Anti-Semitism In The Women's Movement
POGREBIN, LETTY COTTIN
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT A Jewish feminist's disturbing account LETTYCOTTIN POGREBIN Why now? Why write about anti-Semitism and the Women's Movement when we have the Moral Majority...
...Bella Abzug, president of Women U.S.A., former member of Congress "At the panel on refugees, we heard these heart-stopping tales about exiles from Chile, about Afghan women refugees, about the rape of the boat women, about Polisario women and children starving...
...Karen Lindsey explains: "The black struggle fits fairly comfortably into a leftist economic analysis: most U.S...
...Diane Gelon, administrator of Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party," says she often heard comments like "It must have been done by Jewish women...
...I understand when someone says, 'My great-grandmother was a slave,' but I don't feel the same understanding from others when I say, 'My aunt was in Auschwitz.'" Evie Beck described invisibility as a form of oppression that works against both Jews and lesbians...
...The official UN document that served as background for the conference agenda reviewed the formation of Israel without ever mentioning the Holocaust...
...In 1979, when United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young resigned after admitting he had met secretly with a PLO representative, many blacks blamed his ouster on "the Jews...
...The parallels are striking: • Just as woman comes in two opposing archetypes, Madonna and whore, so is the Jew split in two: victim (Anne Frank) and victimizer (Shylock...
...Times are harder now—and both anti-Semitism and antifeminism are on the rise...
...They reduced our revolutionary strategy for women's economic self-sufficiency to a Jewish business...
...My mother is a janitor...
...Roll back Zionist one-worldism before...
...it is useful to pornographers, sexual sadists and even to the Christian mainstream in which Eve, the Old Testament temptress, is cast as inventor of Original Sin...
...in schools and jobs where a finite number of slots is reserved for all non-WASPs to divide amongst themselves...
...As for the intellectual put-down, a lot of feminists see women's studies as an organizing tool...
...about anti-Semitism, one feminist asked, "Won't Ms...
...At a conference devoted to "peace," PLO terrorists Leila Khaled and Randa Nabulsi, killers of innocent people, were recognized delegates...
...By making Israel a macho imperial stand-in for all the world's male supremacy, the Women's Movement threw me into the arms of Judaism...
...Again, like many Jews, I have come to consider anti-Zionism tantamount to anti-Semitism because the political reality is that its bottom line is an end to the Jews...
...I can't afford to sign...
...Fifty had been expected...
...the myth of "Jewish power" recasts the Christian majority as pawns, and helps justify repression of the Jews...
...Oddly enough, internalized oppression is a luxury...
...Carruthers goes on to identify "Aryan intrusion" as the means by which Jewish feminists destroy African familyhood...
...While Israel was excoriated for its treatment of its minority women, other nations with far worse records toward their own women escaped comment...
...You stab her under the table...
...Confounding the landscape on the right are: • Neoconservative Jews like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who, along with Reagan Republicans, are smugly anti-affirmative action and antifeminist...
...Of course, while our groups remain divided, our most violent enemies continue to see us as one and the same...
...Feminists could try to understand what education means to someone like me...
...But when Simcha Chorish, an Iraqi Jew, spoke about her husband being shot without charges or a trial, and about having to escape to Israel with her children, the place turned savage...
...Why write about anti-Semitism and the Women's Movement when we have the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan to worry about...
...In my community in Baltimore, I am vulnerable as a feminist...
...she's a fascist,' " says El?nore Lester...
...I asked that the prayer be struck from the record in respect for non-Christian women and the chair, Libby Koontz, made it official...
...It's that simple...
...The KKK, Nazis, White Solidarity Movement and National States' Rights Party burn crosses and curse Jews, blacks and feminists in one fiery breath...
...In Carole Clemmons Gregory's poem, "Love Letter," a black Delilah suggests that the Jewish Samson would use his God-given strength to kill black people...
...thus sexism absorbs men's economic frustration by buying them off with privatized patriarchal power...
...When asked if she was flatly denying the sexism in Judaism's origins, Plaskow replied: "Obviously Judaism is patriarchal...
...the theory for which is emerging from a predominantly Jewish elite group...
...You women should make peace for your countries,' said the official...
...And in the ears of many, the stated goal "to purify Palestine of the Zionist presence" is alarmingly reminiscent of the Nazi dream of purifying the Aryan race...
...Nevertheless, Jewish women concerned about anti-Semitism are often scolded for raising "side issues," and are asked to wait until "larger" inequities are solved...
...Feldman is a Jewish name, not a male name...
...To me, Zionism is simply an affirmative action plan on a national scale...
...Similar anti-Semitic in-nuendos are used today to mobilize Polish nationalism, a trick that utilizes Jew-hating even in a country that has only a handful of Jews left...
...or why we are cheered when we critique the Bible for its antiwoman bias but not when we criticize feminists for the^r anti-Jewish jokes...
...ruling Jews take all the honey, leaving only the wax for you Christian Goyim...
...When the reality of the Holocaust is denied or trivialized or labeled "Jewish self-centeredness," Dworkin feels the chill of anti-Semitism...
...Yet, Judaism takes the rap for the death of the female deity in several Spiritualist/ Matriarchist books, most notably The First Sex, by Elizabeth Gould Davis (Putnam's, 1971), and A Different Heaven and Earth, by Sheila D. Collins (Judson, 1974...
...Women are too powerful" was the underlying impetus for the slaughter of 9 million "witches" and the advancement of a repressive patriarchal religious establishment...
...blacks are poor or working class, with little access to good jobs or the education that might lead to them...
...As noted, neither does the oppression of women...
...Jews really control the press," "White women really control the wealth" and "Black matriarchs really control black men" are three equally inaccurate clich?s invented to mask the overwhelming concentration of power and money in the hands of white Christian men...
...In Copenhagen, when Jihan Sadat was speaking, Leila Khaled led the walkout...
...When did anti-Semitism turn into a "balanced issue," with Palestine Liberation Organization interests skewed into a respectable other side...
...Neither of them went to high school...
...Pianist-composer Davida Goodman also uses the name Ishatova, which is "good woman" in Hebrew...
...This sort of guilt-tripping and radical myopia is even more blatant in connection with Israel...
...Sonia Johnson, ERA activist, author of From Housewife to Heretic...
...I understand that large numbers of Jewish women, far out of proportion to our percentage in the population, have worked for civil rights, welfare rights, Appalachian relief—issues that did not necessarily affect our own lives...
...A black woman, a Jewish woman, and a white woman...
...They only did one thing right: they killed the Jews.' "I made choking sounds...
