Narrow bridges: Jewish lesbian feminism, identity politics, and the “hard ground” of alliance

Abstract

The emergence of Jewish feminism in the late twentieth century produced a contradictory site for engagement with the Israeli state and its claims to both Jewish identity and the territory of historic Palestine. While some mobilizations of Jewish feminist identity politics promoted nationalism, others engaged the self-reflexive mode to question the coherence of group identity, to work against its codification in the state-national form, and to engender empathy and solidarity with targets of both U.S. and Israeli racial states. This essay maps two forms of Jewish feminist praxis: one liberal, normatively white, invested in both heteronormativity and Zionism; the other radical, emerging in close collaboration with women of color feminism, attuned to comparative racial relations, lesbian-led, and saturated with discourse and debate on U.S. and Israeli racism, and Zionism’s connection to Jewish identity.