Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish women and women’s issues.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish women and women’s issues.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish women and women’s issues.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish women and women’s issues.
This is the seventh entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. As a child in the 1940s and ’50s, I unknowingly experienced Jewish feminism before it really existed. Beginning in 1938 my mother, Marjorie Wyler, worked full-time as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s director of public relations, radio and television; it was a position she…
This is the sixth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. How I became a feminist and why I have remained one for 40 years are two different stories. In December 1962, returning home from the lecture circuit, my husband purchased for me Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” at an airport bookstore. This was…
This is the fifth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. What is Jewish feminism to me? It’s a mission. A calling. An identity. A life purpose. To borrow a French term, it’s my raison d’etre. Or to borrow a Buddhist term, it’s my swadharma, the ideal that connects the work that I do…
By fourth grade, I was already a troublemaker ? taking on any boy who dared to challenge, in the classroom or on the playground, girls? equality or worth. I learned from the best of the troublemakers, women who refused to take no for an answer when going after what they want: my mother and my…
This is the fourth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. In the introduction to my first book, “The New Jewish Wedding,” I wrote, “References to the rabbi as him/or her do no more than acknowledge the decision to ordain women by the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements.” That was 1985. When I revised…
This is the third entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. I want to answer the question of “what Jewish feminism means to me” in two ways: First, about how I learn from it both substantively; and second, on a meta level, in terms of how all of us enrich the Jewish conversation through…
This is the second entry in an ongoing series about Jewish feminism. It’s difficult to be “for” something I have never lived without. I don’t remember a bimah without women. When I was growing up, my mother was the cantor at our makeshift shul on Fire Island, so my Jewish practice always had a female…
This is the first entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. Why am I a Jewish feminist? Because if you’re a woman, you’re either a feminist or a masochist. Because if you’re a Jew, you’re obligated to pursue justice and treat each person — man and woman — with perfect dignity, for all of…
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