...Invisibility...
...Problem 4 Religion, Gods and Goddesses: The 5,000-Year-Old Misunderstanding There is a morning prayer in which every Orthodox Jewish man thanks God for not creating him a woman...
...Only now am I reclaiming the positive qualities of the Jewish mother in me: the strength, the warmth, the characteristics of the shtetl...
...Jewish woman is as bland in its way as working woman, Democratic woman, Southern woman...
...Fundamentalist Christians like Jerry Falwell who claim to support Israel, but whose support does not seem to be founded on any dedication to Jewish survival but on a biblical prophecy that says a Jewish state must exist in order to set the stage for Jesus' Second Coming—after which all Jews must convert or be damned...
...their disavowal of their parents' values and fear for their leftist credentials prevent them from identifying with other Jews...
...Plaskow, who is also coeditor of Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (Harper & Row, 1979), says of those authors: "They overlook the fact that many goddess-worshiping cults were themselves patriarchal or that the Goddess was being dethroned long before...
...The myth of "female power" (in terms of sexual or maternal omnipotence) recasts the male in the vulnerable role and thus justifies discrimination against women...
...What had1 been shushed out of me is up front now...
...Some people see white racism as the only evil on earth, but ignore anti-Semitism, which is the oldest form of racism...
...the grating irony of equating Jew and Aryan is evidently lost on her...
...Just as legal remedies are justified in reparation for racism and sexism, the Law of Return to Israel is justified, if not by Jewish religious and ethnic claims, then by the intransigence of anti-Semitism...
...It condemned Jews for populating Israel without noting that after World War II, virtually every country turned away Jewish refugees...
...In Illinois, fliers bearing a picture of a mutilated woman warned that if the ERA passed, women would be drafted to fight in Israel and would end up looking like her...
...But, as the preceding remarks show, in the daily activities and workshops Jewish women found little sisterhood—and diversity only in the ways in which they were isolated and defamed...
...I have heard that many—including some peace-seeking women—fear for their lives...
...The existence of some leisured women and some affluent Jews is claimed as proof that all members of both groups are privileged...
...And who needs goddesses anyway...
...I obliterated my own Jewishness...
...They told me, 'I'm Jewish' or 'I live with a Jew' or tried to make some connection...
...On hearing that I planned to write an article for Ms...
...Having opened the windows on one secret identity and not only survived but flourished, lesbians seem less willing to live with another part of their identity repressed—and more willing to brave the consequences within feminism for calling attention to those "special Jewish sorrows...
...Chiae Herzig, co-president...
...It's just not cool to be a Zionist...
...The Jewish Princess stereotype—a materialistic child-woman, indulged by her parents and educated to lure a husband—runs dead against the feminist ideal of a strong, up-front, self-supporting radical who demands her rights, and makes her own life...
...I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto...
...That this game of blacks versus Jews is continued in the Women's Movement is one of the gravest failures of feminism...
...Attacked from the left for being too well-off and from the right for being too left wing, Jews lack even the contingent power of dependable political allies," says Willis, describing our classic double bind...
...What concerns me as much as these unholy alliances are those feminists who seem to believe that a monolithic right-leaning "Jewish vote" has been responsible for the defeat of some feminist issues or candidates when, in fact, we have our Ayatollahs and our Gandhis like every group...
...Why not dignify ourselves with the actual achievements of real women: shelter, food gathering, the invention of language...
...All-purpose inferiors, both women and Jews are reminded incessantly of how we differ from the "norm...
...have to give equal time to the PLO...
...Incredible...
...When someone attacks you as an 'outspoken, intellectual female from New York,' you're not sure if they're putting you down as a feminist, a Jew or an Easterner...
...Since then, I have a feeling of 'my people' with Jewish women...
...Her questions made me realize that almost all the women I interviewed called themselves "Jewish...
...Jewish stock types also present extra problems in feminism...
...few said, "I'm a Jew...
...Many Western and Third World black women unquestioningly sided with the Arabs despite the long history of black slavery in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, and the Sudan...
...Jews have historically profited as slumlords and merchants from the suffering of black people...
...The left insists that its anti-Israel position doesn't mean it doesn't like Jews...
...I considered why Jewish women are validated by the Women's Movement when we trudge through Judaic subcultures ruffling beards with our demands for reform but not when we bring Jewish consciousness back the other way into feminism...
...This hurts us deeply...
...Why the gap when women speak bitterness about anti-Semitism...
...she asked...
...Also I was finally able to admit that the feminist format for consciousness-raising is not right for me...
...my father works as a cabdriver and a hospital worker...
...Jews are too powerful" was the argument Hitler used to promote himself as champion of the working class against rich "Jewish bankers...
...On the lunatic right, overt anti-Semitic violence, vandalism, swastika-painting and desecrations have increased in the last three years...
...The black woman yelled back at me, 'That's why you people have always been in trouble, and are always going to be in trouble.' I asked her, 'What do you mean by "you people...
...Many Jewish woman specifically resent that, for years, they have talked openly about "confronting" their racism, while, with a few noteworthy exceptions, black women's anti-Semitism has been largely unmentionable...
...She said she couldn't understand what was wrong with saying Zionism is racism...
...Similarly, Jew (landlord, teacher or homemaker-employer) serves as a buffer between the dominant class and the underclass, thus deflecting their rage onto a convenient scapegoat...
...It made no mention of the fact that under Israeli influence there has been a 93 percent increase in the number of Arab girls attending school, or that in 1976 women in the territories got the vote, or since 1967, gynecological and child-health services have shown significant improvement for Palestinian women living under Israeli control...
...I was amazed when both Jews and non-Jews discarded certain Jewish names because they thought having a Jew associated with an issue would hurt...
...But it was the speak-out on "passing" that brought forth visceral pain and dammed-Up tears...
...That prayer has probably been spoken more often by anti-Semitic non-Jews than by Jewish worshipers...
...Mothers were brainwashed to want their children chosen The "competition of tears" foolishly pits slavery against the Nazi genocide as though inhumanity were a zero-sum phenomenon and there was only so much moral outrage to go around...
...The average black is not sympathetic toward any white person who is brutalized or discriminated against...
...and Zionism is racism...
...I try to give feminists a SO-minute crash course in Jewish history, but they don't want to know," says Judy Dlugacz...
...Copenhagen was no place for the truth...
...A lot of black women resist the Women's Movement because they think it's full of pushy Jewish women who have nothing to do but complain...
...I was completely unprepared for my fear...
...Other Jewish women warned me not to carry it...
