Jewish Feminists: Complex Identities and Activist Lives (review)

Studies of “Jewish identity” all too often are carried out through questionnaires and surveys and lead to percentages, graphs, and essentialization of their subject. This study, in contrast, based on informal life story interviews with thirty Jewish feminists, provides complex “narratives of identity” (96) that offer a far fuller perspective on individuals’ identity than can a definition of Jewishness based on, for example, percentages of questionnaire respondents who attend synagogue or light candles on Friday nights.

I am always interested in what leads authors and scholars to their topic. I came to study Jewish identity through oral history because I wanted to try to understand the reasons why my sister was so much less interested in our shared Jewishness than I was. In this case, Dina Pinsky had difficulties coming to terms with what she calls the “cognitive dissonance” between her feminism and her Jewish orthodoxy. An attempt to find a way to reconcile her feminism with the patriarchy of orthodox Jewry led Pinsky to seek out Jewish women and men who formed part of the feminist movement in the 1970s, to see what answers they had reached to this problem. The book tells the stories of Pinsky’s interviewees’ struggles, where they had them, with the two identities of Jewish and feminist: both, as Pinsky argues, contested identities that exist on a continuum.

Pinsky located the twenty-five women and five men she interviewed through snowballing, writing to specific people she knew would be part of her target group and inviting volunteers through relevant e-mail lists. She was particularly interested in “discursive construction of personal identities” (7). Given her starting point, she focused in her interviews and her analysis on the places where Jewishness and feminism intersected.

Many social scientists have considered the issue of the researcher as “insider” or “outsider”¹ and the importance of the researcher’s positionality, in Anthias’ terms.² Pinsky is Jewish, had attended Jewish schools, and had a good knowledge of the Yiddish and Hebrew phrases and mentions of Jewish practices that, she notes, would have been outside the frame of reference for a non-Jewish interviewer. But she was much younger than her interviewees. Additionally, although she had much in common with the religious Jewish women she interviewed, that group made up less than a third of her interviewees. She probably had far less in common with those interviewees who called themselves secular Jews, cultural Jews, or, in one case, a “culinary” Jew. She remarks on the greater ease with which this nonreligious group of Jewish women was able to live their feminist lives, not finding the patriarchy of orthodox Judaism conflicting—because they did not themselves feel bound (as Pinsky did) by those constraints. She recalls that one informant could not even understand her question about the dissonance between her feminism and Judaism; that particular narrator asked Pinsky, as interviewer, why a religious Jew would even be a feminist. In her introduction, Pinsky talked about the importance of researchers “explaining where they stand.” In the spirit of feminist research, it is increasingly expected that researchers will discuss their misgivings and difficulties within interviews.³ However, despite the fact that it must have been an uncomfortable moment for her, she lets this informant’s incredulity at the possibility of the existence of religious Jewish feminists (like Pinsky herself) pass without comment.

One important issue that Pinsky represents on behalf of her informants is the invisibility of anti-Semitism on the Left. She notes that “in the multicultural debates of the 1980s and 1990s Jewish oppression was rarely seen as a legitimate concern” and that “it has often been considered inappropriate to include Jews in the long list of marginalized groups” (69). Several of her interviewees report a sense of something like shame in bringing out “Jewish issues,” that these might detract from the focus on feminism. Several were aware that “Jews” were often missing in the lists of identities covered in feminist book...