Despite the wide variety and number of texts produced by Jewish feminists over the past ten years1, despite the diversity of workshops and presentations on Jewish themes that have been delivered at the conferences of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)2, we have so far succeeded only partially in integrating the history and culture of Jewish women into the feminist project. In 1986, the strong and visible presence of the Jewish Women’s Caucus3, which had organized a magnificent plenary session and revealed the importance and diversity of Jewish feminist voices, did not suffice to secure a recognized place for Jewish themes in feminist studies or theorizing4.
I am of course delighted by the recent publication of three excellent reference works5 that will be of considerable help to all those who wish to engage in research or teaching about Jewish women. But I can no longer content myself with celebrating these publications as if I thought that the resource they represent would change anything in the emerging discipline of Women’s Studies. I have in fact no reason to believe that these new books will achieve this integration any better than the older books and articles they make available to us with annotations. Because the life of Jewish women is still manifestly absent from the majority of introductory texts studied in Women’s Studies, as well as from most lesbian feminist anthologies — absent even from works that claim to take into account the full range of differences — one cannot help but think that Jewish themes are systematically excluded, with one or two exceptions. The few texts that mention Jewish women marginally often focus on the patriarchal aspects of the Jewish religion alone and fail to mention the feminist transformations of Judaism, as well as the diversity of Jewish women themselves. Nor do they develop a conceptual framework for an analysis of antisemitism.
Let me be clear that I am not speaking here of the exclusion of texts written by Jewish women. In fact, a great number of feminist theorists are Jewish. This must be stressed, even though it is perhaps imprudent to call attention to this point if one thinks of the historical recurrence of the stereotype that accuses the Jews of exercising control and seizing power (and this, even within the feminist movement6). I am not, then, speaking of an exclusion of Jews as such from the institutions, the press, or the positions of power inside Women’s Studies. I am speaking of the absence of texts about Jewish women in feminist writings and the manifest absence of their culture from multicultural feminist events or from those that focus on women from minorities7. My concern is more specifically the silence that reigns on the question of whether the recognition that antisemitism, whose shadow continues to hover over the lives of Jewish women, is or should be a question for feminism.
The reluctance of the women’s movement to acknowledge antisemitism as part of the feminist agenda is not new in the history of feminism. In a revealing article, the reading of which should be obligatory in a great number of Women’s Studies courses (in particular in courses on feminist theory and the history of American women), Elinor Lerner shows convincingly that throughout the 20th century “Jews have generally not been taken into account in the history of American feminism”8. She also shows how the reluctance of white American feminists to speak explicitly about Jews, or to address the beginnings of antisemitism in the early decades of this century, made Jewish support for feminism invisible and then allowed feminists to neglect certain specifically Jewish questions. The result was that the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a coordination of associations founded in 1920 to lobby on behalf of women (of which the National Council of Jewish Women was a member), refused to take an official position against the persecution of Jews in Europe, even though it did so on a wide variety of social issues that did not specifically concern women, such as peace, anti-lynching legislation or internationalism. Attesting also to openly antisemitic acts and to the presence of stereotypes about Jews within the suffragist movement, Lerner concludes that “the most common antisemitism did not consist of openly anti-Jewish declarations. It was an antisemitism by neglect: a non-recognition of the existence of Jews.” I find it profoundly troubling that, with a few minimal modifications, what Lerner says also applies to the contemporary period of feminism.
Certain aspects of this historical neglect unfortunately call to mind the NWSA’s hesitation in the early 1980s, when it came to including antisemitism in the list of “isms” it combats. It resolved to do so only after enormous debate, by declaring its “opposition to antisemitism against Arabs and Jews.” This compromise is certainly a better solution than non-inclusion. But it very clearly reveals the desire to protect the organization against an interpretation according to which declaring oneself unconditionally against “hatred of Jews” would mean being “for Israel.” A stronger position would have consisted in leaving antisemitism the full integrity of its meaning and adding “anti-Arab discrimination” as a greater inclusivity making room for specificity.
In a book published in 1982, I wrote that “Jewish invisibility is a symptom of antisemitism as surely as lesbian invisibility is a symptom of homophobia.”9 This affirmation resonates with even greater force in the conservative political climate of the late 1980s, at a time when Jews are viewed very negatively because of the way in which the media have reinforced the myth that they all approved of Israel’s foreign and domestic policy. It is certainly true that a number of Americans and Israelis still defend the hard line of Israeli policy, but many others are also in profound disagreement with it. While there are people who hesitate to criticize Israel because of historical antisemitism and the misplaced feeling that to criticize Israel is to betray it, there are thousands of Jews in the United States who protest against Israel’s actions and call for immediate negotiations for peace in the Middle East that recognize the rights of Jews and Palestinians to a homeland10.