...Most disturbingly, Thelma Thomas Daley, then president of Delta Sigma Theta, a predominantly black sorority of some 100,000 members, took off from the Young affair to accuse Jewish groups of "subverting affirmative action programs...
...Andrea Dworkin put it brilliantly: "In the world I'm working for, nation states will not exist...
...We make the "superior" group angry because we want to maintain our uniqueness without being penalized for it...
...One night an American black woman rose to accuse our delegation of deferring to the Jews...
...While the right plays new tricks with American Jews, the problems on the left are old and familiar...
...I was brought up to take risks...
...Yet it's one thing when we articulate it in our terms and another when it is taken up by Christians as evidence that Jews are more patriarchal than any other people...
...Of course, it should not surprise us to find anti-Semitism within feminism...
...According to Klanwatch, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, men and women in the KKK are "prepared to kill black people and Jews in the 'race war' their leaders say is coming...
...When negotiating the financial terms of a contract, I've been accused of being 'cunning,' a 'cheap Jew' or of 'Jewing someone down.' When Evie Litwok and I gave financial workshops, several women said we were only into money because we're Jews...
...Three New York women protested when the 1981 International Women's Day forum sponsored by a "Committee Against Genocide" paired a speaker decrying apartheid with a speaker decrying Zionism—implying they are comparable evils—and when Womanews, a feminist paper, chose to list the forum as an important women's event...
...They do not see the Israeli-Palestinian problem as a conflict between two national movements with complex historical origins...
...My whole family Continued on page 49 in Eastern Europe was almost totally wiped out...
...Do we avoid the noun as too strong an embodiment, too central an identity...
...Lyndon LaRouche's U.S...
...But in the world I live in, I want there to be an Israel...
...The women who organized the event—Sharone Abramowitz, Marsha Gildin, Chaya Gusfield and Pnina Tobin—filled the program with a history of anti-Semitism, a short skit on women resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto, a presentation on Jewish women in the labor movement, another on anti-Semitism in the early suffrage movement and a listing on a blackboard of all the Jewish stereotypes called out by women in the crowd...
...Before accusing us of overreacting, our Christian sisters should try to understand the immediacy of our mourning and the 5,000 years of terror that echo in our souls...
...But PLO moderates, rare as they are, seem to have been silenced by their own violent hardliners...
...Like many, I cling to hopes of a two-state solution that does not demand Israel's suicide...
...Andrea Dworkin has altered her behavior to defy the stereotype: "I keep quiet at meetings more than I should because I don't like feeling singled out as the Jew with the words...
...Caught in the big squeeze...
...Women's testimony about anti-Semitic insults is more complex...
...Andrea Dworkin calls it "being insensitive to genocides that are immediate to me...
...I wish I had a nickel for every time a feminist has quoted that prayer to argue the supreme sexism of the Jewish faith," says Pnina Tobin...
...Problem 3 The Three I's What women experience as anti-Semitism varies from invisibility (the omission of Jewish reality from feminist consciousness) to insult (slurs, Jew-baiting and outright persecution) to internalized oppression (Jewish self-hatred, which some call the most pernicious anti-Semitism of all...
...In the absence of peace initiatives and open sisterhood, I am left to assume (according to PLO sentiments expressed in Copenhagen) that the average Palestinian woman would wish me dead...
...I was so embarrassed.' The American answered, 'My Jewish friends saw me too, and I don't give a shit.' " Paula Doress, a Boston-area health activist "We organized a Jewish Women's Caucus to answer the attacks...
...Labor Party and Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby hammer at three themes: the Jews killed Jesus Christ...
...Some readers may be relieved that this report corroborates their own experiences...
...Most of my friends were Christian...
...Also cited by some Jews as deeply offensive were two poems in Conditions 5, the issue on racism...
...Judaism came along...
...Just as Jews have been called more Communist, or more stiff-necked, or more whatever, this kind of projection of humanity's ills onto one group has been used against women...
...Ellen Willis cites the case of Vanessa Redgrave, the pro-PLO actress who "exemplifies a mentality that has flourished ever since 1967, when Israel became the prime metaphor for the powerful Jew: [Redgrave] hates Bad Jews—Zionists—and loves Good Jews—victims, preferably dead...
...I extend my hand with a gun,' she replies...
...how she straightened her despised kinky "Jewish hair...
...There were three hundred KKK in the audience carrying placards that read, 'Kill all dykes, kikes, commies and abortionists,' " she recalls, "and I was three out of four...
...From my new perspective and with my sense of Jewish vulnerability, I understand this world view needs to be expanded to recognize times when sisterhood must bow to "peoplehood" for blacks and Jews...
...Indeed, we question whether their loyalties are first to the State of Israel or to the United States...
...Must we identify as Jews within feminism with as much discomfort as we identify as feminists within Judaism...
...As factual oppression worsens, assimilated Jews have historically been forced to rediscover their Jewishness one way or another...
...Babies were killed to appease them...
...These cranks used to be easy to ignore, but the proliferation of vandalism and assaults in "respectable" neighborhoods makes the fringe seem less remote...
...Black women have been criticized by some white feminists for putting race ahead of sex...
...In the civil rights years, Lindsey recalls, they "identified themselves more as white oppressors than as Jewish oppressed, and their Gentile co-workers did nothing to discourage this view...
...And to give me the chills, for not one Jew in Rosa Luxemburg's Polish town was left alive by the Germans in World War II...
...That style is a threat to some women...
...Women of all races applauded her statement...
...At the university where I teach, posters for my course on "The Jewish Woman' were ripped and defaced...
...There were signs that Copenhagen would be exploited for a similar purpose, and some of us felt a petition warning against this time bomb might defuse it...
...Somehow, leftists who espouse one-world transnationalism make exceptions for "national liberation" struggles and independent nation states in Latin America, Africa or anywhere but Israel...
...Esther) Broner, novelist, co-author of the Feminist Hagaddah, author of A Weave of Women (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), professor of English, Wayne State University "Here's the irony of history: In 1975 in Mexico City while Israeli Leah Rabin was speaking, Madame Sadat led the Arab walkout...
...The Rev...
...Inge Lederer Gibel, program specialist in interreligieus affairs of the national staff of the American Jewish Committee The UN Women's Conference held in Copenhagen was an official conference of governments, so of course it mirrored the distinctly non-feminist and mostly anti-Israel complexion of the United Nations itself...
...But becoming visible opens you to attack, I found it easier to tell straight people I'm lesbian than to tell some feminists that I'm Jewish...
