In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8. Future Directions The recent past provides us with a backdrop for the future. Jewish women on American college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s are becoming the adult generation, the leadership generation, for the remainder of the century. Their participation in all of the socialprotest movements that characterized campus life in the 1960s and early 1970s surely has and will influence their postcollege behavior. Many have become leaders and followers in the women's liberation movement while others, especially after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, have become fervent Zionists, anxious to learn about their history and interested in reforging links to their Jewish heritage. In the late 1970s, there was evidence of a new interest among younger Jewish women in Hadassah and other Jewish women's organizations . Membership among newly married women, single women professionals , and college-age students was on the rise.1 Jewish youth, male and female, played a major role in collegecampus activism in the 1960s.2 One source claimed that twenty percent of the students in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 were Jewish.3 Sociologist Richard Flacks has reported that forty-five percent of the University of Chicago students who participated in the Selective Service System sit-in in 1966 were Jewish.4 Sociologist Nathan Glazer argued in an interesting essay called "The New Left and the Jews" that the Jewish youth in the New Left in contrast to their parents and ancestors who peopled the Old Left, had no cultural foundation in Judaism, and that they shared the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric and philosophy of their Gentile friends. It is impossible to determine how many of the Jewish New Left broke with their politically radical friends and became Zionists, feminists, or moderate liberals. Follow-up studies of college radicals suggest at least three possible routes: making a professional commitment to social-justice causes; dropping out of social activism; and retreating into middle-class, self-fulfilling professionalism. Phyllis Chesler, whom we have already discussed as an example of a suc- Future Directions 141 cessful merger of Judaism and feminism, surely qualifies as an example of the first and third types. She is a successful psychologist as well as a spokeswoman for women's rights. Elizabeth Holtzman, a Congresswoman from Flatbush since 1972, typifies the professionally able woman who channels her commitment to social justice through the legislative process. She is a culturally comfortable Jew who neither proclaims nor denies her Jewish identity. She supports Israel and speaks out against any overt anti-Semitic references; Holtzman has also been instrumental in getting the Justice Department to prosecute Nazis in the United States. She received her education during the turbulent sixties at Radcliffe and Harvard Law School but focused upon her own personal and professional development . The most extreme example of an Orthodox Jewish woman whose involvement with radical feminism led to her break with Orthodoxy was Shulamith Firestone. Her book the Dialectics of Sex (1971) is a devastating critique of capitalism and Western culture. Firestone's thesis is that there is no possibility for respectful human contact between men and women in this society and test-tube babies (which she discussed before the technology had been perfected) should be the only method to create a next generation. Her total disillusionment with religious orthodoxy and Western society in general marks the most complete example of how a sensitive and politically involved woman responds to radical protest movements during her formative years. The college-educated Jewish women of the 1960s and 1970s went on to graduate school, marriage, and career. They differed from their mothers in the level of education and professional training that they acquired, but they displayed little public activism. Their sisters, a decade or less younger, may have joined Zionist clubs or college campuses but generally, true to the "me-ism" of the American culture of the 1970s concentrated on their own studies and postponed worrying about the merger of their Jewishness, their individuality, and their personal ambition. The women's liberation movement gave Jewish women one set of questions and answers to consider while the upsurge of Zionism made them examine their commitment to Israel. Those women raised in traditional Jewish homes had to reconcile their second-class status in the synagogue with their newfound feminism and their awareness of current social-change movements. Many tried to create a new harmony out of feminism, Judaism, and Zionism. Others 142 Consecrate Every Day who were committed to Marxism found...

Share