Epilogue

Gender relations throughout the United States were radically transformed during the two decades discussed in this book. By the 1990s, new directions in the movement suggested a so-called third wave of feminism based on cultural rather than political liberation, yet as is the case with earlier women’s movements, it makes more sense to recognize a continuing chain of feminist actions over the course of the century rather than discrete, disconnected periods of short-term activism. These activities continued into the 1990s and the twenty-first century, when many of the radical feminists discussed in this book maintained their original focus on political organizing. Rather than individual change, often regarded as the hallmark of 1990s feminism, these women kept their eyes on the collective goals that had motivated women’s liberation. Solidarity and social action continued to exert a powerful force on their vision of a socially just and egalitarian future; younger colleagues drawn into feminism benefited from their examples and contributions.1

The women’s liberationists chronicled in this book achieved many of their goals, even when the social movement they helped to lead had been recast and reimagined. In their innovative writings, their imaginative approaches to difficult social problems, and their assertive political and social leadership, they continued to follow the dictates of tikkun olam, sometimes without conscious awareness of Jewish influences on their actions. The many books they authored, the organizations they founded, and the varied campaigns they ran indicate a remarkable level of engagement in civic and intellectual life over half a century and an abiding commitment to feminist change. By 1990, Jewish feminists, too, had achieved considerable success within Jewish religious and communal life as well as in the broader society. These women’s accomplishments provided examples to younger generations of the possibilities of living an integrated life that joins Jewish, American, and feminist social activism in positive ways.

Twenty-first-century Jewish women have faced identity struggles of their own, but because of Jewish feminist role models, many of whom had been conflicted about their Jewish identities, the younger women’s efforts to form unified personalities have seemed less fraught than those of preceding generations. New organizations such as the Jewish Women’s Archive, formed in 1995 to chronicle the diverse histories of North American Jewish women, and Mayyim Hayyim, created in 2004 to offer modern approaches to the mikveh and other spiritual resources, helped to uncover traditions that inspired young women to become change agents in their own lives. Although these women faced new perplexities embodied in contemporary life, they did not need to engage in the deep, often bitter struggles of Jewish women’s liberationists and early Jewish feminists to find partners, mentors, and comrades on the journey to integrate the manifold aspects of selfhood.

How twenty-first century women regard the effects of the women’s movement on their lives was the subject of the last panel at my NYU conference. The stories narrated by the five participants and panel chair, spanning some twenty years in age, point to larger patterns of activism and identity construction. The first three stories, from Tamara Cohen, Judith Rosenbaum, and Jaclyn Friedman, come from women born in the early 1970s who were about forty years of age at the time of the conference. The last three stories come from women in their twenties who were born in the mid-1980s: Nona Willis Aronowitz, Collier Meyerson, and Irin Carmon. I close this book with their snapshots of contemporary feminist and Jewish activism.

Tamara Cohen: “What It Meant to Be a Jew and a Woman in New York City in the Early Nineties”

Tamara Cohen, born in 1971, is a socially committed, feminist activist rabbi, writer, and poet whose roots in Jewish feminism are deep.2 Cohen’s father babysat while her mother attended the first Jewish feminist conference in 1973. Cohen was raised by “a mother transformed by feminism and Jewish feminism”; when she got her period, she was given the gift of Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Tribe of Dina (edited by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz), and Marge Piercy’s The Moon Is Always Female. Yet she never took feminism for granted, watching the struggles of her mother and others of her generation unfold around her.

At Barnard College in the early 1990s, the struggles of gay and black students drew Cohen’s attention, taking her activism to places that her “mother’s feminism had not gone.” She was personally transformed by coming out as a lesbian in the context of identity politics and AIDS activism and also by her discovery of her own “white-skin privilege.” “Betwixt and between,” Cohen tried to figure out where she belonged, situating herself as “a Jewish feminist and a feminist Jew” who felt a sense of “otherness from white Protestant culture” along with a desire to create bonds with other groups. She co-founded a rape crisis center on campus, protested Columbia’s gentrification in Harlem, and became a vocal activist in the campaign to ordain gays and lesbians at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Yet she felt “split at the root,” in Adrienne Rich’s formulation, feeling ashamed in some sense “at being a religious person,” unsure about how to bring her Jewishness into the social spaces of activism, how “to take up the mantle of feminist transformation within Judaism,” how to ally with others in the “external world” for social justice causes. Such was the “what it meant to be a Jew and a woman in New York City in the early nineties.”

