I spent this Sunday and Monday at a conference on Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity at NYU, organized by Joyce Antler, a professor of history at Brandeis, to discuss the connections and disjunctions between Jewish identity and feminism. The conference brought together people from the women’s liberation movement of the late sixties and early seventies, including many of my old friends; feminists who have fought for equality within Jewish institutional life, both religious and secular; and feminists in their twenties and thirties who spoke to the issues of their generation. As is normal in feminist gatherings, panelists used their personal histories as one source of knowledge, connecting their experience with their ideas and political work. Here is the speech I made. If you want to skip the personal bits, cut to the last few paragraphs for some thoughts about the importance of secular space.

 

 

            My Jewish identity and my feminist identity were shaped at the same time, in childhood. I grew up in Milwaukee in a family of more or less assimilated Jews. Milwaukee is a German town and it wasn’t so easy to assimilate there in the 40s and 50s; there was a strong Nazi bund during the war, stores on Wisconsin Avenue still sold Nazi regalia, and restrictive covenants were very much in place. In addition, my mother came from a small country town where her family were the only Jews; they tended to be scared and believed our best chance of survival was to keep our heads down. My father’s family was more middle class, cultured, and self-confident; his sister and her husband were pillars of the local reform synagogue, Temple Emmanuel, where we went every Saturday morning and where I was confirmed and my brothers were bar mitzvah.  

 

            At temple, I absorbed a culture of ethical Judaism based on Hillel’s principle “that which is hateful to you, do not unto others,” and the precept that what God required of me was to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.” I did my best to live by these ideas and still do, but as I grew older I began to notice contradictions between precept and practice in the Milwaukee Jewish community, specifically in relation to black people. Milwaukee was and still is one of the most segregated cities in the country. By 1955, the Civil Rights movement was taking off; I watched the news on TV and was inspired by the heroism of the students who were trying to break down segregation, and by the Montgomery bus boycott. I couldn’t understand why people in temple weren’t marching. This was the year I turned thirteen, the same year my family moved from the West Side to the suburbs as part of that other mass movement known as white flight. I said the move was segregation, and had a terrible fight with my parents that lasted months, a portent of the political gulf that was to grow between us.

 

            I was also tormented and confused by the Jewish community’s attitude towards women. My relatives were always saying I was too smart for a girl. Nobody would ever marry me. If only my brother had my brains and I had his eyelashes. At first I couldn’t understand what they were so worried about. I thought it was good to be smart. Not for girls, they said. I asked my mother, is it true that nobody will want to marry me just because I’m smart? Nobody Jewish, she said. Since there was no inter-dating between Jews and Christians in my high school, I had no social life at all until I was a senior. There was just no way for me to fit into the society in which I was born, no role models for girls like me, except in books. Thank God for the public library. 

 

            Because of the contradictions in my life as a Jewish girl, I became a feminist before there was a women’s movement, before I even knew the word. I read George Bernard Shaw and Ibsen, and studied the suffrage movement. I passed around petitions in my gym class. I argued that girls were as good as boys and should have equal rights. Everybody laughed.

 

            I decided the solution was to get out of Milwaukee, which I did when I went to college. I chose Brandeis, wanting to see what it was like to be in a place where Jews were in the majority and where it was good to be a smart girl. Though I quickly found friends who were sophisticated, secular Jews from NY, it turned out that being a smart girl was still kind of risky. My behavior was not appropriately deferential and I got put down a lot, by teachers and by boys. The worst was when I was chosen to speak at the baccalaureate luncheon. I wrote what I thought was a witty little speech, and got trashed by Abraham Sachar, president of the university, who said my speech was not bright but boorish and he was ashamed of me. My classmates were so outraged that the valedictorian rewrote his speech and made an even bigger scandal the next day. The year after, Brandeis had no student speeches at graduation. The sixties had begun. But my father, who believed in respecting authority, was so furious he wouldn’t talk to me all the way back to Milwaukee.

