from Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends
Volume 7 Number 2
by Lori Ginzberg 1
This essay is dedicated to Lillian and Joseph Dimow, secular Jewish activists, teachers, and friends.
Hats are big in Jewish life, signalling as they do one's loyalty to a particular community among Jews; ditto hatlessness, which is understood to represent non-affiliation. I write this essay wearing several hats--secular Jew, historian of U.S. women's history, founding member of a Reconstructionist congregation, feminist, radical, and teacher, and, lastly, someone who spent 1995-96 and the summer of 1997 in Jerusalem, and so has been forced to think more closely about being in-and of-the Diaspora. This essay is untidy, as balancing acts tend to be. But if being a Jew is, in part, engaging in a three thousand year discussion about what a Jew is, this is where I jump in.2
I want to talk about history, and about the stories history tells of a secular Jewish feminism that is committed to social change from within a consciously Jewish setting. I want to use words that I hear used only reluctantly, and with some embarrassment: words like socialist, irreligious, and Enlightenment. I want to share a narrative that links us with a secular Jewish feminism of the past and that compels us toward a more just future. I want us to think consciously about what it means in the late twentieth century to be Diaspora Jews, and what we have learned from our particular place in American society that connects feminism, Jewishness, and (as freethinkers used to call appeals to reason rather than faith) skepticism. I want us to think about the New York newspaper that wrote, in response to appearances by the freethinker Fanny Wright in 1829, "When a female undertakes to ridicule religion, it is one of those marks of depravity that carries with it the most unnatural and odious idea in nature."3 I want to talk about the possibilities for dialogue in a Jewish context about the range of ways that we are Jews.
When I lived in Israel two years ago, my secular Israeli friends were astonished, amused, and curious when they learned that I was a member of a synagogue. Grappling with this in a conversation with an Orthodox colleague, I referred to the irony of being in the heathen wing of a synagogue, and remarked that I often didn't know why I went at all. She took what I considered a particularly Jewish view when she answered, "Because if you didn't go, there wouldn't be a heathen wing." Rather than seeing my synagogue membership as "really" about my unacknowledged religious faith or hypocrisy or habit, she viewed it as my playing a particular role in this ongoing discussion we call Jewishness. As a secular Jew and as an atheist, I participate in this dialogue among Jews at least in part so that the more (and the most) traditional among us do not define the terms of the debate and of our peoplehood. The point is not that we "finish" that dialogue, nor that we find a common ground on which to establish a permanent peace among Jews, nor even that we have a choice. This is in no way a plea for inclusion; I am as stuck with Orthodox Jews among my people as they are stuck with me. Indeed, this dialogue, this struggle among Jews, may be the most enduring aspect of the Jewish condition. If what I am as a Jew is shaped in part by dialogue and debate with religious tradition, part of what has defined Orthodoxy itself is its struggle with the heathen wing.
Another enduring aspect of the Jewish condition, it seems to me, is that Jews study something about themselves-their history, their practices, their balancing acts in partially-assimilated communities-in order to know more fully what we are and what roles we assume in the various worlds we inhabit. I want the most traditional among us not to monopolize and define the tools of learning that have been central to the Jewish experience, and I have long wished for a setting in which to learn to use some of those tools. Last summer I attended Bat Kol, the newly-founded feminist house of study in Jerusalem. There, in a group of fifteen women, a number of visiting feminist scholars, and my chevruta, or study partner, I spent four incredible weeks on an intellectual high--and thought about why I had never before studied Talmud and other texts that have historically contributed to our becoming this particular people. It is tempting to blame my ignorance entirely on the Orthodox men who have controlled traditional yeshiva study and defined it within a religious context. However, the rest of my education has not been so successfully controlled by the men who dominate the institutions of secular intellectual life. My (and other secular Jews') disinterest in the sources of Jewish life, tradition, and peoplehood--in expanding our historical knowledge about our and others' role in that past--has been an abdication to religious authority. It matters that non-Orthodox, irreligious, and feminist Jews claim our own role in learning and telling and reinterpreting and challenging the many stories of how we came to be a people.
When I returned home, a number of my feminist friends expressed surprise that I had attended Bat Kol (and had acquired, as I like to put it, "a yeshiva of my own"). Several joked with noticeable discomfort that they would worry when I donned a wig. Why the surprise? Does study of tradition make one traditional? I am, after all, an over-educated, intellectual person, someone trained in the study of historical texts, who loves to work in collaboration with others and to argue over interpretation and meaning. How interesting that the notion of my studying traditional Jewish texts made some progressive American Jews as nervous as the idea of my belonging to a synagogue made some Israelis. How completely, I wondered, have secular Jewish feminists given up our voice in the interpretation of texts and in the dialogue about our peoplehood itself?
