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Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement by Joyce Antler

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.2019.0035

1086-3141

Annelise Orleck,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement by Joyce Antler Annelise Orleck (bio) Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement. By Joyce Antler. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 452 pp. Printed on the inside covers of Joyce Antler's sweeping history of post-1960s feminist movements are arrays of black and white photographs. They are head shots of mostly dark-haired young women who gaze at the camera, some smiling, some intensely staring back at the viewer, brazenly, daringly. A few thoughtfully look away into the distance. At first glance these look like yearbook pictures. In many ways they are, as they introduce the reader to the leading characters in a thickly described study of the roles played by Jewish women in multiple, frequently intersecting, often conflicted struggles for women's rights. Many are well-known—Adrienne Rich, Susan Brownmiller, Alix Kates Shulman, Shulamith Firestone, Linda Gordon, Meredith Tax, Irene Klepfisz, and Ellen Willis—some less so, including Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg, publisher Gloria Greenfield, and health activist Esther Rome. The activist profiles include stories of Jewish women who were central to women's liberation struggles, the women's health movement, reproductive rights groups, organizations of the religiously observant seeking to transform Jewish prayer, liturgy and theology, lesbian feminist collectives, anti-racist campaigns and more. Using prosopography as her overarching methodology, Antler charts the dreams, ambitions, political visions and far-ranging accomplishments of a generation of Jewish women activists. Together they left profound imprints on mid-twentieth-century American politics and American Jewish life, thought, gender norms and relationships with other ethnic minorities. For those reasons, this book represents an important contribution to Jewish history, women's history and American history writ large. In a thoughtful introduction, Antler explains what she hoped to do with this book: nothing less than to recast the history of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and at the same time to rethink mid-to-late twentieth-century American Jewish history. Though these are tall orders for one volume, this book goes a long way toward achieving both aims. It also offers insightful and sometimes profound reflections on American Jewish identity during the mid-twentieth century: pride, ambivalence, intellectualism, bravado, survivor guilt, internalized [End Page 371] antisemitism, loving and fraught relations between Jewish women and men, alliances and tensions between Jews and African Americans. The methodology of collective biography enables Antler to illustrate in detail just how varied American Jewish identity was in the years from World War II to the 1990s. The women she interviewed reflect on upbringings in Orthodox families, in secular Yiddishist milieus, as the offspring of Warsaw Ghetto resistance leaders or Holocaust survivors, as child survivors themselves, as children of communist activists, socialist trade unionists or of middle class assimilationist professionals. They remember varied geographies that defined their youths during the 1940s and 1950s, hiding from the Nazis in Eastern Europe, growing up in the working-class neighborhoods of the Bronx or Brooklyn where everyone or almost everyone was Jewish, or in small Wisconsin towns or Portland, Oregon, where they knew few other Jews. These details are crucial, Antler convincingly argues, to understanding the complexity and variety of American Jewish identity. And of course, since this is a book about women's liberation activists, Antler's subjects also reflect extensively on the ways that their perception of Jewish roles for women shaped them and compelled them to become feminists. Some, like Linda Gordon, were supported by parents who felt that fighting for gender equality was a Jewish value. Many talk of being inspired by upbringings that taught them, consciously or not, that fighting for social justice, especially against racism and economic inequality, was a consummately Jewish way of life. But others, like Meredith Tax, describe growing up in homes marked by the silencing of all things Jewish, including the shame about the Holocaust that characterized so many American Jewish homes. And Tax described running from her sense that "contempt for women runs like a dark thread through Jewish tradition—like the traditions of other religions" (139). Shulamith Firestone, subject of one of the most haunting profiles in...