Cohen emerged from these beginnings to fashion a second-generation identity as feminist daughter that creatively synthesized her multiple concerns. She went on to earn a master’s degree in women’s history, writing a thesis on the rise of Jewish feminism; worked as director of Multicultural and Diversity Affairs and LGBT Affairs at the University of Florida; served as program director at Ma’yan, the Jewish Women’s Project in Manhattan; and became a founding board member of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom. In 2014, she was ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi, in which position she writes and lectures widely on topics relating to diversity, Jewish feminism, and spirituality.

Judith Rosenbaum: “Jewishness and Feminism Were Indistinguishable”

An educator, historian, and feminist activist, Judith Rosenbaum is now executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA). Like Tamara Cohen, Rosenbaum was born into Jewish feminism. The daughter of Paula Hyman, a pioneer of the movement, and a physician father, Rosenbaum often heard that her mother discovered that she was pregnant with her at the 1973 Jewish feminist conference. Rosenbaum grew up thinking that “all Jews were feminists and that all feminists were Jews”; feminism was as central a Jewish practice “as eating matzo at Passover. . . . It was as much a part of Jewish experience to have women gathering in your living room on Sunday night for feminist consciousness-raising as going to synagogue.” To have this totally “coherent, organic” vision of the unity of feminism and Judaism was a “tremendous birthright.”

Rosenbaum’s journey as a Jewish feminist involved stepping out of the particularities of Jewish experience that she learned as a child, even with its inherent feminist content, and moving more directly to engage with the concerns of a wider world. Though she felt like a “freak” in high school as a self-conscious Jewish feminist, she experienced little conflict between the “Jewish and women’s center” worlds at college. But by the time Rosenbaum got to graduate school, Jewish feminism seemed to have narrowed and did not feel sufficiently engaged with the breadth of issues fundamental to women’s lives. Rosenbaum’s dissertation on the history of American women’s health activism examined how feminism had dealt with issues of women’s embodiment. Though her work included the stories of many Jewish participants involved in the women’s health movement, she did not explicitly address their Jewishness. In graduate school, integral parts of her own identity—that once “organic” connection between feminism and Jewishness—remained silent, invisible.

Rosenbaum sought to make that connection whole again in her career as public educator. As director of public history and then executive director of the JWA, she has developed creative ways to integrate the narratives of feminism and of Jewish activism, found innovative approaches to online learning, and forged links with community partners and with users of various ages, backgrounds, interests. Most recently, JWA has begun cultivating the leadership of female-identified Jewish teens to shape conversations in their communities, through the Rising Voices Fellowship. Working from the core of Jewish feminism that centers her own identity, Rosenbaum aspires to create broad-based coalitions and partnerships that can acknowledge a changing movement that is not monolithic but rather exults in a new diversity and wider intelligence.

Jaclyn Friedman: “A Daughter of Women’s Liberation”

Jaclyn Friedman, founder and former executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, a nonprofit lobbying group for gender justice in the mass media, is the author of several best-selling books about empowering women’s sexuality and is a popular opinion writer on these subjects.