In making explicit my own place in the continued dialogue among Jews, I come back to history. I take my cues as a Jew from people whose Jewishness informed their social activism, who believed that their vantage point in history taught them something about oppression, marginalization, and the possibilities for change. I want to reassert the principles of the Enlightenment, and in particular its revolutionary notion that human beings can work together to mold the conditions of their lives and their society. Those of us who are not religious, but who identify deeply with the Jewish people and past, need to express an active secularism, and a commitment to be Jews and feminists and socialists without abandoning our distrust of religion and its authorities.
I know that there are people-earnest,
good, progressive, feminist people, in my own congregation and elsewhere,
many of them my close friends--who believe in the power of religion, of a
divine (if non-authoritarian) being, and of prayer to help them act to change
the world. Some of them devote enormous creative energy in reworking god
imagery in a way that allows religion still to give them a sense of hope,
purpose, and faith. I don't share those beliefs. Prayer, which apparently
provides many people with both comfort and inspiration, and appeals to god
for guidance, is, from my point of view, a diversion. I don't believe that
progressive people's turn to religious practice is productive of much social
good. More importantly, given the conservative drift of religion around
the world at this historical moment, it seems to me that those among us
who accept that framework are obligated at least to address the ubiquitous
historical question about upsurges in religious belief and practice: why
now?
In my own historical work, I have researched and written about some connections among female radicalism, Protestantism and secular thought.4But only recently have I begun to think seriously about how my being a secular Jew has informed that scholarly work--and, furthermore, how my understanding of history has strengthened my commitment to acting from a secular standpoint. Let me give some examples. In the 1830s and '40s, radical abolitionists used religion and appeals to a higher moral authority in support of their cause. Urging people to abandon the sin of slaveholding, they insisted that only through adherence to Christian law could the linked institutions of slavery and racial injustice be eradicated.
Yet even as activists insisted that women's moral sensibilites made them well suited to such radical action, ultimately, I've argued, they lost the struggle for the language of morality to those more conservative than themselves. Antebellum Protestantism, in other words, for all its positioning on the radical cutting edge of the American middle class, ultimately better served more conservative goals than those expressed by demands for full racial and sexual justice. In exploring the deep intellectual connections between the language of antebellum Protestantism and that of femininity (a language which associated Christian women with a higher morality), I found that calls to religion and a shared womanhood functioned together most effecively to dissuade individuals from supporting an unpopular, or radical, cause.
While men too suffered derogatory slurs about their sexual identities, it was the ability of the pious to associate irreligion with sexual deviance that proved the most powerful language for attacking female radicalism. In different historical settings, of course, the precise labels that have constrained women's radicalism have differed, but women's fear of being thought unfeminine, or of being called lesbians, or of being considered irreligious, or of being targeted as atheists, has nearly always served the more conservative among us.
Armed with this argument about the limitations of religious radicalism, and wondering about the secular alternative in the antebellum years, I turned some years ago to freethinkers, that tiny group of nineteenth-century activists who sought to build a movement for social justice without reference to Christianity, and I have written about their ideas about religion, women's rights, and intellectual freedom. Yet we find very few women involved in that movement, in large part because of the fear of declaring oneself irreligious or, in the language of the day, an infidel. Merely to associate oneself with reason in the context of a commitment to social change was to alienate those who defined respectability itself.4a
One of those very few freethinking women happened to be a Polish Jew, though little has been made of her origins and upbringing except to note that she rebelled against them. Ernestine Potowski Rose was born into a rabbi's family in 1810.5She was permitted--or seized--an unusually complete education for a girl, but she left her family and community when her father tried to force her into a marriage at age 16. Like so many rebels, she fled first to Europe and then to America, where she immediately began working for married women's property rights, the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage and, most outrageously, the freedom to advocate irreligion, known at the time, simply, as free thought. Hers is a fascinating story, but the point I want to make here is a narrow one. Rose stands out--even as she stood alone--as a secular Jewish woman, one of very few active in the early abolition and feminist movements, for whom Jewishness was identical to arranged marriage and shtetl Orthodoxy. Rose's own history provided her with important lessons in ferreting out the repressive aspects of a religious worldview, in the United States as in Europe; she understood the implications of religious authorities' efforts to "protect" women from full exposure to the world at large. To her opponents, she constituted a serious danger, for her defense of reason threatened to remove women from the constraints of religion, domesticity, and "appropriate" sexuality. Although declaring herself an infidel meant a nearly total break with her own past and people, one suspects that Rose learned lessons from Jewish life that helped prepare her for the painfully marginal position in which she, boldly irreligious, would find herself.