...an anti-apartheid resolution might be passed in return for American blacks' compliance on a Palestinian agenda item...
...In Amnesty International's workshop on the torture of women prisoners, women from Ireland and South Africa talked about being tortured horribly in their prisons...
...On January 11, 1981, at the San Francisco Women's Building, 350 Bay Area feminists showed up for a forum on "Anti-Semitism in the Women's Community...
...Given black Americans' special support for African nations, this statement seemed especially insensitive...
...In 1971, Off Our Backs ran a comic strip lampooning "a Jewish Princess named Felicia" who had a nose job, a lawyer father, a dentist husband, three children, a split-level in Jersey, a powder-blue Mustang and played bridge every Thursday...
...think about the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition of the 16th century, the 19th-century pogroms that drove Jews out of Eastern Europe, Stalin's purges, Hitler's "final solution," or the fact that both the Pope and Franklin Roosevelt were silent after receiving graphic early reports on the fate of European Jews in the concentration camps and that "ordinary" French, Italians and Poles turned in their Jews to the Nazis...
...They control the media...
...Liar!' When I tried to speak, a woman in front of me turned and pushed her fist into my face...
...Israel kills babies and women...
...At the same time I understand why women of color find it hard to accept that anyone with white-skin privilege can be oppressed...
...Phyllis Chester, psychologist, author of With Child "One day I was carrying a canvas bag with American Jewish Congress written on it...
...The idea that suffering purifies is Christian, not Jewish...
...in competition for liberal philanthropic dollars...
...I think they've got funny-looking noses myself...
...in transitional neighborhoods and suburbs...
...To build opposition to the ERA, the extremists appeal to anti-Semitic feelings that the Harris and Yankelovich public-opinion polls have found present in one third of Americans...
...Problem 2 The Big Squeeze: Anti-Semitism from the Right and from the Left In the current climate, Jewish feminists have a special need for the Women's Movement to be a safe harbor from two raging storms...
...My point is that anti-Semitism has not yet risen to the level of concern or talk, much less action...
...but when the going gets rough they have their men to protect them...
...It never occurred to them that there were Jews in the room...
...Insult...
...Esther E. Edwards, director of the Regional Office of the National Black Human Rights Caucus, said, "Young was used as a scapegoat to appease Jewish ethnics here and in Israel...
...Problem 1 Failure to See the Parallels Time and again I heard women use the phrase "Jews are the women of the world," or its converse, "Women are the Jews of the world...
...No matter how "un-Jewish" we are, no matter how unobservant, atheistic, disconnected to the Jewish community or the State of Israel, more and more women who were born Jewish are coming to believe they must deal with what that identity means to them and how they feel about other Jews and Jewish issues...
...Another painful phenomenon on the left is the guilt of Jewish children of families who made it into the middle class...
...Reverend Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, followed his claim that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew," with this comment in a subsequent sermon: "Why did God choose the Jews...
...It is necessary for both groups to make an effort to comprehend each other's situation...
...And pornographers, sadists and rapists make interchangeablemse of black women and Jewish women as the ultimate sexualized victim...
...The failure to see these parallels and make them integral to feminist theory has meant that anti-Semitism and we who care about it are not yet taken seriously in the Women's Movement...
...At a retreat organized to discuss sexism and racism, Gibel raised the problem of elderly Jewish women living in poor neighborhoods...
...Self-hatred and denial of a part of oneself or one's origins is a kind of invisibility imposed from within...
...Where does all this leave us...
...Barbara Leslie, NGO Observer, the International Council of Jewish Women "I did a lot of attacking of other people's definitions of Zionism so that they would understand what Zionism really meant...
...One panelist, Esther Broner, asked rhetorically, "Why this eternal buzzing of the Jew...
...The night I went to the New York feminist seder was the first time I'd ever been at an organized Jewish women's event...
...Ren?e Franco runs workshops on black-Jewish issues in Boston and Atlanta...
...I needed to know if these questions were plaguing anyone else...
...A real test of our fabled 'Jewish power' is how powerless Jews were in Copenhagen...
...Luxemburg, a Jew, went on to speak movingly of suffering Africans, Asians and Indians—which at the time prompted one historian to marvel at the phenomenon of a group so capable of compassion for others but only of contempt for its own...
...Bourgeois...
...Lately, so do women...
...What I do not understand is how much we must live through before our non-Jewish sisters can "afford" to make anti-Semitism their concern...
...Many black woman have suffered more for their race than their sex...
...I'm perceived as intimidating and overbearing...
...or because Jewish women are perceived as influential within the Movement and often in the nonfeminist world as well...
...Is this a clue to our self-hatred...
...The old religions were terrible...
...To cure it, we need to examine the five problems basic to Jews and sisterhood...
...Many Jews believe that pro-PLO women in America are expressing their anti-Semitism as surely as pro-Afrikaner whites in South Africa are assumed to be expressing their racism: • Barbara Seaman faults the Southern women's health center that displayed pro-PLO posters on the walls—as if anti-Zionist Third World solidarity went hand-in-hand with justice in health issues...
...I am saddened and angered by feminists who would never call a separatist coffeehouse or women's center sexist, but who are quick to call the Law of Return racist," insists Chesler...
...The mystique of the intrinsic sexual-psychic evil of both women and Jews makes plausible periodic purges of Jews and bizarre accusations "By making Israel a macho imperial stand-in for all the world's male supremacy, the Women's Movement threw me into the arms of Judaism...
...Because anti-Semitism has been an issue at the National Women's Studies Conference, last summer, an ad hoc group called Feminists Against Anti-Semitism (P.O...
...I worried about my feminist friends' commitment to Jewish survival and about their opinions of events in the Middle East...
...Don McEvoy of the National Conference of Christians and Jews puts it succinctly: "Being anti-Semitic is one way for blacks to buy into American life...
...She showed no awareness of the great numbers of Jewish women's groups who have worked for affirmative action from the very start...
...And now, in the Women's Movement, I am made to feel self-conscious about being 'an intellectual.' " As feminists should know well, stereotypes often originate in group survival techniques and coping mechanisms that have been flattened into caricature...
...Unless one consciously explores the connections between all forms of oppression, it is possible to, say, work for black rights and still be a sexist or work for women's rights and still be a racist...
...Both women and Jews have to struggle to have their oppression recognized, even by its victims, because neither misogyny nor anti-Semitism always results in economic privations...
...We are, interchangeably, the "quintessential Other," says historian Paula Hyman...
...editor, a writer and a Jew...
...she played the same Chopin piece that her mother played in the concentration camp and read a poem about her mother...