Friedman was born in 1971 to largely apolitical parents in New Jersey but grew up with strong Jewish feminist leanings, in part because her rabbi was Sally Priesand, the first American woman rabbi. Ordained by the Reform movement in 1972, the year of Friedman’s birth, Priesand was Friedman’s first feminist role model. Growing up, Friedman did not realize that Priesand was a feminist “rock star”: “She was just my rabbi. It was very subtle; I wouldn’t have told you then that I was learning about feminism, but I was.” Friedman loves to tell the story of a young boy in the congregation, which also had a female cantor, who asked his parents if boys could be rabbis too.3

As a teenager, Friedman became involved in the New Jersey Reform Jewish youth group the Jersey Federation of Temple Youth (JFTY). JFTY incorporated Priesand’s teachings into the social justice framework that guided nearly everything it did, and Friedman credits this influence with shaping her viewpoint on social issues and teaching her to become a leader and an activist. There she formed her vision, and she learned how to organize, how to collaborate, how to see campaigns through to completion. “My social justice framework comes from Judaism,” she said. “Judaism is also often my touchstone; if I feel like the work is getting overwhelming, or I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere, or I want to give up I remember: ‘It is not yours to complete the work, neither is it yours to desist from it.’ That’s from the Pirkei Avot. We would sing the Hebrew version, Lo Alecha, at camp all the time, and it’s never left me.”4

Friedman went to Wesleyan University, where she was active in student government, but it was the experience of sexual assault that changed her life, leading her to become an advocate for the reform of institutional responses to sexual violence. In her thirties, she founded Women, Action, and the Media, dedicated to fighting against rape and sexual violence and to helping women to reclaim sexual pleasure. Her 2009 book, co-edited with Jessica Valenti, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape, was ranked number eleven on Ms. magazine’s “Top 100 Feminist Nonfiction of All Time” list. In 2017, she published Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All, a call for women to move from individualistic models to collective action to create the structural changes needed for female sexual empowerment.5

Friedman celebrated the Jewish holidays, performed rituals, and identified Jewishly but had no formal connections to the Jewish world or to Jewish feminism. In her late thirties, however, Judaism started to pull her back. The “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity” conference helped her to locate herself in a tradition she had not understood. “The history of Jewish women in feminism is largely invisible, which is why that conference was so meaningful,” she observed. “I suddenly understood, ‘Oh, I make sense in this context. This is not accidental.’” Connecting to the Jewish past via these narratives of feminist activism suggests a channel of engagement for contemporary Jews.

Nona Willis Aronowitz: “A New-York-to-the-Core Jewish Feminist”

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a journalist and feminist author. Born in 1984, she is the daughter of cultural critic and feminist pioneer Ellen Willis and radical sociologist Stanley Aronowitz. Willis Aronowitz grew up in Greenwich Village, where “cultural Jewishness was in the water.” This kind of secular Jewishness, modeled by her mother, focused on a heady “cerebral transcendence” and the pursuit of social justice. During many summers at Camp Kinderland, which was founded by leftist Jewish activists, Willis Aronowitz was further exposed to the Jewish social justice tradition; it was a “through line” in her life.

Becoming a feminist was a more deliberate quest for Willis Aronowitz. Ellen Willis passed away in 2006, just as her daughter graduated from Wesleyan. While at college, Willis Aronowitz had felt alienated from the male-led, more conservative Jewish community she encountered there, but she felt no need to question the feminist and socialist upbringing of her youth. In the wake of her mother’s death, however, amid the outpouring of love she received from her mother’s friends and admirers, she wondered about her own connection to that tradition. She also began to question whether feminism mattered much beyond the circle of New York’s Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, where she had grown up in a special, lefty “bubble.” With a friend, Emma Bee Bernstein, a Camp Kinderland alumna with a Jewish, feminist mother who had grown up in a similar environment, she set out on a road trip to dozens of cities across the U.S. to find out about “how young women grapple with the concepts of freedom, equality, joy, ambition, sex, and love—whether they call it ‘feminism’ or not.” “We took our Jewishness along the way,” Willis Aronowitz said, interacting with women from different backgrounds, classes, regions, races, and religions all over the country. Many of her previous ideas about feminism were shattered. Learning about the multiplicity of desires and experiences that this younger generation brought to the fateful term was an “aha” moment that taught her about the variability of feminism while reaffirming its relatedness to her own life. Chronicling her generation’s perspectives as her mother did of hers, she wrote Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism with Bernstein.6 In 2014, she edited an anthology of her mother’s criticism, The Essential Ellen Willis.

