Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement

Why now? Why write about anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement when we have the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan to worry about?

Because, very simply, it’s there. And because I am a Jew who has been finding problems where I had felt most safe—among feminists. […]

• A month or so before the United Nation’s Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1980, I asked a black friend to sign a petition warning against PLO exploitation of the event for anti-Zionist purposes.

My friend told me the Copenhagen conference was a hot topic in the black community. Trade-offs were being negotiated; an anti-apartheid resolution might be passed in return for American blacks’ compliance on a Palestinian agenda item.

“Please understand,” she said. “I can’t afford to sign.” […]

I wondered why Jewish women are applauded by the Women’s Movement when we trudge through Judaic subcultures ruffling beards with our feminist demands but not when we bring Jewish consciousness back the other way into feminism; or why we are cheered when we critique the Bible for its anti-woman bias but not when we criticize feminists for their anti-Jewish jokes.

I thought of how often I had noticed Jews omitted from the feminist litany of “the oppressed.” 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? […]

Problem 1

Failure to See the Parallels

Time and again in my interviews, I heard women use the phrase “Jews are the women of the world,” or its converse, “Women are the Jews of the world.” Feminism has never systematically analyzed the similarities between anti-Semitism and sexism the way that racism and sexism are understood as twin oppressions. Yet 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).
• The myth of “female power” […] recasts the male in the vulnerable role and thus justifies discrimination against women; the myth of “Jewish power” recasts the Christian majority as pawns, and helps justify repression of the Jews.
• “Jews really control the press,” “White women really control the wealth,” and “Black matriarchs really control black men” are three equally inaccurate clichés invented to mask the overwhelming concentration of power and money in the hands of white Christian men.
• The existence of some leisured women and some affluent Jews is claimed as proof that all members of both groups are privileged.
• Woman (wife, prostitute, secretary) serves as a buffer between the capitalist system and the exploited male worker; thus sexism absorbs men’s economic frustration by buying them off with privatized patriarchal power. Similarly, Jew (landlord, teacher, homemaker-employer) serves as a buffer between the dominant class and the underclass, thus deflecting underclass rage onto a convenient scapegoat. […]

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.

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. On the lunatic right, overt anti-Semitic violence, vandalism, swastika-painting, and desecrations have increased. […]

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.
• Anti-ERA, antichoice Orthodox Jews, such as the organization of rabbinical wives who invited Phyllis Schlafly to be their dinner speaker.
• Fundamentalist Christians like Jerry Falwell who claim to support Israel, but whose support is not founded on any dedication to Jewish survival but rather on a biblical prophecy that says a Jewish state must exist in order to set the stage for Jesus’s Second Coming—after which all Jews must convert or be damned.

While the right plays new tricks with American Jews, the problems on the left are old and familiar. 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’s safety. […]

Another painful phenomenon on the left is the guilt of Jewish children of families who made it into the middle class; their disavowal of their parents’ values and fear for their leftist credentials prevent them from identifying with other Jews. […]

This sort of guilt-tripping and radical myopia is even more blatant in connection with Israel. […]

Israel is supposed to commit suicide for the sake of Palestinian “liberation”; Jewish women are supposed to universalize themselves so that Palestinian women can have a national identity. Zionists have no standing on the left. […]

[…] To me, Zionism is simply an affirmative action plan on a national scale. 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 worldwide anti-Semitism. […]

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).

Invisibility. […]

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 never occurred to them that there were Jews in the room. […]

Insult. […]

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. 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.

Jewish stock types also present extra problems in feminism. For instance, the Jewish Mother epitomizes the self-sacrificing, maternal role that many feminists vocally repudiate. […]

The Jewish American Princess (JAP) 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. […]

A third stereotype, the Exotic Jewess, is usually portrayed as dark, voluptuous, close to “animal” sexuality, and privy to carnal mysteries. This feminized version of the “dirty Jew” stereotype gave the Cossacks an excuse to rape women of the shtetl. […]

Internalized oppression. […]

Many of us have internalized anti-Semitic views of everything Jewish—including our own suffering—adding a double unworthiness for being both female and Jewish. Self-hatred and denial of a part of oneself or one’s origins is a kind of invisibility imposed from within. […]

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 so closeted.

It is no accident that this Jewish “coming out” process has in many feminist communities been spearheaded by lesbians. 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. […]

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.” Fifty had been expected. […]

Rising from the audience, woman after woman told of how she hated her “Jewish nose” and had it “fixed”; how she straightened her despised, kinky “Jewish hair”; how she allowed herself to be mistaken for Italian or Puerto Rican; how hard she worked to get rid of her “Jewish accent” or to force herself to stop talking with her hands; or how inevitably she preferred to identify as a civil rights worker, a Marxist, a veggie, a radical feminist—anything but a Jew. […]

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. “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. “That prayer has probably been spoken more often by anti-Semitic non-Jews than by Jewish worshipers.”

Several years ago, Leonard Swidler wrote an essay that has become the basic catechism for Christian feminists. In it he argued that “Jesus was a feminist” because he broke with many Jewish customs that mistreated women. 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 prepetrated in Jesus’s name. […]

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.”

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. Right now, for example, I feel more vulnerable in America as a Jew than as a woman. […]

That “competition of tears” foolishly pits slavery against Nazi genocide, as though inhumanity was a zero-sum phenomenon and there was only so much moral outrage to go around. […]

[…] 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.

Some readers may be relieved that this report corroborates their own experiences. 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. I’m sorry to say I have no such proposals.