How and why have Jewish women become feminists? What experiences have transformed them? How have they related to Jewish practice? Who have been their role models?
The Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA), a national non-profit organization devoted to uncovering, chronicling, and transmitting the rich continuing legacy of American Jewish women, is beginning to collect the history of Jewish women and feminism. Through a new online exhibit on Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, JWA is documenting Jewish women’s roles in the women’s movement and exploring the impact of feminism on Jewish communities and individual women’s lives.
What better place to continue pursuing these questions than the Barnard conference on “Jewish Women Changing America: Cross-Generational Conversations”? At the conference, we conducted brief recorded interviews with eleven attendees, ranging in age from 23 to 70, Orthodox to secular. They are professors, journalists, librarians, artists, psychotherapists, social workers, and development professionals. We focused these interviews on stories of transformation; “firsts” or pioneering moments; feminist activism; and successes and challenges along the road to personal or communal change.
Despite the diversity of the interviewees, several common themes emerged in their stories. Below you will find audio and text excerpts from the interviews.
Foremothers
For many of the interviewees, their female relatives provided models of strength and determination. Though most of their mothers and grandmothers did not have the language to call themselves feminists, their values and actions informed the feminism of their daughters and granddaughters.
Sara Davidson:
“My mother is a very strong woman in many ways, and I look up to her because of that. And she’s always taught me to speak for myself.”Carol Anshien:
“My mother [Adele Anshien], at the time that I was about eight, she started to work part-time. That was a struggle at that time because she had to struggle with my father over wanting to do it, but she did.
Jayne Guberman: What did she do?
Carol: “She worked at first as a statistical typist . . .. And, went from part-time doing that for many years, and then she, she put herself back through various educational processes and got a job at a bank at one point, and became a notary and took some real estate courses and mortgage courses, and she became the mortgage loan officer of a bank. When she retired, she had been made the secretary of a bank and she’d never gone to college . . .. She always had some kind of ambition and drive to do better, to make things better, to do something better . . .. I think it came from her Judaism, which I think part of it came – where I got it as well – which was you just don’t accept things the way they are, they can always be better. And you don’t let people walk all over you, and you try to do something more.”
Barbara Seaman:
“My paternal grandmother Rose Horowitz came over when she was 15, and she was a very skilled confectioner. And they knew she’d be able to get a job in a bakery or a candy factory or something. She came over, no relatives here, and stayed with some landsmen for the first few weeks until she got a job and then she moved out and lived by herself, she didn’t know any English; I mean the whole thing is amazing to me . . .. And, she had seven children. She had a husband who was very bossy . . .. But two very interesting things about her. One is that she took care of these seven children, and once a week, I think it was on Saturday afternoon, she’d go out by herself for a few hours, and she would never under any circumstances give that up.”
Menorah Rotenberg:
“My mother was really a real feminist. She didn’t have the words for that, she didn’t say she was that, but she also, she worked with my father fulltime. They had an antique business, and the thing about her is she never accepted authority.”
Sara Davidson:
“I think I was aware of feminism but I didn’t know I was aware of it, just because of my mother being a hardcore feminist and teaching at an all-women’s college and attending the same women’s college. I mean, seeing positive and strong female roles was something I was used to just from the women I grew up with. And also every month seeing my mother with her New York Havurah friends having an Ezrat Nashim meeting where they would talk about . . . I think things ranged from like menopause and just the way their middle-aged bodies were changing, to politics, religion . . .. My dad wasn’t like dads portrayed on TV, my dad was always very affectionate with us, and he was the cook and the cleaner of the house. My mom paid the bills and was the one who punished me and my brother.”
Judith Kates:
“I think of my mother as a closet feminist – I always thought of her in that way.”
Jayne Guberman: “How so?”
Judith: “Well she, when my parents got married in 1928, they didn’t have children until 1937. And in between, my father – they left New York, my father got a job in Philadelphia at Gimbel’s – he paid for her to go to the University of Pennsylvania. She was tremendously invested in education, and she really had a passion for it. And the fact that my – instead of having children right away, she went to college, she got a master’s degree even . . .. She even had some courses toward a Ph.D. before my brother was born . . .. I’m sure that there were real feminist issues there, that she wanted the education and that my father, at least for a certain amount of time, was ready to support her in it.”
Impact of the women’s movement
Exposure to the women’s movement gave some women the language to understand experiences of exclusion and discrimination and a context in which to join together with other women to make change, in their own lives and in society at large.