Seventy-five years after Ernestine Rose came to America, immigrant Ashkenazi Jewish women no longer cut themselves off from their people in order to express and live their political passions. By the early twentieth century the United States, and, in particular, the working-class neighborhoods of its cities, had witnessed an intense dialogue between Jewish secularists and traditionalists, and between the different versions of history that those groups represented and the futures they envisioned. In that world one could-many did-reject the worldview of the majority of Jews, the traditionally religious, while remaining deeply immersed in a community that was inescapeably Jewish. Young Jews who were involved in labor and socialist movements in the early twentieth century took for granted the connections between their history and their radicalism. Religion seemed to many of them to be fading as an important force in political culture; history seemed to be with them. Only with the overt repression and fading away of radical movements in the middle years of this century-as well as the growing prosperity of the children of socialists-did the choice for Jews seem to be between religion or assimilation or aliyah, a choice brilliantly described and rejected by Irena Klepfisz in much of her work.6
There was no lack of movements and communities
in which to express idealism and a passion for social change; as Klepfisz
puts it, "Sotsyalizm was easily translated" and many young American
Jews committed themselves to social activism, whether against the war in
Vietnam or in the struggle for Black civil rights or in the feminist and
lesbian and gay liberation movements. Others left the United States for
Israel after 1967, seeming to trade a society embroiled in a bad war for
one in a "good" war. But as the politics of Israel grew ever more
painful for progressive Jews, and radical movements suffered in the backlash
of the 1980s, religion did not fade away. It has been reinvigorated, often
by the very people who were, not so long ago, engaged in the political struggles
of their own generation. Instead of directing those passions toward a range
of political actions, many of us are preoccupied with the range of possibilities
for talking about, praying to, and depending upon god. I find this deeply
sad and disappointing, and think that it demands our attention.
Nothing brought this more sharply into focus for me than my experience living in Jerusalem, where I witnessed the struggle of liberal religious voices clamoring to be heard and recognized both by the Orthodox and by the secular majority. Reflected in many of the struggles within Israel are very different notions of history, of the Jewish people, of the place of Diaspora Jews and, of course, of the meaning of that land and nation. The dialogue there is constant, as is the assumption that secular Jews are a part of the dialogue, that being nonreligious does not label one as "less Jewish," as it so often does here. Secular Jews are often told that they've become "merely Israelis," without a sense of tradition and Judaism. While it is true that their Jewishness is different from my own and from their Orthodox counterparts-they are, after all, members of the dominant culture and have in a sense unlearned the particular lessons of outsiderness that Diaspora Jews still live-it is also the case that the language they speak, the calendar they live by, their work week, and the things they studied in school are embedded in our shared peoplehood. Many Israelis expressed surprise at non-Orthodox American Jews' assumption that their Jewishness is best experienced within a religious framework; it is no coincidence that so many of the participants in the small but important movement for Reform Judaism, a movement which insists on religious pluralism within the Israeli context, are American-born. In an Israeli television production about American Jews, the producers expressed great amazement that American Jews identify as Jews-that without living in Israel or being traditionally religious and even when they intermarry or raise children with non-Jews, American Jews are exploring new ways of expressing their Jewishness, of being Diaspora Jews in a multi-cultural society.
I, of course, was not surprised by that effort. Indeed, I believe that American Jews might actually have something other than money and McDonald's to contribute to Israel, namely the experience of (and the effort required to maintain) a pluralistic Judaism. Knowing this, after living in Israel I felt more dismayed by the progressive, feminist Jewish community's emphasis on religious expression. I felt moved by a culture that didn't question its Jewishness, that didn't need to "express" it, that wasn't religious but that struggled continuously, and with important implications, with religious authorities. The battle over religious pluralism in Israel is, to some extent, about who counts as a rabbi as much as it is about who counts as a Jew. Put that way, it becomes more understandable why so many Israelis seem unconcerned with the issues that alarm American Jews. To them, the concept of being "more" or "less" Jewish is not the real concern. The real concern is, to put it bluntly, religious fundamentalists controlling the state.