Willis Aronowitz appreciates the intellectual richness of the Jewish tradition, particularly acknowledging the contributions of her mother and her mother’s friends. While she considers herself spiritually Jewish, in many ways, feminism is the cornerstone of her belief system. “To be culturally Jewish means you have your religion be feminism,” she said, but “also be a Jew at the same exact time, and still be an atheist.”

Collier Meyerson: “About Being a Woman of Color in a Religion That Can Sometimes Shut You Out of It”

Collier Meyerson is a writer, reporter, blogger, and producer. She has been a national reporter for MSNBC / NBC News and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice.

A biracial Jew who grew up on the Upper West Side of New York, Meyerson worked for the multiracial Jewish organization Be’chol Lashon for several years after graduating from Macalaster College in 2007. She brought her special background into this work and her creative efforts as a spokesperson for Jews like her. Collier’s birth mother was Jewish, and she was adopted by a black non-Jewish mother and white Ashkenazi Jewish father. Her parents intentionally created a combination of African American and Jewish cultures so that Meyerson would not be “confused or ashamed” about her background. As a child, living on Manhattan’s West Side, she studied at the Dance Theater of Harlem, a historically black dance school, and learned Yiddish language and Jewish culture at her synagogue.

With Meyerson’s New York background and the summers she spent with her friend Nona Willis Aronowitz at Camp Kinderland, where most campers were Jewish, she grew up with an “innate” sensibility of Jewishness and feminism. But her skin color separated her from other young Jewish feminists for whom the issue of “white privilege” often became the center of probing identity issues. Meyerson experienced the pain of race-based discrimination early on. She chose to be Jewish at the age of ten, when her parents urged her to “practice something,” leaving the choice of religious faith open to her. But after three years of preparing for her bat mitzvah at Hebrew School, synagogue representatives told her she could not hold the ceremony there because she had a black, presumably non-Jewish, mother. Although they relented when her quick-witted mother mentioned that her biological mother was Jewish, Meyerson left the faith, hurt and angry, from then on taking part in her aunt’s seders “begrudgingly.” Another upsetting incident occurred after college, when a dinner guest at her home found it difficult to believe that someone who did not “look Jewish” could know Hebrew prayers and songs as well as she did.7

Interested in efforts “to expand the (often) projected narrow definition of what ‘Jewish’ looks like,” Meyerson turned her attention to being a woman of color “in a religion that can sometimes shut you out of it,” hoping to start conversations that could expand the acceptance of diversity within Judaism. She was especially interested in the relationship between whiteness and women, starting the popular blog Carefree White Girl. Are Jews considered “carefree white girls?” she has been asked frequently. Meyerson’s experience makes it clear that Jewish feminism has many colors. She is part of the current generation of outspoken young women hoping to transform narrow definitions that prescribe what normative Jewish feminists act and look like. More recently, she has come to define herself as a “mulatto,” “creating a clan” with friends from similar backgrounds, with whom she feels completely at home.8

Meyerson writes regularly for Fusion, with an emphasis on the topics of race and politics, and is a contributor to the New Yorker and other magazines.9 Her multicultural, multiracial background provides her an unusual perch from which to comment on deeply contested intergroup matters.

Irin Carmon: “How Do We Maintain That Sense of Otherness and Responsibility towards Social Justice?”

Irin Carmon, born in Israel in 1983, is a feminist journalist who co-authored the best-selling 2105 book about the U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.10 Carmon considers herself “mostly Israeli.” She immigrated to the U.S. with her parents when she was two but journeyed back and forth between Israel and America with her parents for much of her childhood. As an Israeli who grew up without any kind of religious framework, she believed her experiences were different from those of other young feminists on the NYU panel.

Carmon identified three kinds of Jewish influences on her feminist work: those affecting her as a reader, as an immigrant, and as a person of “considerable privilege.” The Jewish tradition of learning and education played a primary role, allowing her to understand and empathize with the way lives were lived, the injustices suffered by many people and groups. Despite her lack of direct contact with second-wave feminists, she gained a formidable feminist education through reading the texts they created, with Jewish feminist authors primary among them.

