Tag Archives: Feminism

Jew of the Week: Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique

Bettye Naomi Goldstein (1921-2006) was born in Illinois to Jewish parents of Russian and Hungarian heritage. She experienced a great deal of antisemitism in her youth which, she would later explain, fueled her “passion against injustice”. She became a writer in high school, and later penned award-winning poems. She graduated with a degree in psychology from the all-women’s Smith College in 1942, then did research at UC Berkeley. Shortly after, she dropped out of school, moved to New York, married Carl Friedan, and became a housewife, while doing some freelance writing on the side. It was at her high school’s fifteenth reunion that she saw an underlying unhappiness in the lives of her former classmates. The discussions, research, and study that came out of this eventually crystallized in a 1963 book called The Feminine Mystique. Friedan wrote about the problem “with no name”, of the “depressed suburban housewife” who was not given the opportunity to fulfil “the basic human need to grow”. The book was an instant bestseller, and is credited with launching the second wave of feminism. In 1966, Friedan co-founded the National Organization of Women (NOW), of which she was the first president. The organization was founded in her hotel room, with its purpose written on a napkin: to ensure legal equality and employment equality for all. The organization also worked to establish subsidized child care. In 1970, Friedan led and organized the Women’s Strike for Equality, with marches in over 40 cities, and 50,000 in New York City alone. Friedan supported many other women in important leadership roles, including Shirley Chisholm, America’s first black congresswoman. (Chisholm had an incredible encounter with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and credited him with inspiring much of her good work). Friedan worked hard to ensure that feminism not be equated with homosexuality (calling lesbian feminists “the lavender menace”), or with hating men, or with abortion (she did support a woman’s right to choose, but called it a “secondary” issue). She would say: “The women’s movement was not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs and all the rest of it.” She maintained the supreme value of a traditional family unit, and that children should “ideally come from mother and father”. Though originally self-described as “agnostic”, in her later years she saw the value in religion and started to regularly attend prayer services at her local synagogue. Friedan had also cofounded the First Women’s Bank in 1973 and Women Against Gun Violence in 1994. Among her many awards are Humanist of the Year (1975), the Eleanor Roosevelt Leadership Award (1989), induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and multiple honorary degrees.

Gentiles Becoming Jews

Words of the Week

A rabbi who is an optimist taught me that what you may think is a challenge is a gift from God, and if poor babies have milk, and poor children have food, it’s because this rabbi in Crown Heights had vision.
– Shirley Chisholm, American’s first black congresswoman, on the Lubavitcher Rebbe

Jew of the Week: Clara Lemlich Shavelson

A Yiddish Feminist Icon

Clara Lemlich (1886-1982) was born to a religious Jewish-Russian family in what is now Horodok, Ukraine. She grew up speaking Yiddish, and learned Russian against the wishes of her parents. This actually allowed her to start a business in her youth, writing letters in Russian for her neighbours. She used the money to buy books, and soon took a deep interest in socialist literature. Following the horrors of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903—in which 49 Jews were killed, over 500 injured, and 1500 Jewish home destroyed—the family fled to the US and settled in New York City. Lemlich got a job in the garment industry, working long hours in terrible conditions, with no breaks or benefits, and poor compensation. She joined the International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union and soon got elected to its executive board. Lemlich started to organize strikes and protests. During one protest, gangsters hired by her employers broke her ribs. Undeterred, in November of 1909 she gave a rousing speech (in Yiddish!) and got 20,000 workers to join her in a massive strike which came to be known as the “Uprising of the 20,000”. This then inspired male garment workers to stage a strike, too, resulting in the “Great Revolt” that brought 50,000 to protest. The result was that employers finally took notice and slowly began improving conditions for their employees. Lemlich, however, was blacklisted from working in the garment industry. Instead, she turned her attention to universal suffrage and wrote: “The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote…” and until she gets to vote, “she will not get justice; she will not get fair conditions.” Lemlich founded the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League. Two years later, she married Joe Shavelson and started a family, switching gears to spend most of her time raising her children. Her activism continued, though, for example participating in a housewives’ boycott of kosher butcheries to protest price gouging. She would go on to join the Communist Party of America, and then to work for Progressive Women’s Councils. She campaigned against nuclear weapons, genocides, and the Vietnam War. At 81, she moved to California to be with her children and lived in a nursing home. Even then, her activism didn’t stop and she convinced the nursing home management to join in on boycotts protesting high prices on fruits and vegetables. Today, Lemlich is recognized as a major feminist icon and an inspiration for countless Jewish women.

Feminism in Judaism and the Curses of Eve

Words of the Week

The world suffers a lot not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people.
– Napoleon Bonaparte

Jew of the Week: Hannah Arendt

Greatest Political Philosopher of the 20th Century

Hannah Arendt in 1924

Johanna Cohn Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Germany to a wealthy family of secular Russian-German Jews. The family was anti-Zionist and assimilationist, desperately seeking acceptance into broader German society. Arendt was well-educated, and was already tackling heavy philosophical works as a teenager. At 15, after getting expelled from her school for organizing a boycott of an anti-Semitic teacher, she decided to go straight to the University of Berlin. Arendt then studied language, literature, and theology at the University of Marburg, where one of her teachers was the famed philosopher Heidegger (the two would go on to have a secret romantic relationship for many years). Arendt later became a towering figure in philosophy herself, writing on politics and sociology, Judaism and feminism (which she opposed, once writing, perhaps presciently: “what will we lose if we win?” Ironically, today Arendt is something of a feminist icon!) When Hitler came to power in 1933, Arendt operated an underground railroad for refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Realizing the flaws of her old assimilationist ways, she wrote that “Jewish assimilation must declare its bankruptcy.” Arendt immersed herself in Jewish study, while also vocally denouncing the Nazis, leading to her arrest by the Gestapo. After eight days in prison, the Gestapo let her go because they could not decipher her encoded diary. Arendt fled to Geneva, where she worked for the Jewish Agency to secure visas for Jewish refugees. From there, she settled in Paris and soon became the personal assistant of Germaine de Rothschild, taking care of distributing her generous charitable funds. In 1935, Arendt joined Youth Aliyah, eventually becoming its secretary-general. In 1938, she was put in charge of rescuing Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis occupied France, Arendt and her family managed to escape yet again, eventually finding their way to New York. In 1944, she was hired as executive director of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, cataloging and preserving Jewish assets in Europe, and reviving post-war Jewish life there. From 1951 onwards, she devoted herself to teaching and writing. Her most acclaimed books followed, including The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. Arendt taught at a number of American universities, including Yale and Stanford, and was the first female professor at Princeton. In 1961, she spent six weeks in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial for the The New Yorker. (During this time, she coined the phrase “banality of evil”, and her conclusions were immensely controversial.) All in all, Arendt wrote hundreds of penetrating essays, articles, and poems, and has been described as the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, as well as one its most enigmatic women. The Library of Congress estimates that at least 50 books have been written about her, along with over 1000 scholarly papers. There is a “Hannah Arendt Day” in Germany, as well as an international peer-reviewed journal called Arendt Studies, along with countless things named after her, including the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize.

Words of the Week

“If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”
– Hannah Arendt