Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forward 50 2017

Emily Shire

Starting The Debate On Zionism And Feminism

Emily Shire’s Twitter bio says it all — combining pride in Israel, feminism and femininity, too: “My high school yearbook quotes were of Golda Meir and Carrie Bradshaw.”

Shire, a 27-year-old law school student and contributor to the Forward, became a voice for young feminist Zionists when she published an essay in The New York Times passionately opposing those feminist activists who excluded Zionists from marches taking place on International Women’s Day.

“As a proud and outspoken feminist who champions reproductive rights, equal pay, increased female representation in all levels of government and policies to combat violence against women, I would like to feel there is a place for me in the strike,” she wrote. “However, as someone who is also a Zionist, I am not certain there is.”

Her argument sparked a storm on social media.

“It got way more attention than I expected,” she said. “It felt like a niche issue, but I was surprised that people seemed to care enough. Many American Jewish women are icons of the feminist movement, and we think it’s a space that we’re comfortable in, and that it should go hand in hand with Jewish values.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.