...Anti-ERA, antichoice Orthodox Jews, such as the organization of rabbinical wives who invited Phyllis Schlafly to be their dinner speaker...
...Many felt trapped in a nightmare of bizarre contradictions: • The nations in which women are most repressed were in control of the official world conference addressing the equality and well-being of women...
...When you're invisible, you lose your voice," she says...
...She, too, had been denying her roots...
...Well, my style is a result of my being the child of survivors of the Holocaust...
...rael through the mud and to declare Zionism racism...
...You do not sit down with her.' "A few days Jater, Shulamit Aloni, an Israeli Member of Parliament, and peace activist, was interviewed by the Danish press...
...What's more, the lunatics have made it seem reasonable and tame when Birchers or fundamentalists call for "a Christian America" or disingenuously stigmatize Jews...
...Cuba si...
...how she allowed herself to be mistaken for Italian or Puerto Rican...
...In the eyes of many, this was tantamount to putting funds for poor Southern women under the control of the Ku Klux Klan...
...against women...
...Yankee no...
...Continued from page 31 Because nations tend to be capricious about protecting Jewish rights, our survival has been tenuous through the ages: Think about the Diaspora Exile, and the crushing defeats by the Romans in the first century...
...Internalized Oppression...
...Their loyalties are not compatible with the struggle of black Americans for equal opportunity under the law...
...To those leftists who excuse their anti-Israel position because of the Begin administration, Dworkin answers: "I resent the expectation that, having been oppressed, Jews should exercise a higher morality running their country than anyone else...
...But are we...
...But the oppression of Jews does not so easily lend itself to a simplistic class analysis...
...The opposite is not to be pro-PLO...
...Comedian Maxine Feldman got police protection when she performed at the conference...
...Are you German?' "One night I heard an Egyptian and a Thai talking with a UN official...
...Insults often result from an ironic overlap between the typecasting of Jews and feminists: Both groups are characterized by outsiders as loud, pushy, verbal, domineering, middle class...
...A British feminist said anti-Zionism turns into anti-Semitism because people define "Zionism as a racial characteristic instead of a cultural phenomenon...
...The Israeli woman is not a human being...
...In the 1960s, I tried to be a hippie mother—white Anglo Southern California mellow," says Tobin...
...Historically, we have been pitted each against other: in ghetto slums as the poorest housing passes to the lowliest newcomer group...
...Some assert that anti-Zionism has become the left's socially acceptable response to "the uppity kike" the way anti-feminism is to "the uppity broad...
...For the first time, I felt afraid...
...In an interview in the New York Times, Daley said of Jews: "We have been patient and forbearing in their masquerading as friends under the pretense of working for the common purpose of civil rights...
...For instance, the Jewish Mother epitomizes the self-sacrificing, maternal role that many feminists most vocally repudiate...
...Prominent Palestinian feminist Raymonda Tawil was left at home for daring to suggest that not only should there be mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO but also Palestinian women had faced oppression within their own ranks...
...I heard a Danish woman tell an American, 'I was handing out PLO leaflets and my Jewish friends saw me...
...The purpose of the Equal Rights Amendment, they say, is to "destroy the white Christian family and discourage the birth of white children...
...Khaled, the only terrorist ever featured on the Style page of the New York Times, was the titular head of the official PLO delegation...
...their distinctiveness is not yet a dignity...
...Why let men's definition of religion be the source of our spirituality...
...And these lines from Judy Simmons' poem, "Minority," seemed gratuitously divisive: mine is not a People of the Book/taxed but acknowledged...
...This article appeared in Ms...
...Yet, within feminism, the attributes and expressive habits culturally associated with Jewish ethnicity—such as being raised to speak our minds, to trade on education and eloquence when there is no other currency, to interrupt or else be interrupted—contradict the ideal of (Quaker meetinghouse turn-taking) sisterhood...
...This hurts us deeply...
...Tobin felt that the forum was important to build Jewish awareness and strength in the face of the rise of the right...
...Jewish women watched a Program of Action adopted (by a vote of 94 to 4) that called for the elimination of Zionism (i.e...
...when I say I see it as serious research, I'm called a bourgeois Jewish intellectual...
...In it he argued that "Jesus was a feminist" because he broke with many Jewish customs that mistreated women...
...4"I said, 'I don't think mugging old women is funny,' " Gibel continued...
...Problem 5 Black-Jewish Relations If parallels between women and Jews are sometimes missed, parallels between Jews and blacks are almost too obvious—so close, in fact, that rather than inspire coalitions, they incite what Susan Weidman Schneider calls "a competition of tears...
...She snarled, 'You know what I mean,' called me a racist, and suggested I go into the next room with her and fight it out physically...
...I do not think criticism of Begin is automatically anti-Semitic any more than criticism of Ronald Reagan is anti-American...
...Barbara Smith, the black feminist writer and activist, said: "I think it's important for Jewish women to claim their oppression but acknowledge their white-skin privilege...
...PLO!' they shouted...
...Here too, there is a parallel: those who would berate us for mentioning anti-Semitism at this time—for "holding the interests of Jews above the interests of women"—ignore the fact that some of all women are Jews and half of all Jews are women...
...Five years before, the PLO had monopolized the Mexico City women's conference to drag IsLetty CottinPogrebin is a Ms...
...Over and over again I heard blacks complain that 'The Holocaust' film on television was the Jews' way of stealing the spotlight from 'Roots,' " said a black friend...
...I've never recovered from hearing a woman at a feminist meeting scream, 'Golda Meir is not my sister...
...Oh, did I hurt your feelings?' she asked...
...The really radical position for women would have been to defend Jews, the ultimate world minority," says Ellen Willis...
...Jewish women are asking their black sisters to deal with the fact that they (like other Gentiles) stereotype, scapegoat, and stigmatize Jews—not just because we are white, but because we are Jews...
...she asked...
...I believe the statement that 'Zionism equals racism' is an anti-Semitic slur...
...People came up to me crying," said Goodman...
...Their purpose was often human sacrifice...
...Many Jewish women, from biblical times through the Holocaust, have been slaughtered not because they were female but because they were Jewish...
...the Holocaust is a hoax...
...Right now, for example, I feel more vulnerable in America as a Jew than as a woman...
...But, warns Cynthia Ozick, "Let's not romanticize them...
...it's so blatantly sexual...
...I grew up among the few survivors...
...Please understand," said my friend...
...For us, reading and writing was the only thing they couldn't take away from us...
...Gloria Greenfield's experiences illuminate the point: "As publisher and treasurer of Persephone Press, I get a lot of heat...