Ellen Kanner
“It [my consciousness raising group] was one of the first times in which I felt safe enough to tell the truth about stuff that just was not okay to talk about, even with one’s family. There was a security about it that was really quite wonderful. And then the second thing, and I don’t mean to gloss over that at all, but the second thing was to understand the real shared experience of it. Betty Friedan had talked about it, whenever that was, ’63, so this was, it was intellectually not new to think that women were isolated and that there was going to be strength in sharing experience. The experience of it was what was so powerful.”
Judith Kates
“I was taking one of those big lecture courses where you had, you know, section meetings, and you were supposed to do certain kinds of reading for your section meeting, and I was a freshman, so I thought, ‘There’s class tomorrow and I have to do the reading.’ I learned afterwards. And I went to the Radcliff library and there were – it was a huge lecture course, you know, hundreds of people in class – there were maybe two copies of the reading in the Radcliffe library. But of course Lamont, which was the men’s library, had zillions of copies. And I was in this big panic; I had to do this reading. But women weren’t allowed into Lamont. We weren’t allowed in the building. So, the experience was, that my roommate’s boyfriend went into Lamont and I stood outside, and you know it’s a – the library has these huge, you know, enormous plate glass windows – I was literally there with my nose pressed against the glass watching him go to get the reading for me to do, and bring it out to me, so that I could prepare for my class. And I felt, later – now this is in ’69 when we started talking about discrimination and exclusions – all of a sudden, I had a language to understand what that was, and it became a kind of epitome of all the exclusion and real discrimination that existed in our – in my – education. I mean we – everything about our education was really second class in comparison to the men. And I knew it at some level, but I never had a language for it.”
Carol Anshien
“There was a coalition of women who realized that all the women were getting different kinds of salaries for different kinds of jobs. And that was one of the key points then, and I was in my early twenties when I was working there as a public [television documentary researcher] – I was at NET [National Educational Television, now PBS] at the time . . .. I finished college in ’66 and I started working there in ’68 so it was the late 60’s. So everyone met and realized what was going on. There was one point where I realized that a guy was hired to do the same job I was, and I challenged them and they – forced them to have to change my salary as a result. So, the women’s movement had brought those consciousnesses to all of us at the time, and that was the form it started taking then.”
Pain of exclusion from Jewish practice
Many women experienced the pain of exclusion from traditionally male areas of Jewish learning and ritual. For some, this exclusion became an early seed of feminism.
Judith Kates:
“For a long time, already before I was a teenager even, felt the exclusion of it, in being distant from where the action was. And since I was the really good Hebrew student and the one who seemed to be, you know, more involved, in fact, with Jewish studies than my brothers, it really rankled. To the point that, when my younger brother, who really had to be dragged kicking and screaming to his Bar Mitzvah training and his Bar Mitzvah, had this Bar Mitzvah with, you know, the whole shebang, I really made a fuss.”
Carol Anshien:
“‘Cause I used to also lead services at [Jacob H. Schiff Center in the Bronx] – in the junior congregation where there was this one other young man who was invited after his Bar Mitzvah to lead a service in the adult congregation, and I always felt well why couldn’t I be invited to do that? . . . I wasn’t yet at a point where I really spoke out and expressed my disappointment and anger in things like that.”
Menorah Rotenberg:
“There was this idea that if two women stood at the doorway, a man wouldn’t be able to walk through, this was, this was already – these would be girls who were menstruating, you know, over that, because they – you would, they would be impure, walking between two women . . .. A girlfriend and I decided one day that that’s what we were going to do. We were going to stand on either side of the doorway and block it so that the men couldn’t go through. And they pushed us away. But there was so, clearly there was a sense that um, you know you couldn’t do a lot of things.”
Sherry Gorelick:
“I think that being excluded was an early seed for feminism that didn’t actually germinate until decades later, but I know that I resented the exclusion of women and the subordination of women.”
Jayne Guberman: “Within the synagogue for instance, you mean?”
Gorelick: “Yeah!”
Toby Reifman:
“The first Hanukkah that we were married, we got married in June, and, so, I guess I had a menorah, I don’t remember, but we took out one menorah, we put the candles in it, and he said the blessings. And, he didn’t even say them like the nice way that I had learned in Hebrew school, he just kind of said them, you know, sort of matter-of-factly, the way people do when they make blessings all the time and it’s not a big production. And I thought, wait a minute, you know, it was like, what about me? And, somehow the notion that I – I felt somehow like I was less of, like some of my identity had been taken away. That is wasn’t – that I didn’t really have a part in this, that I wasn’t an equal partner in this, that I had sort of left it to him and I wasn’t so happy with that.”
