Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices From the Women’s Liberation Movement by Joyce Antler (review)

One only need crack the inside cover of Joyce Antler’s new volume, Jewish Radical Feminism, for visual evidence attesting to the importance of her scholarly work. Displayed over the interior pages are the labeled photographs of forty seminal radical American feminists who advocated for change from both inside and outside the Jewish community. They are brought into shared focus for the first time in this work, a novel “collective” of Antler’s own making. While scholars and lay people interested in topics including the birth of postwar feminism(s), the rise of gay rights, the origins of gender studies, and the push for egalitarianism within Judaism’s denominations may quickly identify several of the pioneers of these movements by perusing these portraits, never before has a scholar brought these diverse voices together to explore the impact of Jewishness on these women’s actions and life choices.

The pages within only build on this exciting visual teaser. Antler begins her study by identifying an open secret in the study of postwar American feminism: that a surprisingly large number of feminist leaders and thinkers identified Jewishly. Fascinatingly, not only did previous studies overlook possible connections between radical feminists’ Jewishness and activism, but in conversations with several of these women, whom Antler engaged with during the course of her research, the activists themselves admitted that they had not acknowledged one another’s Jewish identities, or even ways in which their own backgrounds might have shaped their activist trajectories. To unpack and interrogate this connection between Jewishness and activism, in addition to extensive research into the writings (published and archival) of her subjects, and the existing scholarship, Antler conducted her own form of “consciousness raising” conversations with over forty radical feminists, sometimes in ways that echoed their own collective group work in the late 1960s to the 1980s, which identified and supported their camaraderie through the duration of these women’s circles. Many of these conversations stemmed from a 2011 conference Antler convened at New York University, “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity,” which invited women who were Jewish and active in radical feminist circles in addition to those women who pushed radical feminist influences into Jewish communal institutions and politics. These two groups, as Antler relates, “had not met each other before or directly interacted before” the proceedings, and by putting their voices and experiences into conversation with one another, Antler hoped that the conference, and certainly, this subsequent volume, would demonstrate “that Jewishness and feminism profoundly impacted each other and the revolutionary feminist movement of our time.” (4)

With such vivid material, Antler gives her subjects as much breathing room as possible to individually consider and connect their Jewish backgrounds to their chosen paths of activism. To do this, Antler splits her work into two broad sections, with the first charting regional radical feminist circles in which the vast majority of participants hailed from Jewish backgrounds, but participated in causes almost exclusively outside the Jewish communal world. The second section of the volume looks at how Jewish women exposed to radical feminist thought and action advocated for greater visibility in Jewish communal circles such as within denominational life through groups like Ezrat Nashim, the dual invisibility many Jewish lesbian feminists experienced within both organized Jewish and gay life, and how Jewish feminists attempts to foster global sisterhood encountered the impacts of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the 1970s and 1980s as detailed primarily through the proceedings of the three United Nations Conferences on Women. Antler attempts to cover this diverse and rich landscape through deep analyses of individual feminists and the collectives that they identified with in these decades.

With such an ambitious project, some aspects succeed more than others, though the shortcomings do not detract from the importance of the overall work. For example, using the regional framework in Part I to explore Chicago’s “Gang of Four,” New York’s Radical Women and Redstockings...