 

            I haven’t mentioned Israel because it played almost no part in my formative years. Nobody talked about Israel when I was growing up in Milwaukee—not in my community. They didn’t talk about the Holocaust either. They talked about Jewish life in the US. When the man who lived next door suddenly became an ardent Zionist, he was considered very eccentric and people felt sorry for his wife. How the Six Day War changed the focus of American Jewish politics, and how a rightwing version of Zionism gradually became mainstream opinion, have already been mentioned by others.

 

            In Nora Levin’s history of Eastern European Jews, While Messiah Tarried, she describes three different strains of post-Enlightenment Jewish radicalism: Labor Zionism, the Bund, and the assimilated Jews who joined the gentile socialist and communist parties. Of these three groups, only the Zionists survived the Nazis and Stalin’s purges. Naturally people concluded Zionism was the only path to Jewish survival. But that was more than half a century ago. I think it’s time to ask, has Zionism solved our problems or has it merely added another set of problems? And if a national home is not the solution, what is? 

 

            Personally, I do not believe there is any solution to the problem of the Jews except as part of the solution to the problems of everyone else. So that’s what I spend my time on. Since I am a feminist, I concentrate on the emancipation of women, but, again, I do not think it is possible to isolate the problem of women from the general soup in which we all swim. I identify as a proud citizen of the diaspora, what Stalin called “a rootless cosmopolitan,” comfortable almost anywhere and able to meet and work with all different kinds of people without hiding my Jewishness.

 

            I have spent most of my life doing activist work, with some writing on the side—not enough writing, but that’s another story. I have changed the focus of my work according to the needs of the time and what opportunities came my way, so my living has been very insecure but I have managed to do exactly what I wanted.

 

            For the last twenty-five years, I have focused on global feminist work, concentrating on issues of voice out of a sense of identification with women writers in other places who face the same kinds of pressures I felt as a child—all those pressures against smart girls who challenge authority and who get censored, come under death threat, and so on. First in International PEN and then in a new organization I co-founded, called Women’s WORLD, I helped to build a global free speech network of feminist writers that scrutinized the way gender and censorship mesh in different cultures. For me, intellectual and practical work go together so I also helped a number of women under threat move countries and even saved a few lives.

 

            To do this kind of work, I had to figure out the ways in which global capitalism fits together with the rising tide of fundamentalism, and the way both utilize patriarchal structures already in place. One thing I have observed is the way secular space has been shrinking all over the world. Jews have historically been strong defenders of secular space, so people can come together on a non-sectarian basis, as citizens, rather than as members of one or another religious identity group. We had to defend secular space because that was the only way we could prevent our lives from being totally circumscribed by Christianity, the overwhelmingly dominant religion in Europe and the Americas. 

 

            Yet increasingly—as part of the global assertion of rightwing identity politics after 1989—secular space in the US is being nibbled away. I am old enough to remember the Kennedy campaign of 1960, when his Catholicism became an issue, and how careful he was to say that his religion would in no way influence his politics. Today it’s the opposite; people testify that their politics will be ruled by their religion. In the 2000 Presidential campaign, Obama had to say how he was a Christian over and over—partly to prove he wasn’t a Muslim— while Joe Lieberman can’t stop talking about how Jewish he is. (Of course he can’t stop talking about anything.)

 

             Whenever religion takes over public space, it is bad for women. The government almost shut down this week because of right wing Republicans’ religious opposition to women’s reproductive rights. As Jews, we have to fight to preserve the secular part of our tradition and the space in which to be a secular person in the US. Secularism does not mean that everybody has to be an atheist. It means that civil society and government and public life in general should be free of religious authority, so that people of every faith, including apostates and freethinkers and loose women and people who take the name of the Lord in vain, can speak their minds. Without such secular space, women will quickly be silenced.

 

            For this reason, I am part of a new initiative to set up a think-tank based in London, to be called the Centre for Secular Space, which will oppose fundamentalism, defend both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, and promote universality in human rights—the opposite of the kind of cultural relativism fashionable in some circles, that ends up defending what the UN calls “harmful traditional practices” like stoning women to death for adultery, killing or sitting shiva on erring daughters, and not teaching girls how to read. Two centuries ago, the women in this room would not have been taught to read. My grandmother did not know how to read.   In order to defend and enlarge the sphere available to women, including female voice and education, we need to defend universality in human rights and secular space.