Jewish Women and
the American Mainstream

The committee of academics and activists that helped plan the first Ingeborg, Tamara & Yonina Rennert Women in Judaism Forum - "Jewish Women Changing America: Cross-Generational Conversations" - was faced with a particularly daunting task: "with a field so full of accomplished women and important organizations," asked BCRW Director Janet Jakobsen, "how were we ever to produce panels that were not so unwieldy as to make the conference itself impossible?" In the end, what proved impossible was not the conference but the hope of being comprehensive, of representing the full spectrum, "the richness and variety of American Jewish women's" commitments to fighting for progressive social change. Instead, we envisioned this gathering of more than 20 scholars, artists, and social activists as the beginning of a conversation that examines the wide-ranging contributions that Second and Third Wave Jewish feminists have made to struggles for fundamental human and women's rights.

Moderated by Temple University Professor Laura Levitt, the conference's opening panel discussion, "Jewish Women and the American Mainstream," gathered some of today's most distinguished and provocative voices in Jewish activism, culture, politics, and scholarship, including:

• Katya Gibel Azoulay, author, Black, Jewish & Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity;

• Liz Holtzman, former congresswoman from Brooklyn;

• Lisa Jervis, editor, Bitch magazine;

• Letty Cottin Pogrebin, cofounder, Ms. magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus;

• Nancy Schwartzman, filmmaker, Between Us; creative director, Heeb magazine.

In preparing her introductory remarks, Levitt thoughtfully returned to Adrienne Rich's 1982 collection of poems, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. In "Integrity," the second poem of that volume, Rich speaks of the titular "wild patience" that, for Levitt, encapsulates a particularly feminist strategy of social action: "Even in the late 1980s we appreciated that what we needed was to be wildly patient, because the feminist movement would continue to be a labor of intensive effort. That it required that we take seriously the differences among and between and within each of us . . . that we refuse any easy answers . . . [and] let go of any singular vision of feminist engagement, feminist action, feminist activism, creativity, scholarship, or politics."

Where feminists are concerned, there is, perhaps, no greater test of this "wild patience" than a conversation between members of one generation and the next. Between women who marched for the ERA or legislated to secure Roe v. Wade and today's younger generation, whose activism not only relies on but also critiques the history from which it emerges, there is, inevitably, necessarily, a tension. Proof of just how much "intensive effort" this feminist labor requires, of how adamantly we must resist - to borrow another of Rich's famous lines - "the dream of a common language."

More often than not, the mainstream media is content to present this tension as a severe and uncrossable divide: Second Wave feminists, we hear, blame backlash and backsliding on the inefficacy of Third Wave tactics, while the younger generation dismisses as irrelevant - or, worse, is ignorant of - the struggles of the past. And above the din of their argument, the death knell of feminism is heard. Or so those who pose the perennial question, "Is Feminism Dead?" would have us believe.

In feminist circles, the tension is not only subtler; it is also more productive. The question of "legacy," notes Letty Cottin Pogrebin, is as serious as it is, sometimes, difficult to face. Pogrebin goes on to admit that she "finds it hard to strike a balance between wanting younger women to secure the hard-won progress achieved by [her] cohort and, at the same time, respecting their right to define their own agenda." Echoing Pogrebin's concerns, former congresswoman Liz Holtzman praises younger activists for the "temerity that those of us who are older and wiser . . . have lost," but goes on to lament what she sees as their unwillingness to apply that temerity in the arenas where it's needed most: of the real and recent threats to such hard-won freedoms as the right to abortion and contraception, Holtzman asks, "Is it because young women have forgotten that these rights were only created in the last 30 years and can be taken away just as quickly?" For both Pogrebin and Holtzman, the road to a feminist future winds its way, unavoidably, through the rough terrain of electoral politics; more cultural and theory-driven routes are, they fear, merely detours. "Who gets into office matters," says Pogrebin. "It's nasty, it's dirty, it's not theoretical . . . it's filthy, rotten, slogging through stuff that starts at the district level . . . [but] that's where it ends up. It ends up with the vote, and it ends up with the budget . . . And we've seen what happens when the wrong people are in office."

Katya Gibel Azoulay qualified the observation about younger generations' indifference or inaction by suggesting that the absence is one felt most keenly left of center: conservative and especially Christian right movements have been disturbingly successful at organizing young people, while their liberal counterparts, by comparison, have failed. But Third Wavers Lisa Jervis and Nancy Schwartzman both strongly disagreed. Young women, they insist, are present in all areas of feminist struggle. Moreover, they argue that "personal" or "cultural" feminism is not "blither" that's opposed or subordinate to more ostensibly public, political actions (like putting a woman in the White House), but a necessary piece of a sprawling social puzzle that includes politicians but also filmmakers and novelists, school teachers and stay-at-home moms, organizers of marches as much as members of quilting bees. To them, feminist critiques of and contributions to popular culture - be they via a movie or a magazine - can be, in fact, as "troublemaking, feather-ruffling, rabble-rousing" as the methods of Pogrebin's generation. More and more young women, claims Jervis, believe electoral politics to be "a dead end"; they may see no point in running for office, but their presence and commitment should not be underestimated:

There are so many issues that young women are working on, young feminist women and women who may not identify specifically as feminists, but they are working on issues that are very much motivated by feminist politics and feminist principles . . . You've got women doing work around the prison industrial complex. Anti-sweatshop organizing. All sorts of things that are deeply, deeply feminist issues, but because they're not just about women, that work is not claimed as feminist, and thus gets overlooked when people ask, "Where are the young women?"

The work of Nancy Schwartzman, who screened a portion of her documentary Between Us, speaks to the political power of projects that, at first glance, have little connection to anything as large as national or international policy. Between Usis an intimate reflection on Schwartzman's experience of being raped by a Jewish man during a trip to Israel, but it's also a powerful critique of how notions of nationality and religious identity can contribute to a kind of violence that is often construed as essentially personal. The conflict that Schwartzman often faces in Jewish/Israeli communities that urge her to suppress her story because they only wish "to hear that [a Jewish woman going to Israel] made aliah . . . that she fell in love with a brave Israeli soldier . . . that she is now more religious" reminds us of the need to abandon a "singular vision of feminist engagement" in favor of true, lasting, meaningful, and productive diversity.

"If we are afraid to confront people whose opinions diverge radically from our own, and only want to hear and speak with the people who agree with us . . . we will not have any transformations," said Katya Azoulay. Azoulay's invitation to revise our very notion of American Jewishness - to open up representations of that experience so that it includes feminists other than Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, so that it incorporates Jews who bear no resemblance to the wealthy, white metropolitans of Woody Allen's imagination - is, in fact, a demand to disrupt a norm by which social power (even among progressives) continues to be distributed unequally along racial and economic lines.

In unearthing such complex, sometimes seemingly conflicting issues, the panelists enable us to consider how activists should face those who've come before them. How should one generation pass the torch to the next? How, for instance, do we build on the achievements of a movement even as we assess its limitations, its missteps, its failures? To do so is not to place celebration above the need for critique. It is not to allow frustration to thwart collaboration. It is, instead, to demand a movement that allows for both - for, as Adrienne Rich says later in "Integrity," both "anger and tenderness":

Anger and tenderness: my selves.

And now I can believe they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.