Introduction
Janet Jakobsen
Jewish women have changed America. The leadership of Jewish women in
American social movements, particularly in the second wave of feminist
movement, is striking. This includes well-known figures like Bella
Abzug and Betty Friedan, but also includes a wide range of women who
have led major changes in spheres such as journalism, the arts, business,
and the academy. Moreover, Jewish women are changing America.
After more than four decades, leaders of the second wave, like many of
the panelists at the conference on which this issue is based - Shifra Bronznik,
Sally Gottesman, Judith Hauptman, Elizabeth Holtzman,
Paula Hyman, Norma Joseph, Irena Klepfisz, Judith Plaskow, and
Letty Cottin Pogrebin - continue to
make change as they have throughout their now illustrious careers.
These efforts are being met by those of younger generations, who have
taken up the mantle of social change on behalf of gender equity. Some
of the most exciting work that is being done in feminism today is
undertaken by a younger generation of artists, activists, and scholars,
young feminists who are producing their own publications and doing so in
their own idioms, including Bitch: A Feminist's Response to Pop
Culture, and Heeb: The New Jew Review; who are reviving
previous cultural forms like Klezmar music and Yiddish plays and poetry;
who are challenging the boundaries of gender convention and who are
continuing the fight against sexual violence.
Since at least the 1960s the presumption has been that generational
change also implies generational rifts. "Don't trust anyone over
thirty," is a well known maxim of the 1960s (one that became much harder
to follow after young activists moved beyond thirty themselves). This
perception of the inevitability of generational conflict has been
applied to feminism as well. Successive surges of activity have been
identified as absolutely distinctive waves. The second wave, beginning
in the 1960s, and following on a first wave that began in the
mid-nineteenth century and continued at least until women gained the
right to vote in 1920, has been succeeded by a third wave that began in
the 1990s. Now, as members of the generation identified with this third
wave move beyond thirty, questions have been raised as to what to term
the next generation of feminists. Generation X has given way to
Generation Y in the mainstream, must there be a similar passing of the
torch in feminism?
This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online takes a different
approach to these questions. Rather than presuming that generational
difference is the same as generational divide, "Jewish Women Changing
America" takes the approach that exploring the meaning of Jewish women's
leadership in American feminism across time and thus across generations
might best be pursued through conversation. And so, beginning with the
insight that to understand the U.S. and to understand American feminism,
we must take Jewish women into account, we set out to build a
conversation across generations, first in a conference sponsored by
Barnard's Ingeborg, Tamara and Yonina Rennert Women in Judaism Forum and
now in this issue of S&F Online. We brought together women
leaders across multiple generations (as moderator Laura Levitt pointed
out, there is a forgotten generation that came of age after the initial
surge of the second wave in the 1960s and 70s and before the beginning
of the third wave in the 1990s) to see what they might have to say about
Jewish women changing America, historically, in the present and in the
future. We have pursued this project in conjunction with the Jewish
Women's Archive (JWA) which has independently begun a major exhibit on
the often unremarked, and nonetheless remarkable, fact that Jewish women
have played an especially crucial role in changing the world for the
better, particularly in feminism. This issue of S&F Online
provides both highlights of some of that project and links to its online
component in its entirety. We thank JWA for their mutual
participation and invite you to explore this important exhibit in full.
When the various participants in our conference came together
for conversation spread across four panels and two days, we did
find some of the generational tension that is forecast by cultural
expectation. Yet, there are also striking similarities between second
wave activists like Kelpfisz, who uses Yiddish in her poetry because it
is part of the Eastern European culture of her youth, much of which was
lost in the Holocaust, and young activists, who are reclaiming Yiddish
culture in part because it was not a part of their own upbringing.
These continuities are striking, despite what seem to be clear
differences of style in generational approaches to feminism. While the
activists of the second wave fought for lesbian and gay rights, for
example, their heirs present a more decidedly queer sensibility. Yet
even when it comes to style one can begin to wonder how great the
differences really are. How different is the irreverent style of queer
performance art from the choices of the early second wave, as documented
by JWA, to start the Women's Liberation Rock Band?
One of the main issues of real disagreement surfaced in the opening
panel and reverberated in various ways throughout the conference. It
was picked up by moderator Laura Levitt, who heard the older generation
ask the younger, "Why aren't you more political?" Liz Holtzman and
Letty Cottin Pogrebin both express concern that young women are not
willing to do the dirty work of entering the mainstream political arena
and institutionalizing change for future generations, while young women
are concerned that the political process in the United States is simply
too corrupted by money and media spin to provide a real site for change.
(You can listen to that conversation in the video clips from the panel).
In the midst of this discussion, Irena Klepfisz asked from the
audience whether the older generation has bequeathed to younger
feminists enough of a positive vision. In particular, have those who
made the second wave, offered a message of hope to the younger
generation, a message that could be sustaining as well as motivating?
Klepfisz's question raised a theme that echoed throughout the
conference and across the age spectrum: Where do we go from here?
Feminist accomplishments, in changing both Judaism and the mainstream,
have been significant, as they were eloquently listed by a number of
participants: the election of women to Congress, movement of women into
the Rabbinate, the development of new rituals, the expansion of feminist
scholarship, young women's interventions in popular culture. And yet,
major challenges also remain, particularly after more than twenty years
of increasing political conservatism. Mainstream advances are being
lost. As Liz Holtzman pointed out, over thirty years after being
elected at the age of thirty-one, she remains the youngest woman elected
to Congress, a record she thought would be broken easily and quickly.
