Joyce Antler. Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 464 pp.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement by Joyce Antler Cara Rock-Singer Joyce Antler. Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 464 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001107 Joyce Antler's Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement tells a history of Jewish feminism in the United States from the 1960s through 1980s. The book brings together the stories of the women's liberation movement, which was led disproportionately by Jewish women, with those of explicitly Jewish feminisms that emerged in the 1970s–80s. In tracing the continuities and ruptures between two generations of Jewish feminisms, Antler considers how Jewish and gender identities have mutually shaped a range of American feminist projects. The book adds significant nuance to narratives of undifferentiated white, middle-class, second-wave feminism and challenges simple divisions between gender universalism and Jewish particularism. In part 1, Antler analyzes approximately twenty organizational and intellectual leaders of radical feminist groups in Chicago, New York, and Boston during the 1960s–70s. These women rarely invoked their Jewish identities, and in turn, historians have largely ignored the role of Jewishness in the movement. By [End Page 220] contrast, Antler argues that Jewish values constituted a significant, if implicit, component of their feminist projects: "Jewish backgrounds and values" usually manifest as "latent" "imaginations and memories" of Jewish marginalization, social values, and political traditions (69). During the 1970s–80s, a new generation of women formulated feminisms as Jews, which Antler argues was itself a radical act. In part 2, Antler presents the stories of approximately twenty such women, including "religious liberationists," who sought gender equality as religious subjects; "secular Jewish feminists," who resisted antisemitism and assimilation on the political Left; Jewish lesbians, who fought both antisemitism and homophobia; and global feminists, who embraced Jewishness in a climate of anti-Zionism. The survey in part 2 illustrates that Jewish identity is far from homogenous and Jewish feminisms were not merely applications of feminist ideas to particular Jewish concerns, but rather novel negotiations of gender, sexual, ethnic, and religious identities. The book concludes with an epilogue that briefly introduces six women who have shaped the direction of Jewish feminism since the 1990s. One of the central contributions of this volume is its new source material. To redress the historiography of US feminism and American Jewry, Antler melded published writings, archival materials, and previously conducted oral histories with her own research to establish a rich new record of feminist stories. In addition to individual interviews and conference calls with women who had been members of various feminist cohorts, Antler convened "Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity," a gathering of approximately forty influential Jewish feminists at New York University in 2011, to reflect on the role of Jewish identity in their feminist activism. This book intervenes in debates among historians of second-wave feminism and of American Jewry that hinge on the status of Jews as a distinct group within American society. First, Antler sets out to show how Jewish difference mattered in the formation of radical feminism, in order to complicate narratives in which Jewish women are squarely white in a binary white-black racial system. Antler not only shows the range of socioeconomic, political, religious, and ethnic identities and experiences of radical feminist leaders, but also probes how each city's political ecology combined with the personal identities, collective chemistry of groups, and reactions to the successes and failures of prior or parallel feminist ventures to shape each unit of the broader feminist social movement. The second major historiographical conversation is concerned with the relationship between Jewish and American history. Antler draws on David Hollinger's formulation of "communalist" versus "dispersionist" histories. The former refers to narratives whose scope is limited to those self-identified or considered by others to be Jewish, while the latter opens the aperture to shed light on the lasting relevance of Jewish roots even among the unidentified or unaffiliated. The dispersionist approach enables Antler to consider a multiplicity of fluid Jewish identities and show that Jewishness, defined capaciously as a racial, religious, or ethnic category, influenced feminist thought and practice. While...