...Although under m?st conditions Jews can choose to pass where blacks cannot, Hitler proved that a society can rout out its Jews regardless of their denial or disguise...
...I long for a PLO counterpart to the Israeli peace groups so that rational dialogue may begin...
...To my shame, I hid the bag...
...It is when anti-Semitism exists and people do not admit it exists and accuse the victim of paranoia...
...It is what we as feminists are committed to destroy...
...It cautions: "Wake up, Americans...
...Miriam Slifkin, a scientist and former president of North Carolina NOW, remembered a conference in her state at which some women insisted on an opening prayer that was "full of Our Fathers and Christ's name...
...It's a liberation movement for a people who have been persecuted all their lives and throughout human history.' "I don't know what we would have done without Bella...
...It blamed Zionism for all the problems of Palestinian women from illiteracy to lack of day care to unemployment...
...Instead, I feel suddenly akin to the many black women I know who have refused to take responsibility for curing white racism...
...I don't believe there's a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism...
...Each group is hated because it demands "the right to be both equal and distinctive"—whether that distinctiveness means women's culture or Jewish culture, women's physical differences or Jewish religious differences...
...Because, very simply, it's there...
...To a hushed audience she talked about her pianist mother, a survivor of Auschwitz...
...It makes you a pariah in radical feminist circles...
...I think the reason we often fail to identify together is the same for both black women and Jewish women: We do not always have the ability to be feminists first...
...And no wonder we so badly need to create a feminist politic flexible enough to absorb differing views of Jewish women's issues, but firm enough to resist anti-Semitism with a single voice...
...If today's women also slough off our "special Jewish sorrows," it is because many of us have internalized anti-Semitic views of everything Jewish—including our suffering—adding a double unworthiness for being both female and Jewish...
...Every so often, when times are especially hard, Jews get identified as "the problem...
...Anti-Israel leftists have no idea of who Zionists are," says Sharone Abramowitz...
...After the great outcry against Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, I heard a woman joke, "Israel is Hitler's last laugh on the Jews"—as if Menachem Begin's ultra-nationalism would ultimately destroy the Jewish people better than Hitler could...
...Woman (wife, prostitute, secretary) serves as a buffer between the capitalist system and the exploited male worker...
...I think the current rebirth of Jewish identity among feminists—or at least the desire to confront anti-Semitism— is a repudiation of that internalized oppression that kept us closeted...
...I said nothing...
...Several years ago, Leonard Swidler wrote an essay that has become the basic catechism for Christian feminists...
...They would return to their own countries where they have no voting rights and probably never will...
...Pressed, they show ignorance of even the vaguest outlines of Jewish experience, and yet they freely prescribe what Jews or Israel should or should not do...
...Much leftist anti-Semitism stems from radicals' inability to understand that individual Jews' economic success is not the same as Jewish political power, let alone the power to assure one's own group safety...
...Women's Division, American Jewish Congress "A UN staff person said to me, 'Denmark is wonderful, but the Germans take it over in the summer, and I hate them...
...And I began to wonder why the Movement's healing embrace can encompass the black woman, the Chicana, the white ethnic woman, the disabled woman and every other female whose struggle is complicated by an extra element of "outness," but the Jewish woman is not honored in her specificity...
...Is the adjective a means of diminishing or taming the Jew-part of our identity...
...I cannot think of any feminist context in which a woman's testimony— whether about sexism or racism— would be disregarded or labeled "female paranoia...
...Phyllis Chesler is tired of hearing women say that Israel's Law of Return is racist...
...Will feminism be our movement only so long as we agree not to make our Jew-ishness an issue...
...But the power of Jews as emotional symbols would mean little if they were not hugely outnumbered and so, in reality, powerless...
...Of course, the overall record of Jewish philanthropy to other Jews disproves that generalization, but it is true enough in its particulars to rankle...
...Why does Jew seem to be a racial slur, and Jewish the polite liberal term...
...Given virtually every country's record of treating us as surplus citizenry, the survival of Israel is vital to the survival of Jews...
...Franco is a Sephardic Jew who was raised in the American South...
...She never noticed that she had made Jews a race apart...
...Rising from the audience, woman after woman told of how she hated her "Jewish nose" and had it "fixed...
...And because I am a Jew who has been finding problems where I had felt most safe—among feminists...
...Would she extend her hand in peace even to Leila Khaled, the PLO skyjacker?, a reporter asks...
...in Copenhagen, among supposed feminists of the world, I felt vulnerable as a Jew...
...for death...
...Had I been black or Latina, my commitment to my community of origin would have been acceptable and my attachment to my people would have been honored...
...Until this changes, I have no tolerance for anti-Zionists even if they are feminists...
...Unless we ourselves forge a healthier, more life-enhancing bond, we leave it to our enemies to tell us who we are and what we have in common...
...They've tried to destroy the behavior I need to survive...
...Then a Palestinian said, 'I was never a prisoner but here is how Israelis torture our women.' "Tamar Eshel, a member of the Israeli parliament and chair of its subcommittee on police and prisons, said, 'Name names...
...Women were changing their names if they had a 'man' ending...
...As Susan Brownmiller points out, "the reputation of lasciviousness and promiscuity" is black women's and Jewish women's historic common bond...
...Israel) and that established a UN fund to be spent on Palestinian women "in consultation and cooperation with the PLO...
...He later said he was misunderstood...
...It is no accident that this Jewish "coming out" process has in many feminist communities been spearheaded by lesbians...
...She chose to identify as a Jewish woman for the first time at the West Coast Women's Music Festival at Yosemite...
...Palestinians are all assumed to be have-nots and Israelis the affluent hosts—the parents who made it...
...However comforting this thesis may be for some (especially in view of the misogyny of the religious right), it leaps over all the Christian sexism perpetrated in Jesus' name, from the masculinist liturgy to the lack of women apostles, to the Catholic refusal to ordain women priests—and it has been used to make Judaism the heavy among patriarchal religions...
...It is that combination that makes anti-Semitism so appealing: To kill a gnat, imagining it's an elephant, is to feel powerful indeed...
...I heard someone say that Jews were 'taking over' the local chapter of the National Lesbian Feminist Organization in Madison...
...it's frustrating for anyone whose training is to get excited, interrupt, argue within the mishpachah (family) and expect enough love and warmth to absorb it all...
...Trade-offs were being negotiated...
...Miriam Schneir points out that ancient Judaism was against polythesim, rather than against women, and that it took Christianity to articulate the rabid woman-hating that culminated in church-led witch-hunts...