The status of women in politics may be increasing, but it has in no way
been a directly upward journey. Similarly, while there are a number of
strong, dynamic Jewish women's organizations and projects, like Ma'yan
of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, the leadership of major
organizations within the Jewish community has remained surprisingly and
resolutely male. And as Shifra Bronznik noted, conservatism is not the
only problem: even those who are politically liberal still may not take
women's issues seriously, at least not seriously enough to act upon.
Questions of continuity and difference among the generations were not
the only sites for lively debate, however. Nor was generational
difference the only form of diversity that was explored. Racial and
ethnic differences among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have become a more
frequent part of Jewish conversations, but the conference also took up
the complex issue of African American Jews, who are too often caught
between communities that are now presumed to be in conflict (although
such a presumption was not always so), along with Jews from communities,
like the Mizrahi Iranian Jewish community, that are less frequently
recognized in the traditional sense of ethnic divisions. Like the
generational differences, the presentations by Katya Gibel Azoulay,
Khadijah Miller, and Gina Nihai presented differences in issues and in
approach to those issues, as well as common commitments to gender
equality and social justice.
Denominational differences took center stage in the panel on
"Changing Judaism." Panelists reported varied struggles and strong
feminist presence across the denominations and there was widespread
appreciation for the rapidly growing Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance
(JOFA). Both the panelists and the audience became interested in the
question of whether it is possible to develop more cooperation across
denominations. As moderator Judith Plaskow asked, "Are there ways we
can offer more support to each other across those lines?" Or would it
hurt the projects of Orthodox women, for example, if non-Orthodox
feminists were significant and visible contributors? (You can listen
to the ensuing conversations in the video clips from the panel).
Danya Rutenberg raised the question of whether feminism
is better pursued within denominational institutions or outside of them.
While denominational institutions supply resources and structures for
change, they can also provide obstacles. Perhaps there is more freedom,
if less organization, outside the denominational frame. And perhaps
also there is the possibility for other forms of cooperation, including
cooperation with various Jewish groups that increasingly do not identify
with denominational affiliations.
Concerns were also raised at a number of different points over the
course of the conference that women are sometimes blamed for increasing
assimilation of Jews in U.S. culture and a general sense of decline for
the American Jewish community. Women have been accused in the Jewish
press, for example, of both failing to maintain high birth rates and
promoting assimilation through participation in mainstream movements
like feminism. Paula Hyman provided an historical perspective on this
charge: given that it has been reiterated in various forms since at
least the nineteenth century, problems of Jewish assimilation can hardly
be the fault of twenty-first century feminists. Moreover, as Sally
Gottesman pointed out, it is boys who leave active participation in
Judaism at higher rates than girls: 60% of boys and 40% of girls move
away from participation after bar and bat mitzvah, respectively. Sally
proposed that the urgent project for feminists is not finding a way to
get women back into the business of holding up the Jewish birth rate,
but finding ways for Jewish feminism to address more men so as to
communicate feminist excitement about Judaism.
The issue of U.S. policy toward Israel was clearly on people's minds,
as well. What the panelists in conversation with the audience provided
was a sense that there is a need not only for public discussion of such
policy, but there is also a need to consider how that discussion might
best take place. For the "Changing Culture" panel, Faith Jones
presented on the efforts of the Jewish feminist journal, Bridges,
to produce an issue on Israel. She related how difficult it was to come
to any agreement about this issue even for a group of relatively
like-minded people like the Bridges editorial collective. Given
how difficult these discussions are, other panelists suggested that one
of the great strengths of various art forms is the ability to present
issues in ways that enable discussion. Rachel Havrelock talked about
the way in which her play "From Tel Aviv to Ramallah"
allowed audience
members coming from various social and political positions to leave the
theater in discussion with one another. This panel was followed by
animated conversation with the audience about whether the discussion of
Israel is actively shut down in some communities, or whether with
commitment to diverse perspectives and a sense of respect for one
another, some communities have facilitated such conversations, no matter
how difficult. From the audience Paula Hyman reminded us that
throughout the course of the conference, "one of the things that we've
been trying to do is to avoid stereotyping." Having spent our time
exploring the diversity of Jewish communities and positions, we should
also look to the various places in different Jewish communities where
this conversation might be happening.
Haddasah Gross pointed out that we also should not allow discussion
of Israel to overwhelm all the other issues facing Jewish communities
and Jewish culture. Culture is important for so many different reasons,
from the ways in which second-wave feminists used art and ritual
expression to make a space for themselves as not just feminists, but
Jewish feminists, to the various art forms, from gender performance to
queer yiddishkeit that now provide a site for young people to work
through their sense of Jewish identity.
In this issue we provide you with just a sampling of some of these
wide ranging cultural productions, from "Farlangen" by Metropolitan
Klezmer to "'67 Remembered" by Irena Klepfisz. Together
all of these materials - the transcripts and videos of the conference, the
artistic and cultural projects, and the historical archives and oral
histories of the Jewish Women's Archive - add up to crucial documentation
of the fact that Jewish women not only have changed America; they are
changing America. Overall, the various conversations that have
occurred in producing these materials indicate that generational
difference may not be the most important divide facing Jewish women or
Jewish feminists, but that the strategies learned in cross-generational
conversation are widely applicable. Mutual respect, the ability to
listen, a willingness to grant that women do not all share the same
position in society or the same set of concerns, and a simultaneous
willingness to find sites where women can work together in mutual
support: these skills, all of which are in evidence in the conversations
presented here, are crucial for continued forward movement and social
change. We invite you, our reader, not just to peruse this issue, but
to join the conversation.
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