emphasized race-based diversity had succeeded identity politics as the preferred rubric for expressing difference, inducing feminist and ethnic reconsiderations of identity along a more pluralistic, multidimensional spectrum.21 Although numerous scholars believed that Jews were excluded from the multicultural paradigm, others saw a place for Jewish experience as a “liminal border case, neither inside nor outside—or better, both inside and outside,” with the capacity to broaden the intersectional framework.22
Most of the Jewish feminists in the book foregrounded the Jewish aspects of their identities, whereas women’s liberationists often expunged the Jewish components of their identities or let them lie dormant. Sometimes they were “ghosts,” invisible but present.23 But even the most homogeneous identity-based communities showed a wide array of “mutually constructing multiple aspects of fluid and porous identities,” as political theorist Marla Brettschneider has defined intersectionality, with elements of gender, sexuality, class, and generation complementing the frames of ethnic culture and/or religion.24
The historically diverse experiences of Jewish women in this book demonstrate the multiple ways in which Jewish women brought together the Jewish and feminist aspects of their experiences along with class, generational, sexual, regional, religious, and other perspectives. We see their lives unfolding along these interlocking frames, exposing the simultaneous axes of belonging, commitment, and influence that shaped their participation in the women’s movement and with which they effected change in their own lives and those of many others. The women’s identities were complex, fluid, and multisided. Together they illustrate the wide range of identities among their cohort and the continuous shifting of identity over the course of their own lives.
Beyond the significance of the stories of the women in this book to the construction and meaning of individual lives, they deserve to be recognized as important parts of the larger twentieth-century narratives of the history of feminism and Judaism. These women’s struggles, contributions, failures, and achievements point to new ways of thinking about these remarkable decades.