In the United States and in Europe, antisemitism is also fueled by the growing number of white neo-Nazi supremacists, by neo-conservative Christian fundamentalists and by extremists of the Nation of Islam11. With the increasingly rigid alignment of the left with the cause of the Palestinians, it became easy to substitute “Israel” for “Jew,” turning Jews around the world into targets of anti-Israeli sentiments often expressed through violent acts of anti-Jewish hatred12.
Because the patriarchal politics of the entire world also penetrate the feminist arena, it is from within this latter context that we must analyze the reluctance of many Jewish women to write on Jewish themes. If, generally speaking, they have not brought these themes into feminist discourse, it is because they did not feel sufficiently secure. Out of fear, first, of being attacked — hence a silence to protect themselves. Out of fear, next, of being perceived as asking too much, as insisting too emphatically, or as politically incorrect. Perhaps stronger than the others, the fear of being excluded has also kept Jewish women silent on this point. Speaking and writing on explicitly Jewish themes (or even including them substantially) raises the worry that this work will be considered marginal, and that it will not be read and discussed as widely. In short, in writing as a Jew, the feminist runs the risk of losing her place […]. There is also a fourth factor: the experience of disarray that many Jewish feminists undergo when they try to bring together Jewish and feminist (or feminist and lesbian) identities. Witness Jenny Bourne’s virulent attack on such efforts, in which she denounced the identity-based struggle of Jewish women as particularly reactionary, and the debate that this article provoked in England13. This debate had echoes in the United States, and it seems to me that it discouraged certain feminists from expressing themselves as Jews14.
The reaction of Jewish women to the NWSA plenary session in 1986 is particularly instructive. A great number of them recounted the joy they all felt at the positive reception of the public to this session and their relief at the absence of negative reactions. A number of women who rarely identified as Jewish were particularly moved and encouraged for the first time in their adult lives by this public support for such an identification in a non-Jewish space.
For about a decade now, Jewish women have been increasingly intimidated by virulent attacks against them in the form of the vicious stereotype of the JAP (Jewish American Princess). This most recent incarnation of antisemitism (propagated by greeting cards, T-shirts, jokes, books, cartoons and everyday language) is a shorthand that reformulates everything that is odious in American culture in antisemitic terms and projects it onto the body of the Jewish woman. In fact the expression JAP (some absurdly deny that the “J” of “Jewish American Princess” has any meaning at all) is now the female incarnation of all the evils that used to be attributed to Jewish men — the JAP is greedy, manipulative, parasitic, she expresses herself crudely (she has the New York accent), dresses vulgarly, she is ugly (like the old hook-nosed Jew, she needs a nose job), she is materialistic, showy, insensitive, sexually unreliable. Such an attack does not come only from the dominant culture; it is also propagated by the misogyny of certain Jewish men. The result is that Jewish women, who have internalized this antisemitism as a kind of self-hatred, also use this expression themselves. These stereotypes make them feel particularly vulnerable and avoid identifying as Jews in an environment where this “security” is even more problematic.
The list is long of so-called inclusive anthologies from which Jewish themes are absent, and I do not intend to mention them all. But when there is never any question of Jewish women in a work that deals with women and religion (the form of Jewish life most readily understood by non-Jews), we then realize that we are confronted with powerful forces that would exclude the Jews. One such anthology15 does not contain a single article on the Jewish religion, and when Judaism is mentioned, it is in passing and only in a negative way. Negative attention is the other face of invisibility and is another form of antisemitism that occurs not only in texts but also in certain conference sessions that otherwise never mention Jews. This was the case in one of the plenary sessions of the 1987 NWSA conference (a year after the so-successful Jewish plenary), which dealt with coalition politics. But when Barbara Macdonald presented examples of ageism, she felt it indispensable to point to Ruth Geller’s portrait of her grandmother in her novel Triangles, published in 1984. I believe this criticism was misplaced and that Macdonald did not understand the cultural context of this humorous and affectionate portrait; the insidious character of this kind of negative inclusion often escapes attention, and they should not be allowed to persist without comment.