The immigrant experience was also formative. Her parents found Americans Jews baffling, and so, generally, did Carmon, who had never been to a Shabbat service and did not understand the sort of “cultural inflections that people think of as Jewish.” Basically she did not feel “at home” with American Jews until college. As a result of her confusion, she developed an interest in Jewish peoplehood and, as a writer, spent a lot of time trying to find Jews in unusual places such as Alabama, Cuba, and Brazil.

Carmon’s own mobility and status as a citizen of three countries—Israel, the U.S., and (through her grandmother) Germany—led her to see herself as part of a privileged minority that possesses the economic and social underpinnings to guarantee its contemporary security and well-being. This, of course, is a new position for Jews, unlike the fragility that derived from their perennial sense of otherness but that also sparked their characteristic sympathy for the underdog. Carmon asks, “How do we maintain that sense of otherness and responsibility towards social justice when we become privileged and powerful members of society?”

***

Carmon’s question allies with the core frames of radical feminism, which began as a movement that was not supposed to be parochial or particularistic. The feminist issues that most strongly motivate Carmon and her fellow panelists are the universal ones that apply to the widest swath of their contemporaries. So, too, for these six women, the broadest issues within Jewish life and Jewish feminism are the ones that they see as most meaningful. Their passionate call to pluralism, inclusion, and diversity stands as an emblem of what these younger generations want from a feminism that is integrated with Jewishness in the contemporary world.

Inclusivity and pluralism might be watchwords for beginning a conversation among young Jewish feminists and others in their generation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the most pressing issues on the global agenda today. As this issue has complicated Jewish feminist identities for the young women’s feminist forbears, so it roils contemporary discussions of Jewishness and of feminism. But as Judith Rosenbaum, Collier Meyerson, and Nona Willis Aronowitz pointed out in their remarks, feminist understandings of power and trauma and of relationships with the “Other,” combined with a characteristic Jewish intellectual curiosity, can generate better, more open conversations among the Jewish community and feminists alike. Feminist leadership in the peace movement continues to be one of the most promising international developments of recent times, Tamara Cohen added, especially regarding Israel and Palestine. Israeli-born Irin Carmon admitted to compartmentalizing the politics of Israel apart from identity issues relating to Jewish life. She shares Ellen Willis’s caution about Americans insinuating themselves into the politics of a land where they do not live, but she acknowledges the complexity of these issues and the advantage of openness and inclusiveness as Jewish women of many different stripes attempt to engage politically and ethically on such a deeply divisive matter. As Jaclyn Friedman’s work reminds us, social justice for women must involve both personal and political empowerment across differences, a conviction that owes much to the insights of radical second-wave feminists.

The views of these women reflect the broad societal changes that have occurred within their generation’s life cycles. These include the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the United States, an openness to change, and a confident liberalism based on a willingness to participate in the political process, although on their own terms.11 Such demographic and political factors correlate especially well to women who came of age after the 1980s and who identify as feminists. Even in a period that saw a shift toward postmodern and even so-called postfeminist discourse, young women claimed feminist identities in growing numbers. This group is more diverse in matters of race, ethnicity, income, and education than were their second-wave forbears, demographic factors that shaped their inclusive worldview and political perspectives.12

But the women’s attitudes also reflect the special legacy they have inherited as young Jewish feminists. Their values and worldviews were influenced in part by those who came before—their actual and metaphorical mothers. How these young women define their identities, find community with other young feminist women, and connect with contemporary social movements is a product both of their generational context and the shaping forces of the past, including Jewish feminist role models.

The difficulties of affirming and integrating multiple aspects of feminist identity, without denying, devaluing, or displacing component parts, have not been erased, to be sure. Even the most positively identified younger Jewish feminists must still confront complex problems of sexism and anti-Semitism and the divisive global politics around Israel and Palestine. But the revolutions started by women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists provide a secure foundation for continuing attempts to come to grips with the troubling problems related to the heterogeneous elements of their mixed identities. The achievements of Jewish radical feminism must be placed on the historical record, for they can surely inspire the struggles of the present.