...So for many months I talked to more than 80 women from several feminist constituencies and other than the half dozen who said they had never been made to feel uncomfortable as Jews in the Movement, every woman had a story to tell...
...I thought every Jewish woman made a difference...
...A month or so before the United Nations Women's Conference in Copenhagen in 1980,1 asked a black friend to sign a petition...
...or how inevitably she preferred to identify as a civil rights worker, a Marxist, a veggie, a radical feminist— anything but a Jew...
...I feel angry and sad and I find myself agreeing with Cynthia Ozick: "It is for decent persons to come forward and sound that note of hope, either through self-repair or through declarations of abhorrence for anti-Semitism...
...They said it was to deny the patriarchy, but they were also denying their Jewish identities...
...Dan C. Fore, former chair of the New York Moral Majority, told the New York Times: "Jews have a God-given ability to make money...
...This business of identifying was posited in a new way by a Gentile friend: "Would you say to your c-r group 'I'm a Jew' or 'I'm Jewish...
...My roommate, an Israeli, came in every night in real pain...
...Israel is supposed to commit suicide for the sake of Palestinian "liberation...
...Other than casual reference to Arab traditions that restrict her "freedom of movement," the document contained no discussion of the subordinate role of women in Moslem culture, nothing about male supremacy or the "honor killings" by Arab men of women who become pregnant out of wedlock...
...and then answered: "Because we Jews feel fragile...
...I grew up poor in Camden, New Jersey, where Jews had to stay on our own block...
...Evelyn Torton Beck, professor of Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, thinks not: "At one community conference, our posters advertising a full-day workshop on homophobia and anti-Semitism were torn down—and this happened in locations that sponsored feminist activities, in women's bathrooms and women's bars...
...You stab her over the table...
...We went out in teams," she said...
...Gibel reported that one black woman fliply answered: "Nobody gets mugged unless they're looking for trouble...
...We Jews can't get rid of anti-Semitism by ourselves...
...I thought of how often I had noticed Jews omitted from the feminist litany of "the oppressed...
...As a result, both groups have often chosen to stand in solidarity with their men against a hostile world rather than explore shared circumstances and synthesize an analysis that includes racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism...
...And I agree...
...I heard, 'The only . good Jew is a dead Jew.' I heard, 'The only way to rid the world of Zionism is to kill all the Jews.' The anti-Semitism was overt, wild and irrational...
...Racism among feminists has long been admitted, or at least given lip service, when women assemble anthologies, courses or conferences...
...Add to these distinctly female stereotypes the old "classics," the Jewish Intellectual, the Jewish Moneymaker, and there is no room for us to be anything without triggering someone's preconception...
...No wonder we so badly need to create a feminist politic flexible enough to absorb differing views of Jewish women's issues, but firm enough to resist anti-Semitism with a single voice...
...If they have been mugged and robbed by black teenage boys and they are now afraid of black males, do we tell them they are racists...
...Jewish women are supposed to universalize themselves so that Palestinian women can have a national identity...
...Women say to me, 'You don't look or act Jewish,' and when I challenge them they say they mean I'm not loud or rich and I don't have a Jewish accent...
...Yet it's one thing when we articulate it in our terms and another when it is taken up by Christians as evidence that Jews are more patriarchal than any other people...
...Yet this was the official document accepted in Copenhagen as proof of Israeli oppression of Palestinian women...
...I felt the woman's "joke" was anti-Semitic, but I did not insist that, far from being a joke, Israel is a haven for a people against whom someone is always engineering the "last laugh...
...Each evening the official American delegation briefed us on the conference proceedings...
...694, Cathedral Station, Ne,w York, NY 10025) organized a panel on "Anti-Semitism as Racism...
...I'm sorry to say I have no such proposals...
...Because a third of our people has been destroyed in our own lifetimes and the ashes of mourning cling to our clothes...
...Among those heard from were several important black women...
...They may seem outmoded here, but when children's lives are in danger, like in the pogroms, it's important for women to hover and protect...
...Yet feminism has never systematically analyzed the similarities between anti-Semitism and sexism the way that racism and sexism are understood as twin oppressions...
...I was deeply moved by the fact that Gloria Steinem was there talking about her Jewish grandmother and identifying as a Jew when she is half-Jewish and had the choice not to...
...At the Houston Women's Conference I remember banners saying, "Kikes for Dykes" and "Abzug, Friedan and Steinem are all anti-Christian Jews...
...Ellen Willis goes further: "The oppression of Jews is not economic oppression, it is the dynamic of anti-Semitism...
...Mindful of the time when Jewish refugees were the "Boat People" of the world, the Law grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew...
...Box B.B...
...Inge Lederer Gibel spent most of her adult life in the civil rights movement...
...Everywhere we went we were scared to death...
...Stereotypes are also "Obviously Judaism is patriarchal...
...The press finds Khaled and asks the same question...
...A white civil rights activist proudly described having organized interracial groups of women in Little Rock, Arkansas...
...Have we absorbed the anti-Semite's invective use of "Jew" to the point where we cannot speak our tribal name without fear...
...To anyone who will help make peace,' Aloni answers...
...Never,'said the Thai...
...Must we remind people that those who are against anti-Semitism are against Jew-hating...
...I visit the prisons all the time...
...barriers to intimacy because they deny individual complexities...
...When they asked why I didn't change it, I answered, 'Why don't Margie Adam and Cris Williamson change theirs...
...I am unseen as a feminist among Jews and unseen as a Jew among feminists...
...Copyright © LCP Communications, Inc., 1982...
...Maybe this is because we Jews have not made it an issue...
...Under national instructions they used their once-in-a-lifetime voting power to condemn Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and the one state that grants suffrage to all women...
...Another common symptom of internalized oppression is described by Maxine Feldman: "As a kid, I was the only Jew on my block to keep my own nose, and in the Movement's early days, I was the only one to keep my own name...
...My friend told me the Copenhagen conference was a hot topic in the black community...
...Like the Queen Bee, the "only Jew in the club" functions best when denial of one's group is possible and assimilation is permitted...
...The Forum, on the other hand, was a gathering of nongovernmental women (NGOs) who supposedly reflected international sisterhood and the diversity of the world's womankind...
...Other complaints of invisibility focus on scholars overlooking the latent anti-Semitism that fueled the nativism of some suffragists who objected that ignorant immigrants could vote while native-born Christian women could not...
...My interviews suggest this is changing...
...Don't be a lightning rod,' they said...
...And they hurt...
...No wonder so many Jewish women are finding it harder and harder to find an ideological home...