Power of inclusion in Jewish practice
Inclusion in public religious life as equal participants and role models has been a validating and empowering experience for Jewish women. These women tapped into a passion for learning and participation that has become a vital force for change in American Judaism.
Miriam Yasgur:
“I blew shofar in college for the Orthodox minyan for the month of Elul for four years . . .. That was an amazing experience because it was something I love doing, it was something that demanded my presence in an active way in the Orthodox context, and something that was actually respected by the women . . .. You know, it was really unusual, and also, and also appreciated . . .. I somehow always – always! – felt uncomfortable every single time before I’d do it, but before I’d do it I felt so nervous. But these little changes seem so inconsequential, but women were seeing a model of something else, but something that they could see and not be threatened by.”
Judith Kates:
“At the end of a year or so, they invited me to be the gabbai. I cannot tell you what kind of affirmation that felt like to me. It felt more important than getting a Ph.D. You know, it was as though, you know, some whole universe that was really crucial to me was now, suddenly, welcoming me in. And I really wanted to be in with . . .. And the climax of it was that these High Holiday services, which the congregation organizes, which, at that time, had as many as 1500 people . . .. It meant that I was standing up there . . . visibly being in charge, and in front of all those people, and they – most people had never seen a woman doing those things before.”
Carol Anshien:
“And there was one morning when one of the guys who usually led the morning minyan – there were other women who led it, but you know, no one was there on time to lead the service – “
Jayne Guberman: “On this particular day?”
Carol Anshien: “On this particular morning, and one of the guys said to me, ‘You do it.’ And I just went up, and I did it. And that was like, almost more amazing to me than my Bat Mitzvah – almost. Because it was something that I didn’t know I really had in me to do.”Judith Kates:
“Well you know, in the Jewish world though, I feel much more upbeat about – I think that feminism has been the great revitalizing force in, certainly in American Judaism, and in fact it’s had a big effect in Israel as well, but certainly in American Judaism. I think that, I mean, yes the Havurah movement has been very important, but in terms of the real energy that has made a difference in Jewish life generally, I think it’s really been Jewish feminism. The, you know, everyone talks about the Jewish, the renaissance in Jewish learning. The people who are doing all the learning are women! All these programs of adult learning, which I’ve been very involved with, are populated by women. And their impetus is because women are eager, and they’re the ones who have this, you know, tremendous sense of hunger and excitement about it. And it’s spilled over to men, no question about it, but I really attribute the driving force of it and the energy of it to women. Many of them probably don’t consider themselves to be feminists, but I think it’s Jewish feminism that really, you know, was, provided the catalyst and the spark for all of this. So there I feel, you know, very positive about the impact of feminism. I think we’ve made a big difference to the Jewish community.”
Impact of women-only practice
One result of feminism has been women’s recognition of the transformative power of women-only space, ritual, and activity. In the traditional Jewish community in particular, this has provided an important feminist outlet.
Miriam Yasgur:
“I’ll talk about mezumenet, the invitation before grace after meals, because that’s something I learned really the first day of Talmud class . . .. The fact that women actually can and should, when they’re eating together, should have that invitation, should say ‘Haverotai’ – that was something that we were able to see in the sources, like this is allowed, Tosefot [a commentary on the Talmud] says, we don’t get why women don’t do it, and it’s a very – and so it was sort of that reading, and that gave me the confidence to be able to then go back to my father and go back to other places and to say, you know Tosefot says, I’m like, we should do it . . .. And it took years of constant discussion, every single Shabbat . . .. And I started off by doing it as like ‘No, this is halacha [Jewish law],’ like I didn’t start off by saying ‘This is feminism.’ . . . But my father even, you know after he spent the time to look into the sources himself, and you know, he even agrees that it’s the preferred thing to do . . ..”
Toby Reifman:
“In February of ’73 was when the first Jewish feminist conference was. Friday night and Shabbat day of that conference . . . were women-only . . .. And the next morning I went to the traditional women’s service, and I have to say . . . that was a transformative moment. Because it was the first time I had heard women lead the davening [praying], it was the first time I’d heard women read Torah . . .. This was really the first time that women just did everything. And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness! Well, why not?'”
Miriam Yasgur:
“And I was actually the chair of tefillah [prayer] committee, which was a great experience and I loved it, and I loved all of that challenge of creating a women’s prayer space in a community where women don’t count themselves.”