The failure to take account of Jewish texts can also distort our research. In historical reviews of women’s autobiographies, I have never seen a reference to one of the earliest autobiographical texts, Les mémoires de Glückel von Hameln (The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln), written between 1689-1719, in Yiddish, the language of a Jewish woman. This text gives a fascinating representation of the private/public intersection in the lives of Jewish women at a certain moment in history. A recent self-help book intended for lesbian women couples addresses the question of how racism can affect certain racially mixed couples, but it does not even mention the difficulties that Jewish/non-Jewish couples may encounter, particularly in the oppressive atmosphere around Christmas.
One of my objectives in this article is to sensitize the Women’s Studies community to how the lives of Jewish women are excluded from the feminist project and to propose a framework within which they could be included. Because a theory builds upon itself, it often happens that one omission opens the way to another. From this point of view, the manifest silence about antisemitism (sometimes evoked but marginally) in two recently published feminist texts seems to me particularly troubling.
In Racism and sexism: an integrated study16, Paula Rothenberg establishes the parameters of her analysis in such a way that by definition Jews are not part of her study (because they are “white,” even if this is not stated explicitly); she nonetheless conducts the analysis of “discrimination” and “prejudice” against ethnic minorities in such a way that the omission of any consideration of antisemitism serves to conceal the very real antisemitism that Jews face. What may have been a deliberate decision not to mention the existence of Jews as an “ethnic” minority (not even in a chapter specifically devoted to ethnicity) recalls what Tzvetan Todorov writes about a similar omission in a collection entitled “Race”, writing, and difference: “I was surprised, not to say shocked, by the absence of any reference to one of the most odious forms of racism: antisemitism […] This absence suggests the idea that the authors of the volume have chosen to actively ignore it.”17 If the analysis of antisemitism in terms of racism is not entirely suitable, its specificity must nonetheless be named and analyzed.
Teresa de Lauretis’s book, Feminist studies/Critical studies, is another particularly troubling example. It collects the papers from the conference “Feminist studies: reconstituting knowledge” held in Milwaukee in 1985. That there is no discussion of antisemitism in this volume is all the more disturbing in that the question was raised at this conference by a paper greeted at first by silence, then by hostility and verbal aggressions that reproduced a great number of openly antisemitic attacks against Jews. The fact that this paper was not included in the book and that the editors neither recounted nor analyzed this incident contributes to veiling the existence of antisemitism in contemporary feminism18. I take this omission particularly seriously, because it is entirely possible that this anthology may be the text that, according to Catharine R. Stimpson, will do “nothing less than determine the next stage of feminist thought.” If it succeeds, it will also succeed in continuing to exclude Jewish themes from the feminist agenda.
Under these conditions, it is important to try to envisage how to proceed otherwise. I would like to believe that neither malevolence nor deliberate antisemitism nor complete indifference is the cause of these repeated omissions. Even if certain of these factors no doubt contribute to keeping Jewish themes outside feminist theorizing, there are other factors to explore. I believe a significant part of the problem comes from our initial conceptual framework, which has established (and rapidly fixed) the intersection between “sex, race and class” as the basis of women’s oppression. While such a framework has allowed us to incorporate “sex” into “sexual difference” and “race” into “ethnicity,” it has prevented us from accounting for the Jew, who does not fit into these pre-constructed categories. “Jew” describes a variety of factors (including, but not reducible to, the intersection of religious identifications and historical, cultural, ethical, moral and linguistic affinities). So if manifestly the concept “Jew” does not correspond to the categories we have constructed, I propose that we rethink our categories. It is what feminists have said to those who built patriarchal theories that did not correspond to women, and it is what lesbians have said to feminist theories that excluded lesbian identity — “it is not us but your theories that are not working.” The refusal to rethink the adequacy of our categories, which have ended up becoming mere formulas, indicates a refusal to consider politics beyond our vocabulary and a refusal to confront the implications of our questionings.
One of the results of maintaining these categories is the invisibility of Jews as well as an exclusion, a non-consideration that inevitably leads to a “benign” antisemitism of indifference and an insensitivity that has allowed the stereotype of the “JAP” to develop unchecked. A radical “alterity” is attributed to the Jew as subject in feminist discourse, while being denied at the very moment this figure is constructed. Such a denial is particularly schizophrenic if you are a member of the group that is being actively invisibilized at the very moment when “difference” is increasingly central to feminist discourse and now considered essential for further developments of feminist theory. If Jews do not correspond to the theoretical framework we have constructed, it is more than likely that other groups will not correspond to it either. My experience of working within the feminist project is that one opening almost always leads to another; there is a path here that leads toward the broadening and transformation of our theories in directions that we cannot always know but that will nonetheless give us the pleasure of going further.
