Jews Behind Feminism Quotes:
“On the political end, they put personal identities aside in order to help liberate all women, including those who were oppressed minorities or from poor and working class backgrounds.
Anti-Semitism also was a factor, especially among those who lumped Jews among their white oppressors.”
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Jewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.”
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Jewish women have played a significant role in all aspects of the American feminist movement. Whether agitating for the reform of marriage and property laws, woman suffrage, birth control, improved conditions for working women, the Equal Rights Amendment, or a myriad of other causes aimed at fostering equal opportunities for women, they lent their support to and often pioneered campaigns for women’s rights.”
“While Rose’s outspoken rejection of religion troubled pious feminists, she took a “fighting stand” against antisemitism, publicly disavowing its presence in her own circle of freethinkers and vigorously defending her people. In her own view, her work on behalf of abolition and women’s rights and against antisemitism demonstrated the
“interrelationships between Jew and non-Jew, Negro and white, men and women. …””
“While suffrage, labor reforms and reproductive rights were issues pursued by individuals rather than by Jewish women’s organizations,
the campaign against enforced prostitution (“white slavery”) became a major focus of the efforts of the National Council of Jewish Women.”
“Among this group were a number of northern Jewish women activists who had gone south to participate in antiracist work led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other black groups. They included such activists as
Florence Howe, who would later found the Feminist Press, Susan Brownmiller, who would write Against Our Will,
a groundbreaking analysis of rape as a feminist issue, and Rita Schwerner, who accompanied her husband Michael Schwerner, one of the young men murdered in Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer.
While most of these women were not Jewishly identified,
they acknowledged that their sense of “otherness” as Jews, along with an inheritance of progressive familial values, stimulated their involvement in the civil rights movement. Their experience as allies of African Americans in turn encouraged them to raise questions about their identities as women. Becoming incensed at their second-class treatment by male radicals, they began to organize women’s groups in tandem with other disgruntled student and antiwar activists.”
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Jewish women were a prominent presence in the radical wing of the feminist movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—only no one knew it. Participants in this fiery and transformative movement known as women’s liberation talked about every aspect of social and sexual life as they raised consciousness together; but in some women’s groups, although many members were Jewish, there was one subject they never addressed—their Jewish backgrounds. “We never talked about it,” said Naomi Weisstein of Chicago’s West Side Group, the first women’s liberation group in the country. Neither did historians.
In good part, this omission was due to the fact that Jewish women participated in the movement not as Jews—as members of an ethnic minority—but as universalists promoting a common sisterhood. “Why would we identify ourselves as Jews when we wanted to promote a vision of internationalism and interfaith and interracial solidarity? asks Vivian Rothstein, another West Side member.”
“Despite historical inattention to Jewish women in radical feminism, in some women’s liberation collectives in such cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago,
perhaps two-thirds to three-quarters of members were Jewish. Jewish women’s articles and books became classics of the movement, providing influential ideas and models for radical change.”
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My interviews with dozens of pioneer women’s liberationists reveal that Jewish backgrounds and Judaism’s ethical imperatives played a major part in shaping Jewish women’s feminist activism.”
“They were inspired by parents, other relatives, and immigrant ancestors (including Socialist and Communist Party members).
Family and community members’ direct experience and historical memories of the Holocaust deeply affected them.”
“The Jewish legacy that helped to spur these women’s activism was a product of the universalism embedded in the Jewish credo, an ethos that regarded Jewish values as universal truths and positive social norms. In its concern for ethical values and consciousness of human commonalities, this Jewish vision harmonized well with the pluralist politics of the 1960s and 70s. In the social movements of those decades, Jewish participants projected the racial liberalism of colorblindness and empathy toward the oppressed, values that their families had taught them and which found roots in Jewish thought and experiences.”
“As Letty Cottin Pogrebin has explained about her own roots: "I grew up in a home where advancing social justice was as integral to Judaism as lighting Shabbat candles… Having learned from [my parents] to stand up for my dignity as a Jew, I suppose it was natural for me to stand up for my dignity as a woman, which, after all, is what feminism is all about." In this association of Jewishness and progressiveness, feminism becomes an expression of Jewish values.”
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The shadow of the Holocaust and the long history of anti-Semitic violence often highlighted in Hebrew schools shaped the paths of many feminists coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Heather Booth–founder of the first campus women’s movement organization and of the underground abortion service, JANE–and Susan Brownmiller–who fought violence against women. Booth traces her lifetime of activism to a 1963 visit to Yad Vashem, where she took a personal oath: "I promised myself that in the face of injustice I would struggle for justice."”
“The otherness that many Jewish women felt as Jews in postwar America dovetailed with their experiences of otherness as women. Though often painful, the parallelism of these experiences bolstered their determination to fight for inclusion and equality.”
“We have been ‘the Jewish question’ or ‘the woman question’ at the margins of Leftist politics, while Right Wing repressions have always zeroed in on us. We have–women and Jews–been the targets of biological determinism and persistent physical violence. We have been stereotyped both viciously and sentimentally by others and have often taken these stereotypes into ourselves…We exist everywhere under laws we did not make; speaking a multitude of languages; excluded by law and custom from certain spaces, functions, resources associated with power; often accused of wielding too much power, of wielding dark and devious powers."
“Rich argues that these parallels of otherness and discrimination should serve as a basis for empathy and for political coalition, and for many Jewish women they have.”
“Jewish women did not only experience otherness in negative terms. The resurgence of ethnic pride in the wake of Black Power gave many a sense of satisfaction in their distinctiveness as Jews. Ethnic pride could also combine with and reinforce feminist pride. When Jewish women rejected the postwar definition of beauty and femininity limited to non-Jewish looks, for example, they challenged both ethnic and gender norms and fused Jewish and feminist consciousness.”[Spoiler/]
