Joyce Antler. Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History. New York: New York University Press, 2018. viii + 453 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-0763-0.
Reviewed by Sarah Imhoff (Indiana University)
Published on H-Judaic (August, 2019)
Commissioned by Barbara Krawcowicz (Jagiellonian University)
Jewish women seemed to loom large in second-wave feminism in the United States. Both professional historians and interested observers have noted their voices. The contours and the causation of their participation have certainly been the topics of speculation at numerous book clubs, dinner parties, and informal academic chatter. Yet two foundational questions remain for scholars. First, when they were only about 3 percent of the US population, why were Jewish women such a large proportion of the ranks of radical feminists? And second, why did they not discuss Jewishness, either among themselves or with the greater public?
To answer these questions, Joyce Antler embarked on a historical quest to explore the relationship between Jewishness and feminism. The quest also led her to study another group of Jewish feminists: the women who were involved in Judaism or Jewish institutions and brought feminist critique to theology and practice. Women such as theologian Judith Plaskow and Reform rabbi Laura Geller sought to identify and transform Judaism to be less patriarchal and more inclusive of women. These Jewishly invested feminists were not always in close contact with the radical feminists whose main communities were the broader feminist movement, but they did sometimes take inspiration from those feminists.
Antler’s sources show an impressive depth. Her documents include those that were published, unpublished, and in-between—like those typed, facsimiled, and circulated among feminist groups. She did hundreds of hours of interviews, both with women and their families. The project also builds on Antler’s background of years of other research projects on American Jewish women. (In fact, some of her best anecdotes and stories come from other projects for which she talked to American Jewish feminists.) Perhaps most significant, in 2012, Antler hosted a conference at which many of the women from these two feminist circles met for the first time. There she had them discuss their own sense of Jewishness and its relationship to their feminist life trajectories.
Antler identifies the genre of her book as prosopography, history writing through multiple biographies. This kind of biographic collection, she notes, not only gathers information about the individuals collected together between the book covers but also suggests something about the wider society: it may shed light on who belongs, who is an outsider, how power works, and how norms can change. For all of its benefits, however, prosopography presents significant narrative challenges. How can an author tell a collection of individual stories together in a coherent way? In what order should they appear, and how will readers follow and weave the stories together? Though these issues may not be soluble, Antler nevertheless creates a series of chapters that have a sense of coherence and relationship.
The first half of the book tells the story of radical feminist activists who were Jewish. In truth, telling the story of radical feminist activist collectives and other groups would mean telling the stories of Jewish women whether a historian intends to or not. Antler most certainly intends to. Using publications, other documents, and interviews, she brings to life the story of Chicago’s “Gang of Four”: Heather Booth, Amy Kesselman, Vivian Rothstein, and Naomi Weisstein. She tells the story of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, most famous for the 1973 book Our Bodies, Ourselves. She also explores other networks in New York and Boston. In each of these cases, she tells the women’s stories, but she also pushes them to say something more, something about their Jewishness.
Through these interviews, and through Antler’s analysis, we learn about the individuality of each person. But we also learn something about the group. Why were so many Jewish women involved in radical feminism? Antler, and many of the women she interviewed, suggests that Jewish values matched up with feminist values. But what, one might ask, are these Jewish values, and how were they different from other Americans’ values? Antler identifies “multiple types of Jewish stimuli”: “Jewish women’s affinity for critical thinking,” “emphasis on teaching and learning,” the “ethnic revival” of the 1970s and 1980s, and social justice ideals (p. 356). Some also noted the way Jewish spaces allowed or even promoted sexism, perhaps further drawing their attention to the issue. Although in retrospect many saw their Jewish upbringing as somehow harmonizing with feminist activism, at the time many of the women did not link their feminism to Jewishness or Judaism.
Part 1 is titled “We Never Talked About It.” The “It” is Jewishness. That silence had more than one reason, and probably different reasons for different women. Some did not consider Jewishness as an important part of their self-understanding. Alix Kate Shulman, for example, only in later conversations with Antler “reassessed her Jewishness as a factor in her feminist awakening” (p. 76). In the 1970s, she did not see it as important. Antisemitism may have also played a role for many women; it certainly existed within the women’s movement, as Antler shows. But perhaps most widespread was the sense that proclaiming their own Jewishness ran against the spirit of the very political causes they championed. Antler notes that members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), another politically radical group with a high percentage of Jews, rarely acknowledged Jewishness. The Chicago feminist Vivian Rothstein summed up this stance when she said to Antler: “Why would we identify ourselves as Jews when we wanted to promote a vision of internationalism and interfaith and interracial solidarity?” (p. 12).
The other group of women explicitly wanted to identify themselves as Jews, not only because they felt it to be a central part of who they were but also because, from their feminist standpoints, they wanted to change what it meant to be a Jewish woman. Antler tells the stories of Jewish feminist theologians, secular feminists, and lesbian feminists—Plaskow, Geller, Rachel Alpert, Blu Greenberg, Aviva Cantor, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the Vilde Chayes, and others. Each individual and group identified their own set of concerns and made their own particular interventions, but what all had in common was a desire to remake Jewish communities for the better rather than abandon them.
The conclusion says that the book ends in the 1980s, but in fact it expands beyond that. Some of the events that shaped the book most are those that took place in the last decade: all of the women who attended the conference and all of the women who were interviewed spent time talking to Antler recently. In most cases, it was from their vantage point in the 2000s and 2010s that they reflected back on their feminist participation in the 1970s and 1980s. In many ways, the book is a timely reflection on what it means to be a feminist, which roads were not taken, and how intersectionality shapes the personal and the political.
Yet there is one woman who is largely missing from the narrative of this book: Antler herself. She plays a crucial role not only in writing their stories but also in bringing these stories into existence. Antler acknowledges that it was at her own 2012 conference that the two groups of women—Jews from the radical feminist movement and feminist critics of Judaism—came together to see their similarities. “For a number of them, it was the conference I convened at NYU and the probing interviews I conducted with them that belatedly summoned up these associations or, as Vivian Rothstein put it, ‘instigated’ these connections” (p. 350). Even more than bringing together these two groups of women for the conference, she asked each of these groups to reflect on the relationship between their Jewishness and their feminism. In many of the cases, she recognizes, it was her questioning that generated their own reflection, even their own experience of the relationship of the two. Antler, as an American Jewish feminist, surely connected with some of these women and elicited stories and self-reflections from them that a different researcher might not have been able to hear. The absence is surely disciplinary: scholars from other disciplines, such as feminist anthropologists, dedicate book time and space to considering their own role in the story they tell. Historians are more likely to put themselves in the background, if they appear in the picture at all. Still, Antler’s own story plays a crucial role in this understanding of Jewish feminism.
Antler is a first-rate historian. Her work manages to answer the question of Jewish women’s representation and self-understanding in the context of feminist movements without either overgeneralizing or individualizing; the answers were not the same for everyone but neither were they wholly unique to each person. Jewish Radical Feminism collects and tells stories from a feminist movement whose importance continues to affect American Jewish life.
Sarah Imhoff is associate professor in Jewish and religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-judaic.
Citation:
Sarah Imhoff. Review of Antler, Joyce, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement.
H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54166
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |