Jewish Feminists: Complex Identities and Activist Lives (review)

Dina Pinsky’s Jewish Feminists: Complex Identities and Activist Lives is a slim book that makes a contribution to the literature on Jewish feminist activists. Focusing on Jews who were active in the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it looks at aspects of self-identification and political engagement.

Pinsky is a sociologist by training, and this book emerges from her Ph.D. dissertation. She attempts the difficult task of relying on interviews with individuals to examine important questions about identity, history, meaning and negotiating cultural politics. The research underpinning the book was carried out by means of interviews with thirty self-identified Jews, each with two Jewish parents. Their Jewish orientations span from secular to varying current levels of observance; none, however, are Orthodox. All the interviewees—twenty-five who identify as women and five men—are white and Ashkenazi, and most are currently middle class. While Pinsky did not ask them about their sexual orientations, many of them self-identified to her, six as lesbians and two as bisexual women. The men all appear to be heterosexual, and they self-identify as pro-feminist, which they describe as the proper role for men in the movement. The Jewish literature informing the study reflects the identities of the interviewees.

The book’s primary scholarly aim is to “think critically about the construction of cultural discourses and the integration of diverse identities” (p. 11). Pinsky and her subjects see gender inequality as “interconnected with racial, economic, sexual, and other systems of stratification” and feminism as “part of a larger worldview of political awareness and concern with social change” (ibid.). She found numerous subjects who grew in their self-identification and involvement as Jews through their activism in the (U.S.) American feminist movement. Jewishness as an ethnic and/or cultural identity, and not primarily a religious one, was a prevalent theme.

The book is well organized in four chapters, and the writing is clear. Chapter One, entitled “Torah Warriors,” discusses different approaches the feminist activists Pinsky interviewed have taken toward involvement in religious Jewish matters and modes. One model, which Pinsky associates with the liberal feminist focus on equality within an existing system, has been to seek inclusion of women into specific religious spaces and obligations traditionally occupied or performed by men. Pinsky contrasts this with the feminist model of examining the patriarchal roots of institutions and ideologies with a view to transformation. Her interviewees here engage in feminist deconstruction of Judaism and religious hierarchies, even as they have no clear-cut guarantee as to what the reconstructed Jewish forms will look like. That is a helpful and courageous model of deep transformational work.

Chapter Two focuses on more secular Jewish feminist views and goals. One impulse for Pinsky’s project was to sort through the ways her Jewish and feminist ties and commitments have presented themselves to her as contradictory. Given her own life journey, she expected to find that her interviewees had experienced at least some tensions between Jewish and feminist elements. Even in this new Christian millennium, it may not be uncommon to experience Jewishness and feminism as being at odds. We can see similar paradigms for Jewish queers. However, for the most part, the interviewees did not reflect the author’s expectations. Pinsky presents her subjects as finding general compatibility between feminism and Jewishness. The connection to a Jewish focus on social justice is made more explicit in this chapter. Here, activists engage in a multidimensional process, enacting and understanding their Jewishness through their justice activism, while simultaneously drawing on their experiences as Jews and their understanding of Jewish history/Jews in history to inform their political views and propel their social justice activism.

Chapter Three explores trajectories of Jewish feminists active in the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, moving forward in history. Mainly U.S. based, many were also active in international feminist conferences. Here again, the identifications of Pinsky’s white, mainly middle-class subjects reflect stereotypes of Jewish...