Jews remain a people defined historically by a mix of religion and peoplehood, and even the most traditionally religious Jews, despite our mutual discomforts, know this. Even if the most traditional and the most radical Jews do not as often as in the past converse across one dinner table, the Orthodox nevertheless design themselves-and, in Israel, attempt to design the state-in opposition to us, and with reference to our intellectual traditions. Little of this is new: my studies this summer showed me how much of Jewish tradition is about fights between rabbis, and between the observing Jews and the apostates among them. Just as American Orthodoxy, as some Orthodox Jews will admit, has been strengthened by the emergence of Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaisms, religious Jews within the progressive and feminist communities have something to learn from dialogue with those of us who are secular. As in any dialogue about who is "in" and who "other," religious liberals need to be reminded that their own demand for rabbinic and theological legitimacy- their place at the table, so to speak-need not be at the expense of those of us who are not religious.
Within this dialogue, I want to assert a deep skepticism about the value of religious faith itself. Engaging in dialogue with religious people does not mean that I accept faith as an appropriate or progressive basis upon which to undertake social change-or that I consider religious Jews "more Jewish" than myself. I worry about the trend toward fundamentalism that pervades the world, our nation, and our people, and I believe that progressive religious people should evaluate their participation in that trend, their greater willingness to ally with "faith-based" communities than with secular alternatives.
As a historian I am far more afraid of the dangers in a religious frame of reference than I am moved by its potential for changing the world. I think we should all be more active in fighting those Jews in Israel who are trying to define that state and our people and, especially, women in fundamentalist terms. But we do not need to defend our anger and our resistance in religious terms when women are attacked for wearing pants to work or people are spit at for getting money at the cash machine on shabbat. Nor must we bow to greater religiosity when, after Rabin's assassination, a moderate Orthodox Israeli friend mused that, well, yes, if one adopts a "religious" position regarding sacred texts, such a killing would be justified. When religion simply masks privilege and power-when religious Jews insist that they are not homophobic, but that their opposition to gay men and lesbians is a "religious" issue-we need not respect their terms as untouchable.
Instead, we might remind ourselves that whenever those speaking on behalf of religious truth and a higher authority take charge of a society, women's freedom to express ourselves intellectually, politically, and sexually are among the first things to go. Witness, in an extreme, developments in Afghanistan: the first edicts of the new leaders included a ban on girls learning to read. Witness as well the claim of one "Promise Keeper," those American Christian men who turn to their religious teachings to become "better husbands," that men have been too macho, that they need to "love our wives into submission." We need to consider, as my own historical work continually reminds me, that appeals to religious authority more often mask religion's central patriarchal message than they promote real social change. Secular Jewish feminists should insist, within whatever Jewish community we find ourselves, that our progressive religious friends have a responsibility to notice the dangers of religious authority and to examine their complicity with it. I worry about a Jewish community that finds no place, except a sentimental one, for Ernestine Rose.
With all this, I remain a member, however uncomfortably, of a synagogue, hearing my mother's voice ask "what are you doing there?" at every renewed commitment. Even though I know that no synagogue, however progressive, can replace the radical and feminist movement that many of us still hope to rebuild, synagogues are where American Jews congregate as Jews, and I remain committed to working together on shared ground, in a community that struggles for social justice. As I explained to my daughter when she asked why we were going to synagogue ("we didn't go in Israel, and we don't believe in god," she said), this is where American Jews are.
I choose to use what I've learned from being a Jew to engage in dialogue with a community that combines a respect for learning with a commitment to dedicating that learning to efforts for social justice. When I walk into the synagogue, I hope to learn something that will both broaden me intellectually and will aid those struggles-and occasionally I do. As I told the congregation in a brief address years ago: during the time they spend talking about god, I prefer to do something I consider useful, like childcare.