Translation by Martine Leibovici
We are publishing this already old article published in the NWSA Journal, Vol 1, 1988, because the questions it addresses have been raised for some time now in Europe. See in particular, in Germany, the work of Karin Stögner on intersectionality.↩︎
Translator’s note: National Association of Women’s Studies. We have chosen to keep the English Women’s Studies. Although equivalents of these departments are beginning to be created in universities in France, it is generally under the name of Études Féministes et de Genre (Feminist and Gender Studies), which would be very cumbersome in the text.↩︎
Translator’s note: Jewish Women’s Council, an association that publishes work on the psychology of Jewish women.↩︎
In the recording of this session one finds stories of secular and religious Jewish women, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, peasants and city-dwellers, American-born, Holocaust survivors and from different social classes.↩︎
The Jewish women’s studies Guide, Sue Levi Elwell, ed., 2d ed., Landham, Md: University Press of America, 1987; The Jewish Woman, 1900-1985. A bibliography, Aviva Cantor, ed., Fresh Meadow, N.Y., Biblio Press, 1987; Sex and the Modern Jewish Woman. An Annotated Bibliography, Joan Scherer Brewer ed., Fresh Meadow, N.Y., Biblio Press, 1986.↩︎
Cf., for example, Letty Pogrebin, “Anti-Semitism in the women’s movement,” Ms 12, June 1982, and “Going public as a Jew,” Ms 16, August 1987.↩︎
Strangely, Jews are not mentioned in the categories of “minority” and “ethnicity.” This no doubt stems from the fact that they no longer constitute an “underrepresented minority” in the list of professions enumerated by the law and are therefore not included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The reality is that Jews are still a small minority in the United States and that their number has never exceeded 3.7% of the total population; not naming Jews in these categories can therefore only result from a political decision that distorts and ultimately obliterates their existence. Translator’s note: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a law voted by the U.S. Congress that puts an end to any form of segregation, of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.↩︎
Elinor Lerner, “American feminism and the Jewish question, 1890-1940,” in Anti-Semitism in American history, in David A. Berger ed., Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1986. Many other articles in this anthology would prove very useful for the theorization of marginality in Women’s Studies, and Berger’s introduction provides an excellent overview of how antisemitism is deeply implicated in dominant American culture.↩︎
E. Torton-Beck, Nice Jewish girls: a lesbian anthology, Watertown, Mass., Persephone Press, 1982.↩︎
In New York, the Jewish Women’s Committee to end the occupation organizes vigils outside the offices of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.↩︎
Translator’s note: Nation of Islam is a Black nationalist, supremacist and religious organization, founded in Detroit (United States) in 1930.↩︎
On November 9 and 10, 1987, the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, synagogues and shops identified as Jewish were vandalized, shop windows were broken, swastikas and “Death to the Jews” tagged on the walls of a dozen communities throughout the United States.↩︎
Jenny Bourne, “Homeland of the mind: Jewish feminism and identity politics,” Race & Culture, Summer 1987, no. 29. An article as poorly argued as this one can nonetheless have deleterious effects when it is published in a journal with a wide readership.↩︎
Letty Pogrebin was attacked for her 1982 Ms article (see note 7 above).↩︎
Women in the world’s religions. Past and future, Ursula King ed., New York, Paragon House Press, 1987.↩︎
New York, St Martin’s Press, 1988.↩︎
T. Todorov and Loulou Mack, “‘Race’, writing, and difference,” in “Race”, writing, and difference, Henry Louis Gates Jr ed., Chicago University Press, 1986.↩︎
Feminist studies/Critical studies, ed. T. de Lauretis, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986. Since this kind of event is rarely mentioned, I would like to briefly recall what happened. I am well placed to speak about it because I was the author of that paper. First, the moderator did not allow questions after my intervention on the pretext that “there was no longer enough time,” whereas she allowed several after the paper that followed mine. As I protested against this difference in treatment, a woman shouted from the audience that “the Jews controlled the media” and that “that was why the Holocaust got so much attention, while the Middle East was overlooked.” To someone who recalled how the Jews had been gassed in concentration camps during the Second World War, the same woman replied: “Yes, but you Jews are doing very well until they come for you.” Another speaker at the podium drew laughter from the audience by tossing out: “I can’t be antisemitic; I was married to a Jewish ‘nice boy.’” After this episode she ended her presentation by calling for solidarity with Palestinian women, without any context to justify the relevance of such a declaration. It seemed that most of the audience was paralyzed; only one or two women came to my defense. By my reckoning, the audience was composed of approximately one third Jewish women.↩︎