In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
to be no easy task to Jewish feminists. Although American Jewish women quickly embraced feminism, they equally quickly discovered, as Umansky remarks, that “they were embraced as women but scorned as Jews” (1988: 351). Jewish feminists sought recognition of their particularity within the American women’s movement not only because they had specific issues to come to grips with but also because they were reluctant to conceal an important component of their identity, that is the centrality of Jewishness, in the name of feminism. However, the lack of recognition of their Jewish ethnic, cultural, and religious identity by the black as well as white Christian feminists within the general feminist circles made many Jewish women realize that the price of total acceptance within the feminist community was to repudiate or simply disregard their Jewishness, with which they vehemently disagreed (Fishman, 1989: 13; Hyman, 2003: 301).
By 1980 Jewish feminists had to combat not only ‘subtle’ expressions of hostility to their Jewishness and anti-Jewish prejudices and stereotypes but also overt manifestations of anti-Semitism that had emerged both within the American women’s movement and in the international feminist community. During two United Nations International Women’s Conferences in Mexico City (1975) and in Copenhagen (1980), Jewish feminists were faced with blatant examples of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism coming not only from delegates representing other countries but also from their American co-nationals (cf. Pogrebin, 1992: 149–160; Fishman, 1995: 9–11; Antler, 1997: 274–284). In 1982, American Jewish feminist, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a participant of the two conferences, published a forceful article “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement” in Ms. magazine, in which she denounced “anti-Semitism and sexism” as the “twin oppressions” of women, revealing the ubiquity of anti-Semitism on the radical left as well as the political right, within the black community, and among Christian feminists who blamed Judaism for the birth and the theological legitimation of patriarchy as the cultural system oppressing women, for the death of Jesus, and for sexism within Christianity.35 Most importantly, she identified the “three i’s” as ways in which Jewish women experienced anti-Semitism: “invisibility (the omission of Jewish reality from feminist consciousness),” “insult (slurs, Jew-baiting, and outright persecution),” and “internalized oppression (Jewish self-hatred).” Finally, she declared that anti-Semitism equaled racism, responding to black feminists’ conviction that “anyone with white-skin privilege [could not] be oppressed” in such a way: “some ←70 | 71→people see white racism as the only evil on earth, but ignore anti-Semitism, which is the oldest form of racism” (1982: 45+).
Similarly, two years later, in an article published in a general book of feminist theology and spirituality, Judith Plaskow provided American feminists with an analysis of anti-Semitism as “the unacknowledged racism” of the women’s movement. By recounting anti-Semitic jokes and references to anti-Semitic stereotypes such as “[the Jewish American] Princess/Jewish intellectual/rich Jew/pushy Jew/cunning Jew, etc.” heard by Jewish women at various women’s meetings, Plaskow demonstrates that anti-Semitism is prevalent in the women’s movement, and yet Jewish feminists’ concerns are trivialized and they are accused of “Jewish paranoia” when they vigorously protest the anti-Semitic jokes and publicly complain of anti-Semitism (2005: 94–99). Similar observations are made by other American Jewish scholars, such as Sylvia Barack Fishman (1995: 11–12) and Edward S. Shapiro (1995: 249), who also point out that increased intermarriage might be one of the effects of the dissemination of the negative images of Jewish women, in particular the Jewish American Princess (JAP) stereotype, not only within the women’s movement but also in the American Jewish community itself.
Jewish feminists were rarely critical of American women’s movement except when the issues of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism or Jewish identity were brought up, but they frequently avoided some prominent themes typical of general American feminism. Moreover, they differed from American feminists in their attitudes towards the family. In the early stages of the feminist movement, American feminists were widely perceived as prioritizing professional success and public activity over women’s traditional domestic roles. Moreover, the worth and importance of childbirth and childcare were also devalued, mostly because these roles, as Anne Roiphe remarks, “were associated with all our other deprivations, [consequently] many women turned away with disinterest from the entire enterprise of bringing up the next generation” (1986: 74). Many feminists depicted the nuclear family only as a patriarchal source of women’s oppression (‘a woman’s prison’), failing to acknowledge the satisfactions it offered to both women and men. Additionally, they trivialized or ignored the stress experienced by women who sought to combine careers and family life (cf. Fishman, 1989: 6–7; Hyman, 2003: 304–305). Such a negative attitude to the family as displayed by the American feminists in the early stages was criticized by Betty Friedan in her 1981 book The Second Stage. She asserted that because of their perceived hostility to the family, feminist ideologues were unsuccessful in appealing to the majority of American women, whose sense of personal identity was deeply rooted in family life and closely connected to their domestic roles. “The women’s movement,” she notes, was “being blamed, above all, for the destruction of the family. Churchmen and sociologists proclaim that the American family, as it has always been defined, is becoming an ‘endangered species,’ with the rising divorce rate and an enormous increase in single-parent families […]” (Friedan, 1981: 22). However, as the movement was evolving over the years, the feminists gradually understood that “a full ←71 | 72→family life, a loving connection to the next generation, was as necessary as our liberty and must be incorporated into our lives” (Roiphe, 1986: 74).
Jewish feminists conveyed a slightly different vision of the family than American feminists. Although there were voices such as that of Martha Ackelsberg’s who insisted that the Jewish community should accept and encourage a number of alternative household styles (besides heterosexual nuclear families) in order to ensure the survival and continuity of Judaism (1987: 76–78), the value of the Jewish family, on the whole, was not denigrated. Jewish feminists defended the family, perceiving its role as the central unit in Jewish communal life. For example, Susan Handelman, rejected the claim made by Ackelsberg in Sh’ma magazine that Jewish strength could be separable from traditional normative Jewish family life. By referring to excerpts from the Book of Genesis, Handelman demonstrates that the Jewish family has always been the most important and enduring institution in the history of Judaism. Not only does the family educate the young and support Jewish institutions, but it is also the symbolic representation of Jewish values. What we can infer from her compelling article is that it is impossible to speak of Judaism without the primacy of the traditional Jewish family, which is “the foundation of Jewish life and guarantor of Jewish survival,” and that any “attacks on the Jewish family” are, in fact, directed at both the Jewish religion and culture (1987: 73–76).
Not surprisingly, in view of their commitment and loyalty to the Jewish family, Jewish feminists showed true understanding of the concerns expressed by Jewish communal leaders encouraging Jewish women to have more children to compensate for the Holocaust or for the increasing intermarriage rate in America. Jewish feminists were also aware that the main threats to the Jewish family, as presented by Jewish sociologists and demographers, were not only assimilation and intermarriage, but also the low birth rate, the high divorce rate, dissolving families, delayed marriage and single life choices. In a nutshell, a feminist perspective on the Jewish family has been best articulated by the writer Anne Roiphe in her article in Tikkun magazine, “a truly feminist position does not mock the family and a Jewish feminist position must by definition cherish the home and value the work that is done there” (1986: 71).
On the whole, Jewish feminism, which has been highly successful in its efforts to end the exclusion of women from spiritual and communal leadership and help women to reclaim their rightful place in Jewish history (see also Section 1.3.3 in this chapter), has also enabled many secular Jewish feminists to (re)discover a place for themselves within the community of Jews, and embrace their Jewishness. Paradoxically, this fact was largely attributable to the erasure and critique of Jewishness as well as the encounter with anti-Semitism in the general feminist movement, to which many of the secular Jewish feminists responded by exploring the meaning of Jewish identity. This led them to the rediscovery of their own Jewish (religious) heritage and identity which they began to assert with pride.