I know that I remain a member of a synagogue in part because I am merely stubborn, a prototype for the "stiff-necked" people, the daughter they deserve. If there's going to be an end to the dialogue, if people are prepared to say that a century of secular Jewish activism can contribute nothing to what the Jewish people know and how we choose to act, let them be the ones to say it. More positively, I want to figure out the possibilities for a radical, secular Jewish feminist community within a synagogue in the Diaspora. Can we live in a Jewish calendar, be part of a Jewish world, continue the centuries-old dialogue with believing Jews, and not assume that all of us share a belief in god? Is there a place here for activist secular Jews and, if not, where can we study Jewish texts and history without the obligation to believe or pray, something I especially valued about Bat Kol? Are believing Jews with progressive and feminist politics willing to engage in a discussion with secular Jews about the idea-and the arguable dangers-of a belief in god? I told my daughter when she started public school that she didn't have to say the pledge of allegiance if she didn't want to; why does it seem more threatening, in the context of even the most progressive congregation, to tell her that she doesn't have to pray? Among the lessons I brought home from Israel is that part of the point of this country is that here we do not choose to live in a ghetto but, as Jews, as part of the wider, culturally diverse community. We meet together as Jews, in my view, not simply to carve out a "safe" space in that larger world but to use what we know to act in it. Again, to quote Irena Klepfisz, "only when we ourselves are firmly rooted in our own cultural soil do we understand the commitment of others to their cultures," an understanding that we, as Jews, should bring to all our communities and all our actions.7
Perhaps only among ourselves can
we also confront the less positive implications of the very questions of
identity that bring us together. Often, communities of Jewish leftists and
feminists focus so narrowly on our needs as a community that we forget where
we stand in the larger world: we are among the world's most privileged people
living in an intensely mean time; we are, many of us, women and men with
unprecedented choices who choose what makes us most comfortable and most
safe; we are not offering enough choices to our children about how to be
radicals and feminists and Jews.
Progressive congregations have done important work on Middle East peace, on welfare, on demanding full rights and visiblity for lesbians and gay men, on urban issues, on making bridges with other communities. Even as we try to recreate other political settings for doing the work of radical activism, something many of us miss more sharply since the demise of New Jewish Agenda, we find ourselves in a period when a self-consciously Jewish politics takes place in synagogue, with the inevitable focus on building an institution-a spiritual home-for ourselves. We need to retain our critical faculties about our communities' acceptance of religious frameworks; we need to initiate a serious discussion of why, historically, this renewal of religious practice is happening and what, politically, it means-especially given the rise of religious fundamentalism among Jews on the right. If secular Jews back out of the dialogue, the discussion loses what we've learned from history and from life-if there's no "heathen wing" it will be to all our detriment.
When we give children a Jewish education, we should insist on a range of Jewish possibilities for living that doesn't depend on religious faith or practice. We should teach them about the diversity of Jewish experience-in the Diaspora as well as Israel-and about what Jews have learned from their rootings and uprootings in virtually every place on the globe. We need to explain to them that the idea of Israel as a form of redemption did not inevitably lead to this particular Jewish state but was a history of struggle. We might tell them-and remind ourselves-that there were generations of Jews long before our own who worried about the apostasy of their children, about their assimilation, and about their radicalism, and then discuss why there is still a people called Jews in the world. We might point out, when we celebrate Purim, that god is utterly absent from the book of Esther. Mordechai and Esther don't pray for the salvation of their people; they don't defend their right as a religious body to worship god; they don't thank god for a good result. Instead, without deference to a higher authority, they simply assert their peoplehood and go about the business of its defense. As we set about figuring out how to end this century as Jewish feminists, I hope we will build on our activist past, keeping in mind the conviction of Ernestine Rose, Emma Goldman, and countless other secular Jewish feminists, that the world may possibly change for the better if we devote our lives to it.
1 This paper
is based on a talk given in honor of International Women's Day at Congregation
Mishkan Shalom on Friday night, March 7, 1997. Mishkan Shalom is a progressive,
feminist Reconstructionist congregation in Philadelphia that was founded
in 1988. For assistance with this essay in its various incarnations the
author wishes to thank Robin Becker, Ann Ellen Dickter, Janet Ginzberg,
Clare Kinberg, Debora Kodish, and Joel Steiker.
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2 For a moving
recent account of the struggles among Jews over questions of assimilation,
marginality, and social activism, see Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing.
(Addison-Wesley, 1996).
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3 New York
Observer and Religious Chronicle, Jan. 17, 1829, p. 11.
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4 See Ginzberg,
Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the
Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, 1990) and "'The Hearts
of Your Readers Will Shudder': Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,"
American Quarterly (1994).
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4a For more
on this: Women Without Superstition "No Gods-No Masters": The
Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Edited by Annie Laurie Gaylor. (Madison WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation,
1997).
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5See Yuri
Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose and the Battle for Human Rights (NY: Reynal, 1959).
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6 See especially
her article, "Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America,"
in Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, The Tribe of Dina, (Beacon,
1989), 30-48.
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7Klepfisz,
"Secular Jewish Identity," p. 44.
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