Welcome to the Forward’s Jewish News coverage about feminism and womens issues.
Welcome to the Forward’s Jewish News coverage about feminism and womens issues.
Welcome to the Forward’s Jewish News coverage about feminism and womens issues.
Welcome to the Forward’s Jewish News coverage about feminism and womens issues.
This is the ninth entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. The first time I entered an Orthodox synagogue and saw a mehitza, or divider separating men and women in prayer, I was a little girl visiting my grandparents in Queens. Their home wasn’t religiously observant in the slightest, but my grandfather had grown…
Google “feminist seder,” and links to articles about Seders long passed come up. Google “women’s seder,” however, and you find links to dozens of current model Seders for women, run by synagogues, JCCs and other Jewish institutions all over the country. The word feminist doesn’t appear. Outside of the original, private feminist Seder — still…
Sarah Hepola, in a recent — and ill-headlined — New York Times article explored whether feminists have and/or need a another leader like Gloria Steinem. Hepola writes that nobody has emerged to take Steinem’s place as feminist team captain, and she arrives at the conclusion that feminism has been replaced by feminisms — that feminism is now a…
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 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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