...Then Bella Abzug stood up...
...To the Third World, we are white oppressors, but to our fellow white oppressors, we are Jews...
...Even though I was a girl, my family encouraged me to become literate...
...I wanted to leave but we were so few...
...She can only be reached with the sword.' "The Egyptian woman agreed: 'You must speak to an Israeli with the dagger...
...However, now that it is open season for attacks on Israel, such criticism, often under the rubric of "anti-Zionism," is sometimes a politically "respectable" cover for anti-Semitism...
...When American Jewish women returned from that Copenhagen conference stung by anti-Semitic experiences (see sidebar), some women here at home chose not to believe their stories or called their reactions "Jewish paranoia...
...The opposite is to be for Jew-hating...
...their Holocaust is lower case That "competition of tears" foolishly pits slavery against the Nazi genocide as though inhumanity were a zero-sum phenomenon and there were only so much moral outrage to go around...
...They add insult to injury, transforming group pride and survival strengths into cause for shame...
...how hard she worked to get rid of her "Jewish accent" or to force herself to stop talking with her hands...
...in June 1982...
...There were no attacks on the neocolonialist oil sheikhdoms, no comment about the antiwomen backlash in Iran or the polarization of rich and poor in Arab petromonarchies, no outrage that Saudi Arabia cared so little about its women that it didn't even send a delegation...
...Instead, these hatreds are their own weapons honed by age-old mystical fears...
...Or on women's courses and conferences that always include suffragists, slaves, Christian temperance workers, but not always Jewish garment workers, labor organizers or ghetto social workers...
...Both Inge Lederer Gibel and Cynthia Ozick reminded me of the words of Rosa Luxemburg, the German Communist leader who had this response to a letter about the atrocities and pogroms against the Jews in Eastern Europe: "Why do you pester me with your special Jewish sorrows...
...In fact, a major focus of attention at the December 1981, convention of Catholic, Jewish and Protestant Feminists of Faith was the "disconcerting trend toward anti-Semitism" in the writings of some Christian feminists...
...in other words, Jewish," says Philadelphia's Evie Litwok...
...Midge Costanza gave me a view from the inside: "Because I'm known as an Italian-Catholic, Gentile women feel they can say anti-Semitic things to me, like 'Why should we carry the Jews on our backs,' as if Jews are responsible for the energy problem, or That one's a Jew so there's no arguing with her.' But the worst was at the 1980 Democratic Convention when a bunch of women were tossing around names to speak on various platform issues...
...The Jewish women in the room sat stunned...
...Israel must die!' "American feminists may put down Israel for its macho men and patriarchal religion, as I do, but if you were a feminist in trouble where would you go for asylum, Israel or Saudi Arabia...
...They don't know that the majority of Israeli Jews are dark-skinned, poor and uneducated refugees from Arab and north African countries...
...If we can understand why history entitles lesbians to separatism, or minorities and women to affirmative action, we can understand why history entitles Jews to ^preferential" safe space...
...I'll tell you what Zionism is,'she said...
...Bitter Fruit: Anti-Semitism at the Copenhagen Women's Conference "In Copenhagen I heard people say that Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug all being Jewish gives the American Women's Movement a bad name...
...Instead we do little more than compare burdens and police one another's privileges...
...Or is this perception part of the stereotype and thus part of the reason why anti-Semitism remains the hidden disease of the Movement...
...The Moral Majority uses its pro-Israel position as proof that it likes Jews...
...Anti-Semitism from minority groups, as well as from people in general, is based on misinformation about Jews," she maintains...
...For example, this passage from Iva E. Carruthers' "War on African Familyhood," an essay in the anthology Sturdy Black Bridges (Anchor, 1979): "Today one of the most serious assaults to African familyhood is being forged by the white feminist movement...
...For poet and writer Louise Bernikow, the absence of negativism is enough of a positive: "I came from a lower-class Jewish family and I had an image of'a Jewish girl locked in the attic with the Nazis outside her door...
...I feel reborn as a Jew in the Women's Movement," said Arlene Raven, founder of Chrysalis and the L. A. Woman's Building...
...I don't know why...
...T. Drorah Setel, a student rabbi and coordinator of the Feminist Task Force of the New Jewish Agenda, laments...
...Goddesses may have become important symbols to many feminists for whom both Christianity and Judaism are beyond the pale...
...Such groups accuse the Women's Movement of forcing Christian women into the workplace and the military where blacks and Jews are conspiring to commit lesbianism and miscegenation...
...Jewish women I interviewed mentioned certain grievances more than once...
...Zionists have no standing on the left...
...Like those who berate feminists for "holding the interests of women above the interests of blacks," or poor people, or any group, such critics ignore that half of every group is women...
...These preposterous accusations remind me of Goebbels' technique of the big lie—just keep repeating it and some are sure to begin believing it.' "Eshel was shouted down with cries of 'Liar...
...Jews learn to call it as we feel it...
...A third stereotype, the Exotic Jewess, is usually portrayed as dark, voluptuous, close to "animal" sexuality and privy to carnal mysteries...
...My parents are Russian immigrants...
...She is poisoned by the worm of Zionism...
...In short, asking Jews to blur themselves into womankind as defined by non-Jews is like asking feminists to blur themselves into humanism as defined by males...
...A broadsheet sent to each state senator lists "Zionist names" connected to the ERA plot to wreck Christian homes by "pitting wives against husbands...
...This feminized "dirty Jew" stereotype gave the Cossacks an excuse to rape women of the shtetl (a small ghetto village...
...The more negative they can make Judaism," explains Judith Plaskow, who teaches religion at Manhattan College, "the more feminist Jesus appears for veering away from it...
...Asked to justify their PLO support, many leftist feminists say that they are taking sides in a clash between European imperialism and Third World anticolonialism...
...Her article, "Barefoot in Shul," appeared in moment in September 1976...
...Sherry Brown, president of the Frederick Douglass Community Improvement Council of Anacostia, told the Washington Post: "We have to understand who our true enemies are...
...Are Jewish women overreacting...
...Others may feel disheartened and wish for some hopeful proposals for dealing with anti-Semitism in the Women's Movement so that it doesn't divide us...
...Everyone's so laid back out here," says Phyllis Katz of Boulder, Colorado...
...they control this city...
...The present feminist spirituality movement wipes out the fact that for its time, Judaism was a tremendous step forward," insists Tillie Olsen...
...Women from nine countries, seven of them Arab, voted for the first time in their lives at the conference...
Vol. 7 • July 1982 • No. 7