Future of feminism
In reflecting on the past, present, and future of feminism, the interviewees described feminism’s successes as a double-edged sword – one that has improved women’s lives, but also made women more complacent and less united. They acknowledged a generational shift in the meaning of the word “feminism,” and wondered what the feminism of the 21st century will bring.
Sara Davidson:
“I think feminism’s still a scary word to a lot of people, because I think there’s still that stereotype that, like you’re a man-hater, or that you’re a really angry woman, or, that you’re gay, or just, all the nasty connotations that go with it. So it’s like I can, I just remember not wanting to be associated with the hippie-chicks with – at, you know, protests wearing their Birkenstocks, like that kind of freaked me out a little bit, but not all feminists are like that.”
Carol Anshien:
“What I had and what a lot of us had – which I don’t know if is there today – is that sense of hope and that sense of almost messianic fervor. We can do this, we can make these changes. I can make these changes, I can make something happen . . .. The difference today is that they have so much that we didn’t have already. So I don’t know where that’s going to come from, but somehow that sense of ‘I can do it, I can make it better, I can make it different . . .’ even though you don’t know where it’s going to go and what’s going to finally happen, to kind of follow whatever that dream is, to do it.”
Toby Reifman:
“My granddaughter already told me, probably when she was age four, that women couldn’t be rabbis. And I said ‘Well, not in the synagogue that you go to, but in other synagogues, you know, women can be rabbis.’ So she’ll learn that women can be rabbis.”
Judith Kates:
“I think that I’m less optimistic than I used to be, because in the 70’s, I, along with lots of people like me, thought that we were going to help to make work different . . . not just for women, I mean for all of us . . . at least, I think really I was thinking about professional life. I have to acknowledge that I’m, you know, very limited in terms of my experience in terms of class. But in professional life, women’s involvement was going to change things, and instead what’s happened is that women have become now burdened by the expectations of what seems to me to be an inhumane and anti-family system of work in professional life in this country . . .. It’s hard to imagine that changing. It feels as though younger women often just accept that and don’t feel as though there’s any point in trying to fight about it.”
Sara Davidson:
“I’m sure that without even realizing it a lot of people in their 20’s and 30’s are like, well, we don’t have as much to fight for. We’re not just secretaries anymore, like we can get real jobs as executives and managers and businesswomen. You know, we don’t have to stay at home with the kids, we don’t have to get married, just professionally and domestically there are so many more choices that our grandmothers didn’t have and that our mothers fought for.”
Ellen Kanner:
“What pains me about what has happened to the word ‘feminism,’ is that this sense of the, my goodness, the connection among women, I think has been lost. We’re not just talking about breaking through glass ceilings or career opportunities or, it’s, what’s been so valuable to me has been this connection with smart women. And I think, I think that’s been lost. The value of it I don’t think translates into the word ‘feminism’ anymore. And that it has created maybe a generation, or a couple of generations, of women who are back to feeling isolated and unconnected. Career-wise perhaps with wonderful, God bless them, opportunities, but who have lost the sense of connection, and of sisterhood with other women. I think that’s an incredible loss.”
Sherry Gorelick:
“It’s hard to be hopeful because people are not mobilized. They’re pissed, but they’re not mobilized. And this is such a de-politicized society . . .. But you know, one good thing about living a while is that you get to see the changes. And when I think about the fact that I lived through the 1950s, I was a teenager through the 1950s. And there was the whole set of movements in the ’30s that gave us Social Security, that gave us all the, you know, the safety nets. And I thought, what was it like for them to look at us as a generation, and to look at what happened after. You know, there was McCarthyism, which I remember a little bit of, and it must have seemed like everything was falling apart! And then I lived through the ’60s and the ’70s when we thought we were really going to make a new society, and then we got Reagan in the ’80s. And I thought, well this must be just what our parents’ generation must have felt like, like everything just sort of went backwards and crashed to a halt. But having been through those ups and downs, seeing that there are young people now who question things and want to change things, and there’s so much wonderful energy. You know, I think that we just have to live long enough to watch the ups and downs and hope that it’s going to turn around and turn out well.”
These voices demonstrate the powerful impact of feminism on the lives and experiences of Jewish women and their roles in the women’s movement in the past half century of American life.
To convey the full richness of this story, we need to hear from many more Jewish women across the country. If there is a Jewish woman in your life whose story is waiting to be told, we urge you to consider conducting an oral history with her. JWA’s oral history guide, In Our Own Voices, can provide guidance on all aspects of capturing Jewish women’s life stories.
